TERRY EAGLETON 5

I continue to share thoughts here about Terry Eagleton’s 2009 book “Reason, Faith, and Revolution”.*

Eagleton (p.27) now starts to land some hard punches, to the reader as well as to the New Atheists and Ditchkins.

“The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don’t end up dead it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body. Those who do not see this dreadful image of a tortured innocent as the truth of history are likely to adopt some bright-eyed superstition such as the dream of untrammeled human progress for which, as we shall see, Ditchkins is a full-blooded apologist.”

Eagleton is on to something here – something really big.

While the human psyche’s tendency to try to sugar-coat the terrors that confront it has always exercised a deforming gravitational pull on any world-class religion – trying to make its Vision less frightening and less demanding – yet the New Testament, and especially the Gospels, simply won’t let you do that in Christianity and the other religions of the Book.

The reality of what happens in this incomplete world, shot through with the energy and consequences of the less-evolved and basal and un-Genuine human energies, screams out from the Crucifixion and every little crucifix.

The urge to escape that sight and that Message, added to any less-religious or less-theological urge to throw aside the knapsack of consciousness in order to flee faster, has resulted in smarmy, sentimentalized goo-goo passivity, happy-faced burbling (and some god-awful churchy guitar music), or – on the other hand – robust and maniacal insistence that no matter how many ‘problems’ human existence poses, the human Mind and the human Will can either withstand or conquer them.

And as the West grew out of the threateningly dark forests of the Middle Ages into the ever-improving material world of the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, into the Modern age of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, it seemed possible that ‘religion’ was just a left-over nightmare, a residual depression and shock left over from days when human beings were terrified by rampant disease and burdened by the sheer physical challenge of existing and sustaining what little bits of life could be managed.

In the United States, especially as its almost story-book combination of natural resources and insulation from the ancient and dangerous national feuds of the Old World combined to create the appearance of a totally fresh new Start for humanity, the illusion could more easily find the space and fuel to burn as a large and powerful flame. (If, of course, you were willing to not-see what had to be done to the indigenous peoples and what had to be done to the imported enslaved peoples.)

But Truth and Justice – not simply as abstract empty concepts to be filled by whatever good intentions and thoughts an individual might have, but rather as aspects of a Multi-Planar, God-sourced Reality – have no easy time of it in this world, and those who dare to commit to Truth and Justice are going to find themselves in boiling in hot water or encased in frigid ice very quickly. The gravitational pull of Primitiveness and Sin (not the same thing) must always be taken into account; the ‘powers of this world’ are built into it because they inhere in human beings.

And the numbing, shocking Truth of Christ’s Crucifixion is that this is the way things are, and that God’s recommended response is to endure suffering while staying true to the Genuine and Echt still struggling to be born into actuality. Make your commitment and take your lumps, relying in faith on that relationship with God that is always available, even if your personal shopping list isn’t going to be filled right away.

You have to learn how to handle the ‘birth-pangs’ of a humanity that is only tenuously and inconsistently clawing its way up from its own violent, lumpish Primitiveness and selfish Sinfulness.

In other Posts I have used the image of the Resistance agent in Occupied Europe in WW2: you know London is ‘there’, you know that sooner or later the Liberation is going to come, you get assorted responses – often in code – to the radio messages you transmit with your dinky little set, and occasionally you actually get an airdrop out of the dark of the night sky. And that’s pretty much what you have to go on to keep on going. But you know London is there and that the Liberation is being planned and that someday the day will come.

And if you are a Resistance agent with a particularly clear-eyed grip on your situation and on the nature of things in an Occupied world, then you don’t try to turn London into a teddy-bear or give up on London and figure you and your posse can handle the full weight of the Nazis all on your own.  This is not kid-stuff.

And yet keeping on in an Occupation, and trying to help Liberation along according to your own poor power to add or detract … this is a discipline (askesis, in the Greek) that brings life even as it guarantees exertion and pain and lots of discouragement and irritation. Again, this is not kid-stuff.

And there’s a difference between carrying-on some semblance of acceptable daily life in order to mask your Liberation allegiances from the ever-observant Nazi demonry and simply caving to the pressure to conform to the (mis-)Shapes of the Occupied World and just go along to get along.

This is never an easy line to draw. But like an ‘event horizon’ line, it’s one of those dynamic realities that you always have to keep your eye on, even if you can never get a solid fix on it.

The Catholic approach, a curious blend of ancient Roman and Mediterranean, has always been to set up an ideal and then urge everybody to try for it, fully aware of the fact that nobody can ever fulfill the ideal perfectly in this life. The Church’s law is called ‘canon’ law from the Greek kanon (let’s not get into the letters of the Greek alphabet), which means ideal.

Considering her mandate to extend to all humanity the Church has always realized that you can’t stuff everybody into the same box when it comes to how individuals are equipped to face the various realities and consequences of Sin: different people have different skills and weaknesses, and the best you can do is help them stay committed to the ideal and make allowances for when they fail (as all human beings inevitably do fail, one way or another). You can’t expect everybody to become ‘maquis’, living out in the woods and blowing up supply trains; you can’t expect everybody to have the same strengths and skills. But you can keep alive their faithfulness to Liberation and help their commitment along as best you can.

This ‘abundance of life’ that Christ talked about – I think of it as owning a musical instrument and finally getting it tuned so that it consistently makes music at the height of its possibilities as an instrument. Or again: as an automobile whose gears you have learned to operate, so that when you take it out onto the highway you are in ‘drive’ gear and not one of the lower gears that hold the engine back when you’re trying to drive at speed – and so the car swishes along.

In other words, this ‘abundance’ is the equivalent of reaching in this dimension and within your own Self that narrow-band (as in Narrow-Gate of the Gospels) of consciousness where you are operating out of your most Genuine and Echt energies that comprise the Image of God within you while at the same time you are attuned to the powerful transmission beam of God’s abiding Energy flowing into you.

