The Twilight of the Theologians

Aug 24, 2020

We often hear people complain about the Catholic hierarchy. And even more often we hear from progressives that the failure of Catholics in general to support the policies they espouse is due to the reactionary nature of the bishops put in place by 40 years of reactionary popes. Both John Paul II (1978-2005) and his successor Benedict (2005-2013) were hell-bent on preserving Tridentine Catholicism against what they saw as its unravelling by Vatican II.

These complaints are not just the expression of life-style preference. They have serious political consequences in real time, for in part due to the conservatism of the Catholic hierarchy, 54% of Catholic voters voted for Donald Trump in 2016. And it hardly needs to be said that the issue pushed by the hierarchy as the undebatable reason for such a choice was access to abortion. The Catholic hierarchy condemns abortion as intrinsically evil in the most uncompromising terms. (But it should be noted in passing that the bishops also condemn artificial birth control as “intrinsically evil.” We will return to this later.)

The overblown importance of the abortion issue in the American political scene represents a strange and unexpected entry of religion into politics in a way that the authors of the “separation of Church and State” did not anticipate. Religion has entered not as an institution but as the voice of “God.” And, true to predictions, religion has distorted the political process by introducing an issue that was not amenable to debate and compromise ― the two foundational pillars of democratic government. We can only govern ourselves if we have control over what we decide to enact into law. If what is being discussed is, in fact, beyond our control because it is not debatable or open to compromise, then it is not within the purview of solution by us ― the people. It is a decision already made by some outside agent who takes precedence over the will of the people. Such a situation represents the end of democratic self-governance.

While all kinds of constitutional maneuvers can limit the legislative reach of such non-debatable issues, the fact remains that a demand considered absolute and undebatable because commanded by “God” himself, exercises a controlling influence over the minds and decisions of individuals. The constitution may control what laws can be passed, but it cannot control what individual people think and who they vote for. If an issue as morally absolute and uncompromising as abortion is seen to be part of a package of policy choices none of which makes anywhere near the absolute demand of the abortion choice, morally minded individuals have no alternative. Even if they have strong opinions about the other policies being offered, the fact of the presence in the package of the one absolute and undebatable demand settles the choice in practice.

Many blame the bishops, but there are other actors in this drama. The ones I want to focus on in this essay are the theologians.

Theologians

Theologians are an ancient and highly respected sector of Catholic society whose influence in matters of Christian faith and morals goes back to the New Testament itself. Not only the letters of the apostles but the very gospels themselves whose narratives differ one from another in ways that clearly reveal an interpretative emphasis, must be acknowledged as “theology.” Early Greek theologians like Origen of Alexandria, who died in 253, shaped Christian thinking for centuries after his death. Roman theologian Augustine of Hippo (+430) elaborated theological interpretations that determined the significance of the sacraments, baptism, grace, clerical authority and human sexuality for a thousand years. Today the broad outlines of the Catholic religion from the time of the Reformation until now was the work of mediaeval theologians like Thomas Aquinas. Theologians have always played the role of foil for the bishops, often risking and suffering condemnation and silencing for their outspoken challenge to the authorities. Of course it was to be expected. Who was better acquainted with the sources and traditions than the theologians, better in most case than the bishops. They were a constant check on the distortions of doctrine that authority was wont to use to enhance its power.

What is unique about our time, especially here in the United States, is that the theologians have fallen silent. Almost universally, they work as professors in Catholic institutions of higher learning and not only their jobs but also their very careers are totally dependent on the benepacitum of the bishops who control those institutions. The role of counterweight to the bishops’ misuse of “Christian truth,” when in rare cases it was exercised in the United States, was met with a rejection from the hierarchy that terminated careers. Here in the United States moral theologian Charles Curran was fired from his teaching position at Catholic University in Washington DC, and prohibited from teaching in any other Catholic institution because of his fearless support of the Christian use of contraception, denying the claim that such use was “intrinsically evil.” When Jesuit Roger Haight dared suggest that the primary way Jesus was divine was as a human symbol of “God,” he was silenced repeatedly and forbidden to teach or write on “Christology” his area of expertise and competence.

It doesn’t take many examples of this kind before the entire corps of theologians “gets it.” Open your mouth about issues the bishops do not want discussed and you will no longer be a Catholic Theologian. Many whose livelihood and careers have been built on years of study and exclusive dedication to theological matters are not capable of surviving being fired and blacklisted. Hence their silence. It’s as if night has descended on the profession itself. They can no longer function as a check to episcopal control and doctrinal distortion. When the great William of Ockham challenged Pope John XXII in the 14^th century and was excommunicated, he was able to find refuge with the Emperor who protected him and supported him in his work. Those days are gone. There are no patrons to protect dissident theologians and their pursuit of the truth is fatally compromised.

So Catholics who might be inclined to question the hierarchy’s absolute prohibition against all abortion and the consequent demand to vote only for those who concur, find no moral relief or support among the theologians. Those trained and disciplined teachers who might have helped laymen form a broader conscience that lifted the burden of false obligation and gave them the freedom to choose, maintain a stony silence, not because they agree with the bishops, but because they are terrified of losing their jobs and livelihoods. I am not even mentioning those special few “independents” among the theologians who sell sermonettes directly to paying customers. These “spiritual gurus” are quite aware of the economic potential of the “Catholic brand” they peddle and the traditional doctrines that are signposts of “Catholicity.” They recognize the prestige they enjoy as a trickle-down effect of being Catholic in good-standing and they have no intention of jeopardizing their status by exploring new options just because of the truth. Their silence hides a venality that is, in my opinion, altogether reprehensible.

Abortion isn’t the only issue; contraception falls into the same category. Take the recent (July 2020) Supreme Court ruling on “religious freedom” in which the religious protagonist in partnership with the Trump administration were the “Little Sisters of the Poor.” These Catholic nuns argued that it violated their religious freedom to have to support contraception for their employees in any form, even though in the ACA the direct burden of providing the contraceptive care was shifted to a third party (the insurance company). The Sisters were obviously basing their objection on the Catholic “doctrine” that contraception is “intrinsically evil” as declared by Paul VI in 1968. They claimed to be following their religion.

This case is a heinous example of Catholic theologians’ cowardice and irresponsibility. A Pew Research Center Report of Sept 28, 2016 found that 89% of Catholics said that contraception “was either morally acceptable or not a moral issue at all.” For the Little Sisters to claim that the prohibition is “Catholic Doctrine” when clearly almost all Catholics do not, is egregious enough in itself. It suggests a collusion of the American Catholic hierarchy with the Trump administration in providing a “unimpeachable” religious partner for Trump’s well known efforts to dismantle the ACA. Was there no American Catholic theologian who could denounce this travesty, hypocrisy and political complicity on theological grounds, namely that the Catholic people did not accept it? The sensus fidelium is an authentic source of “truth” in Catholic tradition and has a bearing on the formation of a moral conscience. Did any theologian bring it forward? No. Not even one.

But contraception is small potatoes next to abortion. Catholics have been able to see through the absurd mediaeval arguments calling contraception, “intrinsically evil,” after all it is obviously the surest and safest way to avoid unwanted pregnancies which are the primary reasons for abortions. But the arguments surrounding abortion are another thing. They cannot be dismissed so easily. in the absence of any guidance from the theologians helping Catholics to form their conscience, laypeople are defenseless against those arguments, however specious they may in fact be.

What I am going to offer here is an approach to the abortion issue that lays out a theoretical groundwork for a practical compromise. I believe it is exactly the kind of argument that a Cath­o­lic theologian could bring forward because it is not averse to confronting the unspoken and up-to-now unchallengeable assumptions ― the supposedly undebatable premises ― behind the current Catholic position. Such a challenge coming from anywhere else than from a theologian would be considered inappropriate and impertinent.

1. Acknowledging “metaphysical ignorance.”

The very first step involves acknowledging that the assumption of “personhood” from the instant of fertilization is untenable. It was a metaphysical projection that utilized a mediaeval mental mechanism in order to bypass an insuperable doubt and allow for practical choice. Understanding the thinking involved here is at the heart of the matter. Let’s unpack this.

Mediaeval Christians believed that human beings were constructed of two mutually opposed substances, spirit and matter, which concretely speaking were soul and body. Each was the complete contrary of the other but “God” made them exist together “unnaturally” in the human individual. However the “person” was to be found primarily in the soul which was believed to be able to exist separate from the body and which was the seat of the characteristically spiritual human abilities of thinking and willing. Without a “soul” there was no “person.” Moreover it was believed that the act of copulation, being purely physical, could not possibly be responsible for the creation of the soul which was “spirit.” Only “God” could make a spirit and so it was thought that the soul was created directly and personally by “God” without assistance from the parents and “God,” personally, “infused” the soul into the human body thus creating a human being. All agreed on these assumptions, and they are still to be found today in the Vatican catechism of 1992.

Where disagreement arose was determining the “moment” when “God” infused the soul into the developing body. This was important because before that moment there was no human being there and terminating life would not be murder. Many believed that the soul was infused only when the “form” of the embryo became recognizable as a human being (at about six months of pregnancy). Others believed it was at the moment of conception. But there were no theoretical grounds to resolve the issue.

At that point everyone recognized that they had reached an impasse. In order to resolve the logjam, not theoretically but practically, they created a mental mechanism that allowed them to get around it. They decided that ad cautelam (“just in case”), the issue should be arbitrarily decided for the moment of conception. It meant that, even though all acknowledged there was no solid proof, given the slightest possibility that the fertilized egg has a human soul, abortion should be avoided so as to not take the life of another human being. (The fact that with a high percentage of miscarriages “nature” took such life in great numbers did not enter into their calculations).

In one sense, nothing has changed from those days. We still do not have the vaguest idea when the “soul” is infused by “God,” and there is still no way of resolving that ignorance. But in another sense, everything has changed because (1) the very idea of the “soul” being an immortal substance separate from the body is seriously challenged in Catholic thought. Such a Platonic (pagan) suggestion would render meaningless the “resurrection of the body” heralded in all the creeds which in turn reflect the Christian belief that Jesus rose from the dead bodily, in his own flesh, (2) the idea that human copulation is not fully responsible for the initiation and installation of everything required for the fertilized ovum to become a full human being, has come to be completely discarded. “God,” in Thomistic terms, does not interfere in or displace the operations of secondary causality. Thus the mediaeval “caution” is shorn of its theoretical underpinnings and stands naked as a mere “mental trick” used to get around an ignorance that is totally beyond resolution. There was never any “metaphysical” clarity about the presence of a human “person” from the moment of conception even in the middle ages, and so the very decision to use “metaphysics,” (the inner constituents of the human individual, body and soul) to determine what is a “person” and what is not, is hopelessly without a shred of foundation. That procedure cannot yield clear knowledge. The approach should be abandoned altogether. It is pure projection. Metaphysically speaking we are totally ignorant of what constitutes a human being. This “metaphysical ignorance” should be acknowledged; and it is the place of the theologians who understand and can explain it to insist on it.

Given all this, it is hardly “open and shut” to say that all abortion is murder. Metaphysically speaking we are not even sure what a “person” is at this level of life. But please note: as far as our tradition is concerned we are talking about a theoretical (theological) reversal of huge proportions. An emotional communitarian appeal to “compromise” for the sake of “living in harmony in a diverse society” will not cut it. A demand for a re-thinking of basics at this level requires the credentialed credibility that only a trained and recognized professional can provide. Hence the need for the theologian. This argument does not carry its own proof. It needs to be presented by experts that people trust to know what they’re talking about and who bring the weight of their expertise and experience to the question. Of course it can be anticipated that it will be countered by the bishops. Clearly, at first it will not win the day. But simply introducing another and unquestionably valid way of looking at the issue, is liberating for the conscience of the ordinary Catholic. The clarification of doctrine necessary to make the faith credible is the primary job of the theologian. Their work in a classroom is secondary.

2. Embracing a social definition of “person.”

Shifting the definition of “person” from the metaphysical plane (which is a conjecture dependent on the philosophical system you choose), to the social plane where in fact “persons” have rights and obligations, is quite appropriate in this case because abortion is about the right to life, and the obligation of society to protect it. Once we accept the premise that the “persons” that society has an obligation to protect must be human beings with bodies, the solutions begin to suggest themselves.

In order to commit murder, you have to kill a body. According to our (questionable) tradition, a “soul” being immortal cannot be killed. Therefore society has to be physically capable of defending the body of every organism that claims to be a “person” with a right to protection. I contend that the embryo that cannot live outside the womb cannot be called a “person” with a right to protection because it does not have the physical independence ― a body capable of existing on its own ― that could be protected. In other words, pre-viable embryos cannot be physically protected by society because they are not in any identifiable way independent of the mother’s organism; they remain subject to the forces ― biological, emotional, moral ― arising in the mother that bear on its continued life. No intervention from outside the mother can substitute for her refusal to allow the embryo to grow within her. The fetus is utterly defenseless because it is simply part of her body. Without the acquiescence of the mother, there is no way society can protect the developing human organism that is not capable of living on its own outside the womb. The pre-viable fetus is so totally one with the metabolic processes of the mother, that if it were taken out of the womb at that level of development, it could not live under any circumstances, no matter how technologically advanced the interventions might be. Therefore, I say there is no obligation for society to provide protection because protection is beyond its capabilities. You cannot oblige the impossible.

So once we accept the reality that a “person” and the society it lives in have mutual rights and obligations, we realize that the developing fetus cannot be considered a “person” because the mutuality that is constitutive of the social bond does not exist. The only one that can protect the life of the non-viable fetus is the mother. The coercion envisioned in “anti-abortion” legislation cannot in any way physically stop the mother from aborting that fetus while it is only part of her body. It is only when the fetus can live without the mother ― albeit with high tech life-support devices ― that society has the obligation to step in and provide what the mother refuses to provide to this newly independent “person.”

Therefore what are called “protections for the unborn” currently contemplated by the anti-abortionists, are in fact only punishments after the fact imposed on the mother who aborts a living embryo. It could only be called “protection” if you believe that punishment of mother “A” will necessarily translate into a deterrent for mother “B.” If there is no guarantee of deterrence (and how could there be?) punishment then comes down to society satisfying a sadistic need to make people suffer who have flouted its commands.

3. The denial of medical assistance and the prohibition of contraception

One of the principal “fall-outs” of the criminalization of abortion is the denial of medical assistance to the woman who has decided to abort her pregnancy. As we have seen, no legislation can stop someone from aborting the embryo she carries. The only thing other than punishing the non-compliant mother that such a law accomplishes is to prevent doctors and health care professionals from providing the kind of help a woman needs to make sure she doesn’t end up killing or permanently maiming herself in the process. This speaks for itself. I would hope there is no theologian, even one that might favor criminalization, that thinks the denial of such services should be part of the corrective. Yet word from the theological community, even on such a no-brainer humanitarian aspect of the matter, is not forthcoming. Naturally not. They are Catholics, and Catholics put their self-idolizing church, which they think is “God,” above humanity even when it is not a matter of losing their jobs. Would bishops fire a theologian for seeking to humanize anti-abortion legislation? The inhumanity here is religiously inspired. Not unlike the days of the Inquisition, Catholics will kill you or let you die if you don’t agree with their “truth.”

The same holds true, and even more so, with the question of contraception. The history of this specifically Catholic tragedy is too well known to repeat here. But the fact that fifty years after the unilaterally decided Papal condemnation of contraception as “intrinsically evil,” the Catholic people have universally rejected that condemnation and prohibition, is direct and legitimate material for the theologian. In Catholic tradition the sensus fidelium the “sense of the faithful,”(“sobornost” in the Greek Church) was one of the determinants of universal doctrine and Church law. It echoes the ancient patristic litmus test for orthodox doctrine as: quid creditur semper, ubique et ab omnibus, “what is believed always, everywhere, by everybody.” The sensus fidelium is exactly the “proper object” of the theologian and a most significant factor in the formation of moral conscience.

