This is the big term paper I wrote for my class on the Philosophical/Theological Psychology of Soren Kierkegaard. I feel like a lot of good thought came out of this project, even if it was a beast to finish. Enjoy.
"O! Thou Dangerous Dialectic!:
An Analysis of the Relationship Between Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception Within Despair in The Sickness Unto Death"
In the introduction to the section of The Sickness Unto Death where he expounds despair as defined by consciousness, Kierkegaard directly relates the degree of despair in a person to the degree of consciousness in that person. He says, “The ever increasing intensity of despair depends upon the degree of consciousness or is proportionate to its increase: the greater the degree of consciousness, the more intensive the despair” (1). Consciousness and despair, then, are directly proportionate to each other; whenever they are found together (that is, whenever a self is not in faith, or resting transparently in the power that established it), one’s increase or decrease is marked by the other’s increase or decrease, respectively. To illustrate this point, Kierkegaard gives the example of the despair that is suffered by Satan: “The devil’s despair is the most intensive despair, for the devil is sheer spirit and hence unqualified consciousness and transparency; there is no obscurity in the devil that could serve as a mitigating excuse” (2). This point is well-taken, for it similarly seems true that—as Kierkegaard himself will quickly address in this section—one who is hardly conscious of being a self can hardly despair, at least in despair proper as defined by Kierkegaard.
But what is it of which a person is growing in consciousness as that person also grows in despair? Kierkegaard believes that this consciousness is that of his despair itself. He says, “To the extent that a person has the truer conception of despair, if he still remains in despair, and to the extent that he is more clearly conscious of being in despair—to that extent the despair is more intensive” (3). Thus, as long as one remains in despair (that is, as long as one is misrelating himself to himself and to the other), the more he understands despair, the greater his despair will be. Likewise, as one grows in despair, one grows in the knowledge of one’s despair. If this is true, and despair is the misrelation of the self to the self and the other (including God), then it appears that, as one becomes further and further despairing, one will come to a further knowledge of himself and the other (including God). This is so because in order to know how one is in misrelation to a thing, one must know how one ought to be relating to that thing, and in order to know how one ought to be relating to a thing, one must have at least some knowledge of oneself and that thing.
Thus, as one grows in despair, one will grow in the knowledge of oneself and the other. But how can this be? It seems intuitive to me that as one grows in despair, as one becomes further misrelated to oneself and to the other, one further skews his picture of reality—one further deceives himself. Further, after establishing that sin is intensified despair in the second main section of The Sickness Unto Death, when refuting the Socratic definition of sin as ignorance, Kierkegaard himself says, “That is why Christianity begins in another way: man has to learn what sin is by a revelation from God; sin is not a matter of a person’s not having understood what is right but of his being unwilling to understand it, of his not willing what is right” (4). Thus, when in sin, one is not only ignorant, but is himself willfully ignorant concerning the truth. Is it possible, then, that as one deepens in despair (sin), one grows in knowledge of self and other and simultaneously deceives oneself concerning this knowledge? What are we to make of the phenomenon of self-deception in light of Kierkegaard’s analysis of the different forms of despair? My project is thus to further exegete and analyze these different forms of despair as laid out by Kierkegaard, particularly in terms of how self-deception plays a role in them, hopefully in order to determine how it is that self-knowledge and self-deception relate both to each other and to the phenomenon of despair.
“The Despair That Is Ignorant of Being Despair, or the Despairing Ignorance of Having a Self and an Eternal Self”
It is here, in Kierkegaard’s treatment of what he describes as the lowest form of despair, that I hope to establish a model for how self-knowledge and self-deception relate in despair, and then later apply, test, and if necessary, revise that model in regards to the various, more advanced forms of despair. Being that this form of despair is firstly and primarily marked by the ignorance of being in despair, Kierkegaard begins this section with a treatment of ignorance in relation to what he calls “the obstinacy of truth” (5). He says,
"That this condition is nevertheless despair and is properly designated as such manifests what in the best sense of the word may be called the obstinacy of truth. Veritas est index sui et falsi [Truth is the criterion of itself and of the false]. But this obstinacy of truth certainly is not respected; likewise, it is far from being the case that men regard the relationship to truth, relating themselves to the truth, as the highest good, and it is very far from being the case that they Socratically regard being in error in this manner as the worst misfortune—the sensate in them usually far outweighs their intellectuality" (6).
Thus, the obstinacy of truth presents itself in truth being both its own standard as well as the standard of falsehood—truth insists on having its own way and will not accept anyone else’s. This is perhaps what Kierkegaard means when he says that this obstinacy is “in the best sense of the word.” He goes on to say, however, that this truth-imposed standard of truth is more than often not given proper respect—it is often ignored. Most men, says Kierkegaard, do not care enough about truth and their relation to truth to be properly related to it, primarily because they do not view being in relation to truth “as the highest good.” Further, he says that this is due to the disproportionate importance that these men place upon their sensual desires, rather than their intellectuality. Men ignore the truth and thus become ignorant to it.
Kierkegaard goes on to further describe the ignorant man’s relation to truth:
"For example, if a man is presumably happy, imagines himself to be happy, although considered in the light of truth he is unhappy, he is usually far from wanting to be wrenched out of his error. On the contrary, he becomes indignant, he regards anyone who does so as his worst enemy, he regards it as an assault bordering on murder in the sense that, as is said, it murders his happiness. Why? Because he is completely dominated by the sensate and the sensate-psychical, because he lives in sensate categories, the pleasant and the unpleasant, waves goodbye to spirit, truth, etc., because he is too sensate to have the courage to venture out and to endure being spirit" (7).
This ignorant man, according to Kierkegaard, believes himself to be happy, but only because he is ignorant—that is, this man is happy only because he does not know of his despairing state. Truly, ignorance is bliss for this man. Were this man to stumble across the truth, or were truth to be forced upon him, he would more than likely do everything in his power to continue ignoring the truth, for “he is usually far from wanting to be wrenched out of his error.” Why? Why does truth and any truth-bearer become his enemy? It is because, as Kierkegaard says, “it [truth] murders his happiness.”
Truth is a category of spirit, and thus it calls the man beyond the immediate sensate categories of “the pleasant and the unpleasant”; it calls man to deny himself the immediate, the purely sensate pleasures, to “have the courage to venture out and to endure being spirit,” and thus to suffer through the despair of consciousness. But as has been said, this sensate-driven man will do everything in his power in order to continue ignoring the truth. He will construct elaborate systems—systems “embracing the whole of existence, world history, etc…” (8) as if to be sheltered within these systems from the harshness of truth and reality. However, as says Kierkegaard, we are surprised on one level to find that this sensate man cannot live as though the systems he has created for his shelter are actually true. Thus, the man “himself does not personally live in this huge, domed palace but in a shed alongside it, or in a doghouse, or at best in the janitor’s quarters” (9). On another level, this behavior is not surprising at all, for we can see that as truth begins to impress itself upon him, and as his consciousness of despair may be beginning to grow, the ignorant man may no longer be able to hold up his façade of a palace. He may be no longer able to convince himself that the shelter he built for his protection and distraction from reality will actually protect and distract him because truth itself—the truth that is impressing itself upon him—is revealing to him that this shelter is only a figment of his imagination.
But still he must fight this increasing knowledge, this increasing violation of truth upon his ignorance, in order that he may protect his immediacy, or else his “spiritless sense of security” (10) will collapse upon itself. As Kierkegaard says, “when the enchantment of illusion is over, when existence begins to totter, then despair, too, immediately appears as that which lay underneath” (11). How can this champion of immediacy maintain his illusion so as to not have to come to terms with the emptiness, the despair that lies beneath it? Simply enough, he must will even more strongly to ignore the truth about himself. He must resolve even more firmly to deny the real as the real presents itself even more firmly to him. This, I believe, is the model of the relation between self-knowledge and self-deception within despair—that of the irresolvable tension between complete dialectical opposites. When one is in despair, as one grows in the knowledge of oneself and of the other—and in the knowledge of despair itself—one must simultaneously harden and strengthen one’s resolve to ignore those truths and deceive oneself.
A necessary condition for the growth of one’s despair, then, is the growth of the tension of the opposition between self-knowledge and the will to ignorance (12). It could be also that as one grows in the consciousness of despair, that growing awareness, that ever-growing feeling of despair, may in fact be a phenomenology of that very opposition. As one grows more despairing, one may feel the ever-increasingly grating tension between those things that one knows about oneself, and those things that one cannot accept as being true about oneself for fear that they, being true, will destroy the already fragile self-security provided by remaining within one’s false immediacy. Thus, in order to protect his immediate happiness, maintained through his sensate categories of “pleasant” and “unpleasant,” this man must even more fervently will his own ignorance—his ignoring of the truth—and thus continue to willfully deceive himself.
We can easily see what kind of monstrous dialectical trap in which this man has been caught by reflecting upon the doubly-antithetical nature of his situation. Not only is he dialectically caught between his increasing self-knowledge and his immediacy, and thus is resigned to having to “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (13), but this suppression is by nature self-defeating. The tension found within in this suppression, this self-deception, clashes essentially with the goal of the immediacy to which the suppression is in service, that of his happiness. So, in the attempted protection of his immediate happiness, this man actually sets it up in a dialectic of opposition with his own growing self-knowledge, potentially suspending the fulfillment of both of them infinitely. He is trapped in the limbo between the two, never able to attain either.
Here, for the sake of clarity, it will be helpful to consider a potential counter-argument to our present hypothesis. It might be argued that this dialectical tension is in fact impossible because it appears impossible to simultaneously come to self-knowledge and suppress that knowledge on the same level of consciousness (14). Fundamentally, this objection comes down to a simple affirmation of the law of non-contradiction, for it seems that one cannot know a proposition about oneself (affirming A) and simultaneously deny that proposition (affirming ~A). This is true enough, but this is not what occurs within this dialectic of opposition between self-knowledge and self-deception. Rather than both occurring simultaneously, the two interplay with each other in a coextensive, indefinite succession—that is, they incessantly dialogue. The person in this dialectical tension, in despair, is constantly torn back and forth between the inescapable truth and the necessity of its suppression. Thus, this counter-argument simply does not apply to our hypothesis.
