NeoSurralistic Renaissance 9
by Darwin Leon
www.darwinleon.com

THE ASSUMPTION

Noted scholar and noble Roman emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus was mortally wounded at the age of 31 while fighting the Persians, reportedly by the spear of one of his own soldiers, a Christian assassin disgruntled by Julian’s salvation plan. Some time before Julian the Philosopher died, he authored an essay on the Great Mother of the Gods, best known for giving life to man and other animals as well as the gods. She was called simply Meter by the Greeks, and Matar by the Romans, terms derived from the Sanskrit Ma, or ‘measure’: the Hindu Mama metes out the material universe; her Man, the measure of all things, is he who metes out thoughts.

The Greeks and Romans also knew the Grand Dame as the mountain goddess, Cybele, who hailed from Phrygia in Anatolia. A Greek equivalent to Cybele, known as Artemis, was said to have been born to Leto in a grove near Ephesus. Hera was in hot pursuit of Leto, wherefore militant demons called Kouretes performed a noisy dance around the babe to protect it – hence the politicians of Ephesus were associated with the sacred Kouretes. The image of Artemis, the fleet-footed, lithe huntress, was far more attractive than the staid Cybele, but the men who pursued her were liable to be clawed to shreds.

Cybele herself had been around for ages; some of her characteristics probably originated in the Hellenes, and were then adopted in Anatolia along with other elements imported from farther east. The goddess was formally imported into Rome in 204 B.C. on the advice of the Pythia at Delphi, to protect the Romans against Hannibal. Miracles are of course associated with the Great Mother. Emperor Julian recounts the legend of how, “as soon as the goddess touched the Tiber she made the ship stand still, as though it had suddenly taken root in the bed of the river,” thus proving that she “was not a mere lifeless image.” Vestal Virgin Clodia was then suspected of pollution and blamed for the steadfastness of the goddess, but Clodia cried out, in the manner of a sailor, “Mistress and Mother, if I am chaste follow me!” And forthwith “she not merely stirred the ship, but towed it after her for a considerable distance against the current.” And of course Hannibal withdrew shortly thereafter.

“Who then is the Mother of the Gods?” asks the philosopher-emperor. “She is the Source of the Intelligible and Creative Powers, which direct the visible ones; she that gave birth to and copulated with the mighty Jupiter; she that exists as the Great Goddess next to the Great One, and in union with the Great Creator; she that is a dispenser of all life; cause of all birth; most easily accomplishing all that is made; generating without passion; creating all that exists in concert with the Father; herself a virgin, without mother, sharing the throne of Jupiter, the mother in very truth of all the gods; for by receiving within herself the causes of all the intelligible deities that be above the world, she became the source of things the objects of the intellect…. Now this goddess is also the same as Providence…. Now the fable relates how that the Virginity, which preserves that things that be born and those that die, became enamored of the creative and generative cause of these things, and commanded it to conceive, in preference, with the intelligible world, and to turn itself towards her, and to consort with her; that she made an injunction that it do so with none of the other Powers; whereby it should at once preserve the unity of form that conduces to the preservation, and escape towards Matter; also, she commanded this Cause to look up to herself, because she is the source of creative Powers, without being drawn down into generation….”

Julian as a philosopher was guided by the Virgin Mother to conduct a sort of virtual castration to relieve himself of vanities: “I consider myself especially indebted to all the gods together, and more than all to the Great Mother…that she did not suffer me to wander about, as it were in the dark, but firstly commanded me to cut away, not as regards to my body, but as regards the irrational appetites and motions of the soul, all that was superfluous and empty, by the aid of the Cause, the object of the intellect, and which presides over souls, whilst she herself enabled me to conceive certain nothins perhaps not discordant with a true, and at the same time, reverential understanding of divine matters.”     

The fact of the matter is that there has always been a great goddess to mother the gods in the minds of human beings; her name and image changes according to our cultural dispositions. The Roman Church, the purportedly immaculate womb of the Catholic faith, presided over by an infallible pope, simply confirmed that fact when on November 1, 1950, the twelfth year of the pontificate of Pius XII, it assumed that Mary was assumed to Heaven to sit with Father and Son. At risk of being anathematized, we venture to say that the core religion, that of the divine nuclear family, was officially sealed once and for all, in the Name of the Father, the Mother, and the Son, as One. In any case, the Dogma of the Assumption was officially defined by way of an Apostolic Letter, “Hence if anyone, which God forbid, should dare willfully to deny or to call into doubt that which we have defined, let him know that he has fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith. In order that this, our definition of the bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven may be brought to the attention of the universal Church, we desire that this, our Apostolic Letter, should stand for perpetual remembrance, commanding that written copies of it, or even printed copies, signed by the hand of any public notary and bearing the seal of a person constituted in ecclesiastical dignity, should be accorded by all men the same reception they would give to this present letter, were it tendered or shown. It is forbidden to any man to change this, our declaration, pronouncement, and definition or, by rash attempt, to oppose and counter it. If any man should presume to make such an attempt, let him know that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.” Let us savor a portion of the Apostolic Logic:

“…. We are greatly consoled to see that, while the Catholic faith is being professed publicly and vigorously, piety toward the Virgin Mother of God is flourishing and daily growing more fervent, and that almost everywhere on earth it is showing indications of a better and holier life…. Actually God, who from all eternity regards Mary with a most favorable and unique affection, has "when the fullness of time came" put the plan of his providence into effect in such a way that all the privileges and prerogatives he had granted to her in his sovereign generosity were to shine forth in her in a kind of perfect harmony. And, although the Church has always recognized this supreme generosity and the perfect harmony of graces and has daily studied them more and more throughout the course of the centuries, still it is in our own age that the privilege of the bodily Assumption into heaven of Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, has certainly shone forth more clearly… According to the general rule, God does not will to grant to the just the full effect of the victory over death until the end of time has come. And so it is that the bodies of even the just are corrupted after death, and only on the last day will they be joined, each to its own glorious soul. Now God has willed that the Blessed Virgin Mary should be exempted from this general rule. She, by an entirely unique privilege, completely overcame sin by her Immaculate Conception, and as a result she was not subject to the law of remaining in the corruption of the grave, and she did not have to wait until the end of time for the redemption of her body. Thus, when it was solemnly proclaimed that Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, was from the very beginning free from the taint of original sin, the minds of the faithful were filled with a stronger hope that the day might soon come when the dogma of the Virgin Mary's bodily Assumption into heaven would also be defined by the Church's supreme teaching authority.….The innumerable temples which have been dedicated to the Virgin Mary assumed into heaven clearly attest this faith. So do those sacred images, exposed therein for the veneration of the faithful, which bring this unique triumph of the Blessed Virgin before the eyes of all men. Moreover, cities, dioceses, and individual regions have been placed under the special patronage and guardianship of the Virgin Mother of God assumed into heaven. In the same way, religious institutes, with the approval of the Church, have been founded and have taken their name from this privilege. Nor can we pass over in silence the fact that in the Rosary of Mary, the recitation of which this Apostolic See so urgently recommends, there is one mystery proposed for pious meditation which, as all know, deals with the Blessed Virgin's Assumption into heaven.…. Since the liturgy of the Church does not engender the Catholic faith, but rather springs from it, in such a way that the practices of the sacred worship proceed from the faith as the fruit comes from the tree, it follows that the holy Fathers and the great Doctors, in the homilies and sermons they gave the people on this feast day, did not draw their teaching from the feast itself as from a primary source, but rather they spoke of this doctrine as something already known and accepted by Christ's faithful. They presented it more clearly. They offered more profound explanations of its meaning and nature, bringing out into sharper light the fact that this feast shows, not only that the dead body of the Blessed Virgin Mary remained incorrupt, but that she gained a triumph out of death, her heavenly glorification after the example of her only begotten Son, Jesus Christ ….We must remember especially that, since the second century, the Virgin Mary has been designated by the holy Fathers as the new Eve, who, although subject to the new Adam, is most intimately associated with him in that struggle against the infernal foe…. The revered Mother of God, from all eternity joined in a hidden way with Jesus Christ in one and the same decree of predestination, immaculate in her conception, a most perfect virgin in her divine motherhood, the noble associate of the divine Redeemer who has won a complete triumph over sin and its consequences, finally obtained, as the supreme culmination of her privileges, that she should be preserved free from the corruption of the tomb and that, like her own Son, having overcome death, she might be taken up body and soul to the glory of heaven where, as Queen, she sits in splendor at the right hand of her Son, the immortal King of the Ages. Since the universal Church, within which dwells the Spirit of Truth who infallibly directs it toward an ever more perfect knowledge of the revealed truths, has expressed its own belief many times over the course of the centuries, and since the bishops of the entire world are almost unanimously petitioning that the truth of the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven should be defined as a dogma of divine and Catholic faith…. we believe that the moment appointed in the plan of divine providence for the solemn proclamation of this outstanding privilege of the Virgin Mary has already arrived…. For which reason, after we have poured forth prayers of supplication again and again to God, and have invoked the light of the Spirit of Truth, for the glory of Almighty God who has lavished his special affection upon the Virgin Mary, for the honor of her Son, the immortal King of the Ages and the Victor over sin and death, for the increase of the glory of that same august Mother, and for the joy and exultation of the entire Church; by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”

Now the reaching of this foregone conclusion was not much appreciated by the many Protestants who considered it a scandal to Christianity and anathematized it forthwith. There is much more to it than we have quoted; for instance, the pope was impugned for this idolatrous gem: “We rejoice greatly that this solemn event falls, according to the design of God's providence, during this Holy Year, so that we are able, while the great Jubilee is being observed, to adorn the brow of God's Virgin Mother with this brilliant gem, and to leave a monument more enduring than bronze of our own most fervent love for the Mother of God.” Liberal feminists – many of whom fancy themselves as witches and adore unruly pagan goddesses – fully understanding the danger to the fair sex of placing a virgin on a pedestal so that all females who do not live up to the idol may be chastised by their respective patriarchs after the honeymoon, protested the identification of submissive Mary with disobedient Eve. Reinhold Niebuhr, the respected Cold War reverend, called the dogma a kind of idolatry which placed the “final capstone on the Mariolatry of the Roman Church.” Another highly regarded reverend, R.L.P Milburn, claimed during a 1952 lecture at Oxford that Pope Pius XII had made “fantasy, however pious, to masquerade as fact,” and said the only thing historical about the Assumption was its appearance as a Coptic romance. A mulish Missouri farmer said he would not believe that Mary was in Heaven until he saw her there. On the other hand of God, the Assumption was roundly applauded, not only by those who believe in things unseen, but by those who see images of Virgin Mary in grilled cheese sandwiches, who witness her tears dripping from drywall, and by those who pray to her on a daily basis, sometimes with results, not to mention the untold millions of people who think personal ideals are a good idea, and don’t mind having the goddess as one of them.

The senses provide grist for the mental mill: there would be no Christianity without the historical Jesus, but at some point we are moved to say, “To hell with the facts,” and to get on with the projection of our fondest dreams. So let no one suppose that we would employ the facts of history unearthed thus far to defame Our Lady of Tears, who is, for so many crushed by the great landlord hence nearest to him, the Ark over Troubled Waters. Her legendary tomb in a first-century Jewish cemetery near the Garden Gethsemane is empty, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt to all those who want to believe, that she ascended to Heaven long before the Roman Church made its holy assumption. And that womb, or dome, figuratively speaking, is the landlord’s doom on Earth; that is, his dom or judgment. We can only hope that the dome is refilled with life lest the womb be as barren and devoid of life as the tomb.

MARY’S HOUSE OF LOVE

Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass at Mary’s House on November 29, 2006. He cited the Journal of a Soul of Pope John XXIII: “I love the Turks; I appreciate the natural qualities of these people who have their own place reserved in the march of Civilization.” No doubt he intended John’s words to offset the inflammatory citation of a Byzantine emperor that he, Benedict, had made earlier in Bavaria:“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” And now, at Mary’s house and in accord with John’s affection for the Turkish nation and the tiny Christian community within it, Pope Benedict pronounced to the celebrants, “With great love I greet all of you present… as well as those who could not take art in this celebration but are spiritually united with us.”

He said the Gospel of Saint John the Apostle of Gentiles “invites us to contemplate the moment of the Redemption when Mary, united to her Son in the offering of his sacrifice, extended her motherhood to all men and women…at the foot of the Cross. Although it is true, as Saint Anselm says, that ‘from the moment of her fiat Mary began to carry all of us in her womb,’ the maternal vocation and mission of the Virgin towards those who believe in Christ actually began when Jesus said to her, “Woman, behold your son!” Looking down from the Cross at his Mother…the dying Christ recognized the first fruits of the family which he had come to form in the world, the beginning of the Church and the new humanity. For this reason, he addressed Mary as ‘Woman’, not as ‘Mother’…. The Son of God thus fulfilled his mission: born of the Virgin in order to share our human condition in everything but sin, at his return to the Father he left behind in the world the sacrament of the unity of the human race: the family…at whose heart is this new bond between the Mother and the disciple.”

Thus it stands to reason that the Roman Catholic Church is the genuine Christian church, the institutional womb, figuratively speaking, of the world’s true Christians. The mystery, of how all have become “fellow heirs, members of the same body…is accomplished, in salvation history, in the Church, the new People in which…the old dividing wall has been broken down…. Like Christ himself, the Church is not only the instrument of unity, but also its efficacious sign. And the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Christ and of the Church, is the Mother of that mystery of unity which Christ and the Church inseparably signify and build up, in the world and throughout history.”