The complete abandonment by theologians of this millennial mechanism of doctrinal sanity corresponds to the loss of participative community at all levels of Catholic life. The exclusion of women, the marginalization of laypeople, the supine obedience of clerical functionaries, the autocratic unaccountability of the bishops, the unwillingness to sever the Tridentine umbilical cord to the “trade mark” brand recognition of the middle ages ― together with the disappearance of the role of the theologians, all amount to the end of Catholicism as a living religion. It has become a lifeless business enterprise selling its mediaeval brands. The Church is an international real estate corporation of immense wealth, whose financial managers are the bishops. It is limited to the exercise of the kind of power that comes from wealth alone, incapable of inspiring followers to embrace the compassion and common sense legal freedom of the man it claims as its founder.

The utter absurdity of the prohibition of contraception by a Church which claims to want to reduce abortions by any means necessary, suggests that maybe the hierarchy enjoys occupying the moral high ground, condemning people for abortions that could have been prevented by encouraging the use of contraceptives. Were contraceptives ever to eliminate abortions, who would the Church have to condemn? What excuse would it have to raise its voice in righteous thunder and put on display its claim to be “God’s” voice on earth? In order to sustain its trade mark of moral infallibility and religious supremacy, there must be “sin” and there must be “error.” And if it’s not there, my suspicion is, the Church will find a way to put it there.

 

Translating the Mystics

2,000 words

The mystics, east and west, are a key resource in the pursuit of the universalism that I am convinced lies at the heart of all religions and traditions, among which I include compassionate atheism. The mystics are cherished everywhere, but in the west particularly, they are not taken seriously as a source of “truth.” They are considered rather as visionaries, poets, holy to be sure and inspiring but not entirely reliable because the considerable emotion they display gives rise to the suspicion that they are subjective.

In the Christian west, Jesus fared no better. Observers will notice that gospel accounts do not record that Jesus enunciated virtually any of the “doctrines” that were later counted as core truths of Christianity. Hundreds of years later, as Christian doctrine came to be “defined,” mainly by councils sponsored by the Roman emperors, Jesus was divinized and treated more like an object of worship than a source of doctrinal truth. He was sidelined like all the mystics, even though it was his “defined” divinity that was called upon to “prove” doctrinal infallibility.

In the east, in contrast, the words and practice of Buddha became the subject of discussion, debate, interpretation and eventually canonization in the form of written documents considered by consensus to accurately reflect the mind of the founder. What there is of authentic dogma and ritual in Hindu-Buddhism, is closely linked to practice and bears no reference to the anatomy of the universe or the favor of the gods. The focus is what in our tradition we would call “prayer life,” and spiritual transformation; that practice, among Buddhists, is specifically meditation. Doctrine amounted to accurately identifying and applying the methods of meditation and, of course, achieving its goals: individual peace and social harmony in this world.

This was not true for Christianity where the words and attitudes of Jesus were used to justify a religion structured around dogma and rituals created by the Roman Empire broadly patterned on its earlier state religion. Early Roman religion was a local version of the polytheism common to the Mediterranean region built on the myths of the gods. It was not complex. Its purpose was to secure divine favor for the advancement of the interests of the polis. Social harmony and consensus among the citizens came as a byproduct of that, but were hardly secondary. By the beginning of the fourth century the old state religion of the mythological gods, whose adolescent antics were ridiculed relentlessly by the philosophers, had lost all credibility and the Roman Empire needed a replacement. It selected Christianity. As part of that award, not only the buildings and temple paraphernalia of the gods were turned over to the Christian Church, but with the “donation of Constantine” came a responsibility: to sustain the worldview and purposes of the Roman state religion. Christianity re-invented itself as the ground for Rome’s theocracy.

The “Way of Jesus” which had produced the gospels was ultimately swallowed up by the Imperial embrace. Jesus himself was not interested in using “God” as a prop for state power, so if his followers were to fulfill the role offered to them by Rome they would have to stop following Jesus. Effectively, the religion that came to bear the name “Christian” found itself required to reinterpret Jesus’ words, attitudes and behavior, lifestyle and motivations, in order to subordinate them to Roman priorities. It made Jesus an inspirational, even consoling figure, but it prevented the codification of his message, which was so thoroughly opposed to the demands of the Roman state that it got him killed. Jesus’ use of the words “kingdom of God” was precisely intended to situate ultimate loyalty and behavioral compliance in justice and compassion among people not in any state authority, whether it be the Jewish nation or the Roman Empire. In the frenzy to accommodate themselves to the windfall of Constantine’s “donation,” Christians had to ignore all this. They did. Some say they still do.

Roman “Christian” Doctrine came to be determined on other bases, some a crass, politically motivated exaggeration, like the Greek philosophical divinization of Jesus pressured by the emperor himself at the Council of Nicaea, and others the result of the interpretative fantasies of Hellenizing Jews like Paul of Tarsus and John following Philo, and neo-Platonic Roman philosophers like Augustine of Hippo who concocted “doctrines” like Original Sin which were not part of the Jewish doctrinal legacy and never even alluded to by Jesus. Nicaea, taking place in Constantine’s own private villa and with his dominating personal participation, proceeded to its decisions despite the fact that not only did the assembled bishops try to resist the emperor who insisted they use the word “homoousios” to describe Jesus’ divinity, but also with Jesus himself who, as recorded in the gospels, explicitly denied being “God.”

What “divinization” missed was the heart of the matter.   What made Jesus a great spiritual teacher was the fact that he was an ordinary human being whose extraordinary human experience had brought him to a profoundly human reinterpretation of the theocratic Jewish tradition and turned it into a potential universalism of irresistible appeal. It was providential that his message was preserved in the gospel narratives of his life and work or we may never have known what it was, for it is not borne forward by the dogmas of the religion. He saw “God” as a loving Father, not a demanding and punitive Monarch who would reward you with conquest and slaves if you obeyed him. The gospels, written by his earliest followers for whom it was entirely enough to say that Jesus was God’s messenger, have preserved for us the character and significance of his message. The claim that he was a “god.” or even, outrageously and blasphemously that he was “God” himself, served to distort, undermine and fatally emasculate the radical transformative power of his discovery and his invitation.

Re-forming Christianity

But while the theocratic exploitation of Christianity has created outrageous doctrine that because of its antiquity, we realize now, will never be repudiated by the Churches whose success is tied to the appearance of tradition, the authentic religious endeavor should nevertheless move resolutely to the task of a new kind of codification: to identify and articulate the vision of Jesus in the light of the universalism it shares with all other religions. And in pursuit of that end, as a first and immediate item of common data across time and traditions, the experience of the mystics should be considered foundational. What Jesus and the mystics all have in common is the recognized superlative nature of their lived religious experience and practice. “By their fruits you will know them,” Jesus is recorded as saying. Indeed. It is the only test of religious truth.

Religion is practice. It is the art of living humanly. It is not primarily focused on “truth” taken as objective “scientific” knowledge. This should not be misunderstood. Knowing what things really are is important for determining what they can and should do; that holds true for humankind as well. But in our case, knowing what we are as human beings comes at the end of a process of discovery. We know what we are by seeing what we do that works. So practice, the lived experience of people like Jesus and the mystics who have achieved unequaled success in the art of living, has been the origin and energizer for most religions throughout history.

Unfortunately, because of the “other worldly” emphasis of mediaeval Christianity, some mystics expressed their discoveries in terms of visionary experiences. Despite their own clear rejection of assigning any importance to these forms of expression, the word “mystic” in the popular mind evokes enthusiasts who have psychedelic and hallucinatory experiences. But in reality, as a serious reading of their work will show beyond any doubt, their “doctrines” were about the moral and emotional transformation of the selfish individual into a generous and compassionate human being, for the benefit of all, and the practices necessary to achieve it.

Religious reform, then, which amounts to a re-appropriation of religion’s original vitality, should be equally based on the experience of these extraordinary people.

Jesus was one of the mystics. Christianity originally began as an attempt to follow and elaborate on his lived experience. That process got sidetracked and in many ways actually reversed by the Roman take-over. That reversal is not an insignificant development in the history of humankind. Among other things it has meant, after two thousand years of Christian “truth,” the domination and exploitation of the rest of the globe by White European Christians who falsely identified the wealth and power of their nation-states with the success of their “faith” applying the theocratic justifications embedded in Romanized Christian doctrine.  Correcting the false directions taken by Christianity and undoing the damage done by Christian theocracy will require reinstalling the lived experience of Jesus and other mystics from across the globe at the foundation of a new doctrinal edifice. There is no alternative. Many who have accurately seen the source of the problem, and yet, in an attempt to respect traditional institutions, believed that somehow the damaging effects of doctrine could be ignored and authentic religious experience pursued on a parallel track, have again and again had their hopes dashed as “reform” has been demolished by theocratic doctrine. We should have known better. The very attempt is schizoid. It belies the obvious integrity of the human organism whose thoughts and actions can be split from one another only at the cost of sanity. It is not insignificant that some have defined holiness as a profound and available sanity. What is eluding us transcends “truth.”

The mystics’ vision

I suggest starting here: Mystics, east and west, broadly speaking, agree on one foundational experience that characterizes their practice: the self is intimately one with all things. It has two aspects: (1) There is an intimate connectedness among all things creating an inescapable bond of unity with the whole universe. This is, in practice, most often seen in action within the human community in the form of justice, compassion and mutual assistance. (2) The practitioner’s self has a unique role in the establishment of the religious relationship which grounds universal connectedness. The human individual’s intimate relationship to all things originates in the depths of the self. The self is the wellspring of the principle of unity.

In practice, while the first expresses itself most often in human society, it is fundamentally universal; we see it functioning today in a concern for the whole planet. The second corresponds to a sense of ground residing in one’s own interior depths. It also sets up a relationship with that ground which may or may not be interactive as between two “persons.” All this remains to be explored in detail.

Both of these aspects of common practice give rise to other secondary explanatory “doctrines” which differ among the traditions depending on the “scientific” (philosophical) context provided by the local culture in which they are occurring. But I want to emphasize: the two foundational items are features of direct experience. They are not beliefs or objective truths “out there;” they are the descriptions of personal experience that are universal among the mystics. There is, initially, no talk of “God” or of any explanatory “entities” not encountered directly in the process of living. Such second tier explanations are claimed to be “revealed,” or conjectured, or inferred, but in all cases they are ancillary and, despite the dominant role they may come to play for the particular tradition, they are the doctrines that vary most among the mystics. What all mystics have in common with little divergence is the originating experience: a oneness with all things realized through the source of unity found in the depths of one’s self.

This is absolutely universal among them. For the mystics, we are intimately related, by dint of something resident in the self, to everything that exists, even the inanimate. I want to sit quietly with this for a while as experience before analyzing it in future posts. I think it is fair to say that it is not unfamiliar territory for any of us.

Shibboleth

2,800 words

A shibboleth, in its original signification and in a meaning it still bears today, is a word or custom whose variations in pronunciation or style can be used to differentiate members of in-groups from those of out-groups. Within the mindset of the in-group, a connotation or value judgment of correct/incorrect or superior/inferior can be ascribed to the two variants. (Wikipedia)

The word “shibboleth” is Hebrew. It means variously an ear of corn, or a current, a stream. Its actual denotation is irrelevant, however, because in the Biblical Book of Judges chapter 12 it was its pronunciation that was used by the victorious Gileadites to identify their disguised fleeing enemies who could not pronounce the “sh” and said “sibboleth” instead. Those who did not have the correct pronunciation were killed on the spot.

“Shibboleth” as used today is the equivalent of “password.” It has become a symbol of the practices described in the epigraph that, regardless of name, are common everywhere, among all peoples, throughout the history of humankind. If one were tempted to also include in the definition of this phenomenon, the ethnic, national, linguistic, racial and other differences that have divided us into groups justifying the practices, the effort would soon be abandoned with the realization that even where no “tribal” differences exist, people find ways to create them and they use shibboleths to do it. Effectively in these cases, the shibboleth, instead of being a symbol of real differences, itself becomes the only difference, creating groups artificially where there would otherwise be none. The suspicion that there is more here than meets the eye is hard to ignore.

Examples of these shibboleth-generated divisions abound across a wide spectrum ranging from the fans of sports teams who feel disdain and animosity toward fans of rival teams, to alumni of schools whose claims of superiority are imaginary, to the inheritors of different religious traditions where differences in belief do not result in differences in attitude or behavior. In all these cases, however, the shibboleth ― the team, the school, the religion ― used to distinguish insiders from outsiders is the only difference; as a corollary, the commonality both groups share so outweighs the distinctions evoked by the shibboleth that the resulting divisions appear to be artificial and intentionally maintained.

The utterly irrational level of passion and potentially extreme behavior generated by these shibboleth-created groups is the salient feature here. I believe it’s a clue to the etiology. A baseball fan who supposedly loves the game, observing a great “play” by the opposing team, instead of enjoying such an outstanding display of athletic skill, actually becomes furious, and momentarily has feelings of hatred and the desire to do the players ― and their fans ― bodily harm. All claims of “love for the game” disappear in the reality of the overwhelming emotional avalanche generated by the “tribal” identification with the team. Anyone who doubted its irrationality would have it quickly confirmed by the similarly irrational fact that if those same opposing players were to be suddenly signed by the “home” team, hatred would immediately turn to love.

On May 29, 1985, in Brussels, Belgium, hundreds of English soccer fans attacked rival Italian supporters before the kickoff of the European Champions Cup final, sparking a riot that killed at least 36 people and injured some 250 others. The violence here was clearly irrational. No one was threatening anyone. It was only a game! It’s the irrationality that calls attention and demands explanation.

What is going on here?

winning

In the case of sports, it seems clear that, outside of the money generated by the popularity of watching the games, the entire enterprise is arbitrary and meaningless. Nothing is gained and nothing is lost in winning or losing a sports event. The claim that the “contest” stimulates the highest level of effort and that the real goal is to see superlative athletic performance, is quickly refuted by the example described above where excellence is actually held in opprobrium by half of the obser­vers because it was done in the service of “the other team.” In another example, the awarding of gold medals to Olympic athletes who outperformed rival contestants by a hairsbreadth that can barely be measured, does not reflect the fact that the winners and losers are, to all extents and purposes, equal. The awarding of gold medals under such circumstances seems to reveal a prior need to have winners and losers no matter what.

Clearly, then, in these cases the focus is on winning even though winning may have nothing to do with performance. It impels me to ask: What is there about winning that makes us so passionate that we create arbitrary fictional scenarios where reality makes no such demand? Cries of “it’s only a game” meant to escape the feeling of despon­dency that accompanies “losing,” are swallowed up in the irrepressible passions that hold sway at such moments.

vicarious group identity

The next thing is the vicarious nature of the phenomenon. Our personal identity becomes enmeshed inextricably with something or someone other than ourselves, and most intensely with some identifiable group about which we generate a considerable amount of affect. It’s like we can’t help it. Why is that?

For me this is the dominant feature of the shibboleth phenomenon: the identification of the individual person with a group and the feeling that one’s own survival, identity and destiny is tied to that group. I believe this has its roots in evolution. We evolved in pre-historic times with a need to belong to a survival community (family and clan) and genes were “selected” by the more successful survival of those who were inclined to live in community over those who did not; they lived longer and reproduced. Survival was the selector, as always, not the preference of the individuals. It has to be recognized that such a communitarian instinct was originally crucial to the survival of the individual, and so feelings of loyalty for one’s family and clan along with a fear and mistrust of whatever threatens the group ― like a rival group competing for the same resources ― would be understandably part of the selection. Human beings could not afford to be separated from the protective and reproductive community that stood between them and an impersonal and hostile world. Human identity from the beginning was tied to belonging to a local community.

