Word Made Fresh

Back to the questions raised in the previous post: how and why did Christianity triumph over its cut-rate competitors, e.g., pagan polytheism, human and animal sacrifice, ancestor worship, various spiritual nostrums & Gnosticisms? Was it just survival of the fittest & littest?

Yes, in a sense, in that Christianity is obviously... how to put it... a more adequate reflection of human nature and therefore of our pneumo-cognitive striving. It's a far superior map to what preceded it (and to what lay ahead), to put it mildly.

Indeed, if it is what it says it is, it should be the most adequate map conceivable, of both man and cosmos (speaking metaphysically, of course). However, bear in mind that we're attempting to approach this subject with as few preconceptions as possible, religious or otherwise.

For example, we could say that Christianity triumphed because of the Holy Spirit, or because Christ promised it would, or because of the supernaturally graced courage of Paul, but these beg the question and assume what needs to be proved. Leaving out purely supernatural factors, what was the appeal and why did it spread?

Well, we can't leave out all supernatural factors, for the simple reason that man qua man is the being with inherent supernatural needs and drives. (I will henceforth use the less saturated term transnatural.)

As the saying goes, you can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back. But you can also drive out the transnatural with a pitchfork -- or with anything from lions to guillotines to Antifa mobs -- but he always comes back too. With a vengeance. Which our contemporary political religions prove every day. The gods of godlessness are a jealous, zealous, and bellicose bunch.

Let's be perfectly accurate: man is a religious being with a transnatural nature and transnatural needs. This is so obvious that we shouldn't even need to say it, but we are living in an age in which a host of perfectly settled fundamental truths and natural laws are under assault and being relitigated by the left -- everything from freedom of speech to human equality to the right to self-defense and more.

It is wrong to think of this as a war between the religious and irreligious. Unless -- ironically -- the left is regarded as the former and we represent the latter (or perhaps better, they are merely religious while we are transreligious).

It is clear enough that leftism in all its forms is a political religion. What is less well understood is that Christianity may be regarded as a cure for the primordial religiosity that has plagued mankind since time out of mind (c.f. Gil Bailie's Violence Unveiled or God's Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love).

In other words -- again, if it is what it says it is -- Christianity cannot be "a" religion; it cannot be merely a particular species of a more general class. Rather, it would have to be the other way around: Christianity is the kingdom, as it were, of which other religions must be members.

Of course, this is what all religions claim, or people wouldn't follow them. No religion announces that it has discovered a small piece of the puzzle, so we ought to adhere to it with our hearts, minds, and lives. Rather, every religion claims to be an absolute and total explanation.

Or, let's just focus on the Absolute. Man has an an implicit understanding of this category, for it is the ground of the very possibility of thought. I could explain in detail why this must be the case, but if I do, it will swallow the whole post.

Really, it's rather self-evident. Axiomatic. You can always argue your way to the principle, but arguing itself presupposes the principle, or why bother arguing? By virtue of what principle do you suppose that argument -- or reasoning -- will arrive at truth? In other words, why argue if there is no ground from which it proceeds or telos to which it is ordered?

So, the Absolute is. And truth is conformity to it. What's the alternative? There is truth but we can't know it? There is no truth and we can know it? There is no truth and we can't know it? These are all logically self-refuting, so we have only the one alternative: there is truth and man may know it; the universe is intelligible to intelligence, and these two resolve to One, AKA the Absolute.

Or, viewed from the top down, the absolute bifurcates waaaaaay updream into subject and object, knower and known, transcendence and immanence, heavens and earth, vertical and horizontal, Adam & Evolution, yada yada and blah blah.

Again, I could say much more, but longtime readers are already falling asleep. Let's move on.

Recall that we're rereading an essay by Voegelin called The Gospel and Culture. In it he writes that

If the community of the gospel had not entered the culture of the time by entering its life of reason, it would have remained an obscure sect and probably disappeared from history.

He goes on to say that -- and this is still big, it's the thinkers that got small -- "The culture of reason"

had arrived at a state that was sensed by eager young men as an impasse in which the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth.

In other words, Christianity didn't just spread because it appealed to the unlettered peasantry, but because it explained a great deal more to intellectual elites. "The Logos of the gospel," writes Voegelin, is the sophsame Logos of philosophy, reason, and history, from Abraham to Plato and everyone in between (and since):

Hence, Christianity is not an alternative to philosophy, it is philosophy itself in its state of perfection; the history of the Logos comes to its fulfillment through the incarnation of the Word in Christ.

Okay, but is it still perfect?

As if perfection could ever surpass itself! It only goes to 10, not 11.

True, but lʘʘked at from a slightly different, orthoparadoxical angle: as if it could ever stop surpassing itself!

What could we mean by this? What we mean is that Christianity isn't just about a fixed doctrine.

Yes, it is that, but the purpose of this affixed doctrine is to ceaselessly surpass ourselves; we can never arrive at the father shore toward which the surpassing is ordered in this lifetime. It is the Word baked fresh anew each morning in boundless depth, toward the infinite horizon.

Throughout all ages, world without end. A drop embraced by the sea held within the drop. The food that never runs out, the dream that never runs dry, the son who never stops rising in the yeast, the yada beyond which there is no yadder.