This ‘narrowness’ of the Echt path is precisely what the Boomers rejected: since all life was groovy and (young) people were basically reeeely groovy, then you could wade into life as if it were a combination of Sunday-buffet and picnic at a nudist beach. Wheeeeeee! The Church, like all of the Axial religions, has always been more cautious: navigating in the narrows between Scylla and Charybdis, where the dangerous dynamics under the surface could pull you into one or the other of the lethal rocks … the wise captain doesn’t drive the great vessel and her burthen of souls at high-speed and over-confident self-assurance. This is why kids can’t be in command of ships.

The soul at this level of operation is not simply a radio for transmitting and receiving messages; it is not simply an instrument tuned to its highest competence. It is also something of a lung: drawing in great amounts of fresh air from the Source and converting that into energy to continue. This is not for kids.

None of this is accessible to Ditchkins and atheism.

They limit themselves to the single base Plane of existence, which isolates human beings from any Beyond. And then they have to try to make a decent meal out of what’s left.

The consequences of this are clear, as Eagleton sees (p.32), in how they approach ‘love’. For the Mono-Planar types ‘love’ can be nothing more than personal ‘feelings’ and/or  physical coupling. That love can mean Love in the far more capacious and awe-some and awe-full sense of a relationship that is Grounded in and participates in the life-force of God … they have no room for that; they can’t allow for it.

There isn’t a God and therefore human beings aren’t made in any Image of God. In a single stroke they wind up uprooting this Plane of Existence from any other Higher Plane and they also denude the human being of any Larger or Higher relationship, Help, or Source of self-understanding. A human being trying to figure him/herself out without God is an isolated islander trying to figure out the automobile. They may well wind up taking a dump in it and thinking it’s a nifty out-house and nothing more. Happens all the time.

Eagleton quotes Aquinas (p.32) who figured that the fog of Sin (let alone the ignorance of not-realizing you are made in the Image of God) keeps human beings from using the power of sex well. If humans don’t have any knowledge of the Image, then sex has no Larger Framing context: it’s just some groovy fun-thing to do for a little momentary pleasure – it has no Larger context or Purpose (and no ill-consequences).

And without the context of that Framing Image then there’s no sense of a governing relationship as a framework into which sex-activity has to fit. It breaks loose within the self and just runs wild (and by ‘wild’ I don’t mean ‘free’).

And in the process sex may get mixed up with all sorts of primal emotions and urges and passions like anger, the quest for power, and the primitive lust for violence that so often consumes personalities that have no Larger motivations (or Help) to refine or boundary the primitive utterly self-oriented (I call it self-collapsed, where the self collapses in on itself like a black hole in space).

Think of newbie fireman-trainees: they don’t realize the terrific force of water under pressure that drives the nozzle of a large fire-hose. A standing joke used to be to let the kid loose on the training field all by himself holding the nozzle. Then the pump-engine is turned up, the water flows under pressure, and the nozzle starts bucking like a wild living thing – and assumes a life of its own, the nozzle writhing in his hands and spraying a dangerously powerful stream of water all over the place, and even begins walking him all over the field as it mindlessly gives off energy. (There’s a dark side to it: not only the stream of water but the metal nozzle itself can inflict lethal injury if they get loose from the handler’s control and simply start some crazy dance on their own; they will strike whatever can’t get out of their way.)

Sex can quickly become like that. And things don’t improve when the Boomers figure – as they did and have now allowed subsequent generations to figure – that it’s all ‘fun’ and there are no consequences, and that any attempt to control the stream and the nozzle are just signs of ‘conformity’ and lack of imagination.

Sex is a human energy like any other. If there is no Framing context of Purpose then it will run riot like an incompetently-handled fire-hose. And if on top of all that you wind up with a culture that will not or cannot insist on any Mastery, then the whole dangerous lunacy is erected into a Plan and people regress to their limbic and animal elements. This is not progress. This is not liberation. This is not maturity. This is not for kids.

Jesus, Eagleton notes (p.31), seems in the Gospels not to have much respect for the family. He is continually calling his disciples away.

Eagleton offers the thought that this is due to Jesus’ human awareness that the actual end of time would probably be coming very soon, so the work of sustaining a family and participating in one was – like all other human occupations – going to be ending soon anyway. Sort of as if Jesus expected the Allies to be landing in a couple of days so it’s time to put aside the ‘usual’ and ‘ordinary’ tasks and get ready for the Liberation.

Maybe.

But I think Jesus was using a sense of exaggeration as a rhetorical device: He was constantly trying to get His hearers to think Beyond (not outside-of) the Box of this-world and this Mono-Plane. And He was always aware that the human tendency is to seek a little comfort and predictability wherever it can be found, and then just pull of the trail and set up camp there. (Remember when Peter, having just watched the eye-popping vision of Jesus conferring with Moses and Elijah, came up with the idea that we should put up three tents and just stay here in this groovy place where great stuff happens.)

Jesus wanted to get people used to thinking Beyond the Box, thinking ‘on the Multi-Plane’, seeing and sensing things from the perspective of a Beyond that is not simply ‘coming along’ someday, but rather a Beyond that is continually and continuously here now, participating in this Plane’s activities and always inviting humans to participate in its energy right here and right now. (So ‘stop looking around’, stop searching ‘the sky’, and use your Image-of-God ability to tune into that Beyond right here and right now.)

The disciples were trying to play checkers on what was really a Vulcan chess-board. Jesus was always trying to get them Beyond checkers and even beyond the Single-Board idea, and to see and grasp the Reality of the Multi-Plane.

And the narrow-gate to all that was within them.

So I don’t ever sense that Jesus was anti-family. I think where He was going with it was that if you don’t have a genuine Multi-Planar Grounding then you aren’t really ever going to be able to develop the experience of the family to its full possibility. If you aren’t an Echt Self, sustained by that Beyond while working toward the Image of God within you, then whatever family activity you engage in is never going to get off the ground; your family relationships and your kids are never going to get the full benefit of what ‘family’ can be when it is lived among humans committed to the Image of God within them and living within an active relationship with the God in Whose Image they are each and all made.

This concept of family is not kid-stuff.

The Church always had to try to keep this complex Vision alive, and you can see where it would be hard to keep alive among Nobel prize-winners or the student-bodies (or faculties) of the world’s most prestigious universities, let alone among the hugely-varying competences of human beings generally. (Which is not to say you need Mensa-level intelligence or a degree from an Ivy to embody and embrace the Christian message … not hardly.)

