End Times by Kenneth Smith   

8. Medieval Civilization IV

D. Divine Teleology, Heaven and Hell

The Greeks believed their Gods were intimately entangled with every individual life, indeed, every single person's life and desires were in the care of a daimonic guardian. And they believed that each divinity wove a pattern of justice which, for the severely imbalanced mind or life, meant retribution for moral or religious negligence. Respecting the right values meant cultivating a sense of balance or measure, an intelligent sense of proportion to adjudicate how much of one's life or energies or concern should be apportioned to each principle that has a claim on one's soul. Justice is not an empty abstraction but an artful judgment (gnosis, diagnosis) of how much is due; the values that constitute the psychological metabolism or fuel of our higher life also help us describe our moral and political sense of form. The Greeks also regarded the ultimate order of life and of the cosmos to be bound by the self-fatedness of character, that is, the resolution and irony of the kind of story or mythos in which the three sister-Fates implicated every person and every people.

From the time of Xenophanes the Greeks had understood how naive anthropomorphism was, how ultimately other the Gods had to be, as beings beyond human ken. Socrates and Plato of course had lambasted traditional myths for portraying immoral and unholy acts among the Gods, and had imposed on them instead the stringent moralisms of rationalist philosophers. But for the Greeks every divinity is thought to be knowable in terms of his or her natural character, which defines for that God a dominant interest and responsibility. No matter how awesome the domain of a God's authority, one knows how to address and appeal to such a Being: one knows the essential concerns of any God, even if that God might not like the assumed or conventional name by which men chose to call Him. Only the Fates remain inscrutable, until at least one reaches the last of one's life and cultivates a proper taste for irony, wising up to the tacit forces that have played one like a puppet. The Greek Gods have qualitative differences that set them off one from another, and each one indeed corresponds to a significant chroma in the rainbow of human values or natural principles. Polytheism at one and the same time explains why the Greeks have such brilliance of mythic insight into the nuances of human nature, and why they are so quintessentially political all throughout their culture. All human affairs are a matter of negotiating discrepant perspectives and conflictive principles.

Heraclitus grasped the implication of theism clearly: mortals and Immortals are inversely or dialectically related to one another, that is, in those respects in which human beings are passive and vulnerable, the gods have the power of action; and in those respects in which humans have their own autonomy and competence, the Gods withdraw to leave men in charge of their own lives. ". . . They live in each other's death and die in each other's life." Even though the Gods have need of nothing and men can do little that benefits them, still there is a kind of reciprocation between the acts of men and of Gods. The Greek Gods are finitely construable — woven into the meaning of our own lives — and the proof of this is the evidence of the rich panoply of mythoi that report to men the logic of their divine characters. As Aristotle's Rhetoric advises its readers of the interplay between politics and psychology, as Aesop's Fables give accounts of the wiles and guile of human nature and its correlative follies, so the myths treat the rules of rhetorical interpretation between men and Gods: how should we expect our nature-driven acts and illusions to impact the various Gods, and why do they seek to shape our judgment so subtly? It is for the sake of the natural resolutions of story, the logic of mythos in which pregnant meanings play themselves out as potentials aiming at their actualization or fulfillment.

But the Christian God is not such a creature within nature, conformable to its laws of characteral bias. Although like the Greek Gods He has His favorites among humans, He stands as an absolute Judge, incorruptible and unapproachable. He is radically more mysterious, more remote in principle from the world of persons and psyches. His subjects "know" of Him only what can be grasped about universal principles of justice, love and mercy. The Judaic tradition, as Hans Jonas has encapsulated it, first emblazoned this notion of an unaccountable Divinity who might at any time require even what is unthinkable of His believers: it is for this reason that ancient Judaism sustains the disciplines of fasting and ritual obedience to rules, because no one knows what he might be divinely called upon to do; but one must be spiritually ready. Abraham, father of the faith, was asked to sacrifice his son Isaac, cherished beyond anything else. Did the Jews believe that their God was truly the Creator and Giver of all good things? Then all things, no matter how dear, might be demanded back: it was vital that nothing God gave should be permitted to become more significant than Himself. The Source was infinitely higher than its worldly and human fruits. So unknown and unpredictable was God and His unfathomable Will that Judaism indeed has known better than to produce (in a strict sense) a theology, a putative rational, systematic or scientific knowledge of God. Judaism ascribes to an open-ended fealty, a liability of obedience unto God's obscure will which may even require one to sacrifice his utmost welfare; Christianity by contrast grasps its God in faith, a certainty that God is looking out for the welfare of His flock. Judaism emphasizes the spiritual athleticism or inward virtuosity of those who believe, their aptness to unknown tasks; but Christianity has naively redefined the purpose of God as covertly to serve the human good, to take care of the faithful as a shepherd his sheep. So much Christian prayer is naively boastful rhetoric, pride in having God "on one's side" in war, politics, sectarian conflict, even sports — and so little effort is made to insure that humans know how to get on God's side. That would require a contemplative, philosophical culture, not simply arrogant and self-serving faith — a cultivated naivete.