In advanced civilizations, however, like the ones that now populate the earth, family and clan are swallowed up in much wider networks where the survival connections do not resemble a local clan community. It is my contention that the primitive clan instinct is conatus-driven, biologically embedded and particularly intense; it gives rise to the need to identify something in larger society that satisfies the demands of the instinct or, upon failing to do so, impels people to create one.

I believe the “need to belong” to an identifiable group is as primal as any other biological urge directing human behavior. How the modern “rugged individualist” myth arose is a paradox that is explainable as an historical rejection reaction. Along with other factors that substituted belief in a disembodied mind for flesh and blood human beings, individualism was the expression of the modern worldview that replaced the superstitions and class slavery of European Christian culture. Modernism and its bloodless rationality was a rebellion against the emotional religious totalitarianism of the middle ages which built its monolithic structures on the exploitation of the need to belong to a community of survival. To this day, the inheritors of mediaeval Christianity disguise their Churches’ totalitarian proclivities by offering membership in a “survival community” that is global in extent. Freeing oneself from those structures resulted in the creation of unconnected individuals who then became the building blocks of mass society. Was there no alternative?

Deny it as we might the need to belong will not go away. The current emergence of a grotesque and unnatural tribalism onto the political scene not only puts to rest individualist illusions but confirms Darwin’s theory that all biological life including the permutations that gave rise to species are driven by survival. Intelligence itself evolved as a tool of survival. There is no rationality, no goal, no purpose, no intention directing life beyond life itself. Giving purpose and direction to life is a strictly human undertaking; “nature” does not do that for us. Nature gives us a biological inheritance whose energies are conditioned by their evolutionary origins. Belonging to a group that can be perceived and identified with the survival and wellbeing of its members unleashes the most ferocious of human passions ― those associated with the conatus itself ― the instinct for self-preservation. And correlatively, where the group that human instincts are programmed to seek is nowhere to be found, people will create one. Like those who suddenly sense that they are naked, they instinctively grab for something to put on. The analogy is apt; we emerged as biological organisms wrapped in a protective and nurturing matrix ― a human community ― that allows us to survive. We feel homeless without it. It is embedded in our bones. We can control it, but we cannot ignore it or suppress it.

 

But it is imperative that we control it. For human needs have ever been the feeding ground of abusive political power. The exploitation of what people believe they need has functioned infallibly since the rise of warrior kings who offered protections and future greatness that families and clans could no longer provide for themselves. This widened the community beyond perceptibility. The larger the political unit, the more irrelevant the local community, the more disconnected the solitary individual and the greater the alienation and sense of homelessness. “Progress” as represented by civilization, has always meant the progressive elimination of the local community and therefore the necessary rise of disconnected, isolated individuals. Ironically, the displacement of the locus of protection from clan to king, chosen as an instrument of survival, ends up making the individual feel more isolated and defenseless, generating a deeper anxiety over survival.

The central role of survival in driving these developments helps us understand some of the otherwise perplexing features of the shibboleth phenomenon. The need to have winners and losers in sports competitions corresponds to the focus of the conatus on survival. The “team” as the vicarious community of survival must win. Attending a game is most certainly not the refined enjoyment of superior performance. “Winning” is crucial even when it is clear, as in the Olympics, that athletes are equally accomplished.

Similarly, joining or identifying with a group represents the individual’s instinct to find the support community which is part of his/her identity. “Identity” is ultimately a communal phenomenon, and until the individual connects with a community of survival, s/he will sense a lack of identity. These vicarious experiences ― shibboleths ― mirror the instinctive need to belong to a support group local enough for human interaction to be palpably experienced. Once that happens a sense of wellbeing ― belonging ― is immediately generated.

From this perspective the shibboleth phenomenon is seen to be part of a constellation of human feelings, urges, reactions and practices that get their energy from the instinct to nestle oneself in a perceivable communal matrix ― a family or clan ― producing a sense of well-being that arises from our biological organisms. The fact that belonging to a particular group as a matter of objective fact might not really provide the protections that the individual needs does not mitigate either the loyalty or the sense of well-being that comes with membership. The irrationality in evidence here is a clue to its origin in biological instinct. The attempt to create a society of disconnected individual citizens rationally pursuing life, liberty and security for themselves without connection to others, no matter how reasonable and technically efficient it might be, will never fully succeed because human beings are tribal by nature. Tribalism is rooted in the organic intimacy of the family. Because of its irrational dimension, it can be dangerous; it can be manipulated and people are vulnerable. But so can any other biological feature embedded in our organisms, like the need to eat, the urge for sex, the reflex to self-defense. All these things generate a passionate response because they are biologically hard wired. That doesn’t mean they cannot be controlled, but it does mean that the corresponding urges will make insistent demands that the unprepared may feel they cannot disobey.

Strangers, foreigners, those who do not speak one’s language, who eat strange foods, wear unfamiliar clothing, practice a different religion, have a different skin color, are usually just excluded from the in-group until they are perceived to be a threat to its integrity and well-being. Then they become the object of fear and active hostility. These are instinctive reactions that are innate in us and part of the need to identify with a community of survival. We may consider it unfortunate that our biological equipment happened to be forged in the furnaces of the Pleistocene epoch 1.7 million years ago, but those are the conditions under which we have to eke out our survival on this planet. If we want to control it we have to first understand and accept it. This is what we are. The notion, held by many, that tribalism is an aberration of some sort and that a little education will dispel it, is a fallacy touted by the educated that reveals their prejudice against the “others” whom they disparage. It is another example of the shibboleth phenomenon; this time as a myth generated by the privileged ― the beneficiaries ― to justify their own segregationist tribalism i.e., their claims to class superiority.

 

Once the tribe is perceived to be under attack, the individual’s conatus sees its identity threatened and goes into a defensive posture that is focused on the elimination of the threat to the group. The control of tribalism is not to be found in an attempt to dismiss it, much less to eradicate it, which is quite impossible; for even if the “tribe” were destroyed, the members would recreate it in another form. It is rather to make sure that natural groups at the level of family and clan are protected and their well-being ― their ability to provide for the survival and wellbeing of their members ― insured. Individuals should be encouraged to identify with them rather than insist on the failed policy of promoting a mass society where interpersonal human contact is simply not perceivable if not non-existent and considered irrelevant to human happiness. It is the source of the alienation that is generalized in our societies.

Everything about modern economic “development:” from industrial manufacturing that displaces cottage industries, local guilds and craft labor with the mindlessness of the assembly-line; industrial scale agriculture that has eliminated the family farm and the local jobs that went with it; big-box stores pushing local mom and pop retailers out of business and paying their workers less than a living wage; urban “renewal” projects that destroy neighborhood ethnic enclaves; rural “development” that replaces farms and villages with suburban sprawl and shopping malls, the massification of leisure activities that replaces local restaurants by national chain franchises and fast-food outlets ― the list goes on and on ― have conspired to destroy the neighborhood and village once created by family and clan and to replace them with urbanized, isolated, disconnected masses of unemployed people looking for “jobs” with big corporations and for a “home” to rent from some stranger. All the many benefits of small scale, neigh­borhood and village life ― work, commerce, housing, service ― have been eliminated and in their place people are offered money to satisfy their consumption needs (if they’re lucky), which, given the options for living still left to them in mass society, amount to little more than the addictive accumulation of the empty symbols of wealth and success ― another shibboleth ― another substitute for the real thing.

It’s hard to imagine recreating the sense of local belonging that once characterized the living conditions of the majority of humankind without reversing the factors of massification that were responsible for destroying it. But, until the real thing comes along, it seems we will continue to try to satisfy our instincts vicariously by identifying with substitutes ― shibboleths ― that symbolize the instinctive needs we are no longer able to satisfy. These shibboleths are an ersatz, vicarious, unnatural, substitute tribalism that springs up like a fungus on the decaying corpse of the local communities that have been plowed under by the massification of modern society.

Christianity and the Cult of Forgiveness (III):

Tribal Identity, Political Humiliation and Nietzsche’s Rejection of Christianity

 

1

Nietzsche had a unique take on Christianity. He accused it of being the last recourse of “losers.” He claimed it was the concoction of people who could not achieve a sense of self-worth in the harsh world of reality. Despairing of achieving a human existence in life, they generated a pathetic belief in an imaginary world where all their aspirations would be realized after they died.

The flip-side of Nietzsche’s rant was his belief that the human individual’s appropriation of his humanity in the face of all the obstacles against it would result in the emergence of a superior kind of human being: a “superman” who owed his self-worth to no one but himself, loved the earth, rejected any thought of the after-life and necessarily shunned all those who lived by some other standard. Even though Nietzsche himself was opposed to anti-Semitism and the ethnic German nationalism of his day, the Nazis used his thinking to support their vision of Aryan superiority.

Abstracting from the horrific purposes to which others applied his thought, It seems that there might be some historical support to Nietzsche’s claim. Christianity was a development of later Judaism, and Judaism, we have to remember, was a religion that evolved in a most dramatic and intriguing way. It went through an inner transformation that turned it 180^o from a religion of tribal superiority into a religion of salvation for the oppressed.

It began as a contract (“covenant”) with a warrior god, Yahweh, who freed the Hebrews from their enslavement to the Egyptians and conquered an extensive territory in Palestine along with the tribes that lived there for their possession. He was a god of armies, more powerful than all other gods.

But it was Israel’s destiny to return to servitude. In 587 bce, Jerusalem and its Temple were destroyed by the Babylonians and the people carted off to work for their conquerors. The evidence was clear. Yahweh was no longer providing military victory. This struck at the very core of national identity for the Jewish people. Either Yahweh was impotent or he was uncaring; both were considered impossible. The fault had to lay with the Jewish people. They were not upholding their side of the contract, hence Yahweh’s abandonment.

The Jews were about to disappear as a nation. When they were “miraculously” allowed to return and rebuild their city and their Temple 50 years later, they took it as a sign of Yahweh’s compassion. But because their exile was surely the result of their failure, this miraculous act on Yahweh’s part had to be in the form of forgiveness. Thus Yahweh evolved from a war god into a God of forgiveness and compassion, ready to help the failures who begged him for help.

This is extraordinary. Suddenly, with the post exilic prophets, strength and power are no longer the instruments of life and prosperity. What draws down divine help is precisely the opposite: neediness, failure, poverty, vulnerability and sin … . For the Jews’ return from Exile there was an added factor: the new Persian conquerors gave the permissions and provided the protections for the return. They had to be acting as the agents of Yahweh’s will. The logic was undebatable: Yahweh wasn’t only the god of the Jews, he ruled all of Mesopotamia as well. Political impotence translated to a new universalist concept of “God.” If “God” is indeed all powerful, he must be guiding those who rule the world. How else could Israel have come back to life?

Of course, the earlier imagery of a god of tribal military triumph still remained. But it was braided into the new vision, became muted and went underground. It took the form of hope: that Yahweh would, at some future time “awake from sleep” and keep his “promises” to Israel of tribal supremacy. This meant that the collaboration with the current empire was a “holy” albeit temporary strategy. It established a paradigm that was in place when Jesus appeared at the start of the common era.

Enter Christianity

Jesus’ life coincided with that point in history when Rome changed from a powerful city-state that grew by making alliances, to a plundering despotic world empire. Rome’s oppressive control, which involved enslavement and heavy tribute extorted from its vassals, awakened the aspirations for national independence among the Jews, and these two “Yahwehs,” the conquering, liberating warrior of the Exodus and the compassionate, forgiving father of the Exile who was grooming the Romans for Israel’s ultimate glory, vied for control of the Jewish imagination. Jesus, some say, following the Essenes, melded the two images by declaring the coming “kingdom,” which many believed to be imminent, to be both Yahweh’s long expected military assertion of Israel’s world domination and the installation of a completely new way of organizing society run by justice and compassion. There would be a final battle ― an Armageddon ― between the forces of good and the forces of evil and after Yahweh’s victory, justice, compassion and forgiveness would rule the relationships among men, not force, greed, lies and larceny.

Others say Jesus opted for the forgiving father and used kingdom terminology only because of its universal currency among the Jews. It’s hard to dismiss the first theory entirely, however, because after his death his followers took up a stance of awaiting Jesus’ return in power which they claimed would usher in Yahweh’s kingdom. The imagery was clearly political; the condemnation of Roman oppression was implicit in this expectation. They called themselves Christians and demanded a transformation of life into the ideals promoted by the compassionate Yahweh in anticipation of the coming kingdom of justice.

As time went by two things happened that radically changed the Christian version of post exilic Yahwism. The first was that Jesus never returned. This was more disrupting than we may realize. For it resulted in the dismissal of Jesus’ radical morality of non-violence and compassion as poetic exaggeration.

The second was that ethnic Jews no longer dominated the Christian community either in numbers or influence. Most new Christians were Greco-Roman converts who had been brought up in the polytheism of the Mediterranean basin and did not see Rome as an alien conquering power or Israel as “God’s” favored nation. Their political acquiescence and the categories of their ancestral religion re-shaped Christianity. These factors conspired to bring Christians to disregard any thought of a revolutionary Jewish “kingdom” installed by a conquering Yahweh, and to transfer any hopes they may have had for a better life to an imagined existence after death. These developments occurred during the three centuries prior to the decision of the Roman Emperor Constantine to make Christianity the official religion of the Empire, and, in fact, made that decision possible.

When that history-changing event occurred in 312, the new “Greco-Roman” Christian world­view got set in stone. Christians, almost universally, interpreted Constantine’s windfall as the establishment of the promised kingdom.  But the kingdom was not Israel, it was Rome, which is apparently what “God” had in mind all along.  For them, the struggle was over. The laws and statutes of Rome were to be accepted as the rules and regulations of the kingdom. The warrior god had come back to life, and both conquest and obedience to law were re-installed as the fundamental dynamics that ruled the kingdom.

This development was explicitly sanctioned earlier by Paul the apostle himself who had referred to the Roman Empire as having been instituted by “God:” “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” (Letter to the Romans 13: 1). Augustine’s City of God, written a century after Constantine’s choice, picked up the thread and claimed the Roman Empire had been prepared for its role in the spread of Christianity by God himself. That meant that conquest, plunder, enslavement and cultural extermination were officially acknowledged as appropriate tools for a providential “God” who micro-manages human history. This served as a paradigm for Christian thought throughout subsequent millennia. Power and wealth were “blessings” from “God,” no matter how they were gotten. That’s what “providence” meant.

Evolution

Don’t be fooled by the smooth transitions occurring here. The evolution of the Christian view of political power ended up co-opting Jesus’ message and harnessing it to the goals of empire for external conquest and the internal control of the conquered. Slaves accounted for about 25% of the population of the Empire, mostly obtained through conquest. The economy of the empire was totally dependent on slave-labor. The compassionate, post-exilic Yahweh was actually made subordinate to the warrior king (whom Constantine’s Council at Nicaea identified as Jesus himself) who led the Roman legions to victory, his cross emblazoned on their shields. Jesus and the conquering emperor Constantine were assimilated to one another and Jesus was apotheosized as the Roman Pantocrator: the all ruler who sat in judgment on humankind ― specifically condemning disobedience to the laws of the kingdom and its authorities. Correlatively, the emperor ruled, and conquered, and plundered, and enslaved, in the name of Christ.

Rome took Christianity in stride; the hum of daily life never skipped a beat. Emperor and Church were one entity, a theocracy exactly as it was under Jupiter and Venus. The “secular arm” legislated and imposed sanctions, punishing those who disobeyed, and the Church provided the narrative that divinized Rome as the “kingdom.” No one challenged slavery. And whatever justice was missing in “God’s” kingdom on earth was dismissed by the Church as of no consequence when compared to the pleasures of heaven. All the bases were covered.

