Category: Politics

Posted on

ON THE NECESSITY OF A GENERAL RESURRECTION OF THE WORLD

In these grim and dangerous times the forces of darkness conspire to make us despair and write ourselves off.

The problem with a conservative, or should we even say mainstream Christian eschatology, is that it implies that whereas resurrection is understood as overcoming death, as the person coming back from the dead with new life and new existence, thereby defeating death, there is no such equivalent for the world as such. (By “world” here I mean the world God made, and which has been transformed or built upon by us in history for better or worse.)  That is, the commonly held eschatological attitudes seem to imply not that the world will die and be resurrected, but that it will die permanently, and be replaced by a new world.  Though this new Earth may be immortal, the one it replaced will be dead forever.  But in that sense and problematically, death’s victory over the world will be sealed as permanent.  The individual my rise from the grave triumphant, but the world he or she had lived in will have been condemned forever.

Religion thus often exhorts us to be better people, to give over this sin or that one, to be more loving, or faithful, or truthful, or whatever.  It does not claim that moral perfection is possible this side of the grave, but does say improvement is possible, and commanded by God.  But at the same time, any real improvement in the politics of the world, its economic or social structures, is usually rejected by religion as either being in vain, or even outright blasphemous: an attempt to force the coming of God’s kingdom before God’s own good time.

But are our deeds, great and small, in the course of human history of any consequence in the long run, or are they not?  Do we have ultimately no place in the creation as actual creators, or as J.R.R. Tolkien might have put it, sub-creators?  Or must we as a species be stripped clean of all history and reformatted with entirely new programs, rendering the previous ones not only forgotten but vanished without a trace?

I am not talking about “salvation by works,” but the salvation of works.  Do our works, our lives, our history as a species, have meaning or not?  Nor can this question be escaped by asserting our works have nothing to do with our salvation.  Might not works be important in the eyes of God without saving anybody?

If there is not some form of continuity between the dead person or world on the one hand, and the resurrected person or world on the other, there is no resurrection.  Parents having another child after the first one dies is no victory over death, and no salvation of the dead child.  Nor will it undo their grief, no matter how much they may be rejuvenated or rejoice in their new offspring.  The idea of healing the deep family wound simply by replacing the beloved is obscene.

Likewise, there is something profoundly nihilistic in believing in resurrection of the individual, but not of the world.  Individuals do not exist as such, detached from the world, any more than we find healthy rosebushes floating about in outer space.  What makes the rose what it is, is in part its connection to its world via soil, light, water and air, all the surrounding insects and microorganism that are a part of its life.  Likewise, if we are, as St. Paul says, organs in Christ’s body, then it is true as Donne says that “no man is an island, entire of itself.”  For the full salvation of the individual, the salvation or redemption—not mere replacement–of the world is needed.

If there is no new Earth, a resurrected Earth that is, a reborn Earth, then what we have is fertile ground for frustrated and vengeful fantasies of annihilation.  The Christian eschatologist writes for himself permission to look upon the destruction of the world with glee, as if he will be standing aside with hands on hips, nodding in approval as an ancient enemy gets its comeuppance.  (Christian eschatology is far too often a way of allowing a sickening misanthropy hide out in the open.)  We give ourselves permission to shit on the creation, even to destroy it, because, after all, it is doomed to eternal nonexistence in any case.

It is deeply revolting and an offense to reason to assert that while charity to the poor is smiled upon by the Lord, the improvement of economic systems such that such charity is not so much needed is seen as some kind of impiety.

God’s creation was and is good.  And it is to be saved.  And if we as individuals are to be saved, what we have made in this world, however much may have to be cast into the flames either for destruction or purification, was not given into our power to make only for us to make it in vain.

But in effect, with this mainstream eschatology, it is implied that we are to be like transplanted rosebushes.  In so far as we thought we saw God in the world around us, even though we were also conscious of its terrible corruption, we were apparently deluded.

If history is to be wiped out, then it was always and already meaningless.  Everything we have ever done is of no significance.  But if that is so, why the relentless nagging of scripture and conscience to do this thing and not do that thing?

A priority of being over doing I can understand and tend to agree with.  But the annihilation of the deed is nihilism.

Posted on

ARISTOCRACY

When aristocracy as such became discredited, people still found in themselves a desire, acknowledged or not, to look down on somebody.  It is the old sin of pride.  Just because aristocracy is abolished or muted does not mean its proud and ancient desires disappear.  If they cannot achieve satisfaction in the old political structures, they shall find new ways.