Christianity did not abstain from the intellectual temptation of snaring the essence of God in a theology, however, but like Judaism its God remained concretely uncharted territory — unlike the Gods of the Greeks. The monotheist religions were left with no plurality of Gods among whom divinity might act and discharge its latent nature or character before peers who could appreciate those acts. The singular God keeps His own counsel, has no peers; and how He treats the historical world of men is in ways so obscure as to leave His meaning generally dubious. "Hermeneutics," that branch of theology that seeks to make sense of God's patterns of purpose via His actions, tries to interpret these matters of the Infinite in humanly reasonable terms.

The Christian revolution intensively moralized the relations of God and men: it saw not just extraordinary phenomena (pillars of fire, burning bushes, separated seas, flaming letters etched on the wall) as "signs" of His will, but potentially anything. A child born deformed; the loss of a battle; a scathing plague; a fire in the night; a decline in profits; the turn of a card — what indeed might not be a communication from the infinitely authoritative, omnipotent Creator, thus a signpost for the changing of one's life? The Greek Gods are the very brothers and sisters of this planet, which is itself a Goddess, Gaia; this world is a self-formed natural organism, not a made work of the hands, as Christian Creation takes it. Greeks see Nature as imbued everywhere with its own autonomous purposes; but the created or made world of Christianity serves God's purposes ultimately. God steers all things down to the minutest detail, He doesn't just dabble as the Greek Gods did in token epiphanies. The gulf between finite humans and infinite Divinity had grown infinitely great: the Greeks had deemed some human beings so beautiful or ingenious or courageous as to be conceivably a God in human disguise, and of course the Olympians when it suited their purposes would in fact concretize themselves or coalesce in visible form so as to be mistaken for a human. There was such an overlap between human heroicism or excellence and divine glory. But the Christian God's glory was incommensurable with even the highest human capacity. In the Christian era Man and God had become conceptually or in principle diametrically opposite kinds of beings, separated by a chasm so vast that indeed only God's infinite powers could bridge it with a Son who was both God and Man. That is the force of the Christian theology, to make Jesus as the God/Man a living paradox, a contradictio in adjectis. That is the force of the deist dimension in Christianity, to redefine religion in terms of utter and absolute abstractions, in terms of an infinite universe and faceless forces, not a finite and concretely felt natural cosmos in which man's sanity and intuitive intelligence were comfortably nested in a theism of personal and natural Gods.

The entire playing-field of our lives became a battleground for the testing of souls, the dispensing of orders, the chastening of desires, the spiritualization of personality, as Bunyan's allegory Pilgrim's Progress classically described. If Greek polytheism showed the application of taste or discrimination, Christian monotheism reverted to a worldview more like primitive animism in the sense that anything might be charged with significance by God, employed as a symbol of His Will and a conveyance of transcendent purpose. Christianity originated in a revolt against the massive fatalism of antiquity, but that fatalism had revolved around one's own inwardly desired doings; God seemed now to predestine human lives just by the way He conceived of or knew them and then cast obstacles and tragedies, or opportunities and inspirations in their path. How can such a God be omniscient and all-fathering and yet not determine the entire path of one's actions, feelings and existence? Not just Calvin but Augustine already understood the problems such a God posed for human freedom. A religion that began by profoundly hoping for divine justice came to accept that God deals very different hands to different souls, and not always according to what they evidently or humanly merit. Where Christianity had arisen in peasant simplicities, it was now in spite of itself having to come around to the kind of irony and counterintuitivism that Xenophanes had injected into Greek theology. The world, reality, the poles of natural values by which man oriented himself morally, all these things might necessarily appear otherwise to God and to men. Rather than reassure human intelligence and will of some certainties they might glean from religious insight, religion might indeed deprive them of the very firmament their minds had taken for granted as natural — deprive them in more senses than they could even conceive.

