This is a continuation of my long essay "From Logos to Freedom". It is a preliminary reflection on the deleterious effects that the ethos of "universalism" implicit in identity politics can have on the fighting spirit and the cohesion of a free society. (To exemplify, if "Black Lives Matter", then "All Lives Matter" - including those of our most lethal enemies! - which displays the futility and stupidity, and ultimate power-lessness of this "politics".)
"In the beginning was the Word....and the Word was God," (John 1:1)
206 On Revolution - Arendt
It is in the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a
measure of complete arbitrariness. Not only is it not bound into
a reliable chain of cause and effect, a chain in which each effect
immediately turns into the cause for future developments, the
beginning has, as it were, nothing whatsoever to hold on to; it is
as though it came out of nowhere in either time or space. For a
moment, the moment of beginning, it is as though the beginner
had abolished the sequence of temporality itself, or as though the
actors were thrown out of the temporal order and its continuity.
The problem of beginning, of course, appears first in thought
and speculation about the origin of the universe, and we know
the Hebrew solution for its perplexities - the assumption of a
Creator God who is outside his own creation in the same way as
the fabricator is outside the fabricated object. In other words,
the problem of beginning is solved through the introduction of
a beginner whose own beginnings are no longer subject to
question because he is 'from eternity to eternity'. This eternity
is the absolute of temporality, and to the extent that the beginning
of the universe reaches back into this region of the absolute,
it is no longer arbitrary but rooted in something which, though
it may be beyond the reasoning capacities of man, possesses a
reason, a rationale of its own.
As Arendt justly
notes, there are two kinds of biblical beginning: the first is physico-cosmological
in that it refers to the origins of the cosmos: this is the primary
preoccupation of the Judaic Old Testament in Genesis and, quite
obviously, it concerns God as the Creator. The second type has to do, in
contrast, with the beginning of human thought, that is, the dawn of
human consciousness and awareness of the world. Two kinds of God, then! The first,
the God of the Hebraic Old Testament is a Creator God, a maker,
more akin to homo faber: He is a doer, He is an arti-ficer
who stands outside of his creation as the crafter of the Cosmos. But he
is also a belligerent and vindictive God. His omniscience is that of the episteme
techne. The second God, the one of the Christian New Testament, is a thinking
God, a reflexive and introspective God, the God of homo sapiens; a
peaceful, passive God whose knowledge is episteme logiche. Each God has
his own episteme ethiche, his own ethos. The God-Artificer of the
Old Testament is closer to the pagan deities of the Hellenic
Graeco-Roman world. True, his Cosmos has a beginning in time, and therefore
also an eschatological End, unlike the pagan divinities that populated
Hellenistic mythology, whose history is not linear like the Christian
one, but rather heroic or mythical. These pagan divinities were
associated both in Greece and Rome with the ghens, the ancestral familia,
whence the word ‘Genesis’ found at the very “beginning” of the Old Testament. Yet,
the pagan gods were mythological entities and so the time of the Graeco-Roman
histories was similarly mythical – at most, it was cyclical, never linear,
because it knew neither beginning nor end.
The New Testament
was written by Jewish intellectuals, the Apostles, who most certainly were not
the humble fishermen depicted in it, but rather erudite preachers exposed to
the Greek Paideia. The New Testament was written in Ancient Greek, but it was a
poor version of the language used by the greatest authors of the Hellenistic
period – which is why it found little favour in the educated pagan classes of
the Roman Empire, East and West. Indeed, the fact that the pneumatology of
Saint John identifies the beginning with the human faculty of language as “the
Word”, and then proceeds to equate this Logos (the Word, Reason) with God
himself, means that already from its very origin in the Early Roman
Empire the Christian doctrine of the Hellenistic Apostles displays its logico-deductive,
theoretical abstraction and removal from the world of heroic and
mythological human action and material production to the introspective
and introverted sphere of logic and dialectics that presages the
imminent “decline and fall” of the Roman Empire. To the extent that the unique
faculty of being human is deemed to be linguistic, this second meaning
of beginning is much more concerned with thinking than with doing,
with meaning than with action, with tranquillity than with
conflict.