In this sense then, all genuine Christian theology is ‘liberating’; it seeks to help humans ‘live Beyond the constraints of the Mono-Plane’, to live closer to that Beyond and that Multi-Planar Reality in Whose Image they are made to begin with. You learn to live beyond the basal and primal within yourself and you learn to live in participation with the great Graced energies of God coursing through this PoE from Beyond and seeking to draw humans into the life of the Beyond which is the Image in which they are made in the first place .

There’s a marvelous, dynamic symmetry to it.

But this is not simply a matter of having some ‘faith’ or any ‘faith’. Faith, like loyalty, is only as good as that in which it is invested. Many humans have given their faith, their loyalty, their integrity, to evil causes (the success of the Third Reich and the ‘master race’ or the success of the Communist vision of human life, for example) and yet it has led them horribly off the Echt human path into monstrousness.

This much Eagleton sees (p.37). And he takes it further: the New Atheists will claim that they too seek ‘faith’, although it will be in ‘human progress’ or in this or that this-dimensional ‘cause’ (he uses the two specific examples of “feminism and anti-colonialism”).

But these objects of faith are insufficient as primary Grounds toward which and upon which to anchor a human self (let alone a collective movement of many humans). They are all Mono-Planar and are themselves ‘creatures’ or constructs; human constructs are incapable of serving as Ultimate Grounds for humans.

Such constructs may legitimately serve as expressions of a Genuinely Grounded human activity (although that constitutes an analysis all its own, separate from my general discussion here).

But this is precisely where atheism fails. Because by definition no ‘cause’ can be Grounded in anything Beyond, nor can any human being be grounded in any Beyond. In the atheist vision, there is no Beyond and no Multi-Plane.

Which means that there is no Boundary and no Shape imposed by any Beyond. The this-dimensional construct and the this-dimensional human being are ‘liberated’ from Shape and Boundary.

This is not liberation; this is Shapelessness. And Shapelessness is not a good thing for human beings; and lack of Boundary is not a good thing for human energies.

So, Eagleton says (p.37), the Ditckins-types are wayyyy off course when they say that the world is sort of nice, and would be a whole lot nicer, except for the dark derangements of ‘religious believers’.

A world Flattened and squashed into its most basic levels, and human beings equally Flattened and un-Shaped … this is not a happy picture. And the atheists – even if on the surface ‘optimistic’ or ‘progressive’ – have to adopt a looney sort of happy-face vision of things in order to keep on going.

There’s a reason why Larry McMurtry (if memory serves) described this earth as “a boneyard mostly, but pretty in the sun”. The atheists have to concentrate on the ‘pretty in the sun’ and ignore the ‘boneyard’. And worse, they have to ignore how the Mono-Plane creates a boneyard within the individual human being.

You can see, perhaps, why they don’t want to go into these matters.

But that hardly makes them ‘radical’ or particularly insightful. As Eagleton notes (p.39) one of the Ditchkins triad, Daniel Dennett, actually thinks the invasion was a good idea except that it wasn’t carried out properly. There’s nothing radical there; in fact it’s conventional in a frighteningly in-the-Box and conformist sort of way.

If there are no boundaries, if there is no Boundary and no Shape, then what’s wrong with murder, for example?

Current and recent generations of young have a problem with that (if you press them enough to think beyond simply parroting the ‘sensitive’ or Correct answer).

Is it wrong simply because there’s a law against it? Then if the government passes a law that makes murder legal it’s OK to do it.

Is it wrong because it serves no useful purpose? But what if by murdering a parent can get money to support his/her children? That’s a useful and good purpose.

Is it wrong because it ‘feels wrong’? But feelings change. And on top of that, at any given time different human beings can have different feelings.

What makes murder wrong such that a general moral and legal ban upon it can be enacted and enforced?

And what justifies such a ban being valid even for other cultures and other times? To kids raised with the idea of ‘total autonomy’ and a non-judgmental ‘respect’ for any thoughts that anybody ‘has’ or ‘likes’, what justifies you intruding upon others’ preferences?

It’s frightening how many today would be caught like a deer in the headlights if the questions were put to them.

They have been trained that there is no Beyond and that you can’t go around interfering with people’s ‘total autonomy’ (unless you’re a government that ‘gets it’ and then you can impose anything on anybody who ‘just doesn’t get it’).

So they reach a certain point – and it doesn’t take long to reach it – and simply disconnect: who knows? It’s just the way things are.

This is no type of Citizenry upon whom to ground the governance of a government, nor upon whom to rely for the sustainment of democracy against a government increasingly seeking to engorge its writ.

The question of ‘liberation theology’ comes up (p.39). This is an approach that arose among Western missionaries especially in Latin and South America in the difficult and contorted period when US interests supported repressive (and thus reliable) governments and established elites whereas the peasantry might have been susceptible to Communist agitation. (Whackulently, the US support for the repressive governments drove the peasants even closer to the Communists who promised ‘liberation’ where the US was clearly bringing nothing but more repression.)

In these countries, so often of a dense Catholic heritage through the work of earlier centuries of missionaries, the hierarchy – caught as so often between governments with the power to kill and the Gospel – tried to thread their way and make accommodations. (Matters not made any easier by the class-origins of many of the members of the hierarchy.)

Some missionaries and theological thinkers came to believe that the Gospel demands not simply prayer for the poor, but immediate action. Which, in terms of ‘giving alms to the poor’ has a long and respectable Christian heritage.

But then further, they came to believe that no Christian can be Echt unless s/he works to change the material conditions which oppress and make the poor dependent on alms to begin with. Which moved things further along a difficult road.

Culture is never easily messed with, nor should it be. Human beings are culture-making beings and rely on culture to Shape them and in some ways mediate their relation to the Beyond.

But government is not the same as culture. And the American Revolution was certainly clear on that point, precisely seeking to limit the incursions of Leviathan in the large and more vital culture and society of the Citizens.

So how far can – or must – a committed Christian go toward changing the governmental policies or structures that oppress the poor, and often violently so?