“The Despair That Is Conscious of Being Despair and Therefore Is Conscious of Having a Self in Which There Is Something Eternal and Then either in Despair Does Not Will to Be Itself or in Despair Wills to Be Itself”
At this point, obviously, we will not yet be able to witness the full effects of how this dialectical tension plays out in the deeper forms of despair because we have still only dealt with despair that is unconscious of its being a state of despair—despair that has its immediacy still intact, that has not yet entered the dialectical opposition between self-knowledge and the will to ignorance. Technically speaking, then, we have not yet witnessed this dialectic at all for the same reasons; we have seen only the possibility of the beginning of this dialectic, as truth first begins to impress itself upon the man who has not yet come into any knowledge of himself as spirit. As a reminder, the present reflections upon this possibility have arisen from our reflections upon the indignation of immediate man toward any who would disturb his immediacy by presenting him with that which transcends his immediacy—truth. In order to truly see this dialectic at work, we must begin investigating the forms of the despair as defined by consciousness that are actually conscious of being despair, beginning with the despair that does not will to be oneself.
It is important to notice that in the short introduction to this subsection of the first part of The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard himself notes something like what we have explicitly labeled as the dialectic between self-knowledge and self-deception. He begins this introduction by describing how growth in despair in necessarily accompanied and aided by the growth in the knowledge of what despair is. As we too have noted, this is because, in growth in the knowledge of the nature of despair, one begins to understand the reality of despair as being a condition of the eternal self. However, the full understanding of this reality does not come immediately upon one’s first encounters with despair. On this, Kierkegaard says, “On the one hand, then, the true conception of despair is indispensable for conscious despair. On the other hand, it is imperative to have clarity about oneself—that is, insofar as simultaneous clarity and despair are conceivable” (15). Thus, from the language he is using, it appears that Kierkegaard himself believes that there is some dialectical tension between the clarity that presents itself as self-knowledge and the self-deception found within despair. Going on, he says of the despairing man,
"To some degree, he is aware of being in despair, feels it the way a person does who walks around with a physical malady but does not want to acknowledge forthrightly the real nature of the illness. At one moment, he is almost sure that he is in despair; the next moment, his indisposition seems to have some other cause, something outside of himself, and if this were altered, he would not be in despair" (16).
Here, it appears that Kierkegaard is implicitly assuming the kind of dialectic—that coextensive, indefinite succession of self-knowledge and self-deception—that we have previously described. The man with this despairing sickness has a moment of clarity; he understands that he is in fact sick with the sickness unto death, and that he himself is the continuing cause of this illness. This self-awareness, however, is quickly replaced by the thought that the illness, “his indisposition,” is not being and could not be caused by himself and the dialectical tension growing within him. He could not truly “acknowledge forthrightly the real nature of the illness”, being within his own eternal self, and act upon that, for that would require him to abandon his immediate happiness—it would require him “to venture out and to endure being spirit” (17). He must distract himself from the reality that his own self presents him with, by trying “to keep himself in the dark about his state through diversions” (18). Even more explicitly, Kierkegaard says shortly later in the section, “There is indeed in all darkness and ignorance a dialectical interplay between knowing and willing…” (19) that is, a dialectical interplay between coming to knowledge and willing to ignore or suppress that knowledge. Thus, the man in despair enters the tension of this dialectic of opposition.
Despair that does not will to be itself can be further broken up into the categories of the despair over the earthly or something earthly, and the despair of the eternal or over oneself, and it is here that this dialectic between self-knowledge and self-deception begins to rear its ugly head. This earliest form of conscious despair—that is, the despair over the earthly or over something earthly—is birthed out of the immediacy of the despair that is unconscious of being despair. Since in this self, there is yet “no infinite consciousness of the self, of what despair is, or of the condition as one of despair…” (20) Kierkegaard says that this despair “is only a suffering, a succumbing to the pressure of external factors; in no way does it come from within [the self] as an act” (21). Thus, the dialectic must be begun from the outside, since the self, being trapped in its immediacy, will simply continue in its immediacy; it is only from the outside that the self can be given dialectical inertia, since that which is at rest tends to stay at rest. Conscious despair—the dialectic of opposition between self-knowledge and self-deception—thus begins passively. In the same vein, Kierkegaard remarks shortly thereafter,
"Now something happens that impinges (upon + to strike) upon this immediate self and makes it despair. In another sense, it cannot happen at this point; since the self has no reflection, there must be an external motivation for the despair, and the despair is nothing more than a submitting. By a “stroke of fate” that which to the man of immediacy is his whole life, or, insofar as he has a minuscule of reflection, the portion thereof to which he especially clings, is taken from him; in short, he becomes, as he calls it, unhappy, that is, his immediacy is dealt such a crushing blow that it cannot reproduce itself: he despairs" (22).
As before, Kierkegaard here affirms the violent nature of the onset of this despair; something “impinges” or strikes upon the immediacy of the self, causing this immediacy to shatter, and throwing the self into despair. This despair is thus completely passive in its nature, as we have remarked. But what, then, is acting upon the self, shattering its immediacy?
I argue that this force is truth itself, both because truth is not a category of the immediate, but rather of the eternal, and because truth is obstinate (that is, it insists on entering center stage and setting the standard for all), and thus is not easily ignored. In revealing itself to a person of immediacy, truth, in its eternality, forces open the door on the happy illusions that distraction and complacency has allowed him to maintain, both transcending and crushing his categories of “the pleasant and the unpleasant.” As soon as this person’s illusions—“the portion [of his immediacy] to which he especially clings”—clash with reality, the truth concerning how he has misrelated himself to himself and to the other leaps into the spotlight, and if he is capable of any reflection at all, the self-presentation of this truth launches him into the dialectic of opposition between growing self-knowledge and growing self-deception. If the person is in fact incapable of reflection, if he is one of those “happy” few, then, as Kierkegaard says, he will simply suffer the duration of the despair, and once the immediacy in question is restored, he will return to his previous “happy” state, though nonetheless still unconsciously despairing (23). It matters not how large or small are the first steps onto this dialectical path, how great or insignificant the first inconsistency between illusion and reality, how blatant or subtle the first revelation of the misrelation; once the reflection upon the truth concerning oneself has taken hold, the dialectic also takes hold and begins to have a life of its own.
Once this first step has been taken, and the man begins to despair and reflect on his despair, he attempts to take measures to save his self from it. However, “his struggles are in vain; the difficulty he has run up against requires a total break with immediacy, and he does not have the self-reflection or the ethical reflection for that” (24). This man cannot simply will away his despair and transcend the despairing dialectic of opposition because he cannot transcend his need for immediacy, his need for the protective shroud of his illusion for the sake of his immediate happiness. Thus, rather than transcending the dialectic, he must perpetuate it by providing the response—he must will to suppress the truth about himself and deceive himself. He attempts to temporarily abandon himself, hoping that the problem will go away when he does so. As Kierkegaard says, “As long as the difficulty lasts, he does not dare, as the saying so trenchantly declares, ‘to come to himself,’ he does not will to be himself; presumably this will pass, perhaps a change will take place, this gloomy possibility will probably be forgotten” (25). This man wishes to escape himself because he has identified himself with the immediacy which has been called into question by the revealing of the truth of the misrelation of his self to himself and the other; thus, this man is in the despair to will to not be himself. If the truth about this man’s misrelated self does not further present itself to him—if truth never equally or superiorly answers his will to deceive himself—then it may be that he succeeds in suppressing this knowledge, and will actually forget that “gloomy possibility,” thus passing back into the immediate “happiness” of ignorance he once possessed (26). It is possible, however, that if he is never able to restore his former “happiness,” and thereby deceive himself back into immediacy, he will continue to despair over the earthly for the rest of his life. We ought to note, though, that if this is the case, the dialectic will be suspended, and thus this man will never slip into deeper forms of despair, just as if he were to pass back into his previously undisturbed immediacy. Before we think of this as a good thing, however, we must remember with Kierkegaard that this will also suspend this man’s journey to salvation.
When passing from the despair over the earthly into the despair over oneself (and of the eternal), the dialectic between self-knowledge and self-deception does not change in nature, but rather in intensity. While despair is technically always of the eternal, as Kierkegaard points out (27), there is indeed a shift in moving from the despair over the earthly to the despair over oneself in that the awareness—the consciousness—of one’s despair is fundamentally deepened. This shift is a further movement in self-knowledge because, for the first time, the object of despair—that is, the self itself—is recognized, and not merely recognized as such, but recognized as the source its own despair. For whatever reason, probably due to some monumental poignant failure of the person—a failure highlighting a fundamental weakness of the person—the person in despair comes to understand that he himself is the problem, as he misrelates himself to himself and to the other. Of this consciousness of one’s weakness, Kierkegaard remarks, “Consequently, there is only a relative difference, namely, that the previous form has weakness’ consciousness as its final consciousness, whereas here the consciousness does not stop with that but rises to a new consciousness—that of his weakness” (28). Before, in the despair over the earthly, the man in despair was certainly despairing in weakness; he simply did not yet know it. Following this previously mentioned failure, the man is finally made aware of his own weakness, and despairs even further in that awareness.