And it follows that if Christ and His Church can unite Jews and Gentiles in salvation history, said the Pope in his homily at Mary’s House, the unity by analogy can be extended “to the relationship between peoples and civilizations present in the world.” No doubt that extension would include the host civilization the Pope was visiting in Turkey, the Islamic civilization that Western pundits call “a failed civilization.” After all, all peoples have their origin in the same God. Therefore, “Strengthened by God’s word, from her in Ephesus, a city blessed by the presence of Mary Most Holy, who we know is loved and venerated also by Muslims, let us lift up to the Lord a special prayer for peace between peoples. From this edge of the Anatolian peninsula, a natural bridge between continents, let us implore peace and reconciliation…. Peace for all humanity…. We all need this universal peace; and the Church is called to be not only the prophetic herald, but even more, the ‘sign and instrument’ of this peace.” Indeed, it is this very peace referred to by the author of the Ephesians, who averred, forging Paul’s name, that “He, Christ, is our peace.” That is to say, not only did Christ bring peace, but he was Peace personified, and by shedding his blood in bloody sacrifice, he destroyed hostility “in himself” and created “in himself one New Man in place of the two.”

Pope Benedict’s reference to the text wants clarification lest it somehow be misinterpreted; leading one to think that Christ Jesus was two conflicting entities somehow individually embodied – an infinite god and a finite man bound by laws – and for that reason necessarily suffered the cross and wondered out loud why the infinite power had abandoned him in particular. When the pontiff or his interpreter said that Jesus the Christ had destroyed “hostility in himself,” he could not have meant that Jesus the Christ was a conflicted split or multiple personality, divided and warring against himself, but rather that he presented himself as the one visible sign of eternal peace, that the prospective peace of external divisions amongst the people might be known in his everlasting light. The New American Standard Bible reads:

“But now in Christ Jesus you who were formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups [Jews and Gentiles] into one, and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace.”

In these words of Paul, or rather the words forged in his name, we can understand why Paul became the darling of Marcion, the first archenemy of the Roman Church after Jews and Satan, and of the antinomian liberals of the Great Reformation who insisted that Christ came to abrogate the Mosaic law by the power of love and not to fulfill it; in effect, whether real or fantastic, Jesus the Christ was unknown to Jews because he represented the Alien God or Stranger, and not the arbitrary and cruel god of the Old Testament; therefore let the strange religion of love save the Jews or let them be ever so tragically damned with the other non-Christians although Christians are supposed to love them every so much. But on the other hand, the text also suggests that the Christian freedom of the Gentiles consists in becoming close to Israel, but as uncircumcised Jews, an oxymoronic cult. Circumcision, a custom adopted by the Hebrews from the Egyptians, represented all the laws or works that defined Jews as Jews; Paul made it explicit that no such definitive works save any finite individual from its definition or difference; only faith in the infinite universal or universal love saves the particulars from strife.

Wherefore it would seem that Pope Benedict’s allegory, of Christ as peace, would not apply to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim peoples unless all those people renounce the cruel and ambivalent, deified patriarch of the mythical Garden of Eden – the demonic deity who doomed them for possessing the human nature he allegedly endowed them with, who condemned them to eons of misery for wanting to be human; that is, to know what is good and evil for themselves via self-consciousness – and embrace the loving Stranger whose likes have never before been known on Earth. Emperor Julian the Philosopher, who had studied the Bible and “was convinced that the fabrication of the Galileans is a fiction of men composed by wickedness. Though it has in it nothing divine, by making full use of that part of the soul which loves fable and is childish and foolish, it has induced men to believe that the monstrous tale is truth,” put the question this way in his essay contra the Galileans:

“Is it not excessively strange that God should deny to the human beings whom he had fashioned the power to distinguish between good and evil? What could be more foolish than a being unable to distinguish good from bad? For it is evident that he would not avoid the latter, I mean things evil, nor would he strive after the former, I mean things good. And, in short, God refused to let man taste of wisdom, than which there could be nothing of more value for man. For that the power to distinguish between good and less good is the property of wisdom is evident surely even to the witless; so that the serpent was a benefactor rather than a destroyer of the human race. Furthermore, their God must be called envious. For when he saw that man had attained to a share of wisdom, that he might not, God said, taste of the tree of life, he cast him out of the garden, saying in so many words, "Behold, Adam has become as one of us, because he knows good from bad; and now let him not put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and thus live forever." Accordingly, unless every one of these legends is a myth that involves some secret interpretation, as I indeed believe, they are filled with many blasphemous sayings about God. For in the first place to be ignorant that she who was created as a help meet would be the cause of the fall; secondly to refuse the knowledge of good and bad, which knowledge alone seems to give coherence to the mind of man; and lastly to be jealous lest man should take of the tree of life and from mortal become immortal – this is to be grudging and envious overmuch.”

Christ might wage peace among all humankind with his sword, but how are we to cut the Jewishness out of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, or eviscerate the chosenness from any other people for that matter who considers themselves as the Chosen People in one way or another? Critics might complain that the Jews arrogantly set themselves apart from the rest of humankind, but have not Gentiles, call them pagans or heathens or barbarians if you will, stood apart from them all that time? Indeed, the rebellious son winds up hating the father provided to him by accident of birth, and would be his own father; thus does the new religion hate the religion that fathered it, in order to have their own identity: for instance, Jews hate Egyptians and Persians; Christians hate Jews; Muslims hate Jews and Christians. So the love professed is hate-based self-love, or hate-others-based group-love. Christianity and Islam were founded on calling Jews hypocrites. Self-righteous Christians and Muslims would have been better Jews; fundamental Protestants are more interested in the old testament than the new, while Muslims are said to petrified Jews and better monotheists than Jews; so why the divorce?

Why not a mass conversion, a reunion, or reconciliation, perhaps a federation of religions with a strong central government: one nation, with several state religions and many holy books, under the federal god? A prominent Muslim cleric in Turkey had been hostile towards Pope Benedict XVI until he saw him bow his head in prayer in a Turkish mosque. If there is only one god, as the pope and other religious are wont to say, and if we would respect the multicultural aspects of religious worship, why should we not do as the Pythagoreans recommended, simply conform to the modes of worship wherever we happen to be, and even go out of our way to attend the services of all religions? Pope Benedict would certainly have made a better impression throughout the Near East if he had submitted to Allah at the mosque according to the Muslim custom, and had actually cited the chapter of the Koran named after Mary, and praised Allah and the Prophet Mohammed. But such a concession would have infuriated many Christians and done much to aggravate the infernal quibbling that so often gives factions who identify with limited causes an excuse to fight over nothing, often in the name of the same cause. 