What happens in a theological approach where the individual Christian is not morally justified in not working to change conditions, no matter if it leads to overt – perhaps deliberately intended - violence in the service of the poor?

This is a hugely fraught matrix of issues and questions.

But surely atheism can offer little beyond adopting either a happy-face approach or an acquiescent passivity or simply engaging in political revolution.

It can only offer some form of political illusion or political action, on the basal PoE, because there is no Larger Framework that atheism admits and there is no Help from any Beyond. Atheism plays on no Larger Board or Boards.

The line between intensified spiritual commitment and intensified political action is as close as you come to a tectonic plate-boundary in religious matters. There is no clear and easy way through it and the Church’s vision is to thread its way carefully; ‘damn the torpedoes’ works in war (sometimes) but it’s no basis for a system of government or cultural guidance. Had they not been so turned-off by things-military, the Boomers probably would have found Admiral Farragut’s brassy words at Mobile Bay to be a perfect capture of their sense of things.

So once you take Shape and Boundaries out of the equation – and the Beyond that gives them their capital-importance – then human beings become Shapeless and invertebrate. Yet they remain still possessed of all of their vitalities and energies. Especially if those human beings are not aware of the Challenge to increasingly operate out of their Higher, pre-frontal brainparts and are simply allowed to mistake the Shapeless vitality of the Lower, limbic brainparts as ‘life’ and ‘freedom’.

And if this is a bad way to raise kids, it is even more frakkulous to skew an entire society’s culture such that this sort of dreck is passed on as cultural wisdom and required of any member of the culture.

The Axial religions are each in their way aware of the ‘narrowness’ of the Genuine Path.

The Catholic Church – going back to the days when the Roman emperors and their empire collapsed, leaving the Church more or less in charge of culture and civilization in the West – is painfully aware of how much care must go into the construction and navigation of a Culture.

Like a great ship, a Culture must be handled with deliberation and care and prudence and caution. You don’t just play with them like you would with your personal motorboat out in the harbor or out on the lake on a summer Sunday afternoon.

There’s a reason why your 747 or 777 pilot doesn’t play games up in the air; no fancy loop-the-loops or flying real low to scare the chickens in the barnyard.

In a way, you have to handle a Great Culture the way you would fly a WW2 bomber, and not a WW2 fighter plane. The fighter pilot, so often alone in his highly-maneuverable aircraft, precisely has to operate on quick, instinctual responses in order to win his dogfight; thus he does his job. Whereas the bomber pilot has to hold his big, lumbering craft steady – no matter how much flak and threat from enemy fire and fighters, no matter what the weather and wind conditions are – in order to provide a steady and accurate run into the target; thus he does his job.

Trying to handle a Great Culture as if it were a personal pleasure boat or a fighter-plane isn’t going to work well at all. In fact it’s going to wreck lives and ruin the craft itself.

All of that has been going on for the past few decades around here. Yes, it was going on earlier than that – think of kids raised in the Jazz Age of the pre-Depression 1920s. But the Boomers were much more numerous.

And then when certain advocacies began to put forth various philosophical ideas as ‘justifications’ for creating more ‘social space’ for themselves, then the impatience and inexperienced callowness of the Boomer youth was erected into a Plan. And into national cultural policy.

The New Atheists are just the most recent ‘public intellectuals’ who are surfing the need of various influential ‘elites’ to get rid of any obstructions to this whakkulent Plan.

And one of the biggest of those obstructions is God-Religion-Beyond. And especially in the US, the Catholic version of Christianity, which stubbornly stands as a reminder that there is a Beyond; that there is a certain Shape and certain Boundaries which are built-into human beings and must govern their actions; that this is not a matter of ‘preference’ but rather a sober and accurate assessment of Reality at its most profound and Genuine level; and that conducting a human life is not something to be left to kids and the whimsy of ‘feelings’ and passing preferences.

So long as there is enough pressure to deny all of those elements, the New Atheists will always sound like they are making useful sense.

But they aren’t. Not hardly.

NOTES

*New London: Yale University Press. ISBN: 978-0-300-15179-4

TERRY EAGLETON 4

I continue to share thoughts here about Terry Eagleton’s 2009 book “Reason, Faith, and Revolution”.*

Continuing with his useful look at Nietzsche, Eagleton reminds us (p.19) that Nietzsche didn’t find anything ‘heroic’ about the New Testament stories of Christian virtue at all. Better, Nietzsche insisted, to Go Base and Go Primal (my term for it), and it is this gambit of Nietzsche’s that has contributed so deeply to what became the wreck of Modern Man (in the generic, not the gender sense). (And don’t let’s get me started on Postmodern Man yet.)

As the orchestra of Christendom’s Vision broke up under the successive derangements of the Reformation (where the players insisted they could do a better job with the Piece than the conductor and wound up re-writing the Piece to more ‘genuinely’ capture the Composer’s intention) and the Enlightenment (where other players decided to cut out the emotions and passions and score the Piece only for half the human instruments, i.e. the Mind and Reason), along comes Nietzsche and tries to score the Piece for only the emotions and the passions.

‘Heroism’ for Nietzsche means – in the absence of Man being made in God’s Image – that Man must seek to ground his conception of himself only in the emotions and the passions, especially those powerful ones from the Classical (and, not to put too fine a point on it, pagan) era when in that era’s great literature (think Homer, especially in the ‘Iliad’) Great Men sought to do Great Things and live with High Passion: war, strife, self-assertion, mastery of others and mastery of self … that sort of thing.

The ‘High’ bit is good – as I’ve been saying, there is a hierarchy (yes, that awful and un-Correct concept) within human beings: humans have capacities not only in the Emotional and Rational departments, but also those capacities can be seated within a more primitive and primal self (and self-centeredness), OR within a more advanced level of deliberation and thought-guided capacity.

