"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part I).

Part I:
The Need for a Law

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God….” This well-known verse from Romans has become somewhat of a mantra for many Christians when describing the present condition of humanity, and with good reason. St. Athanasius, in describing the state of humanity at present says,

"But men, having turned from the contemplation of God to evil of their own devising, had come inevitably under the law of death. Instead of remaining in the state in which God had created them, they were in process of becoming corrupted entirely, and death had them completely under its dominion."

God created humanity good, but when, in the Garden of Eden, we chose what we thought best rather than what God asked of us, we unalterably corrupted ourselves, marring what God had created in His very own image! Scripture is quite explicit in what form this corruption takes. We all have fallen short of what we were meant to be; we all selfishly go about our own ways, seeking things we thought to be good, all apart from what God had intended for us. King David of Judah said of man, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, doing abominable iniquity; there is none who does good,” and Isaiah says of us, “All we like sheep we have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way.” From this basic presupposition, it is not hard to see that, if left to themselves with no guide, humanity’s many members would soon find themselves destroying one another in the instances in which their self-interests conflicted.

Enter the moral construct: God, in His infinite mercy, gives humanity the concept of the Law: a system of rights and wrongs, goods and evils, that, when enacted, would help govern human-to-human and human-to-God interaction, allowing men to peacefully coexist. The Apostle Paul paints a picture of the law acting toward us much like a schoolmaster or jailer does in his letter to the church at Galatia— “Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed.” On the whole, it seems that most of these moral constructions were macrocosmicly very similar, perhaps owing to that part of man that still knew of God’s divine goodness and the implications thereof. Microcosmicly, however, these moral constructs tended to be culturally relative—that is, particular goods and evils tended to vary from culture to culture.

This, of course, is not to say that goodness is completely relative, but, just as one person can have a correct perspective on reality and another a false perspective due to his limited knowledge, so too can cultures have true or false perspectives on what is truly good, due to their limited knowledge base. Therefore there are possibly many particular “goods”, each varying from culture to culture. In regard to these particulars, the moral construct has indeed taken many particular forms in the history of humanity. Perhaps in tribute to its divine origins, it seems that it usually was created, enacted and enforced by means of local religious systems of belief, most notably in the classical Greek religion embodied in the prophecies of the oracle at Delphi.

Because of this religious connection, piety toward the gods of the particular religious system came to be regarded as the highest good. Likewise, blasphemy and undue pride against the gods and their laws— what, in Greece, was called hubris— came to be regarded as the worst evil one could commit. Thus, man’s selfish instincts came to be controlled mainly by fear— the fear of divine reprisal, inspired by religious tales and myths of men being punished in horrible and grotesque ways for their hubris against the gods.

Euripides, the Greek tragedian, gives a rendering of one of these myths in his play The Bacchae. In this play, Pentheus, the ruler of the city of Thebes, refuses to recognize Dionysus, an illegitimate son of Zeus, as a god. Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, and grandfather of Pentheus, plays the part of the traditional, unquestioning, pious Greek man, who continues to practice his religion because he will not take the chance of offending the gods who may or may not exist. He knows the gravity of offending the gods, and pleads with his grandson:

"My dear son, Teiresias has given you good advice.
Don’t stray beyond pious tradition; live with us.
Your wits have flown to the winds, your sense is foolishness.
Even if, as you say, Dionysus is no god,
Let him have your acknowledgement; lie royally,
That Semele may get honour as having borne a god,
And credit come to us and to all our family.
Remember, too, Actaeon’s miserable fate –
Torn and devoured by hounds which he himself had bred,
Because he filled the mountains with the boast that he
Was a more skilful hunter than Artemis herself.
Don’t share his fate, my son! Come, let me crown your head
With a wreath of ivy; join us in worshipping this god."