THE QUIDDITY OR WHATNESS OF LOVE

Hail Mary, full of grace, may all the sons of men be with thee. Conservative fathers of old valued sons over daughters, chose their own sons above all others, and made cruel distinctions between them according to their obedience. First of all, a man must know that certain children are his own, hence women must be owned lock, stock and barrel. And woe be unto a son who is disobedient, who dares to take a woman’s advice, who gains enough knowledge of good and evil to know that his father’s choices are arbitrary. Let him be, if not stoned to death at the village gate for disobeying his father, tossed out of the house onto his ear that it might remind him to listen to the voice of the father-god and hasten to obey his commandments through centuries of misery in hopes of reconciliation and return to paradise – or was that primitive state baked by custom really Hell on Earth? On the other hand, Mother’s love is unconditional, is it not, no matter whom the father might be or whether or not the sex is consensual?

In his first papal encyclical, Deus Claritas Est (God is Love), which was promulgated on Christmas Day 2005, Pope Benedict XVI hastened to quote the Gospel of John (3:16): “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whosoever believes in him…should have eternal life.” The New American Standard Bible (3:16) says that God “gave His only begotten Son….” Now we know that even God’s son, like all of humankind, was born of a woman, and her name was Mary. We might say that in the beginning God so loved man that he gave him wo-man, or wife-of-man, that he might not perish but live indefinitely through the sons and daughters of man. Pope Benedict then states that Jesus united into a single precept the commandment to love God and the commandment to love of neighbors; he did not note that, at least according to some rabbis, the author of the commandment to love neighbors intended that one’s own kind should be loved, and that it is quite all right to hate whosoever is deemed an enemy, as can be seen from the conduct of Israel. The object of that hatred may include those who would convert Jews to another religion – the second way to kill a Jew. Arnold Toynbee made much of the old adage that a civilization tends to be destroyed from within and not by external causes. The Jewish lore holds that only “groundless hatred,” meaning hatred for one’s own kind, will set kith and kin against one another and wreak the destruction of the nation, with the help of external enemies if need be. We further note that the hate-others-based group-love was the so-called racial basis of war of much of humankind, until the seeds of the victors became so mixed with that of the vanquished that warriors needed man-made signs to identify friends and foes on the battlefield in order to satisfy their blood-lust.

“In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence,” claimed the Pope, the message of Jesus, or rather the message that is Jesus, who was a gift of love from God, rather than a mere command to love thy neighbors, is “most timely and significant.”  The term ‘love’ has many meanings: “Amid this multiplicity of meanings, however, one in particular stands out: love between man and woman, where body and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness.” We add that the promise must include progeny, for which erotic love between man and man or woman or woman would not do. Friedrich Nietzsche, said Pope Benedict – a German with a Greek instead of Jewish disposition – claimed that Christianity had poisoned erotic love, “which for its part, while not completely succumbing, gradually degenerated into vice. Here the German philosopher was expressing a widely-held perception: doesn’t the Church, with all her commandments and prohibitions, turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life?”

The Greeks, he answered himself, beheld eros as an intoxicating power, a divine madness that overpowered reason. The lover, then, enjoyed fellowship with divinity.  “The Old Testament firmly opposed this form of religion, which represents a powerful temptation against monotheistic faith, combating it as a perversion of religion. But it in no way rejected eros as such; rather, it declared war on a warped and destructive form of it, because this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it.” For instance, temple prostitutes used to deliver divine love to men. “An intoxicated and undisciplined eros, then, is not an ascent in ‘ecstasy’ towards the Divine, but a fall, the degradation of man. Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of the beatitude for which our whole being yearns.”

Therefore the Holy Father in Rome confessed romantic love, which by implication he derived from the Greek god Eros. If only Psyche could be reunited with Eros, she would be blessedly happy, but she still would not enjoy the beatitude or supreme blessedness of happiness that the celibate Holy Father has in mind; an afterlife would probably be required to merge oneself with the Absolute and still enjoy it. To that end the power of erotic love must be disciplined lest it gets out of hand and sons of gods are born of temple prostitutes, in which cases no one may be certain of the identify of the father although one might become king. No doubt the chaste womb, undoubtedly unstained therefore invisible in itself, yet taking the ideal form of the Roman Church – in  insulting hailed by its protesting detractors as the Whore of Rome – will be glad to provide that discipline so that the fondest (most foolish) of fantasies might be safely entertained by God’s fools. How the actually womb conceives yet remains immaculate remains a mystery unfathomable, a well-kept secret of the Romantic Cabal – in Cabala lore, the ultimate Spirit-Mother of Israel, the Lord’s Glory or Shekhinah, constitutes an eternal womb and mobile tabernacle wherein each man is an immortal king.

HAVING SEX AND VIOLENCE

In other words, the powerful sexual urge necessary for the propagation of the race that would live forever if it could, along with the emotional affects of that fundamental power, are to be suitably sublimated by fundamentalist fathers. After all, religion constitutes the worship of absolute power, while Church politics dictates the distribution of that power. The regulation of sex, or the power of life, and violence, or the power of death, is the reason-for-being of primitive religion. The clan must not eat the flesh and drink the blood of its totem animal, the father of the clan, but on special occasions the clan may feast on the father to replenish its collective power, in which case the celebrants rise joyously above their selfishness to mutual dependence on one another and their god’ that is, they reestablish the solidarity of clan kinship in ceremonial eating and drinking of the same substance. Hebrews said of the totemic feast: “I am your bone and your flesh.” Arabs said, “Our blood has been spilt.”

Of course Sigmund Freud compared the collective totemic behavior of so-called savages to the neurotic behavior of his patients, and, with Darwin’s theory of evolution and the Oedipus myth at hand, he speculated on what might have happened among the primal horde that could account for his patients’ neuroses many thousands of years later: “I have supposed that the sense of guilt for an action has persisted for many thousands of years and has remained operative in generations which have no knowledge of that action,” he warned in his Totem and Taboo, Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Freud assumed that kinship is in part based on the fact that man is born of woman and is nourished by her milk, therefore he is part of her substance; yet it is also a fact of kinship that he is later nourished by other food: “If a man shared a meal with his god he was expressing a conviction that they were of one substance; and he would never share a meal with one whom he regarded as a stranger.” Recalling the spectacle of primordial sacrifice, Freud noted that “the clan is celebrating the ceremonial occasion by the cruel slaughter of its totem animal and is devour it raw – blood, flesh, and bones…. Psychoanalysis has revealed that the totem animal is in reality a substitute for the father; and this tallies with the contradictory fact that, though the killing of the animal is as a rule forbidden, yet its killing is a festive occasion – with the fact that it is killed yet mourned. The ambivalent emotional attitude, which to this day characterizes the father-complex in our children and which often persists into adult life, seems to extend to the totem animal as substitute for its father.”