This actually reflects to some great extent the make-up of the human brain as it has evolved. The brain is comprised of a basic Limbic area that retains the earliest primal ‘reptilian’ capacities of the organism: an ability to respond to any external stimulus in such a way as to ensure the basic animal survival of the organism; a Midbrain that reflects the relatively more advanced ‘mammalian’ abilities to Fight or Flee from stimuli evaluated unthinkingly as dangerous to the organism; and then the marvelous and uniquely human Pre-frontal area that yields the amazing abilities i) to think things through, ii) to postpone immediate response-action (Fight or Flee) in order to consider and deliberate upon the context, iii) to postpone immediate gratification of the primal urges in light of more abstract or 'idealistic' purposes or considerations, and iv) to imaginatively stand outside of oneself and consider a possible course of action from the standpoint of some imagined point of view outside of oneself (even, in the Christian view, by empathizing with the viewpoints or needs of others who are not oneself).

But Nietzsche was terrified that being ‘civilized’ as he saw that concept developing in his mid-late 19^th century European world, was simply draining the Greatness from human beings. The urban, office-working or salaried human being was simply conforming to powerful societal pressures and neglecting what he saw as the ‘real’ (later philosophers would call it the ‘authentic’) human spirit.

Worse, he felt that Christianity had actually introduced a profoundly worm-like rejection of the Great Heroic virtues and passions. Christian virtues such as ‘love’, compassion and respect for others had led, he thought, to what amounted to a profound rejection and lack of respect for the Heroic Self. Christianity, as Gibbon had opined a century before Nietzsche, was nothing but a ‘slave mentality’ with its sacrifice and its turn-the-other-cheek cowardly refusal to stomp on whatever got in the way. The Romans were envied; interestingly enough, the same way that the mobster Don Vito Corleone was envied in the 1972 film ‘The Godfather’: to an America already starting to feel that it was losing its grip, here were people who could get things done and stay on top and – also an American necessity – drive really great cars.

And, he added, all that Christian stuff had led to the downfall of the great Roman civilization: once Constantine had made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire all of that mealy-mouthed, milktoast, namby-pamby ‘love’ – especially for others – had sapped the humans of the Roman Imperial era of their ‘genuine’ Heroic passions. And things had gotten no better as Western civilization added urban, salaried, law-and-rule-boundaried living to the original Christian frakkery of ‘love’ and self-denial and so forth. (Marx, a contemporary of Nietzsche, added 'bourgeois' to the mix and the Boomers really went to town with being against that.)

So Nietzsche wanted to get Western humans back to their primal and Heroically Great self, and rejected all the Christian and ‘modern’ stuff. He wanted, he specifically said, folks to strive to be an Ubermensch: a term that literally means Over-man when you translate it, but came out in English as Super-man.

That is to say, he wanted, humans – or at least those with the chops for it – not to conform to what he saw as the ‘depths’ of Christian mushiness, and instead to live ‘over’ and above all that; living their lives and Shaping themselves according to the ancient primal passions that in Homer’s ‘Iliad’ made humans powerfully and in-your-face and are-yew-talkin’-to-me ‘real’.

The human self was, in Nietzsche’s vision, a powerful war-horse, and you don’t want to break its spirit with too much of the reins and the pulling back on the reins: let that sucker run wild and free on the battlefield, carrying the warrior-you into the heat of battle where the warrior-you would do Great Things and cover yourself with blood and glory, come hell or high water. Sort of a ‘damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead’ approach to being a human and living your life among other humans. Sort of a ‘just do it!’ approach.

Now from a brain-geography standpoint, this is actually a call not so much to recovery of the genuine or Echt human possessing all of the skills of the marvelously complex and evolved tripartite brain, but rather a regression to the primal and Limbic brain bits, where you simply motivated and directed your human self using only your earliest, most primal and least evolved brainpart.

A human following his advice would become a Heroic war-horse or bull in a china shop, and all other human beings would either be cast as fellow-Heroes or as ‘last men’, weak and cautious and prudent Untermensche (Under-men) who, he thought, had betrayed their ‘real’ humanity and chosen to live as Christian cattle.** Such an Untermensch is truly, he thought, a traitor to what it really means to be Human.

So it comes down to the question: What does it really mean to be Human? And in answering this absolutely vital question you have to consider the complexity of the brain and the resulting lower and higher elements of the human self, and also the fact that you are living with a whole planet-full of other humans, and – in the Christian view – that you are also living on only one Plane of Existence (PoE) and there are other PoE’s and even a God up there beyond what I call the Mono-Plane of this dimension of existence.

Having tossed out most of that, and having tossed out any Beyond or God, then Nietzsche, like so many other thinkers, had to come up with a vision of what it means to be Human that somehow anchors the human in this-dimension and in whatever resources the individual human alone could lay claim to. For a job that big, he had to ‘valorize’ one or another part of the human self, and he chose to go make his stand not only on the emotions and the passions – as did the Romantics of the early 19^th century who opposed the mind-based Rationalism of the Enlightenment – but also on what are conventionally called the virtues of the Heroic Age so vividly expressed in Homer’s ‘Iliad’.

Christianity had a much larger starting-point: a Multi-Planar cosmos governed by a God who made humans in the Divine Image; and that Image, most clearly and vividly exemplified in the life of Christ, revealed to humans both God’s nature and their own: a nature grounded in Love.*** (Check out what I say in this Note before you read further.)

Before Nietzsche, you recall, the 17^th century English poet John Milton, in his ‘Paradise Lost’, had made the character of Satan more interesting than the Good angels: Milton too, for all his gifts, seemed to think that being ‘good’ was really sort of a bland, wimpy thing compared to the glorious, if tragic, energies of a created being that denies its created-status and tries to go it alone, telling God that ‘You can take this creation and shove it; I’ll do it all myself’. (You may want to take a look again at the Notes to my immediately previous Post where I talk about Frank Langella’s remarkable characterization of Count Dracula in the 1979 movie.)

But if you really really embrace the vital and dynamic complexity of the Christian Vision, then you are into the most challenging human adventure of all, becoming a Master and Commander of a human self that is Shaped in God’s Image and comprised of the whole welter of complex abilities and potentials, which you have to i) grow into and ii) respect in all the other human beings on the planet (who, to make things more challenging, may or may not be having much success at Mastering and Commanding their own selfs).

This is not for kids.

Eagleton tries to get a handle on things (p.21) by talking about the ancient argument about Law and Desire: should humans Shape themselves according to some Law or to their own basic Desires? Much beer and many bongs – to say nothing of astronomical quantities of ink – have been used up over time by folks trying to figure out where they stood on that Question.