It was not in the interest of the Empire to encourage any aspirations toward an end-of-time “kingdom of Justice” that challenged empire’s slave-based economy. Therefore it was extremely convenient that the new state religion wanted people to think of themselves as moral cripples ― losers ― deserving of punishment and thoroughly dependent on the forgiveness of “God,” a promissory note that was brokered exclusively by the Empire’s Church and cashed in only after death. Judaism’s inheritance from the post-exile experience served the Empire well.

2

Thus it would seem that there are historical reasons that would support Nietzsche’s characterization. Subsequently, the states in the West reproduced the patterns established by Rome: that “God” worked alongside (Christian) government to insure peace and harmony. The fact that peace and harmony were necessary for the smooth operation of the Imperial machine made the Christian religion something of a windfall for the Empire.

Please note the dynamics operating in this paradigm which has become our common legacy in the West. The “God of compassion” works in the service of the “God of political supremacy,” not the other way around. The ultimate definition of “God” identifies “him” as “all powerful,” the ally and guarantor of power. All other functions of divine intervention were ordered to it as means to an end. Any other belief would be inconsistent with “providence.”

This “theocratic imperative” ― the marriage of religion and political power ― is true everywhere in the West. For many, even “liberation theology” follows this paradigm; they think of it as a reprise of the “Armageddon” theology of the Essenes in modern, progressive garb. In this view “God’s” kingdom is not a spiritual metaphor, but rather a real social/political entity with laws and sanctions and the ability to defend itself. These new structures will guarantee justice for everyone. The “God” who reigns over this kingdom is still the “God of power” and armies; that’s the way “he” has always worked as illustrated by the supremacy of Rome. The only thing that has changed is the identification of the social class that legitimately wields power, makes laws and imposes sanctions.  There are many who are persuaded that “God” has chosen the United States to be the latest version of the “kingdom.”

My reaction is to say that people have a right to decide the social and political structures they want to live by, and to do what is necessary to install them. But they do not have a right to claim that it is “God” who is doing it.

National underdogs and “their” religion

The political character of our concept of “God” in the West is also on display in the national character of western religious denominations. By “national character” I mean that being from a particular local tribe (nation or clan) is invariably linked to a particular religion. When we think of the Irish or the Polish, for example, especially in the United States, we are accustomed to them being Catholic, while we anticipate that Brits and Germans, despite being from neighboring countries in each case, will be Protestant.

I singled out those nationalities not just as examples, but as particularly supportive of my thesis: that religion follows politics. The thesis, however, is double-edged. For the political choices also in turn shape the religion, sometimes in ways that are not anticipated. Who would have expec­ted, for example, that Jesus, who taught that those in authority in his community should be “like children” inviting compliance from their flock and never “lording it over them as the gentiles do,” would eventually be crowned as Pantocrator of the slave-based Roman Empire and be used as divine justification for its brutal and larcenous projects?

In the case of the Irish and the Polish, the national humiliation suffered at the hands of their dominating neighbors impelled them in each case to cling fiercely to a Catholicism that represented opposition to their oppressors. But look how the second “edge” comes into play. The autocratic infallibility claimed by the Catholic Church served as a welcome psychological prop for the humiliated nations against the debasement being dealt out by their enemies. The Irish and Polish people became invested in Catholic ideology. Catholicism made them superior to their antagonists. Certainly for these people, any suggestion that the doctrines of Catholic superiority ― like doctrinal and moral infallibility ― that they found so supportive in their humiliation were actually contrary to the spirit and even explicit counsel of Jesus, or that the “Reformation” embraced by their hated neighbors was actually closer to the mind of Christ, would be rejected at the doorstep. One might reasonably claim that dogmas that otherwise might have evolved into more mollified form if left alone were actively kept in the strictest construction by these ethnic minorities for the purposes of their national/ethnic interests. What they may have bequeathed to the world by their tribal Catholicism is the most potent tool for the dismantling of the democratic experiment that exists to date: a reactionary obdurate Roman Catholic Church ― whose dogmas are the ideological blueprint for the re-establish­ment of Roman Imperialism, and the last bastion of the Ancien Régime in the modern world.

3

Everything that this version of events describes can have occurred for only one reason: that people believed that “God” was a supernatural humanoid person. “He” has a will, thinks and chooses, intervenes in history in order to ensure the accomplishment of his intentions, and rewards and punishes humans for compliance or non-compliance with his “commands.” “Providence” means God controls everything.

It seems that the theist humanoid “God” of the traditional western imagination not only was used in place of science to explain phenomena that mystified the human mind, but also functioned to justify the conquests that enslaved the conquered. And just as science has eroded confidence in any personal divine agency in the operations of the physical world, so too, modern political self-deter­mination has challenged the theocratic premise that all power forma­tions, no matter how oppressive, were the will and work of God.

But if, as I have been proposing in this blog since 2009, we were to consider “God” not to be an acting, willing person, but rather the source of our spontaneous sense of the sacred, which I identify as the living material energy ― LIFE ― of which we and everything else in our cosmos is constructed, then much of our historical narrative is exposed as just so much myth. It is all a mirage, a projection, the fantasies of primitive ignorance. They are a major source of the suffering that we have inflicted on one another, for they have been used to justify the exploitation of man by man.

A personal “God” who has a specific will narrows the options open to humankind and, in the hands of a multitude of tribes, necessarily pits them against one another. The level of the resulting slaughter and enslavement is proportionate to the divine approval imagined. The more “religious” the people, the more convinced they are that “God” wills their success and rejects that of others, and the less inhibited they will feel about unleashing unspeakable atrocities on people they identify as their “enemies.”

One could legitimately elaborate a theological argument along the lines of the “ex convenientia” logic of the scholastics and say, if all this follows inevitably or even most probably from the premise of belief in a personal “God,” then it suggests the premise is false, for it makes “God” either an unwitting dupe, if he does not really “will” these things, or a moral cretin if he does. It forces us to re-think our assumptions. Minimally it means the theist “God” of traditional western faith does not exist.

In contrast: “God” as LIFE

LIFE, on the other hand, does not narrow the options open to humankind, it expands them. LIFE supports the autonomous management of our way of life. Our political/economic structures are ours to decide. LIFE has no enemies because it has no “will,” and it has no will because it is not an entity, and certainly not a “person” as we understand the word.

We all know what LIFE is because we are alive and surrounded by living things; we experience it directly and first hand. We may have a hard time defining it in terms other than itself, for we have nothing to compare it to, but we know what it is intimately and interiorly for we are alive. It is responsible for the developments of evolution that have filled our teeming earth with a near infinitude of life forms culminating (from our point of view) in the human species. LIFE does not think except in us; it does not choose except in us; it does not have preferences or a “will” except in us; it does not command or cajole or persuade or punish. It is only in us that it is “personal.”

It is this LIFE that impels us to live and do all those things, positive and negative, necessary for life to continue, that gives rise in us to a sense of the sacred. Existence, being-here, is the grail ― the great quest. We know LIFE in living things because we know LIFE in ourselves; and what we all want is to be-here.

To be-here, ESSE, is to die for. We “live move and have our being” in the living material energy of this cosmos. Matter’s energy is all we are … there is nothing more to us. The living material energy of this cosmos is ESSE, and we are THAT.

So where does that leave us? All of the functions, from the elaboration of the universe to the configurations of our social/political structures, that we have heretofore claimed were the work and will of “God,” are the work of living material energy ― LIFE. But that means they are ours … for we are living matter in its most evolved form on our planet. LIFE enters into those functions as ourselves. What we do is what living matter is capable of. We are the expressions of its potential, the outward manifestation of its inner dimensions and dormant properties. LIFE does not intervene in these issues “personally” for it is not an entity; it is a universal energy. It acts as the forms into which it has evolved. There is a sacredness to these things, but the sacredness does not come from an outside “God” … it comes from within, from energy ― creative, abundant, generous and utterly disinterested ― the characteristics of LIFE that impel our work, our morality, our social constructions, and our environmental responsibilities. This what being-here looks like.

We are the mirrors and agents of the living matter ― the LIFE ― of which we are made. There is a reason why we resonate with all the living things around us, from the smallest one-celled organisms to the great animals in our zoos. We all flee from enemies; we all defend ourselves; we all spend our days hunting for food and shelter; we all seek partners for company and to reproduce our kind; and we all want passionately to be-here. We are all made of the same clay. And that clay is alive and has a bearing that elicits a similar response in us all.

Against this background our theist history is revealed as pure projection ― the creation of a primitive imagination that could not cope with being alone. Did that make us all “losers”? Our modern technological prowess has given us confidence that perhaps we are not. We may be, after all, capable of taking care of ourselves, especially if we don’t delude ourselves with expectations that go beyond the possibilities of material energy. Belief in eternal life, is one of those, as is the thought that we are not biological organisms evolved from and living on this earth with all the needs and limitations that entails. But the business of organizing our communities on this earth so that we can be what we are ― the just and generous, empathetic and sharing, exemplars of the living material energy that we bear as our own ― belongs to us alone.

Tony Equale, October 2018

Anti-Semitism?

1,900 words

On February 21, 2017 the Washington Post printed this caption under a photograph of overturned headstones in a St Louis cemetery:

Local and national media report on more than 170 toppled Jewish headstones after a weekend vandalism attack on Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in University City, a suburb of St Louis, on Feb. 21, 2017.

The accompanying article by Post editor Kayla Epstein went on to observe:

For Jews, the act of desecrating cemeteries recalls a dark history of prejudice and intimidation against Jewish communities.

In the 19th century there was an outburst of pogroms against Jews under the Russian empire. “One of the aspects of these pogroms, these violent outbursts against the Jewish community, is targeting Jewish property. A very common target is a synagogue or a Jewish store, but also Jewish cemeteries,” explained Michael Meng, associate professor of history at Clemson University.

During World War II, under the Nazi regime, many Jewish cemeteries were damaged across Europe, including in the Czech Republic (then Czechoslovakia), Poland, Germany and Greece. During Kristallnacht in November 1938, also known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” Jewish cemeteries were vandalized, along with businesses and synagogues, by anti-Semitic mobs throughout the Reich.

David Leonhardt of the New York Times said on Feb 23rd, “social media was filled with anti-Semitism last year: Journalists who said they had never been subject to bigotry before came to expect it, usually from Trump supporters.”  The event came on the heels of the Trump statement of January 27 commemorating the Holocaust which came under criticism because it omitted any mention of Jews or anti Semitism.

The sudden spate of anti-Semitic hostility is widely understood to be part of the resurgence of white supremacist attitudes prevalent among certain sectors of the American population who supported Donald Trump.  Trump has been accused of having sympathy for such views, in part because of the prominent place he assigned in both his campaign staff and then as national security advisor to Steve Bannon, whose editorial policy at Breibart News was believed by many to support white supremacy.  But also Trump’s derogatory statements about Muslims, his distrust of refugees, his claims about the immoral behavior of Mexican immigrants, his disparaging characterizations of African American neighborhoods, confirm for many that the attitudes attributed to Bannon and the views of Mr. Trump are one and the same.  The unmistakable similarity of skin color among the groups that Mr. Trump denigrates has led some to label these attitudes a thinly veiled racism.

The traditional association of anti-Semitism with white supremacy is well known from recent history, and so its emergence in the current context is not surprising.  But there are certain anomalies that beg for an explanation.  One is that Trump himself is not anti-Semitic; he never criticized Jews in his speeches; his son-in-law is Jewish and his daughter converted to Judaism.  Also Trump is  pro-Zionist to an extreme.  He has even reversed the traditional American preference for a “two state solution” concurring with the Israeli right wing.  Even though his delay in condemning these attacks on Jews suggests he is aware that they are being carried out by people who support him, their occurrence can hardly be laid at his feet.  But if he did not call them forth, what did?  The Jews, stereo-typically speaking, have nothing in common with the other groups that Trump has identified as a threat to America’s “greatness.”  American Jews are citizens; they are considered educated, successful, wealthy and white.  So how do they end up in the doghouse with poor and marginated third world people?

To ask it in a different way: what does hatred of the Jews have in common with hatred of Muslims, blacks, and brown skinned Latinos?  Why does racism elicit anti-Semitism?  This shifts the issue away from Donald Trump and to his followers, where I believe it belongs.  It  suggests that there is a pool of negative attitudes that are shared by the people he appeals to.  When he stimulates the loyalties of this sector of the population, what emerges is not just what he explicitly and intentionally calls forth but other elements which no one suspected were whole cloth with it.

Fear and hatred of the unbaptized

I believe what we are dealing with here are ancient Christian attitudes that continue to reside embedded in the emotional subconscious of large sectors of the American population whose ethnic heritage has passed them on.  I claim there is a structural logic stemming from the ancient traditional Christian view of the world which gives rise to a visceral abhorrence for the non-baptized.  What Jews have in common with those other groups is that they were all at some point in time identified by Christians as heathen.  The non-baptized are pariahs in the traditional view; they are slated for eternal punishment because “God’s” wrath, directed at all the children of Adam, is assuaged only by individual incorporation into the Christian Church by baptism.  You have to realize: this has nothing to do with current crimes or immoral acts.  It’s due to the insult of “Original Sin” at the time of creation. “God” hates the non-baptized because of what Adam did, not because of what they did.  If he is so angry as to punish these people after death who have done nothing wrong, what wouldn’t he do to them during life, and their “Christian” neighbors with them, as collateral damage.

Jews in particular were destined to suffer as a public display of their inherited guilt.  That theory was given a compelling articulation by Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century; it was accepted without challenge as the dominant worldview for all of Western Europe for the next 1500 years.  Its theological justification — “Original Sin” and the damnation of the non-baptized — is still taught by the Vatican Catechism of 1992.  The fear and hatred that Christians bore the non-baptized took concrete form in the specific identification of Jews, Muslims, “heretics” and primitive, pre-civilized natives of Africa and the Americas as “enemies of ‘God.’”  The key point is that the presence of the non-baptized — the Jews, for example — in any locality was believed to be a magnet for divine punishment in the form of earthquakes, plagues, famines, droughts, foreign conquest and other calamities.  I claim that, once identified, the non-rational feelings of fear and loathing remained attached to these ethnic and religious groups long after the theological justifications were forgotten.

The violence perpetrated against Jews during the black plague in Europe in the 1350’s is a case in point.  The Jews were blamed for the plague.  Whole communities, men women and children were locked in their synagogues and burnt alive, among other forms of slaughter.  The anti-Semitism of the Nazis and the silent complicity of all of Europe in the genocidal Holocaust that was responsible for the mass murder of six million Jews is another example.  Hatred and punishment of Jews was indisputably a traditional Christian phenomenon; when the Nazis, who claimed to be stone atheists, picked up the baton of anti Semitism they did not have to produce one shred of justification.  The ground had already been prepared.  The imputation of “evil” to the Jews was an unquestioned assumption of all Christians, Protestant and Catholic alike.  The hatred was so deeply embedded that the Nazis didn’t need to be Christian themselves to be energized by the millennia of animosity they had inherited from their Christian forebears.

I claim this is what is functioning in the perplexing emergence of anti-Semitism at this point in time and in response to Donald Trump’s evocation of enmity against the Muslims, Mexicans, refugees and American blacks.  The phenomenon is worth dwelling on.  For it serves as an object-lesson of how these motivations continue on in irrational sub-conscious feelings long after the original logical reasons are gone and forgotten.  I doubt that Trump’s current followers are  worried that the presence of Jews in their communities will call down the “wrath of ‘God.’”  The grave-vandals probably couldn’t even articulate, if questioned, what created such anger in their hearts.  They are blind to the archaic roots of their emotions.

