Early in his History of the World, J.M. Roberts remarks that Modernism has made it impossible for the intelligent man to be a Christian. It is a rather silly remark in a very silly book -- however, truly that was Modernism's main goal and largely they won it.
A goal of my school of thought, were I to be able to found one, would be finally to make it impossible for the good man to be a Christian.
She's been wearing contact lenses; so now her beautiful bruised-looking eyes are always in front of me, and it is impossible not to be moved. I wonder -- and less idly than this sounds -- if I will love her as I ought to some day.
" ... who feel the giant agony of the world
and, more, like slaves to poor humanity
labor for mortal good."
-- Euripides
Paul certainly offered correctives to Hellenic culture. He reserved the thunder of the prophet for sins in men of every culture, but he offered some correctives such as this:
A Greek dramatist shows a beggar so poor he must hold his own begging-cup -- "I must even dress myself," he implores passersby, "so great is my misery that I have had to sell my slave."
But Paul writes Followers in Thessaly: "Learn to work with your own hands."
I venture that, to conduct his great war with Jesus, Nietzsche relied upon a false proposition: a false definition of "to will". He said that the great soul faced with life's suffering rebels, viz., does affirm his will, but that Jesus faced with suffering submitted, viz., did annul his will. In truth, Jesus taught: Rejoice in suffering, i.e., will so to rejoice, when you of all men understand its purpose. If there be a war, then, it is this:
Whether, in suffering, to will perversely or to will rationally --
Both the follower of Nietzsche and the follower of Jesus will, but the former without purpose and the latter with a long purpose.
Paul was a middle-upper-class Hebrew -- educated, of affluent and influential stock -- writing to middle-upper-class Hellenes -- educated and very affluent and influential. The Assemblings he fathered were in a few Hellenistic metropoles in Turkey and thereabout, of course, and were composed of statesmen, merchants, ex-clergy, and so on. He writes just as one would expect, then. He attempts to introduce Corinth to some of the better Hebrew mores, but with a liberal spirit. Indeed, he is always liberal toward the Hellenic culture -- he writes as a sort of respectful, amiable diplomat.
I suppose what I want to say is that: Jesus contended with the powerful clergy, and so did Paul (per the Acts); but Jesus passed his time with the outcast, while we have no such record of Paul. (And Jesus eventually clashed with the civil powers -- which we know Paul did as well, when he volunteered to enter the den of Caesar, but of his showdown we have no record.)
If instead of writing parentheticals to genteel houseslaves, Paul had written a whole epistle to the Empire's slave-prostitutes, what would he have written?
"Copy me as I copy the Christ" seems the only answer we can read in him. "You have but one Teacher," said Jesus.
Paul Envoy sometimes sows in his letters to the wealthy Greek Followers advice how they can thrive in life; this seems such a contrast to Jesus's teaching to rejoice in suffering and seek dying; it is something that rankles the back of my mind these days. I know there is a synthesis; I can feel its becoming clear to me: yet I was glad to read a letter of Peter's today, instead -- and in it he says of Paul: "There are places he can be hard to understand, and then Christians wrench him out of shape because they are greedy."
"... God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."
-- Æschylus
I might wish that Prof. Gates' harassment was racial so that I can pretend that I myself am insusceptible to being arrested in my own home.
The stark truth is that the police can abuse in a wide variety of ways anyone they choose to. In this very valley two years ago an elderly woman was beaten by two policemen, handcuffed in such a way as to dislocate her shoulder, and afterward charged with assaulting an officer (which threatens a stiff penalty including jail time) -- all on her own front porch, and all because she had not watered her lawn. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed not long ago that police may search anyone's car at anytime in any place for no reason. When a federal agent shot and killed a boy in Idaho, was fired for the offense, and subsequently tried, his trial was dismissed by the judge per "sovereign immunity", a Medieval doctrine tied to the divine rights of kings.
In short, if one keeps an eye on the news or talks to enough of one's fellows, one soon learns that in this land police can do nearly anything they please and be supported in it by the courts and other government. Why? Because we, the middle class, rely on them to work our iniquities for us. The viler the deeds they do, the more we sanctify them, so that we need never do these evils ourselves nor ever think of them.
The same is true, needless to say, in the case of our armies. We need never crush the skull of a child in a foreign land because we hire men to do this for us, and we need never admit what they do for us if we always shout out "The soldier is like unto a god in his purity!" And this explains the rabidity with which his neighbors will condemn a pacifist as a hater of his country. For if he is allowed to expose the evildoing of the troops, then he has -- as it were -- broken a vial of poison that taints everyone.
He seeks to poison the whole land, his enemies fear unconsciously -- and yet in truth he would merely throw a light upon the rotted blood we in our conspiratorial darkness already swim in.
What has made me so uneasy the last few years? Today as I walked I was thinking of a lot of frustrations, but they were mostly despair whether the future will be born. On the other hand, what has made me uneasy are unconscious wishes for the past, for the past things I have determinedly abandoned. Perhaps if I try to say some of these wishes aloud, they will be less a poison floating in the air around me and will become obvious desires that I can again determinedly abandon. I feel sure I will only be be able to make a partial list right now.
- I want to be "comfortably wealthy"
- I want to live in the country
- I want my wife to be subservient to me
- I want to be her luxurious provider
- I want to be in an idolized "leadership" position, preferably in a church
- I want to be able to relax in the bosom of institutions such as a corporate employer, a church, a political party, an extended family
- I want lots of pretty clothes
- I want to collect thousands of books and lots of records and some art
There, that's a partial but shameful-enough list. Now just to say "I renounce the devil and all his works" and mean it enough to find some rest ...