Pentheus, however, does not heed his grandfather’s warning, and for his hubris, Dionysus drives him mad, dresses him as a woman and directs him to the hills of Cithaeron, where Pentheus’ mother Agaue and her sisters Ino and Autonoe have been possessed and driven into the Bacchic rituals being held by Dionysus’ followers, the Maenads. At the sight of Pentheus, the Maenads, led by Agaue, are suddenly driven into a violent frenzy by Dionysus. As a result, Pentheus is ripped to pieces by his own aunts and mother as the punishment for his pride against Dionysus. What is the moral of this story? Clearly, it is that the gods take their revenge, and it matters not whether one is a vessel of their vengeance or the one receiving it; all who are prideful toward the gods suffer. Euripides summarizes this moral standard in a warning:

"Though blessed gods dwell in the distant skies,
They watch the ways of men.
To know much is not to be wise.
Pride more than mortal hastens life to its end;
And they who in pride pretend
Beyond man’s limit, will lose what lay
Close to their hand and sure.
I count it madness, and know no cure can mend
The evil man and his evil way."

Thus, the ancient Greek man is held down through the fear of his wrathful gods. Perhaps this is why a Greek tragedian wrote, “Count no man happy until he dies.”

In the City in Words in Books II through XI of Plato’s Republic, Socrates and his interlocutors Glaucon and Adeimantus construct their own system of morality by which the city’s guardians will be governed. In order to convince these guardians that they must live by this moral construct, this system of control— which included a very regimented education, as well as the abolition of marriage and the family unit— replaced traditional tales of the gods with what Socrates called his noble lie:

"And yet I hardly know how to find the audacity or the words to speak and undertake to persuade first the ruler themselves and the soldiers and then the rest of the city that in good sooth all our training and educating of them were things that they imagined and that happened to them as it were in a dream, but that in reality at that time they were down within the earth being molded and fostered themselves while their weapons and the rest of their weapons and the rest of their equipment were being fashioned. And when they were quite finished the earth as being their mother delivered them, and now as if their land were their mother and their nurse they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the selfsame earth."

Once they accept the story they are told, Socrates believes that the guardians will live by the laws they have set down for them.

Similarly, in Book VII, Socrates likens the inhabitants of his city in words to people at the bottom of an enormous cave. According to Socrates, the inhabitants of the city are stuck at the bottom of an enormous cavern, shackled and facing a wall, their only means of sensory input comes from the shadows of images of men and beasts, cast onto that same wall they face by a fire that burns somewhere behind them. Socrates describes the men holding these images as “exhibitors of puppet shows.” The people of the city are completely placated by all this, because this life— though it consists of only the shadows of false images— is all they have ever known. They remain docile because they have no idea that there is more in existence than just their shadow-puppet realities. Thus, the inhabitants of the city in words are kept under control through deception— those in authority over them, the puppet masters, show them only the shadows of mere images of reality. Since the people cannot see anything else, what choice do they have but to accept the shadows as reality and live their lives accordingly?

Though his intentions are good to an extent, man’s best attempts at constructing a moral system of control are still quite imperfect. Traditional Greek religious mysticism had to inspire fear and false piety in men in order to keep their self-centered natures in check. Even Socrates’ attempts to prove that being in harmony with God and man is good and beneficial for men in itself— as well as being a means of maintaining order— first required that man be deceived into believing in shadows. The reason for these failures seems obvious: man is, by nature, finite, and therefore, his perspective and knowledge of reality is also finite. Man’s moral constructs will always miss the mark in some way because he cannot grasp the whole picture, and thus, man’s moral constructs will always be ontomoralities, because he takes what he thinks to be true from his limited perspective, and superimposes it onto the entire picture. Man is in no position to do such a thing.

An analogy may prove useful in illustrating this point. In order to have a truly correct knowledge of one line in a painting, one must be able to view that line in light of, and in relation to, the whole painting. One must be able to look at it from an objective perspective— from outside of the painting. I would argue that, likewise, man, by himself, can never come to objectively correct knowledge of what is good, because he cannot see the whole of the painting that is reality. This is simply due to the fact that he is necessarily inside of it. Therefore, the only being who could actually have a truly correct perspective on reality is God, and the only means that we, as humans, would have of obtaining truly correct knowledge is through divine revelation. We could know what is really good only if God told us what is really good.

In light of this, the only people to ever have a truly correct moral construct were the Israelites, because their moral construct was given to them directly by God! Since they had this correct perspective to reality (and God), they could live under this morality in devotion to God, rather than in fear or deception. Even so, the Israelites too were still under the dominion of the moral construct, because they still had the tendency to seek their own self-benefit, and therefore were not free. As Paul says it, they were still slaves to the Law.