The Reform of sociopathic Christianity — everybody’s responsibility

They may be blind, but we shouldn’t be.  The point of this exercise is to enjoin everyone, not only Christians, to bring these sick mis-perceptions to light and challenge the validity of their origins.  There is no other way to rob them of their power to do harm.  Because of the mythic nature of the sources of these culturally inherited feelings, just becoming aware is usually enough to quell them.  Who still believes that “God” hates the Jews and will punish their neighbors along with them for the “murder” of Christ?

Who, indeed!  But, in this case, we are dealing with a strange twist.  The Catholic / Christian doctrine of “Original Sin,” the source of these feelings, has never been repudiated or denied by the Christian Churches despite a universal consensus that the Genesis story of the sin of Adam was a fable written to encourage moral compliance, not an account of literal events.  The Vatican Catechism, however, published under direct Papal auspices in 1992, continues to promote as “infallible truth” the doctrine that those who die without baptism are the object of “God’s” wrath and deserving of eternal damnation unless baptized into Christ’s saving death.  Why else would the Catechism say that in the case of infants who die unbaptized, if “God” does not punish them it is “a mystery of his mercy.” (Vatican Catechism 1261 & 1283)

Many claim “Original Sin” is archaic doctrine and that no one takes it seriously anymore.  Excuse me.  It’s still “on the books” and there is nothing to stop some future Christian zealot from resurrecting the dogma and following through on its logical implications.

It’s time that the people take responsibility for this ideological insanity that continues in our midst to be perpetrated on a daily basis in the name of “freedom of religion.”  Christians have a moral obligation to the rest of society to reform their archaic dysfunctional religion.  A religion that espouses the superiority of one belief system over another and on that basis tacitly justifies the kinds of anti-Semitic attacks that we see emerging in our society, undermines the very basis of the American Constitution: the equality of all human beings regardless of religion or ethnic origin.

In the 1950’s the contradiction of giving freedom of speech to groups that espoused the violent overthrow of the US government, was duly noted.  In the case of Communists the courts acknowledged that the Constitution respected even those who would speak about revolution, but it would not tolerate actions directed to that end.

I believe we are at a similar place with Catholicism and other forms of Christian fundamentalism.  The same law that will punish the cemetery vandals for toppling the gravestones in St Louis will permit the mediaeval Catholic magisterium to make the absurd claim that Jews, Muslims, and unbaptized infants are the special object of divine wrath.  But by the same token the law permits the rest of us to raise our voices against the stupidity and potential violence caused by obsolete religious claptrap.

Extreme sociopathic attitudes should be denounced as anti-human no matter who displays them.  Freedom of speech cuts both ways.

March 2017

Tony Equale

Christianity and authoritarianism

Feb 2017

3,000 words

“In its American incarnations, it [Christianity] has come to rule the world. The 20th century saw America shrugging off notions of the Death of God and rising to the position of a Christian empire.  It grows more imperial as it grows more Christian.” (Adam Roberts, “The Atheist Paradox,” Aeon 11/26 2012)

Whether or not the “strongman,” predicted by political philosopher Richard Rorty in his 1998 book Achieving Our Country turns out to be our current president, Donald Trump’s xenophobic campaign promises and authoritarian behavior have thrown huge sectors of the nation into turmoil.  Tendencies in the “strongman” direction are unmistakable, and besides strategies of resistance people are search­ing for explanations: how could such a thing happen in the United States of America, the bastion and beacon of democracy in the modern world?

I have already suggested one partial answer: that the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump were amenable to the use of America’s military and economic superiority on the global stage to secure their own well being, much as the wealthy elite have always done, even if it meant the impoverishment of other nations.  It is called “imperialism.”  Trump was perfectly clear.  Many see it as a reprise of an old pattern: the stronger sooner or later will use their strength to enhance themselves even if it means oppressing and suppressing others.

This had an internal component: alarmist rejections of “Muslim terrorists” hardly obscured Trump’s true motivations in curtailing immigration; for the same attitudes were directed at Mexicans many of whom were born here and none are Muslim.  “Make America Great Again,” translated to “the hard-earned wealth of working Americans must not be squandered on “free loaders.”  The fact that it is well known that these immigrants are as “hard-working” as anyone, revealed the racism that was the real source of the rejection.

For now, there are stop-gap resistance strategies, but if you’re looking for a durable solution for this problem you’re going to have to wait until people learn what it means to be human.  We have to identify ourselves as a global community, not some local clan, tribe or nation, or we will destroy ourselves, our species and our planet.  This is not just speculation.

The “Christian” contribution

In this reflection, I hope to present what I believe is another piece of the picture: the role of our Religious institutions — Christian Churches, primarily — in conditioning the American People to accept authoritarian government despite it being directly antithetical to the values embedded in the American Constitution.

This has always been a thorny problem, because included in the guarantee of the Constitution is ideological freedom.  We have to realize: Christianity is not only a religion, it is a social ideology.  It has functioned as the underpinning of theocracy in Western Europe for more than a thousand years and continues to offer itself not only as a way to “God” and eternal life, but as a way to secure a divinely protected harmony and prosperity in our earthly societies.  American freedom was always conditioned by the understanding that among various competing religious and political worldviews, one or another may convince the majority to embrace its beliefs and practices.  Would “freedom of religion” and “freedom from religion” still be guaranteed under majority rule?  The door has always been open to self-defeating choices.

For a very long time this fear was focused on the question of religious establishment i.e., declaring one religious denomination official.  Because in the early days of the republic Americans were Protestants they shared a general belief in a moral code as well as a revulsion for Catholic Papal autocracy.  Officializing a protestant denomination was not necessary to achieve agreement on these fundamental issues, and establishment would  introduce a level of conflict that would have torn the new nation apart.  Catholics were few and any dangers that Americans would suddenly declare obedience to the Pope were non-existent.

That all changed as first the Irish immigration of 1845-1852 and then the arrival of foreign workers from traditionally Catholic countries like Poland and Italy around the turn of the 20^th century brought millions of “papist” Catholics into the country.  Catholic immigrants’ children would all be citizens.  But by the late 19^th and early 20^th century Americans’ fear of Catholics reached a fever pitch and immigration quotas from majority Catholic countries were suddenly and drastically curtailed.

By the end of the second world war the children and grandchildren of immigrant Catholics — now full fledged citizens — had become so integrated into American society that they posed a threat to the smooth running of the traditional political system.  In the lead-up to John Kennedy’s election in 1960, Catholics were subjected to a decade of scrutiny on their American loyalty.  Challengers like Paul Blanchard asked seriously: what would a Catholic President do in the face of a papal decree contrary to the laws and policies of the United States?  Whom would he obey, the Pope or his country?  These issues were seriously debated and Kennedy found himself forced to issue a declaration of loyalty to the Constitution during the campaign, explicitly stating that he would resign the presidency if there were ever a conflict (notice: he did not say he would stop being Catholic).

But lurking in the background was another religious issue that no one suspected would pose a Constitutional challenge of such magnitude that it might bring an end to democratic government in the United States.  The issue was a belief in absolute objective morality which all Christians, Protestant and Catholic, shared, and which had been essential to theocracies in European countries prior to the establishment of Constitutional republics in the nineteenth century.  Together, Christian conditioning prepared people (1) to accept authoritarian (non-democratic) government-by-ruling-class (this is exclusively Catholic), and (2) to profess an objectively true morality coercively imposed as law.  These two things, in my opinion, contributed to Christians in great numbers swelling the ranks of the 63 million people voting for Donald Trump despite the threat to Constitutional democracy that his campaign rhetoric clearly foretold.

Let’s “unpack” these two aspects of the religious (Catholic, Christian) contribution to the breakdown of American democracy:

(1) Authoritarianism: “God” as the Source of all authority

Catholic authoritarianism is not limited to the autocracy of the Pope.  The Catholic system of ecclesiastical governance is pervaded by a patriarchal authoritarianism from top to bottom, and the dogmatic justifications for authoritarian practice are also matters of revelation — truths originating in another world — to which Catholics are expected to adhere.  A personal entity called “God,” not the human community, is the source of all authority, and “God’s” will in this regard is exclusively communicated by men who are themselves un-elected autocrats — the hierarchy.  How is this spelled out in the life of the Catholic community?

(a) Caste status for Catholics is an ontological reality.  The Catholic Church divides Christians into two separate and unequal classes: those who have received holy orders and those who haven’t.  By the Middle Ages church leadership roles had been compressed into one, the priesthood; all other Christians were laity.  The higher clergy were all priests, and all priests were non-married males.  They were the elites: they were educated, exercised whatever authority there was, and through their magical powers were the exclusive mediators of “salvation” to the illiterate and credulous masses.  Once you were ordained a priest, you were a priest forever.  You may cease to function in the role, and may even be released from your vows, but you always retained your magic powers and your status.

Catholics believe that superior social status — the priesthood — is permanent.  It is conferred as an ontological reality independent of function: the equivalent of a genetic code.  If you were looking for some way to make class distinction an immutable social institution, the Catholic belief in priestly ordination provides what you need.

The influence here may be indirect, but it is not insignificant.  The Catholic people have been conditioned for their entire lives to the idea of there being an inherent quasi-genetic ruling class status conferred for life by “God,” exclusively on males, selected by the autocratic leader of a diocese.  There is no room for election of either priests or bishop by the community, despite the ancient practice, and women are excluded entirely.

(b) Political power in the Catholic Church is a “divine right.”  Closely linked to the above is the belief that the source of the right to exercise political power is not the will of the people but rather the will of “God” who is imagined as some sort of rational person who has decided how and by whom authority is to be exercised in the Church and reveals it to his chosen agents.  This proposition is antithetical to the principles of democratic government and as a matter of historical fact is contrary to the universal practice of the Church for almost the first thousand years, when bishops were elected by their people.  Vox populi, vox Dei “The voice of the people is the voice of ‘God’” was the formula that identified the divine source of the democratic ideal.  This democratic mechanism for choice of leaders was still operational as late as the 15^th century until the Papacy, in collusion with other European monarchs, completely destroyed the Conciliar movement which tried to install representative Councils as the highest authority in the Church.  Monarchical authority — the Papacy — exercised as a “divine right” completely independent of the will of the people, was an achievement of the Mediaeval Popes, and it has functioned as the exclusive manner of exercising authority in the Catholic Church ever since.

Once again, the idea that such a justification of autocracy — power invested exclusively in the hands of one person bypassing the participation of the people in the selection of their leaders — is a valid and legitimate basis for governance, by its very existence serves to undermine commitment to the principles of democracy.  Catholic people, at least since the Middle Ages, have been accustomed to being ruled by a “hierarchy.”  The word comes from Greek and means “holy authority.”  This doesn’t mean that all Catholics would automatically accept some strongman’s claim to have a divine mandate to rule civil society, but they have been programmed to accept lifelong patriarchal authority conferred by something other than the consent of the people.

(2) Absolute morality and civil law.

Christianity at the pastoral level, the level of family life and daily labor, whether Catholic or any of its reformed versions, has made moral behavior the principal item in a transactional relationship with a punitive “God” — a quid pro quo  — where “salvation” after death is earned by compliant behavior during life.  This contrasts sharply with the  perspective of the ancient Greeks, for whom morality’s primary significance was individual self-development; by living morally you became fully human, and self-fulfillment made you happy.  Christianity did away with that view and redefined right behavior as the individual’s obedient relationship to “God.”  Compliance with the moral code became obedience, and obedience was a form of worship.

Christianity in its current form is the end product of fifteen hundred years of theocratic governance.  Especially in Western Europe, the Roman Empire’s use of the Christian religion to forge a society of homogeneous values and universal compliance, resulted in the inevitable tailoring of Christian beliefs to the needs of “crowd control.”  One of the instruments developed for that purpose was the welding of Christian morality to Roman Law.   Morality was considered submission to “God,” and the Roman Emperors’ efforts to guarantee divine protection for the Empire drove them to place the entire nation in a state of submission to “God.”  This could only be achieved by making Christian morality enforceable by law.  Thus was theocracy reborn under a Christian banner.

In the Christian view, the “moral code” is imagined as imposed not by community agreement but rather by “God” himself.  “God’s” putative “will” is that humans should comply with an abstract “justice” derived from commandments identified with a deducible “natural law” that may or may not have anything to do with the well being of the human community or its individuals.  This is the essence of an absolute morality — characteristic of theistic religions — as opposed to the conventional agreements by which people form cooperative communities among themselves:  Christian morality is grounded in abstract principles rooted in a world of ideas and made known to humankind by revelation; it is not determined by the discernment of human benefit and a consensus of agreement by the members of the governed community.

A morality believed to be imposed and monitored by a “God” who will punish non-compliance with eternal torment is so dominated by the fear factor that it can hardly be embraced for the purposes of self-development, if one were ever so inclined.  This confluence of law and morality virtually eliminates human authenticity.  Even when behavior conforms to moral norms, the obeisance engendered by the looming judgment of a punitive “God” turns every human choice into a groveling self-interest.  It’s no wonder that the “sacrament” of penance was reconceived in the middle ages as the application of another imagined magic power of the priest “upgrading” what was an unavoidable “imperfect contrition” into something that would be worthy of an eternal reward.  They were honest enough to recognize that fear was the primary motive generated by their “system,” and that a life lived out of fear is hardly “perfect.”

Everything was  obedience; everything was master-slave.  Those that complied out of the “love of ‘God’” were few and far between.  “God” and society’s authorities — the agents of his will — were the masters, and the individual human beings were the slaves.  It is the social paradigm, internally, of authoritarianism, and externally, of empire.   Constantine had chosen wisely.

Christian fascism

Authoritarianism can arise from many different sources.  We are generally accustomed to  military coups where unquestioned authority is imposed by force of arms.  But I believe what put Trump in the presidency is a preference for the kind of authoritarianism that I  call “Christian” fascism.  It is “fascist” because it derives from the will of vast numbers of ordinary people who have chosen an autocrat whom they know will act in their name and “for their best interests” without regard for the rule of law or the interests of others who are not part of his constituency.  I call it “Christian” because I believe a majority of the 52% of Catholics who voted for Trump, and great numbers of others who identify themselves as Christian, were motivated by moral issues that certain strains of Christian fundamentalism, including the Catholic, have identified as Christian: the condemnation of abortion, same sex marriage, contraception.  They believed they were under a divine mandate — communicated to them by their religious leaders — to elect the candidate who would restore “true” morality.  True morality, in their eyes, recapitulates the imperatives of the ancient Roman theocracy.  Enacting them into law makes the entire nation “right with ‘God’” and therefore supposedly deserving of divine protection and prosperity.  These moral norms are claimed to be equally applicable to all because they reflect the “natural law” which all can discern by reason.  Therefore since they apply to all, they can be legislated for all.  Here’s the way Charles Chaput, the Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia put it:

Catholic moral convictions about abortion, contraception, and the purpose of sexuality are clearly unpopular in some quarters. Yet Catholic ideas about the nature of personhood, marriage, and sexuality are rooted not just in revelation, but also in reason and natural law. Human beings have an inherent nature that is not just the product of accident or culture, but universal and rooted in permanent truths knowable to reason.  (Dec 8, 2016, Philadelphia Inquirer)

What Chaput takes for granted and I dispute is the proposition that personal morality has a right to be enacted into law, effectively coercing the entire population to obey what some faction of some fundamentalist cult considers divine revelation and the “order of nature.”  There is no such revelation, and behind it all, there is no such “personal” God-entity who wills, or commands or sanctions legal coercion.  This is a Christian myth; and it makes traditional Christianity every bit as mediaeval, archaic and intellectually regressive as the worst forms of Islam.