But the Question is dangerous because it’s wrongly posed. In the Christian Vision it’s not a matter of the human being – in all that vitality and complexity of the individual self – having to either truckle to an externally-imposed Law (and thus be a traitor to his/her own individuality and will) or else cut loose from any Law and simply become a ‘Heroic’ self-centered and primal and passionate ‘individual’.

This is a non-problem because it is a falsely-conceived view of the human situation.

In the Christian Vision, the Prime Law is the one that is profoundly built-into us: we are made in the Image of God. Therefore, in order to fulfill ourselves as individuals, we have to express in our own unique and individual way the working-out or embodiment of that Image in how we Shape and conduct our lives. The Image of God, that is to say, functions in human beings like the law of aerodynamics functions in aircraft: the craft is already designed precisely to operate within the laws of aerodynamics, and to ‘fulfill’ the aircraft you have to operate it within the parameters of those laws or else you are going to wind up with a catastrophic monstrosity of a situation and you will not really ever do much flying.

Or as St. Paul never tires of saying, the Law – the Prime Law – is built into us, such that we cannot ignore it without betraying (and failing) our own fulfillment.

The ‘new atheists’ – reflecting the entire Modern West for the past few  hundred years – wind up getting rid of the God in Whose Image we are made. Thus, humans have no way to gauge whether they are ‘fulfilling’ themselves or are simply running around like chickens with their heads cut off, or skittering through life like little individual globs of fat and grease on the surface of a hot pancake skillet.

Recall in my prior Posts the image of the native of an isolated Pacific island suddenly one morning finding a modern auto that has accidentally been airlifted to his/her island and left here without an owner’s manual in the middle of the night. S/he doesn’t know what it’s supposed to do or has been made to do, doesn’t know therefore what sort of use will ‘fulfill’ the actual potentials and ‘nature’ of the auto. So s/he may wind up using it as a hut, or a decorative planter, or even an out-house – maybe then happily figuring that this ‘gift from the gods’ has been a real plus.

This is pretty much the situation of the post-Christian Modern situation, I would say. (Let’s not even get started on the Postmodern or Pomo situation yet.)

Atheism winds up removing the owner’s manual or even any conception of what the ‘gift’ is for in the first place. And that’s when you wind up with the type of frustration masquerading as ‘thought’ and ‘philosophy’ that simply figures that this odd thing is either a joke or a mistake or a really bad trick … people go through their lives with that sort of vision (or, if I may, anti-Vision) of themselves and of human being generally.

Or comes up with some burbling, happy-faced, cheerible, maniacal strutting that this thing is really the world’s bestest-ever lawn decoration, or planter, or out-house.  

So there is no either-Law-or-personal-fulfillment opposition in the first place. The Prime Law is the only accurate Shape of human fulfillment (in the Christian Vision). You can’t fulfill yourself truly, you can’t get to your Echt Self, unless you Shape your energies and potentials according to the directions that the  handy blueprint or owner's manual of the Prime Law provides for you.

And to simply give in to your Desires (or, in Nietzsche’s view, your primal passions) is not to fulfill yourself but rather to betray yourself and get off the Road or the Path and head off into the jungle.

Today, I think, wayyyyy too many folks – especially in the West – are lost in that jungle and trying desperately to believe that they are actually having a good time and are actually going somewhere and getting somewhere.

In an aircraft, you aren’t going to be having a good time for long if you ignore the laws of aerodynamics. With some respect for and knowledge of the Prime Law the aircraft will do amazing things for you, And if not, not.

BUT – in a marvelous but serious-as-a-heart-attack complexity – since the Prime Law is built-into you, is ‘within you’ as St. Paul says, then you can’t simply hope to just coast through life by following external secondary laws made by humans. Law is a part of the Image, and is most totally fundamental to each of us as human beings. So you have to transform – and not simply conform – according to that Prime Law.

Secondary laws – made by humans – are often valuable (to the extent that they help each and all humans flesh out the implications of living together according to the Prime Law). But we are not created to simply be ‘followers’ of stuff imposed upon us from the outside.

Rather, we are made to enflesh and incarnate the Divine Image according to our individual gifts and personality. This means that we must become Inner-Directed (meaning directed from within ourselves) rather than Outer-Directed (meaning that we are directed by forces outside of ourselves).

Yes, traffic rules are necessary and worthy of obedience. But you can’t achieve genuine and Echt fulfillment and human authority as a human being simply by obeying them.

There are different levels of laws. Take an airline, for example.

There are regulations about what color the company planes are going to be painted and what uniforms the crew will wear – the company has complete control over this level of regulation.

Then there are FAA regulations about what altitude west-bound flights can fly at, and what altitude east-bound flights can fly at. These are beyond the control of the individual airline; these are government regulations that every airline operating in that government’s airspace has to follow.  Neither the company nor the individual pilot can disregard them just because they don’t feel like following them today or because they feel they don’t ‘need’ them.

And then, third, there are the laws of aerodynamics. This is the level of Law that is built-into the very nature of powered flight and this level is beyond even the control of governments (let alone individual pilots). You follow this level of Law or you crash (if you ever get off the ground in the first place). Not because the Law-giver has decided to punish you by crashing you, but simply because this is the way the whole thing has been created to operate.

The Boomers, my generation, kind of lost sight of that huge difference in the types of laws, and figured that if it’s a case of doing it my way or some other way, then I gotta be me and do it my way. Kinda kewt, but as a philosophy and vision of life it’s totally inadequate. You might as well figure you can consume only candy-bars and coke (the … non-liquid kind) and then wonder after a while why your life doesn’t seem to be working out well.

AND THEN on top of all that, there is also the fact of what the Christian Vision calls Original Sinfulness: there is an abiding tendency in all humans to just say ‘The hell with it – I’m gonna do what I feel like doing and that’s all I’m gonna do and I don’t care about anybody else and I don’t respect anybody else and what I want is what I do and nobody tells me otherwise’.

Which usually before long also means that ‘If anybody else gets in the way of what I want to do, then to hell with them’.