Men naively sought help from God, a way of overcoming the vicissitudes of an unjust world. They learned instead that religion offers men a quintessentially contrarian wisdom: so far is God from meting out beneficence to the good and suffering to the evil, that God seems in His omnipotence to be the One who designs souls to be good or bad in the first place. Some have health, some misery; some are born to inestimable wealth, some to destitution; but God is presumed to be the omnipotent Will behind all arrangements and circumstances, be they boons or tribulations. All things bear some divine meaning, nothing is mere or pure accident. Praying to get what they want is nothing but infantile folly in humans; they should pray instead for the wisdom to understand and appreciate what they have already been dealt. Some lives find themselves so accursed that, like Job, they have to wonder if God is not looking for their breaking point, tempting them to curse Him and turn away from Him — and yet they cannot ascribe malevolence to this God, by His very concept. "Theodicy," from the Greek Dike or justice, is the branch of theology that seeks in Milton's words "to justify the ways of God to man." It is a priori axiomatic that the Christian God's very desires and acts are definitive of justice. To God's dispensations we should say no more than "yes" or "no," said Jesus (Matthew 5:37), but merely align our understanding and will with His. Thus do our finite purposes nest in God's infinite purpose.

Jesus speaks of "the kingdom of God" and pointedly tells His hearers they should not look for it to manifest itself in the world:

The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

—Luke 17:20-21

God rules over the unseen tides of our inner lives, the powers in our souls: the work of Spirit is overwhelming moral, and manifests itself by the changes that are wrought in our shape and strength of conscience and will. That is God's domain, His realm of authority. Early Christians, and Christ Himself, expected the unruly world to draw to a conclusion within the lifetime of some who were hearing Jesus' own words. Jesus tried repeatedly to rupture the materialist assumptions of those who kept looking for God to exert His power in the outer world, just as St. Paul tried to defeat the naive egocentrism of the Church in Ephesus, which supposed that worldly wealth was a sign God was pleased with them; and St. Ambrose had to deal with thickwits who heard but could not comprehend Jesus' admonition to "lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven." "You ask me," wrote Ambrose, "'How can I put my treasure in heaven?' Give it to the poor...." Apparently, wealthy dullards conceived of heaven as a sort of Swiss bank account, a vault safer than this precarious world. Even Christianity's most emotional converts could not necessarily raise their mentality above thingly goods. It did not dawn on them that Christianity meant to revolutionize the crass outer world only secondarily, but the inner world of how we see that world primarily. Trying to induce people to understand a transvaluation when they hardly comprehend values at all is a thankless task.

Exemplary of the transfigurations which the organized Church worked on Jesus' teachings is the concept of immortality. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, full of Jesus' logia or wisdom-sayings, has nothing to remark about immortality. The New Testament's accounts of Jesus' speeches and sermons hint only off-handedly at the sufferings of the damned. Overwhelmingly, "immortality" in Jesus' own ministry is meant to appeal to the pathos of workers and small merchants who sense their own lives expiring like wheat and grass, and all for the sake of what? It is incongruous and inconceivable to them that countless generations labored to sustain life and give birth only to have their survivors languish in futile imperial slavery. Jesus asserts for these hopeless multitudes the simple unspeakable value of being alive, the richness and meaning that life could have, in a world where it was not being bled white for the sake of someone else's material gain. Jesus teaches them anew the dead language of joy and gratitude for the beauty that life could have, for the freedom to grow in spirit with others. Coupled with the pain of their meaningless lives is the horror of a meaningless death; and Jesus brings the salving reports of a meaning of spirit that is beyond these.