The poignancy of this failure and its corresponding weakness has made the growth in the knowledge of self-as-misrelation nigh impossible to avoid. This step is thus the next natural movement in the dialectic of opposition between self-knowledge and self-deception. For, once the truth concerning oneself-as-misrelation has been suppressed in the previous manner—that is, in separating from oneself until immediacy is restored—truth’s proper response in raising the stakes is to reveal that the thing from which we had attempted to escape is not only the problem, but also that it is in fact inescapable. Thus, upon reaching this level of despair, there is understandably an enormous intensification of the dialectical tension, such that whether one simply sits in this immediacy-smashing self-knowledge, or can somehow manage to find the strength of spirit within himself to continue the dialectic of opposition and will his own self-deception even in the face of such a revelation, he is miserable. On this revelation, Kierkegaard states, “He now becomes more clearly conscious of his despair, that he despairs of the eternal, that he despairs over himself, over being so weak that he attributes such great significance to the earthly, which now becomes for him the despairing sign that he has lost the eternal and himself” (29). We can see here that the self from which the despairing person previously attempted to distance himself was in fact his real self, his eternal self, which he rejected in favor of the false self in which he could preserve his immediate happiness. And now, fearing that he may have lost that which was eternal in him, he despairs. Of course, looking in from the outside, we can see that he does still have his eternal self, this being evidenced by the simple fact that he has had the strength and resistance of spirit to continue the dialectic and reach such depths of despair.
But what of the other option? Could it be possible to continue the dialectic of opposition still further yet, and summon up such strength of spirit as to will one’s own ignorance in the face of such blatant self-knowledge? This is possible only by standing truth on its head, by making oneself the standard of the true, and by judging the world according to this standard. This is precisely what occurs in the man, who, still unwilling to submit to faith, despairs to will to be oneself in defiance. Here, as Kierkegaard says, “If the person in despair goes one single dialectical step further, if he realizes why he does not will to be himself, then there is a shift, then there is defiance, and this is the case precisely because in despair he wills to be himself” (30). Thus, the man who in despair wills to be himself defies all of truth and reality because it will not let him retain that in which he finds his immediate happiness (those categories of “pleasant” and “unpleasant”). Further willing his own ignorance, he reassembles reality is a way that suits that which he wills himself to be. “On closer examination, however,” Kierkegaard says, “it is easy to see that this absolute ruler is a king without a country, actually ruling over nothing; his position, his sovereignty, is subordinate to the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate at any moment” (31). We clearly see, then, that this man is truly the most deceived of all, even though he has had the most self-knowledge, become a stronger spirit, and participated in the eternal far more than those who are ignorant of their despair. In fact, it is precisely because he has seen more of the truth and continued to will to reject it (and not only that, but he willed to remake it) that he is the most deceived of all.
Thus, in examining how it is that self-knowledge and self-ignorance could exist together within the phenomena of despair, we have seen that the relationship between these two states within despair is one of dialectical opposition—a coextensive and indefinite succession of opposites. This dialectic is ever building, raising the stakes at every exchange. It begins with truth’s first appearance, breaking into the immediacy of ignorant despair, and culminates in the defiance and complete self-deception of the man who in despair wills to be himself, thus casting an image of reality in his own image. This man has perfected the despairing dialectic of opposition, rather than transcending this dialectic by submitting to his maker in faith, and thus fully given himself over to the sickness unto death.
Endnotes:
1. The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Hong and Hong, pg. 42.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., pg. 48.
4. Ibid., pg. 95 (emphasis mine).
5. Ibid., pg. 42.
6. Ibid., pg. 42-43.
7. Ibid., pg. 43.
8. Ibid. Kierkegaard certainly seems to be referencing Hegel’s philosophy in saying this. This would imply that Kierkegaard believes that Hegel’s motives in doing speculative philosophy are primarily derived from his sensate-psychological need to repress, ignore, or perhaps to distract himself from reality. Whether this was actually the case for Hegel, I know not. However, if Kierkegaard is truly referring implicitly to Hegel in speaking on the repressive nature of philosophical systems, that Kierkegaard thought this was the case appears to follow.
9. Ibid., pg. 43-44.
10. Ibid., pg. 44.
11. Ibid.
12. Whether this is a sufficient condition for the growth of despair is another matter, and obviously remains to be proven.
13. Romans 1:18 NKJV
14. I am indebted to Michael Garten for his very astute thoughts, both in this specific counter-argument, as well as his valuable feedback and conversation in regards to this paper as a whole.
15. SUD, trans. Hong and Hong, pg. 47.
16. Ibid., pg. 48.
17. Ibid., pg. 43.
18. Ibid., pg. 48.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., pg. 50-51.
21. Ibid., pg. 51.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., pg. 52-53.
24. Ibid., pg. 55.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., pg. 55-56.
27. Ibid., pg. 60.
28. Ibid., pg. 61.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., pg. 67.
31. Ibid., pg. 69.
Love and Peace in Our Lord Jesus Christ,
Garrett
Showing posts with label Ontology of Humanity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ontology of Humanity. Show all posts
Monday, December 15, 2008
Thursday, July 12, 2007
"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part V).
Part V:
Theogony
Thus, it is through our God-given love made possible through Christ that Nietzsche’s mantra of man becoming “beyond good and evil” is made possible— since it is obvious that a man who acts in Christ-like love toward both God and his neighbor will always freely do what is best toward them without need for moral guidance. This conclusion is especially ironic considering Nietzsche’s view of Christianity, since Nietzsche said that himself: “Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.” Nietzsche may have recognized the truth of this statement, but even if he did, he had no means to bring it about himself, since he clearly did not know Christ. In going beyond good and evil, Nietzsche claimed that one would be immoral, building up his own moral construct against the moral construct of his time and culture— he groups himself in saying, “We immoralists….” However, I would claim that, in going beyond good and evil in Christ, we are not immoral in the least— we are supramoral because we transcend the need for a moral construct entirely!
Our salvation in Christ, then, has at least two major effects on man. The first is that the will of man is actively transformed by his God-given love through the Spirit, so that he more and more displays the “will to love” of Christ. The second effect on man follows directly from the first: man’s “will to love” enables him to freely act in love toward both God and man, freeing him from the restraints placed on him by moral construct. Now, man can do more than just the good action— he can love! Irenaeus says this as well in his treatise On the Apostolic Preaching. He states,
"Therefore we do not need the Law as a paedagogue…. For no more shall the Law say, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ to him to whom even come desire for another’s wife; nor, ‘You shall not kill’, to him who has removed all anger and enmity from himself…."
Put simply, this salvation in Christ makes us Christ-like— makes us God-like— completely free to love.
If this salvation in Christ is making us more Christ-like, then this salvation is the restoration of man to what he was originally created to be— the image of God, since Christ himself is “the image of the invisible God.” Athanasius was very concerned with the fallen state of man in light of what he could have been. He says, “What was God to do in face of this dehumanizing of mankind, this universal hiding of the knowledge of Himself by the wiles of evil spirits?” We had “dehumanized” ourselves by marring the image of God that God had originally stamped on us in creating us. In our salvation, God makes us truly human again— that is, God makes us to be gods again, since to be truly human is to be godlike. Athanasius says,
"As, then, he who desires to see God Who by nature is invisible and not to be beheld, may yet perceive and know Him through His works, so too let him who does not see Christ with his understanding at least consider Him in His bodily works and test whether they be of man or God…. He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God."
As Athanasius says, Christ— acting like the Superman, acting as the God-man— gives us the example of what a human truly is in his fullest sense. He shows us a life lived in love, defying the set moral construct of the time and abolishing moral constructs embodied in the Law altogether, healing and giving life to man even in this earthly life, and destroying death once and for all, defeating nihilism through submitting himself to it.
As far as what being Christ-like means, Paul also gives us clues in his epistles. He says in Romans, “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed into the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” Christ, through this example, shows us, whom are called his brothers and coheirs in his kingdom, that men as we are now were meant to be like Supermen; free from the bonds of death and morality, we would be able to freely choose to love God and men in true freedom. Also, Paul says in 1 Corinthians, “Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels?” Paul was not the only man of faith to give us insight in this area. Saint Gregory of Nazianzus said of the Christ-like life in his Five Theological Orations, “Walk like God through all that is sublime, and with a fellow-feeling through all that involve the body; but better treat all as God does, so that you may ascend from below to become God, because he came down from above for us.” Really, we Christians surpass even Nietzsche’s hopes for the continuing progression of man. Far from making man into a herd animal, as Nietzsche thought, Christ makes us into the men of true excellence that we were always meant to be. Following Christ’s example, we who are truly in Christ— and have thus received His Holy Spirit— are, through His ultimate sacrificial love, being remade to be like Christ, to be Supermen, to be gods; higher even than God’s angels, brothers to the only-begotten Son of God, coheirs to the universe! Immortality, eternal life, godhood, is ours for the taking, if we will only but receive it!
So often we make so little of humanity. Obviously, we are correct in saying that all men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but in doing so, it seems as if we do not understand the glory for which humanity was really created. In understanding the greatness for which we were made, we can see our present depravity and rejoice all the more in our restoration to godhood through Jesus Christ. After realizing this, however, we must also understand that we are still underneath the God by whom we were created. We must realize that we are glorified only because He was, is, and will be glorious, and that though we are closer than brothers to the King of Kings, He is still King, and we are not. Between both of these represented extremes, we find humanity’s proper place. Christ, then, fulfills Nietzsche’s project better than Nietzsche himself ever could have. By restoring man to his proper place, Christ has restored the natural order of the universe, placing those who were meant to be strong back in a position of strength, excellence, and power. Through Christ, man is restored to where he was always meant to be: sitting at the right hand of God the Father, a god himself, crowned in glory, splendor, and majesty.
It may be that someone objects, and believes that this idea of human apotheosis as I have stated it— the idea of our Theogony— is absurd. After all, even as Christians, we still fall prey to sin and do “bad” things. In at least some real way, we are not truly free from morality. This objection would indeed present a problem for my argument, if I were arguing that, in Christ, we are made into perfect images of Christ immediately. However, this is not what I am arguing in the least. This is a simple objection to circumvent by simply arguing that our Theogony is another way of viewing our Christian sanctification. As the Holy Spirit, through the love of Christ, makes us into more perfect images of God, we are made more and more able to exhibit Christ-like love, thereby continuously lessening the hold of morality over us. C. S. Lewis talks about the surpassing of the moral construct by humanity in an essay entitled “Man or Rabbit?,” arguing that man was always meant for something much greater than our moral constructs. He says,
"The people who keep on asking if they can’t lead a decent life without Christ, don’t know what life is about; if they did they would know that ‘a decent life’ is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for. Morality is indispensable: but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up."