And you can see where a world can go off the rails really really badly. And the beat goes on, and the band plays on.

Original Sinfulness comes along with ‘freedom’. If God is free and wants us to share in that life, then we need to be free. Otherwise this world is just a great big divine train-table in the play-room, with God arranging all the little figures and little trains and scenery and little toy houses and toy cars and toy people and just passing time making them do what He wants them to do.

It’s a way to pass the time, but in the Christian Vision it’s not what God is really up to and it’s not what God is really all about.

But in the atheist vision, what else is left really? We are somehow toys on some huge train-table, and either we settle for that – like it or not – or else we try to do what we desire to do and some big hand will suddenly move us around back to where we don’t want to be.

Not much of a reason for getting up in the morning. And more reason to just hit the candy and the coke really hard (or, to use a phrase from a recent President, ‘just go shopping’).

And who would want to bring kids into a world like that? And who would want to go through all the trouble of having and raising kids – won’t they just add one more level of obstruction to doing what you want to do? What’s the point?

You see where this sort of ‘philosophy’ can go.

As Eagleton puts it, we wind up being the ‘dead who won’t die’ (or haven’t died yet even thought we are pretty much ‘dead’ on the inside – which also brings us back to vampires and such un-dead but still walking-around monsters).

Who can really call this a life?

Nicely, he characterizes this (p.22) by saying that what such atheist-Moderns call reality is really just the “remaining precipitate after the love of God has been removed”. Bingo!

It’s also like saying that a corpse is just a human-being with the life removed. (Or the ‘soul’ removed, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

And it leaves no room for the ancient Axial (especially Jewish and Islamic and Christian) concern for the anawim, for the ‘poor’. In one sense this means the literally poor, those who haven’t got access to the resources for sustaining even basic human existence.

In another sense, we are all anawim (and walking dead) if we haven’t really got the life of the Law – the Prime Law of God’s Image – alive within us. And as you may have noticed if you’ve gone to a funeral home for a wake, no matter how much you gussy up a corpse and put really nice clothes on it and surround it with lots of stuff, the dead remain rather clearly and stubbornly the dead. You can’t call that living.

So, Eagleton bravely and rightly asserts, it’s only by staring straight into the Medusa’s face of life’s terribilita, its terribleness, that you can ever really start to walk the Walk. You have to look at the human situation, and your individual human situation, straight-on: its dangers, its pains, its challenges, its bad bounces.

But you can’t do that all on your own and stay really sane. The shock of seeing life in terms of the iffy and often painful possibilities that are within it is not something human beings can do all on their own and still keep their mental and emotional balance. They either become scared rabbits or monsters when they try to do that.

That’s why – as Eagleton immediately goes on to say – you have to have some Help from Beyond.

And in the Christian Vision, that is where the Crucifixion comes in: God says that the only way to get through the accumulated frakkery that results from a whole lotta human beings indulging their Original Sinfulness and not turn yourself into a rabbit or a monster is to look things in the eye, see them for what they are, rely on His Help and his Love, and go through it.

The alternatives are a) becoming a rabbit constantly trying to hide from the awful reality of Original Sin’s effects (but then also hiding from your Echt self) or else becoming a monster and trying to force Sin to pass you by or make others pay for the frak that Sinfulness has brought into your personal affairs (and thus calling your monstrous self your most 'real' or 'authentic' self).  

And, since each of us is human, then at some point or another each of us has brought our share of Sin’s effects into the world whether we meant to or not, and each of us has made our little compromises and cut corners on fulfilling the Divine Image within us just to make things a little easier for ourselves.

Atheism can’t really begin to address this level of complexity. It’s like trying to do the math of quantum-mechanics with a pencil while you’re half in the bag and watching a dvd at the same time while also texting or tweeting to half a dozen other people in pretty much the same condition you are.

The best atheism can do is to say ‘man up’ or just say ‘screw it’ and then go do whatever it is that will make you feel a little better for a bit.

Not much chance of making any progress in the Great Human Challenge there.

Now a point that brings things a little closer to home is that to some extent ‘secularism’, especially as it has developed in the West in the past few decades, has to buy into some sort of ‘atheism’ in order to do what it wants to do.

In order to create more conceptual and social ‘space’ in people’s minds, a whole bunch of different ‘revolutions’ that got rolling in the West since the 1960s had to get rid of much of the sense that there are boundaries or limits to what people can do, and even to get rid of any sense that there is any Shape to human nature or the human self.

Instead, the big emphasis was on – had to be on – ‘freedom’ to do whatever you want and be whatever you want to be. Nothing could get in the way of that: not traditions, not customs, not laws, not even any Prime Law or even any ‘human nature’, and not even any God if that concept (secularism can’t really bring itself to think of God as a Person) is somehow going to tell you what you can and can’t do.

The Boomers were big – really really big – on not being told what to do. Why should they let older people or old ways get in their way, since Boomers knew so much more than anybody else and anyway it was a ‘brand new day’ and a whole new world and nothing was the same (before 9-11 ‘changed everything’ the Boomers had declared that they had ‘changed everything’).

North Americans, especially, have always been liable to this type of illusion. Compared to the Old World of Europe where life existed in layer upon layer of human history and experience all jammed in together on the same space where centuries of prior generations had also lived there lives, the New World was a fresh start (if you ignored the indigenous populations and their cultures and civilizations) with no pre-existing cities and jurisdictions and huge never-before-seen tracts of fresh land rich with abundant resources of all kinds.

It was a Whole New Game and it was, sorta, ‘totally fresh and free’. And the ‘American’ would be a New Man (generic, not gender), even a New Adam (and Eve) who would start human history all over again. Back in the day, God was also signed-on as clearly agreeing with this proposition.

After a while, God simply became the sort of rich grandfather who had turned His kids loose on the estate and told the rest of the world that whatever these oh-so-speshull ‘kids’ did was OK with Him and everybody else should learn from them. Or else.