The fear of Catholic authoritarianism that haunted the early Republic and disturbed Americans as late as the 1950’s, turned out to be well founded, but for reasons that ran deeper than the Popes’ exercise of autocratic power.  The contagion of authoritarianism spread by Catholicism is shared by all fundamentalist versions of Christianity and springs from deeply embedded beliefs that will continue to wreak havoc on the human social experiment.  Christianity in its traditional form, which embodies a divinely mandated morality, the fruit of an absurd belief in a theist humanoid “God”-person, the Creator-craftsman who made the universe and everything in it the way a carpenter builds a house, is utterly false.  It is pure fiction.  It is an incredible belief system, the incoherent vestige of a past era whose view of the world has been completely superseded by the findings of modern science, and whose holy books have been proven to be the religious speculations of an uninformed people as they evolved their understanding of what “worked” in human society.  They projected their discoveries onto “God.”  There was nothing “revealed” about the morality recorded in those books.

From my point of view the election of Donald Trump can be directly attributed in large measure to the completely unreformed state of the Christian religion, despite the ethereal work of theologians whose academic ivory tower elaborations never reach the pastoral level, much less do they challenge the mediaeval authority structures which are the living contradiction of everything theologians claim for a Christianity that exists only in their imaginations.  The state of Christianity today, politically and socially, is the same as it has been for the last 1500 years, since Augustine of Hippo spelled out the theocratic role the Christian Church should play in the ascendeancy of the Roman Empire.  Unreformed traditional Christianity — one version of which is fundamentalist Catholicism — is the DNA of authoritarianism and empire.

Vast numbers of traditional Christians, including a majority of Catholics, were one of the principal sectors who elected Donald Trump.  “By their fruits you will know them.”

THE HAIGHT-KNITTER DIALOGUE

January, 2017

3,140 words

I’ve just had what might be called a surreal experience: I’ve been reading an exchange between two Roman Catholic theologians, both 80 years old, imagining a “Religion of the Future” that will not be any recognizable version of Roman Catholicism.  Their dialog is recorded in a new book called Jesus and Buddha and is focused on the potential complementarity of Buddhism and a post-modern version of Christianity.  The friends are Roger Haight, SJ, well known author of the 2000 award winning book Jesus Symbol of God, and Paul Knitter, author of many books, most recently, Without Buddha I could not be a Christian, Orbis, 2013.

Surreal as it might be that married, ex-priest and retired Catholic theology professor Paul Knitter has committed himself to Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism, it is well matched by his interlocutor: silenced theologian Roger Haight who, incredibly, is still a Jesuit priest in good standing.  Haight’s attempts in this dialog to restate traditional Catholic doctrine in a post modern idiom mirrors the surreality of his status.  He was silenced by the Vatican in 2004 because his book contained “statements contrary to Catholic doctrine.”  Given the Papal resistance to doctrinal reform since Vatican II, it was inevitable.  Both men, institutionally displaced in different ways by that resistance, are here  grappling with issues that, in my opinion, should have been resolved a long time ago.  This state of affairs is consistent with my belief that the Catholic Church will never change.  That’s a pity.  For in its current condition official Catholicism does not faithfully represent Jesus’ message, and I think that may explain why it is not capable of carrying on a coherent conversation with Buddhism.  The authors seem to agree, because this dialog from the Christian side conspicuously omits all traditional Catholic articulations.

The conceptual careening of these two Roman Catholic professionals who hold membership in an elite corps of systematic and disciplined thinkers, is an indicator of the utter disarray of Catholic theology after a half-century of officialist resistance to Vatican II.  The Council encouraged the Church to leave the 16^th century and become a serious partner in interfaith dialog.  That required theological exploration and innovation that was never allowed to happen.  The result is, as I see it, that these two very old soldiers are just now entering doctrinal territory that should have been conquered and pacified two hundred and fifty years ago, when the American and French Revolutions broke the aristocratic rule of the ancien regime.

1. Theocracy

I believe that the Haight-Knitter dialog is being covertly diverted by a theocratic imperative embedded in Roman Catholic doctrine.  This theocratic imperative has historically exploited the Jesus movement for its crowd-control potential and prevented it from generating a human community of free men and women.  Catholic Christianity is not a faithful repository of Jesus’ vision.  The “Jesus” represented by Roger Haight in this book does not exist anywhere, and certainly not in the Catholic Church.  Moreover, I believe these two Catholic theologians are hampered by their institutional loyalty.

Institutional loyalty in the Roman Catholic Church has, since Trent, become more than a social virtue; obedience to the Church authorities is virtually a matter of latria — internal submission at a level that one would think belonged to “God” alone: worship.  Roman Catholics believe their Church is divine and what it teaches are “truths” revealed by “God” himself.  Both of these professional Roman Catholics, coming from their respective points of view, are in my opinion trying to find ways to outflank an obsolete Roman Catholic ideology without openly contradicting the magisterium.  Knitter, I believe, avoids direct confrontation by claiming that Buddhism is praxis not dogma.  Erstwhile “heresies,” disguised as prayerful exercises and mental training not statements about the nature of Sacred reality, should be of no interest to the inquisitors, while Haight I see as the consummate wordsmith, elegantly crafting new post-modern formulations of orthodox dogma fully confident that he has found a way to “save the words” of ancient formulae while becoming intelligible to the post-modern mind … or at least that it will fly below the radar of the thought police currently under new management.

The overblown role of the hierarchy in managing the belief structure of the Church is never itself the direct object of discussion, validating or invalidating the doctrinal complex of which it is an integral part.  The way authority is exercised can’t be separated from the doctrinal underpinning that justifies it.  Also, authority cannot be given absolute unquestioning obedience without conceding the doctrinal basis claimed for it, or at least allowing others assume it and thus appear to support a gross distortion of Jesus’ teaching .

No one considers stating the raw truth: that from the point of view of Jesus’ message the Roman Catholic doctrinal edifice and the authority structure it supports are disfigured beyond repair; they need to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up.  These Catholics, I believe, are using a Buddhist-Christian dialog to disguise what they are really doing: trying to find a replacement for a Roman Catholicism that has lost its credibility.

I humbly and respectfully challenge both these men, clearly my superiors in virtually any category you select, to look squarely at the real issue in Roman Catholicism — the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about — the fatal historical distortion of the message and mission of Jesus stemming from the transmutation of the role of the Christian community from proclamation by example to social control by juridical coercion.  Over the course of two millennia the decision of Western authorities to use Christianity for political and social control has caused the erection of a doctrinal complex that both in terms of the alleged “facts” it adduces and the significance of those facts for people’s lives, stands in stark contrast to sacred reality as Jesus understood it and as he encouraged people to respond.  That it is also unintelligible to Buddhists and post-modern westerners reared in the perspectives of modern science is hardly a surprise.

Theocracy is the intent of Roman Catholic Doctrine and the source of its distortion.  Theocracy — “crowd-control” — has functioned from very early times to subvert the fundamentally liberationist dynamic of Jesus’ message.  The Roman authorities took a religious vision based on love and freedom and converted it into an ideology driven by law, and obedience … and fear: they forced Jesus through a metamorphosis that made him the divine Pantocrator, the all-ruling judge of the living and the dead.

The 18^th century political upheavals that finally overthrew Roman theocratic governance in the West never penetrated its ideological foundations.  The Roman Catholic Church preserves those underpinnings in its doctrine, and its own authority structures are based on them: caste status as an ontological reality, political power as a “divine right” and obedience as a form of latria.  The Church is the last bastion of anti-demo­cratic aristocratic control welded in steel to “infallible” dogma, and the perennial vector from which its contagion — the divinization of fear, law and obedience, the living embodiment of the master-slave relationship — is always ready to spread.  Latin American liberation theology represented the direct antithesis of this aristocratic intent, and one can understand why, despite its orthodox credentials, it was the object of venomous attack by the counter-conciliar forces in the 1980’s and ‘90’s.  They said it was attempting to use Catholic dogmas “contrary to their purpose.”

The implications of this thesis are wider than Christian doctrine.  Because of the iron link between doctrine and practice, authentic doctrinal reform will only occur if accompanied by social-moral-political reform.  Two hundred and fifty years of the rhetoric of “democracy” have yet to persuade the vast populations of the modern world that they no longer need the protection or guidance of a superior elite — an upper class — nor fear its wrath.  A “God” ordained Aristocracy is a myth that will not die.  Populist fascism, based on racist subordination, is a version of it with which we are becoming increasingly familiar in the USA even as we speak.

2. “God” transcendent or immanent

The foundational doctrine of theocracy is a punitive “God.”  Only a punitive “God” inspires fear.  In order for “God” to be punitive he has to be a “person” who “wants” certain things from people.  This personal “wanting” (despite contradicting the very definition of “God”) generates a corresponding obligation to obedience on the part of the individual human being who is terrified of the wrath that non-compliance may engender.

A punitive “God” also needs to be transcendent.  By that I mean very specifically that  “God” must transcend the natural order and not be identified with it.  He must stand over against the material universe and humankind as a separate entity, or he cannot interact with it, command it, punish or reward from outside.

The seminal event that established the transcendence of “God” is creation ex nihilo.  A personal “God,” without any pre-existing substance or force to determine the shape of creation except his choice and artistry, makes the world out of nothing and therefore stands above and apart from it and owns it lock, stock and barrel.  The world makes no contribution to creation and has nothing to say about its direction.   “God” controls and commands.  We obey.

The opposite of transcendent is immanent.  Immanence means that to one degree or another “God” is identified with the natural order and indistinguishable from it.  Modern science has discovered that the story of a separate personal entity/agent creating the world out of nothing has no evidence to support it.  In fact science has discovered that the cosmos and everything in it, from the smallest sub-atomic particles to macro-structures of immense size like galaxies, and complexity like human beings, has self-elaborated in a process called evolution over an unimaginably long period of time.  Far from making no contribution to creation it is now known that matter’s energy to secure continued existence for itself is the exclusive force that has shaped everything that exists in our universe, including the living things whose autonomous pursuit of existence is now an intrinsic part of the evolutionary process.

Insofar, then, that one continues to insist that it is still “God” who is the ultimate ground and dynamism behind this energy and its elaborations, it must be said that “God” is not perceivable as a singular entity or separate agent of evolution and must be understood as indistinguishably identified with the material energy that is actually observed doing the creating.  We are just now learning how profoundly immanent “God” is in the natural order; any creative energy he imparts to it is inseparable and indistinguishable from what it is observed doing.  We know abstractly that “God” is “cause.”  But how exactly “God” is distinct, if indeed his causation is distinct at all, is beyond our ken.  Thomas is clear: God is not an entity and his causation is totally commensurate with secondary causes.

But please notice, an immanent “God” is also indistinguishable from yourself.  The only commanding “God” could possibly do, if indeed “he” were ever to take the form of an entity/person who commands, would derive from primary causality providing the energy of esse (let’s call it LIFE) to your body.  To hear the “will” of such a “God” means to listen to your self in the deepest sense of that word.  That’s why John’s first letter suggests that those who are in touch with LIFE immediately recognize Jesus’ “divineness.”  Similarly, once LIFE is embraced, it has a profound effect on one’s bodily behavior.  The two, God and the conscious human organism, primary and secondary causes, become one again.

The depth of this immanence — this metaphysical and etiological identity — is not sufficiently described by calling it the “within” of things, as Teilhard does, because it evokes the image of a tenant in a garret room, active perhaps but necessarily separate and distinct in a way that is not faithful to the reality.  Ramon Panikkar calls this imagery a pseudo-immanence that is really a disguised transcendence and he excoriates it mercilessly in his little book The Trinity in the Religious Experience of Man.  Actually, Aquinas’ Aristotelian imagery in the SCG of “secondary causes” that are the sufficient and necessary cause of all things in a hierarchical relationship with “God” who is the invisible primary cause, the “Pure Act” that activates everything with “his” own esse, is my opinion, remarkably faithful to observed reality.

3. Science, evolution, person

I object to the way evolution is mentioned always ancillary to some other philosophical or theological guiding notions relating to creation; the evolution of material forms is not acknowledged as the sole, exclusive, sufficient and necessary etiology at play in creation.  The lack of focus on matter’s self-elaboration is responsible for the failure to recognize the deep, intimate and pervasive nature of the immanence of “God” in the material universe.  There is an identity here that the West has avoided like the plague.  The esse we deploy by existing is not only “God’s” it is “God.” 

The observable data about “God’s” way of creating do not come from scripture, they come from science.  “God,” if we must insist on saying that it is “God” who creates (constantly confusing ourselves by evoking the anthropomorphic entity/agent imagery associated with the word), does so at the pace and with the exclusive agency of matter at whatever point of development it has reached on its own.  “God’s” presence and action precisely as Creator is not distinguishable from the 13.7 billion year old material evolutionary process, and that includes the extinction of 99.9% of species that failed to adapt.  Humanity and perhaps even all life on our fragile planet are similarly susceptible to that eventuality.  Our traditional assess­ment of the central role of humankind in “God’s” relationship to creation, and therefore a putative guarantee of permanence for our species, is cast into grave doubt once we accept the determinative role of evolution in the creation process.

In this same regard, to say “God is personal but not a person,” as they propose, is unintelligible.  There is no theodicy that justifies traditional micro-manag­ing providence.  Traditional providence implies a rational, interactively relating, living entity who communicates with, hears and responds to other persons.  That’s what “person” means to human beings.  I think it is incontestable that Haight means “personal” in exactly that sense:

In this framework Jesus reveals God to be personal, not a big human person in the sky, but in such a way that the absolute divine power that creates and grounds all being is personal, intelligent, knowing, understanding, willing, and desiring what is good for God’s creatures. This means that all beings, in themselves and in their specific relationships and actions, stand in relation to a ground of being that is personal. The universe is suffused with intelligence and affective attention. Individual beings have a value that is guaranteed by a creating power that personally cares about them. Persons are more than individuals; they are subjects called to respond to an all-encompassing personal attentiveness.  (Chapter 4, Kindle 1250)

If “God” is a person in the sense described above, then he falls onto the horns of MacLeish’s dilemma: “If God is good he is not God, if God is God he is not good.”  If “God” is personal, the Haitian earthquake and subsequent cholera epidemic were a disgrace.  ¾ of the 200,000 people who died were children.

Micro-managing providence is a joke.  There is no such providence.  What “God” provides is the natural order.  The psalms themselves are full of MacLeish’s lament.  The only way out, it seems to me, is the identification of the primal “act” in the universe as a changeless will-to-esse where even “love” as we humans understand it is not yet operational: love is implicit in the will TO BE but must wait for its full explicitation on the secondary causes (conscious organisms) that will elaborate it as a derivative of their own pursuit of survival … the primal “act” (esse) is a living dynamism coming from a suffusive life-source which is not an entity and which does not distinguish among its truly universal effects to favor sentient and intelligent victims.

It is we, human beings, limited material organisms, who awaken in a world of such universal disinterested donation that even the microbes that kill us are sustained by “God” in the form of being that they have been able to achieve on their own.  It is we, then, that interpret LIFE in our case to mean compassion and protection and relief of suffering.  It is we who have invented “love” as part of our evolutionary process.  And as we evolve we are learning that if we are to survive we have to love species other than ourselves.  “Love” is our thing.  “God” is love only because he sustains us too.

Forgiveness

“God” is fundamentally immanent.  It is as immanent that “God” is transcendent, i.e., he cannot be identified with any particular entity, because “he” is the living energy that transcends them all.  “God” is also transcendent because the spectacular elaborations achieved by evolution have, each and every one of them, transcended exponentially the base from which they emerged, belying the age old dictum; ex nihilo nihil fit.  ESSE supports secondary causes that draw from an unfathomable well of creativity what is absolutely new, ex nihilo:  life from non-life, human intelligence from animal consciousness, and sustains all this newness with esse — “him”self. 