Since, then, as we are still unable to completely and totally exhibit Christ-like love at all times to both God and man, morality must govern our actions insofar as we cannot love as Christ did. This can be shown as a kind of inverse relationship. Less ability to act in love requires more moral control; more ability to love requires less.
Now surely, this imperative of love is much harder to live by than any moral construct, since it comes into direct conflict with our “will to power.” Now, instead of repenting of our sins— those actions that did not conform to morality— we now must repent of anything less than unconditional love for both God and man. Until our “will to power” is completely replaced by our “will to love,” this is indeed a difficult thing— surely, it is a complete paradigm shift. But thank God for His Grace, and for His Holy Spirit, who is continuously reforming and reshaping us, transforming our “will to power” into the “will to love,” making us more and more into the likeness of the Son of God and His Glory. We will love and be loved as He does and is; we will be free as He is free; we will be glorious as He is glorious. We will be gods, but we are not quite there yet.
Theogony
Thus, it is through our God-given love made possible through Christ that Nietzsche’s mantra of man becoming “beyond good and evil” is made possible— since it is obvious that a man who acts in Christ-like love toward both God and his neighbor will always freely do what is best toward them without need for moral guidance. This conclusion is especially ironic considering Nietzsche’s view of Christianity, since Nietzsche said that himself: “Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.” Nietzsche may have recognized the truth of this statement, but even if he did, he had no means to bring it about himself, since he clearly did not know Christ. In going beyond good and evil, Nietzsche claimed that one would be immoral, building up his own moral construct against the moral construct of his time and culture— he groups himself in saying, “We immoralists….” However, I would claim that, in going beyond good and evil in Christ, we are not immoral in the least— we are supramoral because we transcend the need for a moral construct entirely!
Our salvation in Christ, then, has at least two major effects on man. The first is that the will of man is actively transformed by his God-given love through the Spirit, so that he more and more displays the “will to love” of Christ. The second effect on man follows directly from the first: man’s “will to love” enables him to freely act in love toward both God and man, freeing him from the restraints placed on him by moral construct. Now, man can do more than just the good action— he can love! Irenaeus says this as well in his treatise On the Apostolic Preaching. He states,
"Therefore we do not need the Law as a paedagogue…. For no more shall the Law say, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ to him to whom even come desire for another’s wife; nor, ‘You shall not kill’, to him who has removed all anger and enmity from himself…."
Put simply, this salvation in Christ makes us Christ-like— makes us God-like— completely free to love.
If this salvation in Christ is making us more Christ-like, then this salvation is the restoration of man to what he was originally created to be— the image of God, since Christ himself is “the image of the invisible God.” Athanasius was very concerned with the fallen state of man in light of what he could have been. He says, “What was God to do in face of this dehumanizing of mankind, this universal hiding of the knowledge of Himself by the wiles of evil spirits?” We had “dehumanized” ourselves by marring the image of God that God had originally stamped on us in creating us. In our salvation, God makes us truly human again— that is, God makes us to be gods again, since to be truly human is to be godlike. Athanasius says,
"As, then, he who desires to see God Who by nature is invisible and not to be beheld, may yet perceive and know Him through His works, so too let him who does not see Christ with his understanding at least consider Him in His bodily works and test whether they be of man or God…. He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God."
As Athanasius says, Christ— acting like the Superman, acting as the God-man— gives us the example of what a human truly is in his fullest sense. He shows us a life lived in love, defying the set moral construct of the time and abolishing moral constructs embodied in the Law altogether, healing and giving life to man even in this earthly life, and destroying death once and for all, defeating nihilism through submitting himself to it.
As far as what being Christ-like means, Paul also gives us clues in his epistles. He says in Romans, “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed into the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” Christ, through this example, shows us, whom are called his brothers and coheirs in his kingdom, that men as we are now were meant to be like Supermen; free from the bonds of death and morality, we would be able to freely choose to love God and men in true freedom. Also, Paul says in 1 Corinthians, “Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels?” Paul was not the only man of faith to give us insight in this area. Saint Gregory of Nazianzus said of the Christ-like life in his Five Theological Orations, “Walk like God through all that is sublime, and with a fellow-feeling through all that involve the body; but better treat all as God does, so that you may ascend from below to become God, because he came down from above for us.” Really, we Christians surpass even Nietzsche’s hopes for the continuing progression of man. Far from making man into a herd animal, as Nietzsche thought, Christ makes us into the men of true excellence that we were always meant to be. Following Christ’s example, we who are truly in Christ— and have thus received His Holy Spirit— are, through His ultimate sacrificial love, being remade to be like Christ, to be Supermen, to be gods; higher even than God’s angels, brothers to the only-begotten Son of God, coheirs to the universe! Immortality, eternal life, godhood, is ours for the taking, if we will only but receive it!
So often we make so little of humanity. Obviously, we are correct in saying that all men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but in doing so, it seems as if we do not understand the glory for which humanity was really created. In understanding the greatness for which we were made, we can see our present depravity and rejoice all the more in our restoration to godhood through Jesus Christ. After realizing this, however, we must also understand that we are still underneath the God by whom we were created. We must realize that we are glorified only because He was, is, and will be glorious, and that though we are closer than brothers to the King of Kings, He is still King, and we are not. Between both of these represented extremes, we find humanity’s proper place. Christ, then, fulfills Nietzsche’s project better than Nietzsche himself ever could have. By restoring man to his proper place, Christ has restored the natural order of the universe, placing those who were meant to be strong back in a position of strength, excellence, and power. Through Christ, man is restored to where he was always meant to be: sitting at the right hand of God the Father, a god himself, crowned in glory, splendor, and majesty.
It may be that someone objects, and believes that this idea of human apotheosis as I have stated it— the idea of our Theogony— is absurd. After all, even as Christians, we still fall prey to sin and do “bad” things. In at least some real way, we are not truly free from morality. This objection would indeed present a problem for my argument, if I were arguing that, in Christ, we are made into perfect images of Christ immediately. However, this is not what I am arguing in the least. This is a simple objection to circumvent by simply arguing that our Theogony is another way of viewing our Christian sanctification. As the Holy Spirit, through the love of Christ, makes us into more perfect images of God, we are made more and more able to exhibit Christ-like love, thereby continuously lessening the hold of morality over us. C. S. Lewis talks about the surpassing of the moral construct by humanity in an essay entitled “Man or Rabbit?,” arguing that man was always meant for something much greater than our moral constructs. He says,
"The people who keep on asking if they can’t lead a decent life without Christ, don’t know what life is about; if they did they would know that ‘a decent life’ is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for. Morality is indispensable: but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up."
Since, then, as we are still unable to completely and totally exhibit Christ-like love at all times to both God and man, morality must govern our actions insofar as we cannot love as Christ did. This can be shown as a kind of inverse relationship. Less ability to act in love requires more moral control; more ability to love requires less.
Now surely, this imperative of love is much harder to live by than any moral construct, since it comes into direct conflict with our “will to power.” Now, instead of repenting of our sins— those actions that did not conform to morality— we now must repent of anything less than unconditional love for both God and man. Until our “will to power” is completely replaced by our “will to love,” this is indeed a difficult thing— surely, it is a complete paradigm shift. But thank God for His Grace, and for His Holy Spirit, who is continuously reforming and reshaping us, transforming our “will to power” into the “will to love,” making us more and more into the likeness of the Son of God and His Glory. We will love and be loved as He does and is; we will be free as He is free; we will be glorious as He is glorious. We will be gods, but we are not quite there yet.
Monday, July 09, 2007
"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part IV).
Part IV:
The Death of Morality
But how is this even possible? As I have previously mentioned, and as C. S. Lewis aptly points out in The Abolition of Man, fallen man requires a Law— a moral construct— in order to keep from destroying one another and himself. This is why Nietzsche failed, so how is it that we succeed where he did not? We succeed in this endeavor simply because we have the Superman, Jesus Christ, the man who was “beyond man.” Paul tells us, in his letter to the Romans, of the restoration of man through the great actions of Christ, and likewise, of defeat of sin and the law:
"For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
In fulfilling the Law here on Earth and defeating death, Christ does what we cannot, and lifts up the whole of humanity in doing so. He makes us righteous, bringing us above the Law that could only condemn, giving us new life eternal here and now. Of our absolute freedom in Christ, Paul writes in Galatians:
"But what does the Scripture say? ‘Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.’ So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman. For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."
Christ sets us free, and we are free indeed! To do anything less than live our new lives in Christ as truly free men would be to turn back to our slave masters, as the Israelites did in the desert when they begged to return to Egypt, rather than face the hardships their new-found freedom brought them.
But how is this new life brought about? How do the life, death and resurrection of the God-man almost two thousand years ago affect our lives in such a way as to bring us freedom, specifically, freedom from morality? Christ himself tells his disciples before he ascends back into heaven: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” Once he has gone back to God the Father Jesus will send us the Holy Spirit who will come upon us in power to guide us in the ways we should go. Christ acted analogously to the Superman, doing what man could not do by himself; restoring man to glory, and, more importantly, restoring man to God. Once that restoration took place, Christ could then send God’s Holy Spirit to dwell within us. In the Spirit, we are set free from the Law in its many forms, as Paul tells us in Galatians chapter five: “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” This is true because since we are being guided and empowered by the Spirit, we no longer require moral constructs to curb and control our behavior. We no longer need the Law to act as our schoolmaster, as Paul says.
But what does the Spirit do within us to make us able to transcend our need for morality? Quite simply, He replaces our “will to power”— that product of the Fall that causes us to selfishly exert our own will for our personal benefits and happiness— with the even more powerful “will to love.” This “will to love” was first exerted by Christ himself, when, all for our sake, he made himself nothing, as Paul tells us in Philippians. Christ Jesus, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross,” and, in the letter to the Romans, Paul tells us that, rather than let us suffer death, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Arguably, in making himself nothing, Christ relinquished his “will to power” (his right to exert his omnipotence in any way he desired). But what an enormous display of power this is! To forfeit one’s will to act as he wished (his “will to power”) out of love, only to gain back the power over death itself, as well as the restoration of man to God, through that same “will to love.” Christ’s “will to love” was indeed much more powerful than his “will to power!” Our selfless “will to love” is similarly even more powerful than our selfish “will to power.” In our “will to love”, we relinquish our “will to power”— that desire to enact change to benefit ourselves— in order to benefit another, only to gain back what we desired: the power to benefit ourselves, the power to flourish, the power to be happy— as well as the ability to live harmoniously in community with other men.