"Immortality" of course bears the refracted light of however many meanings life itself may have, it is nothing literal and definite. But to teach to the Many a subtle moral truth is to be heard by them as only appealing to their gross fears and desires: the more cravenly emotionalist or slavish the mentality of an individual, the more that individual makes every word he hears complicitous with his own delusions. "Rhetoric" is famously the art of telling people what they want to hear, of controlling crowds through their preexisting appetites and prejudices. Although it may be an art as a few practice it, it is indeed almost the whole of demotic or popular speech: language is no more than a tool of one's own and others' appetites, and most people cultivate it no further than will serve this purpose. Language is the cunning internal attorney by which most people think they can gain more for themselves of what others currently have a feeble grip on. Premier among the fears so profound as to be unspeakable for most people is the fear of dying, of ceasing to see or feel or desire or act. Most people do not grasp the absurdity of squandering one's precious little life, spoiling its whole quality, by obsessing about losing it. The limits on our lives serve a salutary natural purpose and should appeal to our natural wisdom, not least of all by imbuing life with gravity and weight that should make us take it seriously and sanely and glean what is most of value. Oscar Wilde's wisdom is lost on the Many, that what is tragic is not that men die but that something in them dies and they have to live on: were they properly and proportionally concerned about what most deserves their concern, they would realize that already in this life men cease to see or feel or desire or act, for want of devotion to the task of self-cultivation and self-enrichment. Not death but men's own habits and obtuseness rob them of the essence of their life while they continue to "live," mechanically and myopically. Not abstract Death but the all-too-concrete living dead should worry us most.

What Jesus taught was heartening wisdom about the fount of spirit, the gift of seeing what continues to give itself whether men close their eyes and hearts to it or open them. But to the craven all that is heard when "immortality" is spoken of is a release from the great pain and burden of a myopic and compulsive thanatophobia: for these, Jesus' teaching is merely a way of making life safe for those devoid of the aristocratic virtue of courage. But there is no way of making life tolerable for the pathologically cowardly, who cannot face any of the pain or duress in human or natural existence: "Life," said one comic, "— maybe it's not for everybody." Such personalities manufacture their own opiates inwardly, their lives become inevitably a bulwark of denials and delusions about the character of life itself. The fear of dying, and the fear of life's trials as well, do not affect all personalities the same way: for some, these instill a compulsion and obsession against which an otherworldly religion is needed to elaborate a countercompulsive or compensatory world, a corpus of delusion. Aristotle understood the simple reality of moral engineering, that courage is the heart, the foundation, of all the other virtues and values: lacking this, one will have no other values. Life presents very different obstacle courses to differently endowed individuals, but the worst obstacles of all are those inherent or ingredient in their own subjective perspectives.

The truth of spirit is that the life people see is ultimately a field of meanings they themselves have created for themselves, spawned unwittingly from within. That is the degree and form of creation that finite spirit is capable of, which leaves us ultimately the chief subjects of our own unthought-about authority, and which leaves most humans the conformist victims of the relative unoriginality of their own constructed inner world. Is not such a dilemma of self-subjection ultimately incompatible with the very notion of "salvation" from without? If so, then at one and the same time Jesus must contend with conveying a paradoxical and sublime vision for whose seed He knows most humans are culturally and personally condemned to be stony ground; but also, by this very dilemma, ancient fatalism's principles trump the softer and sweeter world of the Christian cosmology, which evolved further to appeal not to the stringently spiritual but rather to those immired in pathos and emotion. Christianity institutionalized itself just by means of its genius at capitalizing on and organizing what is not at all spiritual but merely psychologically pathetic. Jesus' subtle moralizing got digested into such a pathological perspective and indeed grew more saccharine and mendacious with the centuries, until in modern times it blossomed into fantastic cults of puerile sweetness and light, with their cheapened feelgood gospel of "happy talk." In the early 1840s, when there was as yet no epidemic of drug abuse and opium was known primarily as an anesthetic or analgesic, Marx wrote his famous passage on religion:

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

In more modern times it is more like sucrosis. For modernity indeed had its own uses for childish minds or "simple" people who were constitutionally incapable of seeing the harshness and cruelty of how great power and wealth control this world, and most of all those in it too squeamish to think. By the same token that the wealthy among the primitive Christians could not grasp that "spiritual wealth" would not be at all the same kind of thing as worldly wealth but a metaphor for something higher and utterly alien to them, so too the profoundly pathetic could not comprehend that their minds were so far consumed by their worldly pathos that they could not even grasp what "redemption" or "salvation" might consist in. The Church came to compromise with both materialism and patheticism and with other perversions of the essence of spirituality, because of course that was the path to worldly power.