An immanent “God” is our very own LIFE.  This kind of “God” cannot punish because he has no “will” that is different from what we are and most deeply want for ourselves.  If he cannot punish, he cannot be harnessed to social control no matter how benevolently it is conceived.  Thugs have known that forever.  The only “God” they ever feared was the autonomy of men.  “God” impacts human politics only through secondary causes, just as he has nothing to say about when and where the tectonic plates of the earth’s crust are going to move in response to pressures from the circulating magma.  Theocracy and the “facts” adduced to justify It — like reward and punishment — are a fraud, a lie, preying on our fears to trick us into surrendering our autonomy to those who claim to rule in “God’s” name.   There is no one to punish us … and we have already received the greatest reward possible: the privilege to be made of living matter and eternally part of this LIFE-driven evolving cosmos.

Can we ever forgive such a “God” for not being the protective parent we think we need and want “him” to be?  Can we love “him” for the anguished autonomy he sustains in us and this fragile material organism that we have evolved?  Indeed, to my mind, that is the only authentic “religious” question … and the final answer to the Grand Inquisitor.

 

Universalism and Catholic Totalitarianism

One of the principal qualities claimed for Christianity as it emerged and separated from Judaism was universalism. The Jewish followers of Jesus carried over from their parent religion virtually everything except its sectarian character which was identified with Jewish nationality. Christians said that the loving Jewish Father whom Jesus preached was open and inviting to everyone because he was their father too, the “God” in whom they lived and moved and had their being, the “God” that all people groped for, whatever their nation and religion.

But once established in the Greco-Roman world, class structure took over and Christianity itself succumbed to the forces of authority and control and became sectarian. Authority requires boundaries and identity. This occurred even before the Roman Imperial marriage conferred divinity on the Catholic Church. In fact, it was the sectarian / authoritarian nature of the version of Christianity that had evolved in post-apostolic times that made the union desirable to both partners. The Church became an apt instrument of Roman theocratic rule because its boundaries were not only fixed, they were lethally obligatory and held carefully in place by an authority for whom such control redounded to personal prestige. It had to be clear who was inside and who was outside, and outside the Church there was no salvation. There was nothing invitational or open about it. It was either the Church or damnation. What had earlier been free became a debt due upon receipt. It had the ultimate effect of making the Empire and the Church commensurate with one another and Roman Law divine. It assured the authorities that compliance with the rule of law would be sanctioned by a level of punishment for the disobedient far beyond anything they could bring to bear on earth: eternal torment in hell. Better than constabularies in every town; each citizen policed himself. The legions could be kept along the Rhine and the Danube.

The Romans liked to project the image that their empire embraced the whole world. It was propaganda; they knew better. Caesar stopped his conquests at the Rhine; the entire Germanic and Slavic world east of France and north of the Danube was not part of the empire. The Romans dismissed them as barbarians, but they were still there. Going eastward from Anatolia (modern day Turkey) the world of the Persians and beyond them the Indians, once part of Alexander’s domains, also lay outside of Rome’s control and often challenged its eastern border.

Regardless, Roman Christianity, named “Catholic” because it was not just some local church but the totality, became the official religion of the empire and therefore “everyone’s” religion everywhere Rome ruled. Hence, the Church also touted itself as “universal.” But there was nothing universal about it. The empire that had earlier been completely pluralist and open to all religions, under the Christian ascendancy became adamantly intolerant. All other religions were outlawed. The plethora of cults from the traditional Mediterranean gods, the homegrown mystery cults of Demeter and Orpheus on which Paul modeled Christian initiation, the imported mysteries of Isis from Egypt, Tammuz from Mesopotamia, Mithraism, Manichaeism, to diaspora Judaism, and all the varied dissident Christian sects who disagreed with the “official” version and were called “heretics,” after centuries worshipping freely throughout the empire were all driven underground by Theodosius’ decree in 380. Suddenly it became a state crime to adhere to any religion but the emperor’s.

Impressed into service to a theocratic empire, Christianity took on all the characteristics of theocracy: it expected that its moral and ritual program would be enforced by the “secular arm” and dissenters punished. Hence, even today we are subjected to the demand of Catholic bishops that their people vote only for politicians who commit to translating the Church’s moral code into legislation. Christianity transformed its inspiring narratives and family legends into codified dogma and, item by item, made them the litmus test of membership in the sect, outside of which there was only weeping and gnashing of teeth. Exile and excommunication were parallel punishments meted out by the state for “heresy.” And later, in the Middle Ages, when fear of the devil surpassed the fear of “God” as a motivation for religious compliance, execution by burning at the stake was the prescribed antidote for failure to respect the boundaries of the sacred: outside the Church there was only the devil.

*

True universalism respects all religions as pathways to full human development — what has traditionally been called “holiness.” One of the indications today that the Roman sect is not universalist is that it insists that whatever holiness may be found anywhere in the world among other religions is actually due to “grace” that comes through the “merits of Christ” and mediated to humankind in a hidden way through the Catholic Church. In an official teaching entitled Dominus Jesus published in 2000 by then Cardinal Ratzinger, it was clearly stated that anything of truth that may be found in the writings of any other religion anywhere in the world was exclusively the prerogative of the Roman Catholic Church to discern and decide. The perennial “missionary” efforts of the Church, often justified under the fiction of “universalism” is simply a repeat of the same imperative: the Catholic Church alone is “God’s” personally founded institution, the only path to human fullness, the only escape from eternal punishment. It is not optional. “Mission’s” purpose was supposedly to lay out the case for voluntary conversion. It didn’t always happen like that. Having the “truth” made Catholic missionaries less concerned about free choice than eternal damnation. An ignorant “native” saved from damnation by baptism, the missionaries reasoned, would be inclined to overlook any coercion applied on his behalf. It was, after all, an act of love … and error has no rights. Mission did not include encouragement to deepen and practice one’s own ancestral religion.

Supporting other people’s religions is universalism; obliging everyone to abandon their religions and join yours is totalitarianism. They may seem similar because in each case everyone seems to be of the same mind, but it is a superficial similarity focused on externals alone. Totalitarianism is anti-human because it leaves no room for religious expression that may correspond to the peculiarity of regions or clans or individuals.  Totalitarianism doesn’t respect others’ names for “God” because it refuses to acknowledge that its own is only metaphor. Totalitarian sectarianism is the handmaiden of empire, the agent of theocracy, and most often co-exists with a tyrannical despotism that can be monarchical, oligarchic and even, as in the case of modern fascist versions, “democratic.” We can’t forget it was an Athenian democracy that condemned Socrates to death in the name of religion for encouraging the young people to think for themselves. He caused them to disrespect the gods.

But in the case of Catholic totalitarianism there is nothing democratic about it. After 500 years of entrenched and unopposed Papalism since the Protestant Reformation, Catholics have come to identify their “brand” of Christianity with the Pope. The identification of the Church with the person of the Pope, an absolute autocratic monarch, was the result of the defeat and demise of the Conciliar movement in the 15^th century.

Conciliarism maintains that the Church has been traditionally ruled by Councils since earliest times and that the Pope’s “primacy” is one of respect, not of autocratic power. Indeed, when lust for Papal power had resulted in a Great Schism starting in 1378 in which first two, then three men claimed to be Pope at the same time, and all three had support among the monarchs of Europe, it was Councils in 1408 and 1414 called by the Conciliarists that resolved the problem. Once the Schism was settled and the Papacy restored to one man, however, the Pope’s autocratic power was so great that within thirty years he was able to destroy the movement that had preserved the papacy and prevented the Church from breaking apart. It is significant that half a century after that the Church did break apart, and “Councils,” eviscerated by the Popes, were powerless to stop it. Resentment over the derogation of the Conciliar movement and the perennial belief that “reform” would only come to the Church through Councils, sustained the “Protestants” who were convinced that the reforms they introduced would someday be validated by an Ecumenical Council for the whole Church. They were not interested in starting new churches. That belief never materialized. The Council that was called to deal with the Protestants met in the city of Trent in northern Italy almost half a century after Luther’s revolt began; it showed no interest in reconciling with the Reformers and reaffirmed the absolute autocratic power of the Pope. It was the beginning of the Catholic “brand.”

Catholics have become so accustomed to the idolatrous worship of the Papacy as a “divine” institution that in 1870, when the Pope, in complete control of the first Vatican Council, declared himself to be “infallible,” an outraged world was doubly shocked to see that among Catholics, however intelligent, educated and well intentioned they might be, it barely raised an eyebrow. At this point in time the Papacy is seared into everyone’s brain as an intrinsic element of the Catholic “brand.” Institutional attachment, now, is determined not by scriptural fidelity, consistency with the message of Jesus, compassionate embrace of the suffering victims of injustice or any other religious motivation, but rather by the evocation of an organizational “identity” made recognizable by the display of its brand. Ecclesiastical authority activates its ancient role of maintaining the boundaries that guarantee “identity” and of all authorities, the one simultaneously most cherished and feared is the Roman Catholic Papacy. Like all other anti-evangelical authority, it is a correlate of sectarianism.

There is a great deal written about Catholic “universalism” as if it actually existed. It is all projection. It is fiction: stories that come full blown from the imagination of well-meaning religious who accurately discern the spirit of Jesus’ ancient message in the scriptures. Indeed universalism is implicit in Jesus’ invitation to trust his Father’s endlessly forgiving embrace. One writer uses the word catholicity to refer to a sense of wholeness meant to include in the Father’s embrace not only the totality of humanity, but the entire cosmos. But don’t be fooled. The last place you will ever encounter such attitudes being lived in the flesh is in the organization known to all as the Catholic Church. In this case the word catholicity becomes something of a sleight-of-hand: it makes you think that the wholeness you seek will be found there. The writer, surely, is not being intentionally deceptive. She honestly imagines that the Church that supports her, wants to live the authentic spirit of Jesus’ message, and therefore wants to be catholic, as much as she does. But it cannot do it because an authority invested in its own power and prestige must protect the boundaries. It cannot be universalist. It must convince those who are “inside” that “God’s” love is NOT free, by distinguishing them precisely from those who are “outside” and have no access to “God’s” embrace as they do.

Imagine if “God’s” forgiveness were available to everyone free of all cost and obligation. How could you control the boundaries? How would you identify your organization? How would you get people to obey you? There would be nothing to do but celebrate! Jesus understood the confusion. So in order to make himself perfectly clear he proposed, on more than one occasion, a radically different kind of authority.

Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the last of all and the servant of all.” Then He had a little child stand among them. Taking the child in His arms, He said to them, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in My name welcomes Me, and whoever welcomes Me welcomes not only Me, but the One who sent Me.”… (Mk 9:35ff)

And then, at another time:

So Jesus declared, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in authority over them call themselves benefactors. But you shall not be like them. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who leads like the one who serves. … (Lk 22:25ff)

The scene of Jesus surrounded by children is one of the most beloved in the gospels. But we fail to notice that Jesus’ used children to make what is probably the most radical and universally disregarded point of his message. Jesus said if you exercise authority you must do it like a child. Note: Children do not command one another. They exercise leadership and organize multitudes by inviting others to play with them … and no one is left out.

Tony Equale, November 12, 2016

 

The Limits of Knowledge (2)

the human being — time and death

Existence is time.^[1] It’s not coincidental that time caused us to look at being-here separately from abstract “being” and ask what it otherwise would not have occurred to us to ask, why do I die, or “Why does being-here seem to end?”

My life is both temporal and temporary.  There’s a connection between the two.  It seems the very nature of the modulations of existence is to find better ways to be-here, to survive and extend survival.  The vitality displayed by matter’s energy is not a leisured aesthetic creativity, an unhurried pastime.  There is an urgency here that derives from a conatus, a drive to survive, that is integral to a developing universal entropy that results from the energy expenditure of any “thing,” whether it be the hydrogen fusing into helium in stars or the respiratory activity of the cells of the human brain.  Entropy is the exhaust from combustion — the smoke that is the sign of fire — the tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to move toward a state of uniform inertia through the expenditure of energy for the performance of work.  Work is energy applied in the endeavor to survive. The aggregation and integration forged by matter’s energy is part and parcel of the “downhill” flow of the existential cataract initiated at the big-bang that drives the Universe to produce its effects — like the eddies and vortices that spin off in a raging current.  These pyramidal vortices (one vortex cumulatively building on another and another) are an anti-en­tro­pic phenomenon — they struggle against dissolution, to survive — even though they add to universal entropy as a result.

My life is the inner force of existence because it is matter’s energy.  It is driven in the direction of perdurance in an obsession to continue the dance of presence.  Time is the effluence of my own presence.  As my existence perdures from moment to moment — as each “now” molts into the next — it emanates time as the sweat of its creative labors; the vapor trail of its endless explorations.  I embrace my being-here, and so I embrace time.

The transcendence over death, not only through evolutionary integration but also with other communitarian strategies like daily alimentation and organismic reproduction, harnesses even as it recapitulates the patterns and primordial energies let loose within the first second of the big bang.  The energy that drives my hunger for existence, is the energy of matter itself.

We live in a banquet of existence.  We are not self-sufficient.  We are dependent on the entire material matrix within which we evolved.  In our lifetime, each human organism consumes in sustenance probably 40 or 50 tons of the matter’s energy — in the form of carbon — of other living things who must die in order that we might live.  Add to that another 50 tons of oxygen continuously drawn in from the atmosphere and utilized together with carbon in the cellular combustion we call metabolism.  At death we return our “stuff” to be used as food by others as part of an endless cycle of interchange within the one organism produced and energized by the cascade of existence.  Matter’s energy is a totality.

At a certain magical moment, also, the very cells of my body, by utilizing another communitarian tactic, combine with another’s to create a new identity — my daughter, my son — which is automatically granted a full allotment of time, slipping under the entropic radar of death.  How was this miracle accomplished?  The living cells are mine, but their age and accumulated karma are erased.  Death is cheated, fooled, outwitted.  The new individual with my cells, my DNA, eludes the death they were otherwise destined to endure.  Do we share this adventure in survival with love and gratitude? … Only if we understand!

But if we mis-under­stand — if we originally mis-interpreted that moment of crisis, the perception of death, as the cessation of what’s really there, we are quite capable of turning this banquet of sharing into a selfish grab-bag where the desperate “eat drink and make merry” in a display of bitter disillusionment against a morrow of imagined nothingness.  It is precisely the fact that “I” am metaphysically insignificant except as an integra­ted function of matter’s energy that opens me to a new dimension.   I realize that what is really there and really important is the matrix, the universal “stuff” of which I am made, the homogeneous substrate of which all things are made, the single organism of which we are all the leaves and branches, and which will go on in other forms endlessly.  It was with those micro-threads of existence that I was woven.  The primacy here, as always, belongs to the stuff of existence, the matter-energy of the universe.  It is material energy “congealed” in me.  And in short order, the same existence will use “me” to do something else in a constant search for survival — existence.

So time is the expression of process; it is the measure of groping and the tracks of creativity.  It marks the work in progress of evolutionary development.

endless or “eternal”

The re-cycling is endless.  Isn’t that the same as “eternal,” and doesn’t it imply transcendent, necessary, absolute etc., all those abstract, essentialist characteristics derived from the “concept of being” that we rejected in chapter 1?

No.  Endless is not “eternal” because endless is open and empty.  “Eternal” is closed, fixed and finished, full and complete; “eternal” is the absence of time.  Endless, on the other hand, is time … time without end; it contemplates development without term, a presence that is forever thirsty.  “Eternal,” is synonymous with unchanging, impassible and immutable, Pure Act, pure stasis, without a shred of unfulfilled potential — perfect.  It’s a completely foreign concept to us, pure conceptual projection.  We’ve never experienced anything the least bit like it.  For us, being-here as we know it is an endless phenomenon that throbs always with unrealized potential, with an ever perceived emptiness seeking to be filled and asking for nothing but more time.  We have never encountered existence in any other form.  Its current modality is always in the process of becoming, apparently without limit, itself — existence.