This is the reason that the Law can be summed up in Christ’s simple command: “‘And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,’” and “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Paul says something very similar to the church at Galatia: “For you were called to freedom. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” But what really makes love so much better than the Law? Why does acting in Christian love through the Holy Spirit transcend the moral construct and truly make us free? Within a moral construct, the goal, or the end, of the man that wishes to be “good” is to act in such a way that is considered to be good within that moral construct. This is generally in order to avoid its punishments. To do this he must conform to the construct’s standard of goodness; he must be moral.
Presupposing a man unable to exhibit Christ-like love (as we would have to do pre-Christ), the “good” man is being moral for the sake of being considered morally good within the construct. If the man wants to be good, and therefore remain unharmed, he must conform to the good action X as is defined by the construct. Nietzsche talks about this when writing about the taming of man by society and its moral constructs:
"Those fearful bulwarks with which the political organization protected itself against the old instincts of freedom—punishments being among these bulwarks—brought about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself. Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction—all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the bad conscience."
It then follows that if he wants to be good, the “good” man is effectively coerced into committing X. Even if this man “freely” chooses to commit this action X, his freedom to choose his course of action has been removed for the sake of his desired end— being good so as to avoid punishment. These effects of the construct cause man to turn his “will to power” on himself, and thus Nietzsche believes man experiences guilt or “bad conscience.” Therefore, the pre-Christ man cannot be freely good— he must be coerced into being so.
The moral construct then acts as an electric fence that curbs man’s “will to power.” If he wishes to not be shocked, he must necessarily stay within the fence— but this is really all morality can do. Nietzsche says as much in his Genealogy: “That which can in general be attained through punishment, in men and in animals, is an increase of fear, a heightening of prudence, mastery of the desires: thus punishment tames men, but it does not make them ‘better’—one might with more justice assert the opposite.” In this way, morality is insufficient because it cannot reform the “will to power” and therefore it cannot allow us to be freely good. Why then does acting in Christ-like love transcend the moral construct? Because when we come to know Christ and receive the Holy Spirit as a result, our “will to power” is gradually remade into a “will to love” that continually reforms us into the image of Christ. Thus, the law is summed up and surpassed in loving God above all and our neighbors as ourselves. About this, St. Irenaeus of Lyons says,
"And that, not by the prolixity of the Law, but according to the brevity of faith and love, men were going to be saved, Isaiah, in this fashion says, ‘He will complete and cut short His Word in righteousness; for God will make a concise Word in all the world.’ And therefore the Apostle Paul says, ‘Love is the fulfillment of the Law,’ for he who loves God has fulfilled the Law."
The electric fences of morality are gradually removed because we begin to understand where it is beneficial for us to go, and we desire those places rather than the harmful ones. In Nietzsche’s terms, we are no longer guilty, because the “will to power” that was necessarily turned inward against itself within the moral construct, thereby inflicting the “bad conscience,” has been replaced by the “will to love,” against which “there is no law.” Therefore, in the love of Christ lies the death of morality.
The Death of Morality
But how is this even possible? As I have previously mentioned, and as C. S. Lewis aptly points out in The Abolition of Man, fallen man requires a Law— a moral construct— in order to keep from destroying one another and himself. This is why Nietzsche failed, so how is it that we succeed where he did not? We succeed in this endeavor simply because we have the Superman, Jesus Christ, the man who was “beyond man.” Paul tells us, in his letter to the Romans, of the restoration of man through the great actions of Christ, and likewise, of defeat of sin and the law:
"For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
In fulfilling the Law here on Earth and defeating death, Christ does what we cannot, and lifts up the whole of humanity in doing so. He makes us righteous, bringing us above the Law that could only condemn, giving us new life eternal here and now. Of our absolute freedom in Christ, Paul writes in Galatians:
"But what does the Scripture say? ‘Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.’ So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman. For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."
Christ sets us free, and we are free indeed! To do anything less than live our new lives in Christ as truly free men would be to turn back to our slave masters, as the Israelites did in the desert when they begged to return to Egypt, rather than face the hardships their new-found freedom brought them.
But how is this new life brought about? How do the life, death and resurrection of the God-man almost two thousand years ago affect our lives in such a way as to bring us freedom, specifically, freedom from morality? Christ himself tells his disciples before he ascends back into heaven: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” Once he has gone back to God the Father Jesus will send us the Holy Spirit who will come upon us in power to guide us in the ways we should go. Christ acted analogously to the Superman, doing what man could not do by himself; restoring man to glory, and, more importantly, restoring man to God. Once that restoration took place, Christ could then send God’s Holy Spirit to dwell within us. In the Spirit, we are set free from the Law in its many forms, as Paul tells us in Galatians chapter five: “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” This is true because since we are being guided and empowered by the Spirit, we no longer require moral constructs to curb and control our behavior. We no longer need the Law to act as our schoolmaster, as Paul says.
But what does the Spirit do within us to make us able to transcend our need for morality? Quite simply, He replaces our “will to power”— that product of the Fall that causes us to selfishly exert our own will for our personal benefits and happiness— with the even more powerful “will to love.” This “will to love” was first exerted by Christ himself, when, all for our sake, he made himself nothing, as Paul tells us in Philippians. Christ Jesus, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross,” and, in the letter to the Romans, Paul tells us that, rather than let us suffer death, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Arguably, in making himself nothing, Christ relinquished his “will to power” (his right to exert his omnipotence in any way he desired). But what an enormous display of power this is! To forfeit one’s will to act as he wished (his “will to power”) out of love, only to gain back the power over death itself, as well as the restoration of man to God, through that same “will to love.” Christ’s “will to love” was indeed much more powerful than his “will to power!” Our selfless “will to love” is similarly even more powerful than our selfish “will to power.” In our “will to love”, we relinquish our “will to power”— that desire to enact change to benefit ourselves— in order to benefit another, only to gain back what we desired: the power to benefit ourselves, the power to flourish, the power to be happy— as well as the ability to live harmoniously in community with other men.
This is the reason that the Law can be summed up in Christ’s simple command: “‘And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,’” and “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Paul says something very similar to the church at Galatia: “For you were called to freedom. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” But what really makes love so much better than the Law? Why does acting in Christian love through the Holy Spirit transcend the moral construct and truly make us free? Within a moral construct, the goal, or the end, of the man that wishes to be “good” is to act in such a way that is considered to be good within that moral construct. This is generally in order to avoid its punishments. To do this he must conform to the construct’s standard of goodness; he must be moral.
Presupposing a man unable to exhibit Christ-like love (as we would have to do pre-Christ), the “good” man is being moral for the sake of being considered morally good within the construct. If the man wants to be good, and therefore remain unharmed, he must conform to the good action X as is defined by the construct. Nietzsche talks about this when writing about the taming of man by society and its moral constructs:
"Those fearful bulwarks with which the political organization protected itself against the old instincts of freedom—punishments being among these bulwarks—brought about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself. Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction—all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the bad conscience."
It then follows that if he wants to be good, the “good” man is effectively coerced into committing X. Even if this man “freely” chooses to commit this action X, his freedom to choose his course of action has been removed for the sake of his desired end— being good so as to avoid punishment. These effects of the construct cause man to turn his “will to power” on himself, and thus Nietzsche believes man experiences guilt or “bad conscience.” Therefore, the pre-Christ man cannot be freely good— he must be coerced into being so.
The moral construct then acts as an electric fence that curbs man’s “will to power.” If he wishes to not be shocked, he must necessarily stay within the fence— but this is really all morality can do. Nietzsche says as much in his Genealogy: “That which can in general be attained through punishment, in men and in animals, is an increase of fear, a heightening of prudence, mastery of the desires: thus punishment tames men, but it does not make them ‘better’—one might with more justice assert the opposite.” In this way, morality is insufficient because it cannot reform the “will to power” and therefore it cannot allow us to be freely good. Why then does acting in Christ-like love transcend the moral construct? Because when we come to know Christ and receive the Holy Spirit as a result, our “will to power” is gradually remade into a “will to love” that continually reforms us into the image of Christ. Thus, the law is summed up and surpassed in loving God above all and our neighbors as ourselves. About this, St. Irenaeus of Lyons says,
"And that, not by the prolixity of the Law, but according to the brevity of faith and love, men were going to be saved, Isaiah, in this fashion says, ‘He will complete and cut short His Word in righteousness; for God will make a concise Word in all the world.’ And therefore the Apostle Paul says, ‘Love is the fulfillment of the Law,’ for he who loves God has fulfilled the Law."
The electric fences of morality are gradually removed because we begin to understand where it is beneficial for us to go, and we desire those places rather than the harmful ones. In Nietzsche’s terms, we are no longer guilty, because the “will to power” that was necessarily turned inward against itself within the moral construct, thereby inflicting the “bad conscience,” has been replaced by the “will to love,” against which “there is no law.” Therefore, in the love of Christ lies the death of morality.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part III).
Part III:
Jesus Christ: Superman
Therefore, the whole of Nietzsche’s project is a shout, nay, a scream of exhortation to mankind, saying, “Be excellent! Be excellent, and you will make us even more than this mortal man that we are now!” He believes that this will be achieved when mankind goes beyond good and evil by surpassing the need for a morality to control our actions. The man who is willing to destroy the ascetic ideals, willing to destroy moral ideals, and able to overcome nihilism—this man is the Superman. He spurs man on to a higher existence by allowing him to access his “will to power,” and through that, the excellence that Christianity and other ascetic ideals attempt to hold down. The rub: as previously stated, mankind requires a moral construct in order to be able to function without destroying itself because of the effects of original sin, man’s “will to power.” As long as man has the “will to power,” he is liable to destroy both himself and his fellow men.
