Frankenchrist and Mankind v2.0

It has no doubt occurred to you that every monster you've ever seen in a movie is just man, or a symbol thereof. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, the Werewolf, the Invisible Man, the Creature from the Barack Lagoon (Chicago) -- each is just a symbol of what man is capable of.

We are all inhabited by monsters, otherwise we wouldn't recognize them. Hollywood depicts so many monstrous capitalists because these caricatures are a projection of liberal greed and envy. Greed and envy are interior monsters, but they haunt the exterior landscape of the left -- for which reason liberals always denounce someone else's greed, never their own.

You know what Barry says: "White folks' greed runs a world in need." Which begs the question, because why don't the victims of white greed just exercise their own? Then they can run the world.

But enough about ObamaCare.

Think of those classic monsters: Frankenstein, a grotesque experiment in living death, or of inserting the brain of a criminal into the body of a man; Dracula, a nocturnal predator who feeds on the substance of others and whose bite enlists one into his soul murdering cult; the Werewolf, who simply echoes the ancient truism that man is a wolf to man; the Mummy, a restless spirit swaddled in his decaying flesh; the Invisible Man, who can only be seen phenomenally but whose essence is nowhere; Obama, the cold, dead hand of collectivism calmly administering the anesthesia mask over your horror-stricken face.

Yeah, man is some piece of work, ain't he? Of this work-in-progess -- or regress, depending -- Berdyaev begins with the obviousation that he "is the meeting point of two worlds" -- although I think we need to widen this duality out into four dimensions.

In other words, just as the horizontal has a past and a future, the vertical has an up and a down. In nether worlds, a bad monster is the meeting point of an atavistic or barbarous man and the lower vertical -- which explains why no mere animal can be a monster, only a beast.

I suppose you could say that Jesus is another kind of monster, if we take that word literally, e.g., "something unnaturally marvelous," or "one who shows a deviation from the normal in behavior or character." Thus, Christology is really the last word in anthropology, revealing to us a divine-human attractor-destiny:

"Christianity recognizes the eternal significance and the eternal value of man, of the individual soul and its destiny." Thus, "the unique and unrepeatable visage of every man exists only because there exists the unique and unrepeatable image of Christ the God-man" -- in whom we see "the eternal image of every human being" (Berdyaev).

So, I suppose this means that man has the freedom to choose which kind of monster he will be, supernatural or subnatural. For "the very fact of man's existence is a break with the natural world.... As a being belonging to two worlds and capable of overcoming himself, man is a contradictory and paradoxical being, comprehending within himself diametric opposites," "capable of great love and sacrifice or of great cruelty and limitless egotism."

Ultimately, man "is both the child of God and the child of nothingness.... His roots are in heaven, in God, and in the deepest abyss as well." As such, this problem child cannot be solved "from the viewpoint of nature and only in relationship with nature." Rather, "we can understand man only in his relation to God."

To be sure, the world -- or nature -- cannot solve the riddle of man. Or, to bring in another monster, man is the Riddler supreme. Just when you think you have him figured out, he defies your logic and expectations -- which is why the the 20th century was such a monstrous surprise to the 19th.

Even in knowing damn well he is a creature of biology, man knows damn well he isn't, because knowledge transcends biology. Although rooted in biology, man "lifts himself above it, and finds within himself a higher element than the given world, another plane. Knowledge would be impossible if man were only nature, if he were not spirit also" (ibid.).

If we pursue this train of thought all the way to the station of wisdom, we see that "True human-ness is the god-like, the divine in man." And the bad monsters among us are the caboose.

So, here is the orthoparadox: "In order to fully be man, man must resemble God." Alienated from God, man tends not only to be un-human, but "even inhuman.... It is God who demands human-ness of man," man himself being "not very demanding in this connection." To put it mildly.

I think this is the point of Judaism also, i.e., the explication of man's higher nature, or the transformation of the lower via the higher -- almost as if Jesus himself were Jewish or something.

For the Christian, one might say that Christ is simply the actual incarnation of this striving, or its teleological end made fully manifest; again, rather than lower vertical made flesh (the bad monster), this is the upper vertical made so.

Or, to put it in plain coonspeak, the lumen being triumphs over the human beastling. And just as revolutionary leftism is a betrayal of the human state, Christianity is treason against the left. So, if you're not a monstrous Enemy of the State, you're doing it wrong. Thus, an IRS audit is the new martyrdom.

For "Caesar is the eternal symbol of authority, the state, the kingdom of this world." It's simple, really: for caesarian suckups of the left, we must render to Caesar what belongs to us, and render to the state what belongs to God.