Being-here in our world, is endless becoming.  It’s all we know.  Where, then, do we get the notion of a fixed and finished “eternal”?  I believe it’s another of our fantasies based on the requirements of the imaginary ancient “concept of being.”  Existence, matter’s energy, as found in the real world, however, is a function of power — potentia as Spinoza discerned insightfully — potential; it is focused on survival and constantly ready to change tactics in order to achieve it.  Matter’s creative power is the drive to exist (survive) by extruding new forms out of itself creating time.

“Eternal” is unthinkable.  Endless is not.  We can understand endless perfectly because it’s no different from time itself.  To conceptualize “endless” requires no more insight than imagining present moments, “nows” in an open-ended flow into the future.  In our very own awareness of ourselves-exist­ing, which is the unfolding of our personal presence in time, we actually experience this pheno­menon most intimately as our own sentient selves.  We experience ourselves in a temporal flow into a potentially endless future.  To experience temporal flow is to experience that part of “endless” which will always be here — the present moment, “now,” the only part of “endless” that ever … and always, exists.  To experience one’s own presence in the here and now is to experience, in a sense, everything, because it is to experience all that reality is, or ever was, or can ever be.

We are reminded that for the 14^th century mystic Johannes Eckhart, “now” was the most sacred of all locations, the center of the universe.  It was precisely where “God,” he said, who exists in an Eternal “Now,” was actively sharing “being” with creation in an effluence of love and self-donation.  If you want to touch “God,” he said, you can only do it “now.” The fact that “now” — the present moment — is the only moment that really exists and that, at the same time, it goes almost universally unattended, may be a measure of exactly how alienated from existence we are.

Can we say that our conception corresponds to the emphasis on living in the present moment promoted by the Buddhist, Thich Nat Hanh?  The Bud­dhists insist their counsel is a discipline not a doctrine.  They don’t speak about metaphysics, “being” or existence, so we can’t say for sure.  But for the Buddhists, as for Meister Eckhart, the present moment is all there is.  We are-here only in the present moment.  To live in the present moment is to embrace the impermanence, the “emptiness” that drives reality always to the next moment, creating time.

[1] The similarity of this proposition to Heidegger’s thesis expounded in his Being and Time is only semantic. For H. time is the pulse and measure of Da-sein’s anguish of being-toward-death, which alone brings Da-sein’s authentic care to bear on the beings-in-the-world. In my conception, on the other hand, I make every effort to exclude the subjective factors. Time for me is foundationally a physical property exuded by the physical perdurance in existence of a physical entity — matter’s energy.

Inventing Capitalism

Larry Siedentop, emeritus professor of political philosophy at Oxford, published a book at the end of last year called Inventing the Individual (Belknap, Harvard U. Press, 2014).  It carries the provocative sub-title The Origins of Western Liberalism and proposes to trace the history of the transformation of the Western political paradigm from ancient Rome’s patriarchal / clan-based class system protected by its legal and moral codes to the one that prevails today of autonomous individuals, all enjoying the same inalienable rights guaranteed by law.  Given the history of the West for the last two millennia it should come as no surprise that Siedentop finds the roots of those political developments in the evolution of western Christianity.

The Christian Church grew from a minority cult struggling to be heard in the religious cacophony of the ancient Roman Empire to the only religion in an officially Christian state, a primacy it held for more than a millennium.  During the Imperial Papacy of the high middle ages the Church elaborated a jurisprudence and a philosophical theology to back it up that reflected the political implications of its worldview.  Those mediaeval developments were the sources of our current political preferences, and they were squarely based on the immortality and post-mortem moral accountability of the individual soul.

It is in the foundational Christian vision of the “soul” that Siedentop sees the roots of the supreme value of the human individual which characterizes modern society.  Ironically, he points out, it was the very effort of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the middle ages to protect its interests against the encroachments of theocratic secular princes that drove the Popes to assert the “Church’s” right of universal jurisdiction.  It was because the Church hierarchy had the “care of souls” that its universal right to rule was codified in law — a law which claimed to extend beyond all boundaries and include everyone everywhere, yes, even the “souls” of the very princes who challenged its power.  In pressing toward that goal, Church authorities created a canonical scaffolding that eventually served as a model for the legal systems of the emerging nation-states of Europe.

Use of the word “soul” immediately evokes a radical egalitarianism that puts every individual, regardless of social status, wealth or role in society, in exactly the same relationship to “God” and therefore to the Church and its ruling hierarchy; it supported the Pope’s claim to ultimate and absolute power.  At the end of the day, in mediaeval society, it was because the hierarchy claimed to rule both the prince and the pauper that it developed laws that treated them as equals.  These Church laws inspired the secular authorities who were desirous of achieving the same kind of central control as the Church.  It was the unwitting source of political liberalism, and it is adduced by Siedentop as the explanation for the modern “democratic” republic with its supreme respect for the equal and inalienable rights of the individual.

But Siedentop’s thesis is not without paradox.  The author has selected the one single thread out of the Christian tapestry of the “soul” that led to “individual equality before the law” because it is the specific focus of his study.  But we shouldn’t be deceived.  The picture of the “soul” is much larger and is woven of many threads which Siedentop does not track, some of which lead to social results with a quite contrary bias.  For example, in societies ruled by the Christian worldview, the very same “individual-destiny-after-death” can be cited to account for the crass tolerance for extreme inequality even to the point of slavery and human exploitation; for it is claimed that all injustices will be adjudicated after death, and the oppressors punished.  Redress need not occur in this life.  The hardships created by these “earthly” disparities are temporary; the sufferings of time are insignificant when compared to the joys of eternity. 

An extreme instance of this mindset was on grotesque display during the 13^th century Albigensian Crusade launched to eradicate “heresy” in the lands of what is now southern France.  The “crusaders” felt completely justified in employing extermination tactics, in one case wantonly slaughtering 20,000 men women and children in the city of Béziers in 1209, under the religious battle cry: “Kill them all, let God sort them out.”  Clearly the butchers of “the cross” believed that each of their victims would be judged by “God” for an eternal reward or punishment, and the innocent victims of the Church-sanctioned slaughter (and its obedient agents) would be cleared of guilt and compensated by an eternity of happiness.  The “immortality of the soul” together with the individual judgment for an eternal reward or punishment after death provided a unique permission to slay indiscriminately.  Any residual guilt due to an excess of zeal in the pursuit of such a lofty goal was a minor matter — easily disposed of in the confessional.

Siedentop places great emphasis on the contrast between the ancient and the modern conceptions of the human person.  The older version, he says, identified the person as a member of a patriarchal household and its clan extensions.  He claims that such a starting point immediately involves status and inequality because there is a natural, organic subordination within the family of wife and children to the father; and the constituent clans of a community always possess a “fullness of humanity” that externs: traveling merchants, servants, employees, immigrants, slaves, never achieve.  The legal and moral extensions of that mindset create and protect class distinctions that reflect the superiority / inferiority implied in those genetic relationships.  Your “worth” as a human being was determined by where you were born in the social pyramid.  The author says that basing society on those relationships necessarily entails a structured inequality.

The individual relationship to “God,” in contrast, is said to create an invincible equality based on an inescapable moral (not physical or intellectual) accountability over which class, birthright, status or “earthly” qualifications have no bearing.

The contrast also points up a significant  difference in the thought process employed in each case.  For, under the Christian definition, you are not identified with where you come from but where it is imagined you’re going.  You are not defined by your origins in this world, but by your imagined destiny in another — a world for whose existence there is no evidence whatsoever.  Your very concrete relationships to the earth and the species that spawned you and with whom you necessarily interact for survival are determined by your projected relationship to a “God-person” whom you have never met and with whom alone, whether you like it or not, you will spend eternity.  There is no guarantee that your family or loved ones will have “earned” the right to be there with you.  You are on your own and you are encouraged to maintain an emotional distance from everyone else.  It is from these “facts” that modern society has developed its vision of what the human person is and the laws and moral codes believed necessary to protect and enhance it.

Capitalism and the “immortal soul”

But there was still another paradoxical thread whose social import tacks contrary to the wind of Siedentop’s theory of “individual equality.” Defining the very meaning of life as earning a future happiness not available until one’s total merits are tallied and weighed at death can be said to account for the characteristic western obsession with individual achievement measured by the conspicuous display of amassed wealth.  For the Christian believer the urge to accumulate necessarily becomes internalized.  The curious “discipline” of western Europeans — notorious across the globe — that allows them to postpone satisfaction and to continue working compulsively to stockpile resources long after a secure satiety has been achieved, is a peculiar dynamic that can be attributed to the internalization and progressive social application of the “last judgment” paradigm.  The individual’s drive to amass without limit is protected by an absolute right to “private” property, even after it is indisputably clear that the owner’s superabundance is surrounded by (and even may be causing) the severe deficiencies of others.

“Capitalism” sprang from these roots.  Capitalism is an application of the individual’s right to amass superfluous wealth indefinitely and use it for personal profit, despite the needs of others.  Under the ancient paradigm, superfluous wealth was considered the sole right of nobility; it provided a magnificence reflecting the superiority of the blood-line and no commoner had the right to any such public display.  Under the new “Christian-inspired” vision of man, in contrast, the ownership of great wealth is open to all individuals regardless of birth and is accompanied by the exclusive right to use it however they want.  The change reflected a revolution in human self-definition. “Full humanity” was no longer determined by noble blood but by the immortal soul preparing for its day of judgment.  And in pre-judging one’s chances business acumen was often confused with moral superiority.

In inventing the individual, it may be said that the West also invented capitalism.

Clearly, the Church did not introduce these changes.  Far from it.  The hierarchy’s reactionary resistance to the revolutions of the 19^th century — giving unwavering support to the maintenance of aristocratic control and their prerogatives — is well known.  But, as Siedentop repeats over and over, the Church provided a radically egalitarian metaphysical definition of man that, however unwittingly, in the long run undermined the structural inequality of the class system based on patriarchal / aristocratic definitions of man.  The egalitarian implications of Christian doctrine were hypocritically ignored by the authorities even though it was increasingly recognized and embraced by the general population.  The Church hierarchy, in the attempt to shore up its own power, undermined the very system that sustained it.  What was revolutionary was the Christian definition of man that put each individual human being into a one-to-one relationship with “God,” solidly joined to the Platonic belief in the immortality of the human soul and its liability to eternal punishment.

Alternatives

It all seems quite inevitable, in the way that what actually happens always appears inevitable in retrospect.  There was also a relative inevitability about the earlier, second century embrace of Platonism by the Christian culture of the ancient Mediterranean.  Platonism was the conventional wisdom of the age; the upper class take-over of the ascendant sect of Christianity meant that the platonic paradigm with its “particular judgment” would be favored as “orthodox” over the earlier Pauline  vision of community salvation.  The official public “sacrifices” to the gods in which all citizens had participated as pagans were transferred to the Christian agape meal turning it into the “sacrifice of the mass;” and a quid pro quo self-interest that contradicted the fundamental thrust of Jesus’ message came to dominate the Christian religion.

But what, historically speaking, may seem “inevitable” is not so in any absolute sense.  Past contingent events do not determine future choices.  In this case the respect for the individual, so characteristic of Christianity, could as easily be derived from other grounds as from platonic theory.  It is important in this case because the platonic premises are, in my estimation, completely false: there is no “immortal soul;” there is no “particular judgment;” there is no reward or punishment after death and there is no “God”-person who adjudicates individual human lives.  The fact that our hard-won and highly cherished respect for the individual person was ultimately derived from these erroneous doctrines does not imply either that individual rights will suddenly evaporate when these beliefs are shown to have been a mirage or that there is no other ground in which equality can be rooted.  Our instinctive enthusiasm for the ultimate value of each individual has convinced us that there must be a deeper reason — one that is not tied to the platonic fantasy that there is another world where we are going after death.

Rediscovering the community

Defining life in individualist terms stands in stark contrast with basing law on intrinsically communitarian social configurations like the family and its social context.  Siedentop locates the very difference between the ancient and modern social priorities in the shift of the source of the definition of the human person from the family and clan — a source of status and inequality — to the individual immortal soul which is egalitarian.  But it is important to emphasize that the source of the inequality identified by Siedentop is the patriarchal family.  It is not because the human individual is born of a family but because the “father” enjoyed an unquestioned superiority that gave him a permanent “status.”  The father in the ancient household was also “priest” mediating relationship with the gods.  Hence the family and clan took on a sacred reality and the “father” was considered, genetically, a source of sacred value; he possessed a status that could not be lost even by physical or intellectual failures or serious moral lapses; it was his forever.  This image of the “father” was carried over into larger society.  The Roman Emperors considered themselves the “father” of the State; in imitation, the Bishop of Rome was called Papa — “Pope” — and every Catholic priest, in direct disobedience to the explicit command of Jesus, is called “father.”  Equality between levels was never possible.

It is only recently that egalitarianism has begun to penetrate the very structure of the patriarchal family itself.  Prior to this development, equality may have been operative in the public forum, but the private domain of the family was still considered sacrosanct and off-limits.  The legislature, police, courts and judicial systems tended to refrain from interfering with fathers’ rights to discipline their wives, determine the destiny of their children and dispose of the family’s goods as they saw fit.  The sanctity of the patriarchal family, despite the victory of the liberal mindset, had been most resistant to interference.  We never realized how resistant until the unexpected shock of the women’s’ movement of the last 50 years brought it to light.  The drive for women’s equality is only one expression of how far the liberal paradigm has penetrated into the foundational structures of society and, in retrospect, the realization of how little, up to then, it had.

But in the kind of “family” that is emerging, the patriarchal prerogatives are being eroded and a new kind of family relationship is developing.  In the industrialized nations where 16% of all children are reared in single-parent households (in the US it is 25%), more than 80% of which are headed by single mothers, the class structures and inequality that were once associated with the patriarchal family have less fuel to burn on.  Even where the family is comprised of both father and mother, the woman’s ability to earn a living is universally acknowledged and the consequent tendency to parental equality is unmistakable.  Respect for the rights of children in the family is beginning to be reflected in law and the policies of government agencies responsible for the protection of the family.  While these trends are far from dominant, the drift is unmistakable and, I believe, irreversible.

That means that defining the human person as an “organism spawned and sustained by a human community that provides survival, personal-identity and social significance” does not run the risk of either slipping back into a class system of structured inequality, or maintaining an ersatz equality grounded in a truncated individualism devoid of any social meaning and based on a projected destiny in a world that does not exist.  If the human person is conceptualized in exactly the terms of her biological-social reality, not only is each individual immediately validated as fully human but there is no need to search for another ground to justify the social reality by which she survives and is recognized as a person with identity.

With this perspective suddenly Capitalism is shorn of its Christian underpinnings.  The personal accumulation dynamic is exposed as an inhuman “earthly” recapitulation on the eternal Christian theme of “gaining merit,” which was itself, in turn, a corollary of belief in the “particular judgment” of the “immortal soul.”  The entire emotional drive toward personal, individual profit as a display of “merit” begins to atrophy because its “heavenly” model is discredited as delusional, and “salvation” little by little comes to be recognized as a community achievement, constructed from the collaborative contributions of its constituents.  There is no individual future life or other immaterial world to accumulate for, and the individual person begins to see her destiny identified with the survival and fully human development of the community where she lives, receives her identity and makes her contribution to others.

In such a communitarian paradigm the always glaring disjunction between the family dynamics of sharing, and the aggressive self-interest that is claimed to rule the marketplace, begins to cede to a cooperative mindset across the entire spectrum of social institutions.  Every social interaction of whatever kind — whether inside or outside the home — can now be considered part of a communal venture: mutual assistance in survival and in the development of the personal potential required to sustain it.  “Love” dominates the definition of the human person and becomes concrete: the gift of self to the community … it ceases being a “law” that one obeys in order to gain merit for oneself and a safe place in another world … and the market ceases being a place where cutting throats is considered a necessary part of living.