Now we might presume that the “violent and jealous father” of the primal horde “keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up.” No doubt the sons desired to return to the womb of their mother one way or the other, and of course sisters and other female relatives might serve a similar purpose. One day the brothers banded together, killed and ate their father, and thus ended the patriarchal horde; Freud observed that the most primitive kind of organization still observed to this day “consists of bands of males; these bands are composed of members with equal rights and are subject to the restrictions of the totemic system, including inheritance through the mother.” And, “Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers: in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one acquired a portion of his strength.”

The mob of brothers who wanted to be fathers hated their father and scapegoated him; but after they killed him and were nourished by his flesh and blood, affection for him surfaced from the digested identification, and they began to feel awfully guilty. In their minds, “The dead father became stronger than the living one had been.” Therefore, they compensated for their disobedience after the fact, with “deferred obedience,” through the establishment of the totemic system based on two fundamental taboos: “not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of the totem clan of the opposite sex –thse must be the most important and oldest of human desires.” We may restate the rule for males, as: Thou shall not kill thy father-totem nor shall thou have sexual intercourse with thy mother or any other female member of thy clan. A taboo implies a demonic power, something sacred or profane, or both. The king, for example, is taboo, and should not be touched, for within him resides great power, a power extended to everything nearby, but if he touches someone they might be healed instead of destroyed: the healing touch of ancient kings is well documented.

At the conclusion of his inquiry Freud insisted that “the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex” that “constitutes the nucleus of all neurosis…. It seems to me a surprising discovery that the problems of social psychology, too, should prove soluble on the basis of one single point – man’s relation to his father.” Freud claimed, on page 54 of Totem and Taboo, that the whole social organization of the Australian aborigines, “described by anthropologists as the most backward and miserable of savages,” people whom one might expect to be promiscuous under the circumstances, seems to serve the purpose of avoiding incest. Indeed, in an article entitled ‘The Universality of Incest’ (The Journal of Psychohistory Vol. 19, No.S), Lloyd DeMause took to task the notion of experts that one of the few known cultural universals is the prohibition of incest. Apparently that notion was a presumption based on wishful patriarchal thinking, which interpreted reports of incest mere fantasy unworthy of publication. DeMause discovered that most of the authors on the subject cited no evidence at all; yet he and his collaborators turned up a great deal of evidence to the contrary, suggesting that incest, particularly the sort of incest we identify as child abuse, has been the norm throughout human history; indeed, one might be reluctant to call incest a perversion at all since it is universally practiced: 83 percent of females in a BBC study remembered sexual molestation, and 62 percent of the full sample reported full on sexual intercourse. Despite the notion in many parts of the world that sex with children is good for them, children apparently feel profoundly betrayed and terrified, and are left with lives permanently ravaged: “severe somatic reactions, depersonalization, self-hatred, hysterical seizures, depression, borderline personality formation, promiscuity, sexual dysfunctions, suicide, self-mutilation, night terrors and flashbacks, multiple personalities, post-traumatic stress disorders, delinquency, bulimia, and the overall stunting of feelings and capacities have all been documented.”

Contrary to the received notion that pedophiles just cannot control their urges because they have weak superegos – the internalization of the disciplining father – the research showed that “adults who molest children have extremely powerful punitive superegos and are often highly religious.” Pedophiles are driven by overwhelming intrapsychic anxieties, and not by a so-called sexual instinct. “The pedophile, similar to other perverts, suffers from severe lack of love and fears of individuation in his or her early childhood, and both desires and dreads merging with the mother because of an eno0rmouis need to reinstate the mother-child unity.”

DeMause credits Freud for believing his patients definite memories of seductions instead of writing them off as fantasies: “He even call his own memories ‘genuine’ of having been sexually molested as a little boy by his nurse, who had not only forced him to perform sexually and, he reported, ‘complained because I was clumsy,’ but also, he said, washed him in water that contained her own menstrual blood.” The sexual exploitation of boys by their mothers “for their own good” apparently remains rather commonplace even in some more civilized parts of the world; until just recently the seduction of boys by women was not considered abusive – is not that what every boy wants?

    Instead of listing the dirty details of incestuous behavior, let us return to the so-called sublimation of instinctive drives, to the idealization of vulgar reality and the conversion of erotic love, which is the love ascending to divine madness, to Christianized agape, the unrequited, descending love that God has, even in his violently vented wrath, for his adulterous and otherwise undeserving brood. Pope Benedict’s ‘Deus Caritas Est’ informs us that we cannot live with either eros or agape alone, and refers us to Jacob’s ladder, in which the Holy Fathers apparently enjoyed the sublime homosexual object of their bottom-up sexual love, God Himself, and were duly compensated by top-down love: 

“In the account of Jacob’s ladder,” speculated the Pope, “the Fathers of the Church saw this inseparable connection between ascending and descending love, between eros which seeks God and agape which passes on the gift received, symbolized in various ways. In the biblical passage we read how the Patriarch Jacob saw in a dream, above the stone which was his pillow, a ladder reaching up to heaven, on which the angels of were ascending and descending. A particular striking interpretation of this vision is presented by Pope Gregory the Great in his Pastoral Rule. He tells us the good pastor must be rooted in contemplation. Only in this way will he be able to take upon himself the needs of others and make them his own.” Therefore we might suppose that the erotic love of the good pastor for the Heavenly Father cannot be physically consummated. What actually happens upstairs must remain a mystery: “Saint Gregory speaks in this context of Saint Paul, who was born aloft to the most exalted mysteries of God, and having descended once more, he was able to become all things to all men.” Never mind the women. And likewise for Moses’ refreshing intercourse with the Lord: “He also points to the example of Moses, who entered the tabernacle time and again, remaining in dialogue with God, so that when he emerged he could be at the service of his people.”

Israel’s stock issues from the seed of holiness, from the head of Moses, as it were, who deposits his semen in the Ark from which the Pregnant Being of the Kingdom of Israel finally emerges from the tenth sefirot or pudendum of the Tree of Fire, the Burning Bush at the lower reach of the Canal of Light and Life; that is, issues from the Shekhinah or Presence standing for the Assembly of Israel, the Queen whose symbols are Earth and Moon. Yet this truth shall remain hidden until the way is purified by fire: “Yet there will be a tenth portion in it,” dreamed Isaiah of the tenth of the people of Israel who will be saved, “and it will again be subject to burning, like a terebinth or oak whose stump remains when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump.” From the impatient House of David comes a sign: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she shall call His name Immanuel (God is with us).” And this New Adam “will eat curds and honey at the time He knows enough to refuse evil and choose good.” Yet again the knowledge of good and evil shall have dire consequences until, by virtue of the sword of distinction, “the government rests on His shoulders, the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.”