And so, much of the 19th to 21st centuries’ opposition to “modernity,” however defined, may owe some of its existence to the old desire to feel superior. The aristocrat of the spirit looks down on the NOW in the name of the PAST.  He cannot, perhaps even in his own eyes, despise openly in the name of “blood,” or even class, and maintain credibility.  But he can cook up some theory—even one which may have considerable truth in it—wherein he stands by the past over and against the present.  Thus, he can despise all and sundry about him as the benighted commoners in effect, those who do not understand or appreciate the old ways.  This is a source of tremendous satisfaction.  The other type of snob, the one who despises the past in the name of the present, must be content to despise the dead.  It is much harder in this situation to pose as the brave knight living in enemy territory but soldiering on nonetheless.  To cast one’s attack broadly against “modernity” can be to gloat in one’s superiority in the face of an enemy whose power outstrips one’s own (while, in effect, living in no greater danger than anyone else); this is more gratifying to the ego than to gloat over a helpless corpse.

Posted on

C.S. LEWIS’S PHILOSOPHY OF HELL AND A NEW WORLD

C.S. Lewis never wrote about politics very much, but in the eighteenth letter of The Screwtape Letters he has his devil, Screwtape, say the following:

The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. ‘To be’ means ‘ to be in competition’.  

This philosophy could be seen as what has always been the dominant politics of the world—or the sin of pride in its structural or corporate manifestation—whether the rulers were soldiers, priests, hereditary aristocrats, or business people.  Capitalism, with its “war of all against all,” its social Darwinism, is the locus of the Devil’s philosophy in the current age.

Many Christians simply accept Churchill’s dictum that history is “just one damned thing after another.”  Whatever he meant by that, they see it as an essentially meaningless and contemptible series of events and eagerly await the Christ to come back and wipe it all out, taking us to heaven.  They are disappointed in life, and want it to be punished.  And for what they imagine to be their admirable otherworldliness, they think they shall be rewarded with a new world that has no connection to and very little similarity to this one.

What is a resurrection?  It is a rebirth, a new person, but a person not entirely discontinuous with the old person.  It is the old person who has died but is transfigured and reborn.  Otherwise, there is no resurrection, but simply the death of one person followed by his or her replacement by another who is entirely someone else.

Thus it is, I believe, with the new Earth that is destined to be born.

The Christian’s approach to history should not be that of an unloving parent troubled by a chronically and seriously sick child, hopefully counting the days down to when that child shall die and the parent be presented with a healthy replacement.  The parent wants the child to be saved, not replaced, and this is what we should want for the world—not just for the individuals within it. 

Much of Christian eschatology, unfortunately, is simply a disguised desire for genocide, geocide, even.

Posted on

HELL IS POLITICAL

Many of the early Christians were very cheerful, very good, very fearless.  There was a real danger they might have no fear of death; and this would never do.  Christ came to defeat sin and death, and death is a much reduced master if he is not feared.  Fortunately, there was an answer: the Christians’ faith in the resurrection could not be easily shaken; but it could be more easily twisted.

Enter hell.  The solution was simple.  If people do not fear anything in this life because their deepest faith is in the life to come, make that life to come uncertain: not by denying its reality, but by making that reality potentially terrifying.  Tell them that they very well will live forever after they die, but that they must step very carefully in this life or end up in perpetual torment.

And so death, the retreating ancien regime, poisoned the wells for the advancing revolutionaries who were overthrowing him; he re-established his foothold on Earth in the very midst of a church that was to lead the revolution against him.  For now, Christians again lived in fear.  And their fear of the next world gave them all the vices and weaknesses people experience when their fears are only of this one.

The pagan world of the Middle East had believed in a dark and shadowy afterlife, a world of shades and shadows, of ghostly spirits who had forgotten their Earthly lives and wandered forever in gloom.  This miserable fate had been thought to await all but a few privileged ones favoured by the gods for whatever reason.  But now, after the victory of Christ, this shadowy underworld was superseded in its misery and terror by the Christian hell.

Thus it is that in wars and revolutions, the enemy puts up such resistance that one looks back longingly, like the Hebrews in the desert after leaving Pharoah, upon a time that was miserable, but less miserable than now.  Would it not have been better to make bricks without straw under a tyrant than be where we are now?   Would it not have been better to submit to death, its power and propaganda, to be “realistic” and bow to his “natural” reign, than rebel and find ourselves cast into the flames?

But not so fast.  For death never had power to make a hell, only the fear of it.  Death never cast us into the flames but only into the fear of them.  Death has enlisted us against ourselves in his war against us, and we need not commit this self-betrayal.  Nor need we believe that the rise of hell as a propaganda pinion of the Church was ever inevitable, or, even if inevitable, need we see it as anything other than a tremendous bluff, which itself is doomed inevitably to fall.

Hell is decidedly political.