C. S. Lewis, in his book entitled The Abolition of Man, discusses the dangers of the destruction of objective value, specifically dealing with the philosophies of those who, like Nietzsche, believed that the possession and exertion of power that is the most fundamental drive in man was a drive to abundant life, and should be embraced and encouraged, because it allows man to flourish and to conquer nature. In response, Lewis fully plays out the implications of their own philosophy and finds that those humans who hold ultimate power—and therefore those who determine ultimate value, if there are actually any such men—will be the least bound to any external force, including any objective system of value. These “Conditioners,” as Lewis calls them, will then be forced to determine new values completely from their own desires—their own natures. Therefore, Lewis says,
"At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man."
In Nietzsche’s abolition of moral value, we become more and more like his “savage cruel beast,” but instead of achieving a race of transcendent men, we cease to be men. We do not ascend into a higher existence, we slump into a lower one; we become beasts, machines, or as Lewis says, those who hold power will “envy us as eunuchs envy men.” Nietzsche, then, in wanting to affirm life in the here and now and the potential power held within the human race, succumbs to the very nihilism he so adamantly hated.
Then, if we are all truly depraved, no man has the strength to be like Nietzsche’s Superman, for no man can destroy both the ascetic and moral ideals and overcome our tendency for death. Our options are either to be controlled or to be destroyed. What then is to be done? Only a god could succeed where men’s strength fails. But what good would this do, if man too did not overcome himself? He would still be left in the dust, while this god did his work for him. What would be required would need to be a fusion between god and man, and who better for this task than Jesus Christ, the Word Who Became Flesh? Christ, in coming to earth, does what all other men cannot do for themselves— by “overcoming” and “going under” himself and making himself nothing, he becomes the Superman. Through Him, we have abundant life and we live life fully and joyfully in the here and now, not just in some transcendent life to come. Through Him, we live life freely, and are no longer bound by the Law. Through Him, we overcome death.
If Christ was really so much like Nietzsche’s Superman, then why was Nietzsche so opposed to Christianity? Nietzsche must have had Christianity misrepresented to him, if he was to miss this observation that, in retrospect, seems to stare us in the face. Christianity is not based on some ascetic ideal— a rejecting of our lives in the here and now as base and unworthy for the benefit of a life to come. In Christ, we have life abundantly here and now. Paul states as much in his epistle to the Colossians when he significantly downplays the importance of regulations and asceticism in the spiritual life. He says of them, “These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.” Therefore, we live here and now joyously and without shame of our earthly lives, and Nietzsche misunderstood our faith. Also, Christianity is not a system of law and punishment meant to keep us under control, nor a set of regulations to maintain, because in Christ, we are set free from the law. Paul tells us in his letter to the believers in Galatia of the absolute freedom we have in Christ: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.” Therefore, the Christianity that Nietzsche was so vehemently opposed to because of its ascetic and moral ideals was not actually Christianity at all; it was merely sinful people misrepresenting the Gospel, as we so often do. Nietzsche completely misunderstood Christ, and therefore, his arguments against Christianity as it actually is are merely straw men.
It should be noted that even in the life to come, our new life will be lived bodily on this earth, when it too will be recreated as we are in Christ. The resurrection, then, should not cause us to live as always only looking forward to the life to come. The life to come will be better, to be sure, and looking forward to it is not necessarily bad, but the resurrection should cause us to start living that new life here and now, since we are in fact being recreated here and now. We Christians do not live nihilistically in the least, seeking after death, as Nietzsche thought. St. Athanasius tells us this very fact in his treatise entitled On the Incarnation. He says, “All the disciples of Christ despise death; they take the offensive against it and, instead of fearing it, by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ trample on it as on something dead.” Far from seeking death, as Nietzsche thought, we Christians laugh at it. But how do we do this? How are we to live in light of the resurrection of the dead, in light of the death of death? We live as Nietzsche suggests: free from any moral construct controlling us as far as we are able, free from the ascetic ideals that cause us to neglect the joys in this present life that we have been given, free from the guilt that comes from missing the mark of morality.
Jesus Christ: Superman
Therefore, the whole of Nietzsche’s project is a shout, nay, a scream of exhortation to mankind, saying, “Be excellent! Be excellent, and you will make us even more than this mortal man that we are now!” He believes that this will be achieved when mankind goes beyond good and evil by surpassing the need for a morality to control our actions. The man who is willing to destroy the ascetic ideals, willing to destroy moral ideals, and able to overcome nihilism—this man is the Superman. He spurs man on to a higher existence by allowing him to access his “will to power,” and through that, the excellence that Christianity and other ascetic ideals attempt to hold down. The rub: as previously stated, mankind requires a moral construct in order to be able to function without destroying itself because of the effects of original sin, man’s “will to power.” As long as man has the “will to power,” he is liable to destroy both himself and his fellow men.
C. S. Lewis, in his book entitled The Abolition of Man, discusses the dangers of the destruction of objective value, specifically dealing with the philosophies of those who, like Nietzsche, believed that the possession and exertion of power that is the most fundamental drive in man was a drive to abundant life, and should be embraced and encouraged, because it allows man to flourish and to conquer nature. In response, Lewis fully plays out the implications of their own philosophy and finds that those humans who hold ultimate power—and therefore those who determine ultimate value, if there are actually any such men—will be the least bound to any external force, including any objective system of value. These “Conditioners,” as Lewis calls them, will then be forced to determine new values completely from their own desires—their own natures. Therefore, Lewis says,
"At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’—to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammeled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man."
In Nietzsche’s abolition of moral value, we become more and more like his “savage cruel beast,” but instead of achieving a race of transcendent men, we cease to be men. We do not ascend into a higher existence, we slump into a lower one; we become beasts, machines, or as Lewis says, those who hold power will “envy us as eunuchs envy men.” Nietzsche, then, in wanting to affirm life in the here and now and the potential power held within the human race, succumbs to the very nihilism he so adamantly hated.
Then, if we are all truly depraved, no man has the strength to be like Nietzsche’s Superman, for no man can destroy both the ascetic and moral ideals and overcome our tendency for death. Our options are either to be controlled or to be destroyed. What then is to be done? Only a god could succeed where men’s strength fails. But what good would this do, if man too did not overcome himself? He would still be left in the dust, while this god did his work for him. What would be required would need to be a fusion between god and man, and who better for this task than Jesus Christ, the Word Who Became Flesh? Christ, in coming to earth, does what all other men cannot do for themselves— by “overcoming” and “going under” himself and making himself nothing, he becomes the Superman. Through Him, we have abundant life and we live life fully and joyfully in the here and now, not just in some transcendent life to come. Through Him, we live life freely, and are no longer bound by the Law. Through Him, we overcome death.
If Christ was really so much like Nietzsche’s Superman, then why was Nietzsche so opposed to Christianity? Nietzsche must have had Christianity misrepresented to him, if he was to miss this observation that, in retrospect, seems to stare us in the face. Christianity is not based on some ascetic ideal— a rejecting of our lives in the here and now as base and unworthy for the benefit of a life to come. In Christ, we have life abundantly here and now. Paul states as much in his epistle to the Colossians when he significantly downplays the importance of regulations and asceticism in the spiritual life. He says of them, “These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.” Therefore, we live here and now joyously and without shame of our earthly lives, and Nietzsche misunderstood our faith. Also, Christianity is not a system of law and punishment meant to keep us under control, nor a set of regulations to maintain, because in Christ, we are set free from the law. Paul tells us in his letter to the believers in Galatia of the absolute freedom we have in Christ: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.” Therefore, the Christianity that Nietzsche was so vehemently opposed to because of its ascetic and moral ideals was not actually Christianity at all; it was merely sinful people misrepresenting the Gospel, as we so often do. Nietzsche completely misunderstood Christ, and therefore, his arguments against Christianity as it actually is are merely straw men.
It should be noted that even in the life to come, our new life will be lived bodily on this earth, when it too will be recreated as we are in Christ. The resurrection, then, should not cause us to live as always only looking forward to the life to come. The life to come will be better, to be sure, and looking forward to it is not necessarily bad, but the resurrection should cause us to start living that new life here and now, since we are in fact being recreated here and now. We Christians do not live nihilistically in the least, seeking after death, as Nietzsche thought. St. Athanasius tells us this very fact in his treatise entitled On the Incarnation. He says, “All the disciples of Christ despise death; they take the offensive against it and, instead of fearing it, by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ trample on it as on something dead.” Far from seeking death, as Nietzsche thought, we Christians laugh at it. But how do we do this? How are we to live in light of the resurrection of the dead, in light of the death of death? We live as Nietzsche suggests: free from any moral construct controlling us as far as we are able, free from the ascetic ideals that cause us to neglect the joys in this present life that we have been given, free from the guilt that comes from missing the mark of morality.
Thursday, July 05, 2007
"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part II).
Part II:
Enter Nietzsche
Skipping ahead to late nineteenth century Europe, we have the entrance of Friedrich Nietzsche, a German poet, psychologist, and philosopher who was very interested in the fundamental nature of humanity and how it related to morality. Contrary to his contemporary Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed that, most fundamentally, all creatures exerted a will for self-preservation, Nietzsche believed that, even more fundamentally, all creatures exert the “will to power.” This was the need of the self to wield and exert power over the self and others according to the self’s interests— a desire for ultimate freedom— and the will for self-preservation was only a product of that. He says as much in his book entitled Beyond Good and Evil: “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation….” This view is very similar to a Biblical perspective on the fallen nature of man— with the man pursuing his own interests, he will exert power to master both himself and others when it will gain him the freedom to do what he desires, benefiting himself at the expense of others’ subjugation and/or detriment. Nietzsche says earlier in the same section,
"Refraining mutually from injury, violence, and exploitation and placing one’s will on a par with that of someone else—this may become, in a certain sense, good manners among individuals if the appropriate conditions are present…. But as soon as this principle is extended, and possibly even accepted as the fundamental principle of society, it immediately proves to be what it really is—a will to the denial of life, a principle of disintegration and decay."