The passages in Isaiah reminds us of Emperor Julian the Philosopher’s reference to the legend of Gallos and the castration of Cybele’s effeminate priests (galli), the so-called virginal nuns or eunuchs who wore their hair long, wore dresses, and otherwise made themselves up like women. Following the lead of Attis, they had gathered about an evergreen tree and ceremoniously cut off their own sacred trees, no doubt to stop them from wandering indefinitely among the burning bushes.

The name ‘Attis’, a term that means, according to Julian, “almond branch,” does not appear in the early cult practices of Phrygia. Attis might have been a member of the Phrygian royal family, the memory of whom might have been preserved after the collapse of the kingdom by making him a member of the priesthood. One myth claimed he was born to Nana, a virgin water nymph, who placed on her breast a testicle-shaped almond taken from a tree created from the blood of the male organ of a hermaphrodite. But the most popular account has him born of Cybele, who grew obsessed with the pretty young man. When he fell in love with a nymph, he was cursed and went insane, the spell causing him to castrate himself to prevent him from loving anyone but the Great Mother. He bled to death on the spot. Violets sprang from the blood; the gods were duly impressed and resurrected him in a form that would never age or decay. One version of the myth says Attis was transformed into a pine tree; therefore the celebrants bind his effigy to a pine tree as part of the resurrection festivals that took place from March 15-27, culminating, on the spring equinox, with the joyful festival of Hilaria. The bloody castration ceremony, which took place on March 24, was toned down in Rome, where castration and effeminate men were not greatly appreciated, and limited to a token cutting of the phallus, or the arm, or the head of the initiate, that he would be baptized in blood. A private celebration called the Taurobolium, including a sacramental meal and initiation ceremony was held on Vatican Hill, the site of St. Peter’s Basilica: a bull was castrated slaughtered over a grating, and the initiates underneath were baptized in blood. March 24 or Castration Day is therefore known as the “Day of Blood,” but the event is referred to by Julian as the “Cutting of the Tree.”  Julian provides an astrological allegory: Attis was born by the streams of the river Gallos, where the Goddess crowned him with stars and confined his wild beauty to the Milky Way

The “Cutting of the Tree,” wrote Julian in his essay, the ‘Mother of the Gods,’ written one winter night before the Persian expedition, took place in the equinoctial circle when the Sun reached the highest point of its arc, a circle where, all things being equal, nothing is distinguishable until the tree is cut, so to speak, and a spiritual tree may from its stump arise, from the indefinite or uncertainty below, towards certainty in the definite One above. Julian advises us that the vulgar reference to castration signify the cessation of indefiniteness or waywardness. Castration along with other forms of male and female genital mutilation was and still is a worldwide phenomenon. The practice was widespread in the Near and Middle East, hence was wrongly thought to be of Semitic origin. Whereas men were castrated long ago, to keep them true to gods and kings and emperors, little girls are still mutilated lest pleasure eventually lead them astray from their husbands: a 2006 survey indicated that 96 percent of Egyptian married women have been mutilated. Although a spokesman for the conservative Muslim Brotherhood claimed Islam does not require the practice, a prominent Egyptian cleric, Yusuf al Badry, argued that it protects women from nymphomania, infertility, tuberculosis, and from growing a large, penis-like clitoris. The Catholic fathers addressed the issue as far back as the Council of Nicea in 325, and a bull was issued by Pope Leo I around 395. We have already noted elsewhere that the great allegorist of the Church, Origen of Alexandria, took a New Testament passage quite literally, mutilated himself and associated with virgins – we may doubt that his imaginative approach to the historical facts of scripture was enhanced by the deed. As for female virginity without mutilation, we have no doubt that the Church has saved countless females from a miserable life and early death.

Julian the Philosopher certainly did not recommend vulgar castration; quite to the contrary: he said that the legend of Attis “has nothing to do with the rites which it accompanies; for the gods have thereby, I fancy, taught us symbolically that we ought to pluck what is most beautiful on earth, namely virtue joined with piety, and offer the same unto the goddess, for a token of good government here below. For the Tree springs up out of the earth and aspires upwards into the air; it is likewise beautiful to see and be seen…to reap virtue joined with piety from our conduct upon earth, and to aspire upwards unto the deity, the primary source of being and the fount of life… King Attis checks the Indefinity by means of castration, the gods warn us thereby to extirpate in ourselves all incontinence, and to imitate the example, and to run upwards into the Definite, and the Uniform, and if it be possible, to the One itself; which being accomplished the ‘Hilaria’ must by all means follow. For what could be more contented, what more hilarious that the soul that has escaped from uncertainty, and generation, and the tumult that reigns therein, and hastens upwards to the gods? Of whose number was Attis, whom the Mother of the Gods would not suffer to advance farther than was proper for him, but turned him towards herself, and enjoined him to check all indefinity.”

The reader may know that Julian the Philosopher was nephew to the Constantine the Great, a most brutal and vicious man but one who made Christianity the predominant religion of the Empire. Julian survived the murder of most of his family in a struggle for succession to the imperial throne. He was kept out of the way during his youth. Christianity was forced on him by his Arian Christian masters and tutors; for instance, he was in part raised under the tutelage of the now notorious Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, a great friend of Arius. He naturally despised Christianity, the religion of his family’s murderers. Fortunately he had access to a broader education, in what are now know as the Classics, and he admired, by way of comparison to Christianity, the culture of Hellenism, and in particular the cultivation of its religious revival, Neo-Platonism, which was seen as an antidote to the declination of the Empire some scholars have blamed on Christian ignorance, to which they attribute the onset of the Dark Ages. Julian had no pretension to the throne, no military training, and was by nature and experience inclined towards scholarship. He forwarded his education in several great cities.

The happiest spell of his life was passed studying in Athens. But his stay in Ephesus is most interesting in our present context, for that city was home to the great Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, as well as a missionary center for Christianity. Paul was reportedly arrested in Ephesus for his own safety because his religion was deemed a threat to the tourist business that accounted for the sale of idols of goddess Artemis. And it was at the Council of Ephesus of 431 that Virgin Mary was recognized Mother of God. Virgin Artemis was adopted by the Romans and called Diana, but the Great Goddess was first known in Ephesus (perhaps Apasas: “the city of the mother goddess”) as the Phrygian goddess Cybele, whose cult, as we know, was managed by the eunuchs – the priests of Artemis were also eunuchs. The most common statue of Cybele is rather plain; the mother goddess of the mountainous wild looks rather staid in the city. But in the statuary of Ephesian Artemis we find something truer to the imaginative fertility myths of the East, the so-called many-breasted Artemis. Analysts have determined, however, that the globules are not breasts, and have suggested that Artemis is neatly ringed with so-called eggs, which of course would also be symbolic of the fertility of the motherless Virgin Mother who gives birth to all. However, other scholars have suggested that the so-called eggs are really a representation of the testicles of powerful bulls: we in turn opine that they might represent the severed testicles of her devotees, totemic items hung on the village totem pole, so to speak.      