The notion of "heaven" grew gradually to merge God's reign with the fellowship of saints, with immortality of the soul, with rewards for living a holy life, and with ridding oneself of the afflictions of an evil world. The concept of a kind of blessedness after this life was known of course to the Egyptians and the Greeks, who placed the Eleusinian Fields and Isles of the Blessed in the dark underworld of Hades. Heaven curiously plays little role in the far more modest Jewish theology or morality. But heaven became more and more perfectly the deformed creature of Christian moralizing, of a system of rewards and punishments that belied much of Jesus' original teachings. As the Church elaborated its own hierarchies, it also extended hierarchies in the ranks of Heaven and Hell. In the Odyssey, Odysseus took a bowl of blood to a secret place within the earth, to attract the lifeless shades that cannot even speak without the ruby elixir of life: from the departed Achilles he learned just how miserable the life after this life truly was — "I would rather be a slave in Thrace than Lord over the entire Underworld," said Achilles. Since not one human other than Jesus Himself, Lazarus (John 11:1-46), the widow's only son (Luke 11:12-15), and Jairus' daughter (Mark 5:38-42) had returned from the Christian afterlife, and since there was no demonstrable epiphany from God relating the organization charts of Heaven and Hell, how are we to suppose the knowledge of the ramified ranks of angels and of demons got conveyed? Christianity here lapsed into gullibility, that is, uncritical and flamboyant superstitionism — myth indeed, although devoid of any wisdom.

More significantly, the Church sought by means of the ideas of Heaven and Hell to make its control over its flock more poignant and wondrous. But over centuries it mutated that control from spiritual into political, from paternalist into predatory: the Church's "love" and mercy became more and more the nostrum for a mere fear of suffering, a theologically fed paranoia. The Church existed more and more for its own circular self-interests, ministering with promises of mercy, forgiveness and beatitude to salve fears and horrors that would not have existed had it not propagated them. It sold a cure for an artificial disease. The sufferings of this world and everyday soulish strife were no longer sufficient to drive men to the consolations of religion; for not every year or month was a time of war, plague or grief. But hellfire and damnation were, however speculative, truly perennial matters of concern. The Church's authority clenched itself to become more ironclad and totalitarian, less moral or spiritual.

And, as Nietzsche realized, the Church extended its power of intimidation deeper and deeper into the ranks of irrational psyches, not just the spiritually volatile or discontent: the Church changed its own shape by reaching into the douloi or slavish who live and reason solely by emotion and appetite. Extorting obedience and donations had become the sole consideration: that the obedience no longer had spiritual but only animal motivations was immaterial, and so the end of "salvation" justified the means of terrorism, in the strictest sense of the term: rule by fear. We have many salacious and sadistic accounts from the Church Fathers about the tortures of the damned; even Aquinas, a late-medieval, speaks of the blessed's view of the eternally miserable as being a chief source of bliss for them to enjoy from Heaven (Summa Theol., Ill, Suppl., Q. 94, Att. 1). Did the Church honestly warn its quivering flocks how feeble the odds were in their favor to gamble for eternal blessedness? Salvandorum paucitas, damnadorum multitudo, "Few are saved, many are damned" — according to Aquinas, the ratio is as that of Noah's family to the rest of humanity.