As he says here, instead of constraining individual “wills to power” for the benefit of the community, as Scripture would have us do, Nietzsche believed that it would be better for humanity to allow those who had strong “wills to power” to dominate and subjugate those who were weaker, because to do otherwise would somehow decay the hierarchy of social structure.
In complete opposition to traditional moral genealogists, who held that the value of “good” was originally developed as a measure of “unegoistic” actions, it was Nietzsche’s view that the value of “good” developed out of those who would be considered the aristocracy, the good people, of a particular culture, the “good” being their own happy condition. They “felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank.” He believed that this value judgment was made by these aristocrats when they recognized the advantage of their position over the “plebeian” classes, those considered commoners. Nietzsche deduced this from his studies in the etymology of “good,” in which he discovered that in many different languages, the word “good” had its conceptual roots in the same thought. “The basic concept from which ‘good’ in the sense of ‘with aristocratic soul,’ ‘noble,’ ‘with a soul of high order,’ ‘with a privileged soul’ necessarily developed.” Likewise, his studies into the etymology of the word “bad” in various languages showed a very similar relationship to that word and the more common “plebeian” classes, and the terms used to describe them; a tribute to the aristocratic ancestry of social moral values.
Thus, for Nietzsche, the possession of both physical and, more importantly, social power played a fundamental role in the formation of social values. He says of the aristocracy, “They designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as ‘the powerful,’ ‘the master,’ ‘the commanders’) or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority…” He believed, literally, that “might makes right,” and also in the one-to-one correspondence of the power of the social nobility to truth. This was especially true, as Nietzsche points out, in the society of ancient Greece, where
"They call themselves, for instance, ‘the truthful’; this is so above all of the Greek nobility…. The root of the word coined for this, esthlos, signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true; then, with a subjective turn, the true as the truthful: in this phase of conceptual transformation it becomes a slogan and catchword of the nobility and passes over entirely into the sense of ‘noble,’ as distinct from the lying common man…."
The ability to assert one’s (or a group’s) “will to power” was therefore, for Nietzsche, the most essential factor in the formation of moral value constructs, the construct being based most essentially on those values that the aristocratic elements of the particular society valued most highly. Nietzsche coined this moral construct under the title of “master morality.”
Nietzsche goes on to argue that “morality” as it appears today— the “good” being called in general “unegoistic,” and being measured in selflessness— was a reactionary movement against the aristocracy by the common classes, who, wanting to believe themselves happy as well, effectively had to deceive themselves into believing their own wretched condition “happy.” He calls this type of moral construct “slave morality.” This took place most effectively through the priestly institution, who claimed that the weak and lowly were really those who were good, and, to combat the visibly obvious “good”-related happiness of the aristocracy, they convinced the common classes that their happiness lay hidden beyond death, in another more happy afterlife.
This denial of the good of the present life Nietzsche calls the “ascetic ideal,” and, because of their strict religion-based moral construct, he believed that the Jews were the most effective at inspiring it. He says,
"It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God)… saying ‘the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone—and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!’"
This grand subversive overthrow of master morality by the Jews and the triumph of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche believed, was completed by Jesus Christ, and consequently by what followed him: the religion of Christianity. A section later, he states,
"Did Israel not attain the ultimate goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely through the bypath of this ‘Redeemer,’ this ostensible opponent and disintegrator of Israel? Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that ‘all the world,’ namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait?"
Nietzsche condemned this seemingly Christian kind of thinking as ultimately nihilistic and anti-human, because it seemed to him to rob man of the happiness able to be experienced in this life, as well as stifling the excellence of man by denying him the ability to exert his “will to power.” This thereby turned him into a kind of herd animal, a sheep to be led around, and Nietzsche was therefore highly antagonistic toward it.
Because of its embrace of the ascetic ideal and its denial of the “will to power,” Christianity causes those men who are naturally more strong to be suppressed into the herd, and as a by-product, they are kept from exerting their own “will to power” by what Nietzsche calls the “bad conscience,” or guilt—the bad feelings received by not conforming to the system’s conception of “good.” This guilt, as well as the fear of punishment by the system and, more importantly, by God, were the means by which Nietzsche thought Christianity held the world in a vice-grip. Therefore, Nietzsche believed that Christianity was the absolute bane of the existence of mankind, that it ruled mainly by means of fear and deception— much like the moral constructs used in ancient Greece and Socrates’ city in words— and therefore should be rejected at whatever cost was necessary. It is in rejecting this slave morality that has conquered the earth through its cleverness that Nietzsche believes that mankind will be able to progress to a higher state of existence. Man’s complete rejection of the ascetic ideal and its supposed nihilistic tendencies allows him to live fully in the here and now by exerting his “will to power.” This, in turn, will spur on excellence in the whole of humanity, and eventually will give rise to the Superman, a man who is “beyond man,” a man who transcends the moral imperative entirely, a man who goes “beyond good and evil.”
Enter Nietzsche
Skipping ahead to late nineteenth century Europe, we have the entrance of Friedrich Nietzsche, a German poet, psychologist, and philosopher who was very interested in the fundamental nature of humanity and how it related to morality. Contrary to his contemporary Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed that, most fundamentally, all creatures exerted a will for self-preservation, Nietzsche believed that, even more fundamentally, all creatures exert the “will to power.” This was the need of the self to wield and exert power over the self and others according to the self’s interests— a desire for ultimate freedom— and the will for self-preservation was only a product of that. He says as much in his book entitled Beyond Good and Evil: “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation….” This view is very similar to a Biblical perspective on the fallen nature of man— with the man pursuing his own interests, he will exert power to master both himself and others when it will gain him the freedom to do what he desires, benefiting himself at the expense of others’ subjugation and/or detriment. Nietzsche says earlier in the same section,
"Refraining mutually from injury, violence, and exploitation and placing one’s will on a par with that of someone else—this may become, in a certain sense, good manners among individuals if the appropriate conditions are present…. But as soon as this principle is extended, and possibly even accepted as the fundamental principle of society, it immediately proves to be what it really is—a will to the denial of life, a principle of disintegration and decay."
As he says here, instead of constraining individual “wills to power” for the benefit of the community, as Scripture would have us do, Nietzsche believed that it would be better for humanity to allow those who had strong “wills to power” to dominate and subjugate those who were weaker, because to do otherwise would somehow decay the hierarchy of social structure.
In complete opposition to traditional moral genealogists, who held that the value of “good” was originally developed as a measure of “unegoistic” actions, it was Nietzsche’s view that the value of “good” developed out of those who would be considered the aristocracy, the good people, of a particular culture, the “good” being their own happy condition. They “felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank.” He believed that this value judgment was made by these aristocrats when they recognized the advantage of their position over the “plebeian” classes, those considered commoners. Nietzsche deduced this from his studies in the etymology of “good,” in which he discovered that in many different languages, the word “good” had its conceptual roots in the same thought. “The basic concept from which ‘good’ in the sense of ‘with aristocratic soul,’ ‘noble,’ ‘with a soul of high order,’ ‘with a privileged soul’ necessarily developed.” Likewise, his studies into the etymology of the word “bad” in various languages showed a very similar relationship to that word and the more common “plebeian” classes, and the terms used to describe them; a tribute to the aristocratic ancestry of social moral values.
Thus, for Nietzsche, the possession of both physical and, more importantly, social power played a fundamental role in the formation of social values. He says of the aristocracy, “They designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as ‘the powerful,’ ‘the master,’ ‘the commanders’) or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority…” He believed, literally, that “might makes right,” and also in the one-to-one correspondence of the power of the social nobility to truth. This was especially true, as Nietzsche points out, in the society of ancient Greece, where
"They call themselves, for instance, ‘the truthful’; this is so above all of the Greek nobility…. The root of the word coined for this, esthlos, signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true; then, with a subjective turn, the true as the truthful: in this phase of conceptual transformation it becomes a slogan and catchword of the nobility and passes over entirely into the sense of ‘noble,’ as distinct from the lying common man…."
The ability to assert one’s (or a group’s) “will to power” was therefore, for Nietzsche, the most essential factor in the formation of moral value constructs, the construct being based most essentially on those values that the aristocratic elements of the particular society valued most highly. Nietzsche coined this moral construct under the title of “master morality.”
Nietzsche goes on to argue that “morality” as it appears today— the “good” being called in general “unegoistic,” and being measured in selflessness— was a reactionary movement against the aristocracy by the common classes, who, wanting to believe themselves happy as well, effectively had to deceive themselves into believing their own wretched condition “happy.” He calls this type of moral construct “slave morality.” This took place most effectively through the priestly institution, who claimed that the weak and lowly were really those who were good, and, to combat the visibly obvious “good”-related happiness of the aristocracy, they convinced the common classes that their happiness lay hidden beyond death, in another more happy afterlife.
This denial of the good of the present life Nietzsche calls the “ascetic ideal,” and, because of their strict religion-based moral construct, he believed that the Jews were the most effective at inspiring it. He says,
"It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God)… saying ‘the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone—and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!’"
This grand subversive overthrow of master morality by the Jews and the triumph of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche believed, was completed by Jesus Christ, and consequently by what followed him: the religion of Christianity. A section later, he states,
"Did Israel not attain the ultimate goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely through the bypath of this ‘Redeemer,’ this ostensible opponent and disintegrator of Israel? Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that ‘all the world,’ namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait?"
Nietzsche condemned this seemingly Christian kind of thinking as ultimately nihilistic and anti-human, because it seemed to him to rob man of the happiness able to be experienced in this life, as well as stifling the excellence of man by denying him the ability to exert his “will to power.” This thereby turned him into a kind of herd animal, a sheep to be led around, and Nietzsche was therefore highly antagonistic toward it.