NOTE ON ORAL INTERCOURSE

We should not be embarrassed or insulted by the sexual undertones of oral intercourse between good pastors who are bound to share their divine gifts with wayward sheep. As we have already duly note, sex is no stranger to the religion that would harness its creative power to the Creator. What lies below is grist for the mental mill, and sexual intercourse is not erotic love without mind engaged in the exchange. Idealists stood on their heads and took infrastructure for superstructure, thinking that the word is foundation of the universe. Sexual deviance from reproduction is no wonder where Woman is whitewashed for fear of retaliation for incest, and where her revolutionary Son, who would replace the despotic Father, is daily worshiped in naked detail. Origen went so far as to castrate himself and consort with virgins so that his head might remain erect in Heaven at all times; in that domain his fear of the Father kept his intercourse symbolic that he might bear witness to his faith in his seminal works. Somehow the double-edged sword of the Son must be kept in its sheath that the patriarchy might be kept intact; somehow the Prince of Peace must be reconciled to the Father, and the Mother must be kept obediently chaste, lest she, the Alabaster Throne of the Lord, be usurped. A perfect nuclear family is in the making, with the mother, who is wise to the plot, presented in male attire or kept indoors behind a screen, where she becomes white as a ghost lest someone get the wrong idea. If everyone suits the model, burning bushes will no longer tempt men to mix seeds, and sex shall be obsolete – one of Origen’s “errors” was his neo-platonic doctrine of preexisting souls – we excerpt this from his Commentary on John:

“His taking away sin is still going on, He is taking it away from every individual in the world, till sin be taken away from the whole world, and the Saviour deliver the kingdom prepared and completed to the Father, a kingdom in which no sin is left at all, and which, therefore, is ready to accept the Father as its king, and which on the other hand is waiting to receive all God has to bestow, fully, and in every part, at that time when the saying is fulfilled, ‘That God may be all in all.’ Further, we hear of a man who is said to be coming after John, who was made before him and was before him. This is to teach us that the man also of the Son of God, the man who was mixed with His divinity, was older than His birth from Mary.”

GENITALIA ET RATIONALIS

“If we are to pray for the whole of ourselves,” explained Isaiah Berlin in his book about J.G. Hamann, The Magus of the North (1993), “and avoid the fate of poor Origen or Abelard – austerity, dry intellectualism, passionless contemplation, self-castration are associated into one symbolic pattern in hs mind – the we must not suppress our ‘lower’ nature: it was given to us by God as surely as all else. ‘I have always sought to identify and to pick out the interna of a torso, rather than the superna of a bust…my coarse imagination has never been able to picture a creative spirit without genitalia.’”

“The spiritual word was made flesh in man,” sermonized Hamann. And now the Enlightenment would use Greek reasoning to mutilate the whole man, would in effect castrate him and erect the totem pole of Reason in place of the generative organ, and make prudes of us all. The ascetic who would severe intellect from “the deepest abysses of the most tangible sensuousness” deadens life and thus perpetrates blasphemy. “Children are not full of prudery, nor savages,nor Cynic philosophers,” Hamann avers. Prudery is a social convention, a perversion in itself of God’s divine revelation – the generative organs are key words of God’s creative language. Let us forswear despotic reasoning cast off the bad habit of prudery; let us take Christ’s words literally, and be as innocent children again.  Yes, we must be children again; we must restore a natural and unashamed attitude towards the flesh that Christ Jesus himself made sacred. The creative spirit is not a eunuch; the holy spirit cannot create without the genitals that bind creator and creature. It is one thing to be created in God’s image, and another to be God. Man, created in the image of God, finds himself lacking, and in that want he has his creativity. The man who imagines himself to be a disembodied, self-sufficient god, a creator without genitals, a man who would fain weave creation out of his bodiless mind, reasons in vain and is a slave to his supreme arrogance. He should instead direct his creative organ toward his bodily source in woman, who is, before all, his mother. And the prudish ice queen, if she would realize her true godliness in the creative scheme, should dismount from her high horse of virginity and sacrifice her innocence to what Hamann called the “tongues of fire.” Taming the passions with cold, calculating reason puts the knife to genius; instead, man should have Providence for his muse, that he may fulfill his ordained destiny instead of abusing his freedom by defying God’s will. We might wonder how doing God’s will differs from doing Satan’s bidding reason alone cannot make the distinction: we shall never know until we feel the difference, until we experience the Orgy.

“Passion alone gives to abstractions and hypotheses hands, feet, wings; images it endows with spirit, life, language,” wrote Hamann. Reason for him was the “poisonous snake” in paradise, the arch-heretic, the great enemy of God and his truth.” Whereas Catholics did their level best to sell out to the Enlightenment or to at least incorporate its mental idols in a compromise, intermixing faith in God with faith in Reason and Progress rather than be left behind in the dust; thus has the artificial god become more monstrous in the process, resembling the grand dragon of old. Thus the people were doubled-taxed, once by Church and once by State; Kant had gotten his friend Hamann a job in Frederick the Great’s tax department; Hamann duly observed that the so-called enlightened monarch’s state had turned the citizens into “serfs” who must pay “double fees” because of the misconceived relations of people to one another and to their dead god.

Human reasoning did have its place for Hamann, among other passions natural to humankind, but he refused to seat a mere name for the dynamic verbal process on the dragon throne itself, which would be a preposterous placement; for the fluctuating mother tongue or the cosmic river is in fact the throne or cosmos, the revelation itself, which cannot be without a body, and not its driving force, which cannot be fully identified with anything singular with the exception Christ Jesus. Although Hamann’s god had a body, the universe divinely voiced, any human voice that pretended to define the deity or induce God’s existence from the particulars raised his ire, for all such inductive reasoning could lead to in the end was nothing but the denial of God’s existence, which should be confessed, instead, beforehand, as a principle prior to reason, so that the universe may be deduced from the top down. Although Hamann, who founded Germany’s Storm and Stress movement, thought that the Supreme Being had to have a body in order for human beings to sense the divine presence, he was a Jewish iconoclast when it came to his faith: a god stripped of all definitions is much easier to defend than a bearded father-figure with a large phallus: Nothing is perfect because Nothing is defensible. Of course not all Jews are iconoclasts – what we call Nothing is found only in the original purity of religion, known only to a few divines in the center – the very unwillingness to pronounce the true name of YHWH suggests that the deity exists as a certain thing, the only thing that cannot be smashed by the iconoclast’s mallet – a mere look at this undeniable deity kills the beholder –would not the believer lose his faith if he saw Nothing instead of Being?