The Puritans came over and tried to live in a genuinely godly way, according to their lights. But the temptations of such a richly endowed land with all its possibilities for fun and profit and even for genuinely human betterment and improvement in living conditions proved too much. (Although even Thoreau realized that just because you improve living conditions tremendously doesn’t mean you have achieved Echt human betterment: looking at the new-fangled railroad zipping along at 30 miles an hour he observed that it was “an improved means to an unimproved end”; what good, really, does it do to get from Concord to Boston in a few minutes rather than a few hours, if you still haven’t got any really Echt human goals when you get there?)

The bits about Adam and Eve in the Garden with that Serpent mostly got lost. Writers like Hawthorne and Melville and even Poe in his way tried to remind folks that the darkness of Sinfulness had followed humans to this brave New World. But others, like Emerson and Whitman and many preachers, just figured that if God is Good, then so are human beings and anybody who tries to ‘depress’ you with ‘sin-talk’ is just trying to ruin your day and lead you off the great American highway of Abundance and Success.

Of course, many of those writers and preachers had lost the critical distinction between ‘laws’ and the Prime Law or they didn’t really believe in Original Sinfulness because it was all ‘sin talk’. Or both.

And on the basis of this Great and Good American Warrant, presumed to be ordained by God, then slavery and the subjugation of the indigenous tribes was part of the overall Great and Good Thing.

And in the late 1800s when American industry had reached the point where it needed new markets and American wealth could fund a world-class navy, then President McKinley got down on his knees, prayed about it all, and decided that God wanted the country to take over Cuba and the Philippines and start having some real ‘impact’ on the world. His vice-president Teddy Roosevelt – soon to replace him as President when McKinley was shot to death by an anarchist – couldn’t agree more.

And so into the 20^th century, where America has had a decidedly mixed record of making the world a better place, but did indeed withstand and subdue  the truly monstrous realities of fascism and communism.

Now this country faces a far different world. And since its Abundance and economic power have been spent, the belief that whatever it does is God’s Will (or, in the secular version, is Democracy’s will to liberate from every oppression) is now liable to become unpleasantly mixed in with the urgent need to Grab other people’s stuff and souls in order to keep on top. And of course, ‘on top’ is where it belongs … or so it has for so long seemed to be so.

And all of this on top of a population that has for so long been told that there is no Beyond, no Shape to genuine human behavior, no boundaries and no limits to what the sovereign and ‘totally autonomous’ Individual (and his/her totally Sovereign government) can do.

And now the country faces the same deranging terror that individuals have always faced when they beheld the terribilita, looking the great beast of human existence in the face, up close and personal, without the artfully arranged bars by which Abundance and worldly power caged the beast. Like in ‘Jurassic Park’, the monsters are now loose and all around: not the monsters of other peoples, but the monsters of Fear and Terror, and with them come the sadly common human responses of Paralysis or – the opposite response – a brassy, violent, in-your-face Heroic primitiveness such as Nietzsche wanted to see in his Ubermensch.

Nietzsche’s options aren’t really very good, for us an individuals or as a nation: Be an Uber or be an Unter.****

Atheism and its step-child secularism aren’t going to be able to help anybody, here or anywhere else. There are no limits on the self (or the government); total autonomy means that you get to do what you want and there will be no consequences or blowback; there is no Shape that such ‘liberated’ humans (or their government) need to conform to and transform-toward; there is no Beyond that can sit in judgment; there is no Law built into the human self (or that has any jurisdiction over the government).

This was the madness of Faust and Dr. Frankenstein, and of the world-shattering totalitarianisms of the last century.

That Cross, somehow now appearing to have much more reality – and also much more hidden and mysterious dynamic power rooted in God’s own Image – needs to be looked at a lot more carefully.

And soon.

NOTES

*New London: Yale University Press. ISBN: 978-0-300-15179-4

**Half a century or so later the Nazis would take up the Ubermensch trope: all the Germans were the Ubermensch ‘master race’ and peoples like the Slavs and the Jews were just an Untermensch herd, to be used or gotten out of the way for the convenience of their ‘masters’.

 This wasn’t quite what Nietzsche was looking for: he did not simply equate one’s nationality or ‘race’ with being Uber or Unter; he was looking for particular individual human beings who would have the courage to kick off the Christian traces and get back to the Heroic basics (using only those primal brainparts and Shaping their lives totally around their primal passions).

You see where ideas can lead, even beyond what you actually envisioned. You want to be really careful with ideas: they are powerful motivators of humans, adopted as ‘ideals’ around which people will not only Shape their own lives but through which people will conceive of the world and all the other people around them.

All sorts of things can happen that you yourself hadn’t actually envisioned or planned for; yet it’s your ideas and the ideals others derived from them that will fuel those consequences.

Ideas and ideals require an awful lot of thought, and a serious grounding in ‘reality’.

For Nietzsche, Christianity was ‘unreal’ when measured against his idea of what most fundamentally makes humans Human. For Christianity, there is a whole lot more to being Human than Nietzsche realized, because there is a whole lot more to Reality.

***The English language fails us here, since it has so few words for the many many shadings and definitions that English tries to cram into ‘love’ (which today has to cover everything from having sex to fulfilling the Divine Image). What Christianity means by ‘love’ is an vital, dynamic, and powerful amalgam of a) powerful caring respect for self and others as made in the Divine Image and b) a faithfulness to that Prime Directive by Shaping yourself according to the requirements of that Caring Respect for yourself and others that c) is sustained by an ongoing mutual relationship with that God Who started the whole thing in the first place out of His Caring Respect for humans and seeks for all humans to fulfill themselves by Shaping themselves and their lives-with-others according to that Caring Respect.

There aren’t many more dynamically complex yet utterly vital dynamics to master in human life, even if you have some mastery of the math involved in quantum-dynamics or the mechanics of the 16-cylinder gasoline engine.

****Nor is this at all a ‘gendered’ type of thing. America has quite a roster of females in positions of elected or appointed national power, and rather than putting any brakes on things, they are helping provide a front for it: America must go out and ‘liberate’ from ‘oppression’ all those countries and peoples that ‘just don’t get it’. And gobble up the local resources while they’re in town. This is the National Nanny State allied with the National Security State, and it is simply a 21^st-century ‘secular and liberal and progressive’ form of the colonialist ,We Know Better Than You' game of Grab-and-Keep.