Because of its embrace of the ascetic ideal and its denial of the “will to power,” Christianity causes those men who are naturally more strong to be suppressed into the herd, and as a by-product, they are kept from exerting their own “will to power” by what Nietzsche calls the “bad conscience,” or guilt—the bad feelings received by not conforming to the system’s conception of “good.” This guilt, as well as the fear of punishment by the system and, more importantly, by God, were the means by which Nietzsche thought Christianity held the world in a vice-grip. Therefore, Nietzsche believed that Christianity was the absolute bane of the existence of mankind, that it ruled mainly by means of fear and deception— much like the moral constructs used in ancient Greece and Socrates’ city in words— and therefore should be rejected at whatever cost was necessary. It is in rejecting this slave morality that has conquered the earth through its cleverness that Nietzsche believes that mankind will be able to progress to a higher state of existence. Man’s complete rejection of the ascetic ideal and its supposed nihilistic tendencies allows him to live fully in the here and now by exerting his “will to power.” This, in turn, will spur on excellence in the whole of humanity, and eventually will give rise to the Superman, a man who is “beyond man,” a man who transcends the moral imperative entirely, a man who goes “beyond good and evil.”
Saturday, June 30, 2007
"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.
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.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Prologue).
Ever since he wrote in the late nineteenth century, people have been either glorifying or demonizing Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a self-proclaimed Antichrist, not finding much middle ground for serious critical acceptance or denial for him. This is particularly true of Christians, who, for the last century, have tossed Nietzsche in their philosophical wastebaskets, simply ignoring his enormous contributions to certain modern and postmodern views on ethics and psychology. In doing this, I believe that we have been missing an extraordinary opportunity to reconcile an enemy of the Kingdom of God to ourselves, granting us yet another weapon for use against the forces of darkness. While we, as Christians, should obviously not accept a Nietzschean philosophy wholesale, I believe that adopting a Nietzschean perspective in certain ways is invaluable to a Christian understanding of ethics, as well as a Christian understanding of the ontology of man. This is because Nietzsche says some particularly enlightening things in regards to the relations between the nature of man, his “will to power,” and moral constructions that have much more in common with Scripture than most Christians would like to believe. In this paper, I hope to reconcile elements of this Nietzschean perspective on morality and man with a model of Christian soteriology, our doctrine of salvation, as seen in the writings of the Apostle Paul, as well as several patristic theologians. Christ, in becoming a man, makes it possible for us to become gods by replacing our “will to power” with a more powerful “will to love,” thereby removing the need for the constraints placed on us by the moral construct.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Thoughts to Chew On. Part I.
To be human is to be uncertain.
---------------------------------------
"Now, faith is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see."
Hebrews 11:1
---------------------------------------
"Now, faith is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see."
Hebrews 11:1
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
The Flesh Post-Mortem. A Repentance.
"If Jesus Christ is Truth, then I am mostly lies.
If Jesus Christ is Love, then I have failed to try.
If Jesus Christ is Life, then please just let me die."
excerpt from "Eulogy"
- Five Iron Frenzy
I am so glad that Jesus is Jesus, and that I am not.
I am so glad that Jesus is Life, and that I get to die.
If Jesus Christ is Love, then I have failed to try.
If Jesus Christ is Life, then please just let me die."
excerpt from "Eulogy"
- Five Iron Frenzy
I am so glad that Jesus is Jesus, and that I am not.
I am so glad that Jesus is Life, and that I get to die.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Death by Plato. A Herald of Doom.
Here's something happy. :) P.S. I am by no means a Plato scholar. This is just something to think about.
"We've found our meaning in a bottle of beer,
Diluted what's true to escape our fears,
And lost sight of the present using lens-less glasses.
Replaced our lives with a fantasy,
Because life isn't what we'd like it to be.
It's steadily becoming a brand-new opiate for the masses.
It's soma for our brave new world."
excerpt from "Opiate"
- Looking for Atlantis
Well, on my quest to be a "good" Torrey student, I've just finished book 5 of Plato's Republic, and after about two hours of intense reading and thinking, my brain has never been so enthralled and--for lack of a better term--so mushy. My brain literally (and I do mean LITERALLY) hurts from the pounding Plato just gave it, and every fiber of me that is still capable of coherent contemplation is frightened, again, out of its wits. I suppose it's not ironic that what sanity one has that Plato doesn't at least give a hard "tweaking" to from his depth of thought is completely driven away by the brevity of the actual content of his thought.
The Republic (at least through book 5) does exactly what Socrates sets out to do, at least on the surface level (I'm not willing to speculate any deeper, mostly because I don't think I have sufficient knowledge to concretely go any deeper than that); it describes the perfect city, a utopian society. Now, there is really nothing wrong with a utopia (irony intended), except for the fact that they do not exist, and this not because no one has ever tried, far from it. I think this brings up a situation where I could honestly say, "Many are called, but few are chosen," but what might be more appropriate is this: "No one was called, and those who actually try are stupid and fail miserably." :) Utopias do not and CANNOT exist on this earth because humans have been corrupted by sin and so cannot act out the laws put forth by Socrates and Co. in the Republic with the desired effect. This perfect society discounts the individuals living in it of just that: their individuality, and along with it, their individual free will (that will most likely seek what IT wants). This is probably the most problematic part of human nature for a utilitarian state.
The most frightening thing for me about all of this (for the moment anyway) is that, in this system, our problematic and self-seeking free wills would combine with Socrates' "laws" and the communitarian lifestyle of the city, creating a whole new Sodom, full of self-seeking individuals who, because of their communitarian lifestyle, will have every opportunity to take every advantage of the others in their community. Debauchery would run rampant as the sense of family and love for the individual soul is destroyed; this destruction of the love of the individual along with the repressed emotions he suffers under Socrates' laws will lend to a selfish search of the individual to find this love that he lacks, causing physical and emotional whoring of the worst kinds. This, again, would cycle around and further the lack of the sense of love for one's individual soul and, in turn, the selfish seeking to fill these deficits. It sounds altogether too much like Brave New World meets Equilibrium, for undoubtedly, Aldous Huxley and Kurt Wimmer found similarities SOMEWHERE, right? This vicious cycle--just as the Charing-T Tower and the Tetra Grammaton really would build EACH OTHER--would congruently build gratuitous immorality and emotional callousness, destroying the society in a maelstrom of self-service, self-pity, and SELF-destruction, instead of leading upward toward Grace.
In all honesty, I think I'm beginning to understand what Dr. Reynolds means when he says that this document is probably one of the most dangerous that has ever been written in the history of the human race. Pray that our rulers do not become philosophers a la Plato (or if Plato himself doesn't believe anything that Socrates is saying, pray our rulers do not read Plato and miss what he is really saying), else WE become worthy of perishing in a rain of fire and brimstone.
In short, be afraid.
Be very afraid.
Please.
"We've found our meaning in a bottle of beer,
Diluted what's true to escape our fears,
And lost sight of the present using lens-less glasses.
Replaced our lives with a fantasy,
Because life isn't what we'd like it to be.
It's steadily becoming a brand-new opiate for the masses.
It's soma for our brave new world."
excerpt from "Opiate"
- Looking for Atlantis
Well, on my quest to be a "good" Torrey student, I've just finished book 5 of Plato's Republic, and after about two hours of intense reading and thinking, my brain has never been so enthralled and--for lack of a better term--so mushy. My brain literally (and I do mean LITERALLY) hurts from the pounding Plato just gave it, and every fiber of me that is still capable of coherent contemplation is frightened, again, out of its wits. I suppose it's not ironic that what sanity one has that Plato doesn't at least give a hard "tweaking" to from his depth of thought is completely driven away by the brevity of the actual content of his thought.
The Republic (at least through book 5) does exactly what Socrates sets out to do, at least on the surface level (I'm not willing to speculate any deeper, mostly because I don't think I have sufficient knowledge to concretely go any deeper than that); it describes the perfect city, a utopian society. Now, there is really nothing wrong with a utopia (irony intended), except for the fact that they do not exist, and this not because no one has ever tried, far from it. I think this brings up a situation where I could honestly say, "Many are called, but few are chosen," but what might be more appropriate is this: "No one was called, and those who actually try are stupid and fail miserably." :) Utopias do not and CANNOT exist on this earth because humans have been corrupted by sin and so cannot act out the laws put forth by Socrates and Co. in the Republic with the desired effect. This perfect society discounts the individuals living in it of just that: their individuality, and along with it, their individual free will (that will most likely seek what IT wants). This is probably the most problematic part of human nature for a utilitarian state.
The most frightening thing for me about all of this (for the moment anyway) is that, in this system, our problematic and self-seeking free wills would combine with Socrates' "laws" and the communitarian lifestyle of the city, creating a whole new Sodom, full of self-seeking individuals who, because of their communitarian lifestyle, will have every opportunity to take every advantage of the others in their community. Debauchery would run rampant as the sense of family and love for the individual soul is destroyed; this destruction of the love of the individual along with the repressed emotions he suffers under Socrates' laws will lend to a selfish search of the individual to find this love that he lacks, causing physical and emotional whoring of the worst kinds. This, again, would cycle around and further the lack of the sense of love for one's individual soul and, in turn, the selfish seeking to fill these deficits. It sounds altogether too much like Brave New World meets Equilibrium, for undoubtedly, Aldous Huxley and Kurt Wimmer found similarities SOMEWHERE, right? This vicious cycle--just as the Charing-T Tower and the Tetra Grammaton really would build EACH OTHER--would congruently build gratuitous immorality and emotional callousness, destroying the society in a maelstrom of self-service, self-pity, and SELF-destruction, instead of leading upward toward Grace.
In all honesty, I think I'm beginning to understand what Dr. Reynolds means when he says that this document is probably one of the most dangerous that has ever been written in the history of the human race. Pray that our rulers do not become philosophers a la Plato (or if Plato himself doesn't believe anything that Socrates is saying, pray our rulers do not read Plato and miss what he is really saying), else WE become worthy of perishing in a rain of fire and brimstone.
In short, be afraid.
Be very afraid.
Please.
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