Hamann, in his Third Hierophantic Letter, determined that Christianity’s physique had Jewish and Heathen attributes: “If one were, with Pharisaic criticism, to eliminate all the Jewish and heathen elements from Christianity, no more would be left of it than would be left of our body, if it were subjected to a similar metaphysical chemistry – namely, a Material Nothing or Spiritual Something, which for the mechanistic natural philosophy of sound reason amounts to the same thing.” No doubt Pope Benedict XVI, who objects to the fundamentalist effort to dehellenize Christianity because he believes the Greek spin gives it is superior European character, would agree with Hamann on this point. But Hamann called Jesus the “Jewish homunculus,” and the Pope might object to that sort of nomenclature. In any case, it seems that Hamann was a frustrated nihilist in respect to all attempts to slice and dice organic religion and human beingness into neat categories with the knife of reason, and to remake God into a Frankenstein monster and man into a machine. In the final analysis, Hamann, in defense of his own blind faith in absurdity, would annihilate nothing itself, if nothing could only exist. In his Phillipic Gloss, he calls God “The Creator Genius, who by the energy of his bon mots causes the representative universe to spring forth from Nothingness and to return to Nothingness.” In between is the something of history, which cannot be understood except in relation to its Creator. How the Creator exists before and after Nothing exists, that he may reiterate universes from the Gap with his bon mots or witticisms, remains to be revealed. This all seems quite unreasonable, but we would have it both ways, and cannot avoid the ambiguities of our language.

To be fair to the Roman Church, we must observe that, for all the talk of Pope Benedict XVI and his predecessors about the virtues of “reason,” their reasoning is unwise or foolish, so to speak, not to mention deviously serpentine, for their token tribute to Enlightenment reasoning is covertly intended for the mysterious source, the author of the book of the universe, an author about whom any statement is necessarily absurd; to wit, the Logos, whose particular form, the absurd reconciliation of infinity in a singular person, stoops to suffer the world in order to conquer it. And there is good reason or cause for why this universal Logos must be something more than the perfect man preferred by the Arian heretics; he must be at once the man and the divinity: he must be superior to the political gods, the Caesars who dare to crown themselves; only then can Logos incarnate be the salvation alluded to by such words as liberty and freedom and summed up by reference to absolute, unrestrained power. This non-Arian god is by no means reasonable or logical in the worldly sense of the terms; to the contrary, this almighty power is the Supreme Anarch, the Ultimate Arbiter, the Winning One, the Ace of the ancient dice.

Despite his close friendship with Immanuel Kant, who was of course the most heroic philosopher of the Enlightenment, and even because of that friendship, Hamann saw the Reason idolized by the Enlightenment for what it was, and asked the reasonable world, in his famous essay on the comet, “What is this reason, with its universality, infallibility, exuberant certainty and obviousness? An ens rationis, a stuffed dummy which the howling superstition of our unreason endows with divine attributes.” The Church already had its mysterious Logos behind its Hellenistic reasoning power, a power used to justify blind faith in the schemer, the origin of the word and world, as well as the scheme itself made obvious in man, so it did not take long for it to give a wary nod to the convoking battle cry of the Enlightenment penned by Pierre Bayle and disdainfully quoted by Hamann: “Reason is the supreme tribunal, and one which judges in the last resort, and without appeal, everything that is placed before it.” When the philosophers said “Reason,” the theosophists thought “Logos,” and they were not afraid to associate religion with the scientific thinking, since that seemed to make religion even more reasonable and palatable in the worldly sense. Indeed, modern science is in part derived from religious skepticism towards the things of this world.

Pierre Bayle, refugee from the Catholic persecution of Protestants in France, the author of the popular and bizarre dictionary or “Talmudic” encyclopedia entitled Dictionnaire historique et critique, might have been the so-called Arsenal of the Enlightenment, in fact had just as little faith in reason as an excuse for faith in God as Hamann did. The Apostle of Toleration was a consummate religious skeptic, naturally skeptical of organized religion. He implied that that reason is an acid that eats through everything; but he was not afraid of the result, for he was left with his faith in God. His great power of reasoning was in fact subversive of the Enlightenment’s faith in reason, for he used reason to deconstruct reasonable systems; Voltaire himself said: “The greatest master of the art of reasoning that ever wrote, Bayle, great and wise, all systems overthrows.”  His entire corpus implies that reason is repugnant to faith; the more reasonable one is, the less faithful one becomes: indeed, he stated that the thoroughly rational process is inimical to faith in the existence of the god of the Jews and Christians. Any reasonable person who conducts a thorough and rational investigation of the subject matter in its historical context including the arrant hypocrisy of Judeo-Christians over the centuries is likely to arrive at atheism in respect to that god. That is not to say that there is no god, the Unknown God heretofore unknown, but that is to say Nothing for the time being – mystics of all shades have said that God is Nothing.

The “reason” preached by religious inquisitors is unreason; their Logos is inherently illogical; one might as well let instinct fashioned by the laws of nature rule than to rely on the sort of “reason” that is not reason at all but simply a name for the freedom to exercise the will to power in the name of a projected omnipotence. Hamann the ultraconservative romantic reactionary employed in the tax office of the enlightened Frederick the Great, whom he despised, did not have to be as subtle as Bayle, whose family was victimized by inquisitors and whose religious criticism left his protesting faith as a matter between him and God – his critics called his skepticism atheism despite his persevering reiteration of faith. Hamann expressed little faith in reason and he did not mince words over the subject while planting the seeds of the Storm and Stress Movement. Of course we cannot deny that he was a student of reasonable philosophers and that he employed his reasoning powers to blaspheme Reason; he would go so far as to admit that "faith has need of reason as much as reason has need of faith." Indeed, historical revisionism casts him now as yet another rational son of the Enlightenment! Thus are we constituted by our enemies and deemed their allies.

Yet undoubtedly Pope Benedict XVI’s logolatrous worship of Reason of late would raise Hamann’s dander and cause him to claim that the Roman pontiff’s idol is in fact a stuffed dummy, a gigantic scarecrow erected in hopes of monopolizing the seed, a scapegoat that distracts people from loving one another by giving them something in common to fear. Man is a rational animal whom religions of death would make inanimate. Reason makes an empty caricature out of God incarnate: How dare the high priest call Christ Jesus the Logos, to make him identical with logic, which can by itself prove nothing. Blasphemy! Of course we might be called blasphemers for saying so, if blasphemy is using God’s gift of reason against Him. But to question the Torah was not blasphemy in the old days: in fact, teachers whipped students who neglected to question the law written in stone. There was a day when the Rock itself sufficed, and under that Keystone was the abyss so much feared, the very Face of the Unknown God. Logic can only demonstrate the error of all ontological arguments: thus does it prove the Nothing that Pierre Bayle said he was unafraid of; that is not to say that Nothing is nothingness, for Nothing is pregnant with Being, and Being reigns supreme.  

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