Just as in Platonism the philosopher-king has turned aside from the sublime contemplation of ideal truths in order to leaven some understanding of justice into human affairs, so too in Buddhism the bodhisattva spurns Nirvana for the sake of helping others. Christianity however does not know such selflessness with regard to Heaven. Heaven is the only conceivable choice a sane Christian can make — not earth or Hell — but Heaven is a blessedness strictly for one's own sake. A Christian may certainly want to share the prospects of Heaven with others, just as his spirituality will make him altruistic and eager to help men in their worldly afflictions; but both of these godly works only insure his own place in Heaven. Who gives up that place for the sake of others? Heaven and Hell are the pleasure-and-pain drives of the spirit: they have been forged to appeal ultimately to spiritual self-interest, to give spirit what it most fervently desires. These twinned ideas of eternal reward and punishment are meant to redesign religion for the sake of those douloi driven not by what is right in itself but by their own appetites, purportedly to modulate those appetites from natural to spiritual; these venal ideas indeed got modified further by late-medieval Catholic "indulgences" so as to reduce the terms of the afterlife to a commodity in a transaction, for the sake of the banausoi, those who know no value but exchange-value.

In spite of its ostensible ethic of self-sacrifice, Christianity spread by appealing to such a self-interestedness too self-obscure and pathetic to see itself for what it is. To capture this fundamentally self-interested soul, the organized Church orchestrated a vengeful God, the fires of Gehenna (some writers have argued it was the subterranean smoldering pits beneath ancient Rome that impressed Christians with the possibility of a Hell), and the awful eternity of a tortured soul. But purely in concept, how can utterly active spirit be made to suffer? In such a notion, Christian theology had betrayed its very central idea. Body alone is passive matter, subject to pain and torture. Disembodied spirit cannot feel external afflictions, for spirit is by its very notion what is most God-like and sovereign in us.

Self-interested fear for one's own soulish happiness, as defined by others; craven, slavish anxiety over displeasing the absolute Master; desperate desire to conform to an authoritative regimen with an absolute standard of right and wrong that obliterates the need for thinking or judgment — these induce "Christian" souls turn utterly to selfish concerns for their own sake. Just how far these social and political controls corrupted Christian principles can be seen by how very, very few Christians comprehend this simple point: the very idiom of reward and punishment of course betrays all intrinsic values in religion, love, gratefulness, respect, awe, etc. It converts religious motivation into a mechanical, truly amoral extrinsicalism, with everything being done for the sake of an externally related and applied reward or punishment. Aristotle was far brighter than modern behaviorists; he understood that by the application of pain and pleasure, human youths could be conditioned to desire, believe or think anything whatsoever. Therefore it was all that much more crucial to use these sanctions to reinforce the healthiest and highest values practically possible for a given individual's character — but for aristoi who think and judge in terms of what is intrinsically right and good, such reinforcement can only be corruptive. The drives of pleasure and pain are, as Bentham knew, what humans have in common with animals: these are the lowest motives we have, and the only motives that the lowest personality-types among us have. Homicide detectives recognize the psychical fingerprints of such mentalities in the way they commit crimes; and we all see the movies, TV and publications and hear the music that caters to the overwhelmingly hedonist. In our time their culture has grown crass and gross enough to nauseate even the most tolerant. But it was the historical ingenuity of the Church to realize that there were ways of recasting Christian doctrine to make it compelling even to the nearly bestial.

Orthodoxies change over centuries; one Machiavellian party defeats another in the secret chambers of Mother Church, and even papal infallibility takes on another protean shape. Enough time and history, and an altogether different species of Christianity arises to reconceive the will of God; yet more time, and quite exotic para-Christian or even barbarized faiths displace the earlier forms. The same disciplinary and exhortatory apparatus that once enforced rigid dogma may be turned to more humanitarian, or more repressive, or more liberal, or more reactionary purposes. The same intimidative apparatus of hellfire and damnation serves any and all sects who care to avail themselves of it. All such thinking in terms of extrinsic purposes corrupts philosophical and rational intelligence, it diverts minds from the values that are immediately relevant and imperative. It lowers argument to the level of rhetoric for the Many, the douloi and banausoi who care nothing for intrinsic values and principles. And thereby it deceives corrupted minds into supposing themselves righteous, just as it gulls the self-stupefied into thinking they have understood something when it has merely been translated into their own deformed idiomatic terms. The idea of Heaven and Hell is arguably the most catastrophic turn in the whole history of Church dogma. By this tactic Christian values eviscerated themselves in one stroke, sacrificed to the primal electricity of nightmare-horror and delirious but vague hopefulness. The very concept of spirituality was debased by this campaign.