The pagan gentes
and familiae of the Early Empire were far more interested in the lives
of Alexander, Alcibiades and Caesar or indeed of Hercules and Theseus than in
the lives of the Christian Saints or, by the Late Empire, in the history of
Christian persecutions and un-Christian heresies! There can be little doubt
that, as Nietzsche charged, the introspective, pacifist, eremitic, ascetic and monastic
bent of the proselytizing Church, from St. Ambrose to St. Augustine (and well
beyond that, St. Thomas Aquinas), sapped the pagan bellicosity of the Roman
polity and above all of its Army that contributed in large part to the fall of
the Empire in the Occident. For whereas the God of the Old Testament was a
pro-ductive Creator God, an artificer that literally “brings forth”
the Cosmos – let there be light! (Fiat lux!) - and then the heavens and
the earth, the God of the Christians is already a divinity self-absorbed in
logic, in the sterile inertia of self-evident, analytic and tautologic Reason.
With the advent of Christianity, faith and Scholastic logic fully displaced the
Stoic valour and the military order and traditions of pagan Rome.
Symptomatically, a
full four centuries after the birth of Christ, with the Late Empire in full
decline, St. Augustine could decree its imminent demise with the phrase “In
interiore homine habitat veritas”. The Christian church, its saintly
intellectuals and historiographers were concerned almost solely with its own incestuous
“history” – the story of persecutions under the Empire and of heretical
challenges to its authority once it became the religio imperii. The
Christian God of peace and equality appealed to the impoverished,
welfare-dependent masses of the big cities in the Empire where the early
apostles went almost exclusively to preach the Gospels. The farmers in the
countryside were largely immune and insensitive to the Christian creed. The
reason why Christianity spread so rapidly and widely across the Empire was
precisely that it appealed to these plebeian urban populations dependent on the
largesse of the Roman State for distributions of food and other victuals – panis
et circenses (bread and circuses). Worse still, the early church was not a
monolithic institution but rather a variegated cluster of individual
proselytizers and monastic groups gravitating around newly-built cathedrals and
monasteries. Their ethos was to replicate the life and deeds of Christ the
Saviour. This imitatio Christi, to a much greater degree than the
ethereal intellectualism of the Church, contributed to the rapid decline of the productive
and military mettle of the Western Empire above all.
The reason why
Constantine elected Christianity as the official religion of the Empire was, of
course, that the new ecumenical and universalist Christian creed
played a vital role in unifying its extremely heterogeneous, incohesive and
diverse multi-lingual, multi-religious population from spread from Spain to Syria
which otherwise would have been splintered by its very autochthonous and
fragmented pagan rituals and creeds. In fact, it was the wider spread of
Christianity among the urban masses in the Eastern Empire that facilitated the adhesion
of the new religion to the existing pagan state structures there and helped
solidify imperial institutions. By contrast, in the Western Empire, the
weakness of Christianity and its mounting contrast with ancient Roman paganism
led to conflicts between the Church and the Roman state that deeply undermined
the latter. The Christian preoccupation with the salvation of the individual
soul and the preservation of the Church as an institution in open and often
bitter competition and conflict with the imperial state institutions and with
paganism meant that the respublica Christiana diverted vital
socio-economic and military resources and energies away from the defence and
fortification of the Roman Army against barbarian incursions from the
north-eastern provinces and boundaries. From its very inception, Christianity
saw the Roman state as a persecutor at worst and, at best, as a “restrainer” (catechon)
of the inevitable advent of the Antichrist before the Apocalypse. By providing
a parallel universe of power and meaning to that of the Roman state and
the army, there can be little question that Christianity and the Church
contributed to the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire.
As we saw earlier,
the Word-as-Spirit placed by John at the very beginning of the Cosmos and
indeed identified with God himself (!) decrees the irremediable separation of
both the Spirit and the Word, of the Logos, from the Flesh – a separation that
only faith (pistis) can bridge and overcome, and one that faithfully
reflects and espouses the Hellenistic philosophy of Neo-platonism. Christian
doctrine and theology gradually came to incorporate many of the philosophical
principles of Neoplatonism, just as the latter diverged and expatiated on the
more extravagant aspects of theurgy and magic. Regardless, the sharp division
between Christian faith and pagan philosophy endured through the entirety of
the Middle Ages. When eventually European thought emerged from the long night
of the Dark Ages, it was to the Hellenistic antiqui auctores that its
great minds reverted, chief among them the early Italian historians like
Machiavelli and Guicciardini.
(On all these themes, we recommend the essays edited by A. Momigliano in The Conflict Between Christianity and Paganism. Perhaps the earliest great work on these themes is by J. Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantins. See also S. Mazzarino, Antico, Tardo-Antico ed Era Costantiniana for a historiographic review of the period. Also on the theme of the relation between early Christianity and Neoplatonism, see the lecture notes in M. Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life.)
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