That westerners are Hyper-christians
The West is often described as “post-Christian.” This means that Christianity no longer functions as the organizing principle by which we make sense out of ourselves and the world around us. Put snarkily, Christianity is passé, but, as even the snarkiest of post-Christians will admit, it built the ruins we now inhabit, and so our age continues to evidence its power — we are post-Christian, and not some new thing.
All of this is rather boring, dredging up memories of falling asleep during high-school history classes on “secularization.” It is also false. Our age is not post-Christian, it is hyper-Christian — and not because granite cutouts of the ten commandments still pop up like pustules on courthouse lawns in the American South. Our age is hyper-Christian because it has digested certain Christian principles and now lives them out with such radical fidelity that it no longer recognizes them as Christian, but takes them to be natural.
It is as if a man were to fancy himself post-American, a real citizen of the world — all while expecting the staff of the Marriott hotels and airport Starbucks that make up his existence to speak English. If you ever were to meet this global citizen (he’s usually the one reading The Economist and checking his investments on a very large phone), you’d be rather tempted to say, “Look, you haven’t really moved beyond American provincialism. You’ve actually extended it to such an extent that you can no longer see it. Your nation is invisible to you because it is omnipresent; you live in a worldwide America, enjoying the dubious luxuries of a global strip mall. But were I to slip Rohypnol in your latte; shred your credit cards; throw you into a chopper and drop you off in Po-dunk, Yemen — what would become of your world-citizenry then?”
So too, the post-Christian has extended Christianity to such an extent that he can no longer see it. He takes as natural what is, in fact, the hard-won construction of Christianity. René Girard has shown this convincingly in his argument that care and concern for victims were unnatural to the Gentile world — that it took a great, oft-failing effort of the Jews to proclaim the care of widows and orphans as the mark of true religion. [1] Nietzsche understood this, and cursed Judeo-Christianity for its “transvaluation” of the strength and nobleness of the Greeks by its diseased, resentful desire to aid the weak and unhealthy and powerless. But the post-Christian is so very Christian that he feels no need to quote Christ when he demands that victims be believed, that the hungry be fed, and that shackles be broken. He takes the stirring of his spirit, which urges him to leap down from the heights of privilege to the “less fortunate,” as a original sentiment; an experience born of nowhere but nature and built under no conditions but the goodness of his inner being; a selflessness which every other man would find, be he Ancient Persian or Modern Pittsburghian, if only he would grimace in such and such a way. The post-Christian does not quote Christ, rather, the words of the Apostle Paul are queerly fulfilled in him: Christ lives in him.
Likewise, the post-Christian takes the idea that “all men are equal” as something discernible in the very order of things — as something he just knows. It’s a bold stance to take. Even the Declaration of Independence, that masterpiece of liberal thought, was forced to understand this as a fundamentally theological claim, arguing that all men are created equal, leaning against an edifice of creation theology that is by no means self-evident — a theology openly rejected in many parts of the contemporary world. But the Christianity of the post-Christian is like that faith Christ asked for when he pronounced “blessed are they who do not see, and yet believe” — for the post-Christian sees no particularly compelling evidence that mankind are all of fundamentally equal value, and should exist as equal members of the one human family. He does not see, but he believes.
Perhaps the most unshakeable faith one can find in our post-faith people is the belief that slavery is wrong, astonishingly evil. This sentiment is taken as concomitant with human existence — one would have to be evil himself, or at least insane, in order to think otherwise. But Hilaire Belloc’s history of slavery has not been refuted: “You find no barbarian from some free place astonished at the institution of Slavery; you find no Slave pointing to a society in which Slavery was unknown as towards a happier land. To our ancestors, not only for those few centuries during which we have record of their actions, but apparently during an illimitable past, the division of society into those who must work under compulsion and those who would benefit by their labour was the very plan of the State apart from which they could hardly think of society as existing at all.” [2] From whither, then, and from what organ cometh our post-Christian, abolitionist fervor? Not from the influence of Christianity, which is what Belloc concludes; indeed (and in an irony too rich to be fully appreciated in this mortal life) the hyper-Christian usually takes it upon himself to blame St. Paul for the institution of slavery. Rather, the post-Christian believes, against the immense glut of historical evidence, that moral opposition to slavery is natural — the intellectual result of being born a reasonable bloke and a decent chap.
2. That hyper-christianity results from the material heresy of liberalism.
We are hyper-Christians because we are heretics. I mean this in a hyperbolic sense, but it is a light hyperbole. Heresy is a kind of infidelity that involves “restricting belief to certain points of Christ's doctrine selected and fashioned at pleasure.” In one sense, our heresy is merely what the theologians call “material heresy.” We never willed to cherry-pick Christianity for its humanistic content. The cherries were already picked. Anti-trinitarians like Newton; Pelagians like Locke; total-depravity theologians like Calvin and (yes) Hobbes; these heretics squeezed Christianity into a liberal humanism before we learned to crawl. Therefore, we live and die without grave moral culpability, for “a man born and nurtured in heretical surroundings may live and die without ever having a doubt as to the truth of his creed.” [3]
And in another sense, we are not heretics at all, believing ourselves to have fully rejected Christ, making us what the theologians call “apostates” (if we burned our Bible on the back lawn) or at least “material apostates” (if our parents, in high spirits, burned our Bible for us). But the unique heresy of liberalism strains and frets against the categories of the theologians. Insofar as the liberal West has digested Christ; insofar as he hums in our blood; insofar as we take his work as the natural stuff of our mortal bodies, we neither reject nor quite proclaim him. We have simply devoured him, become him, and assumed him, not in a Eucharistic reception of the whole Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity, but in the digestive reception of the parts of Christ that nourish our liberal bodies, the rest of him passed.
Whenever Christian heresy flares up, it is by a gross exaggeration of a particular teaching of Christ over and against the whole teaching of Christ as it is lovingly received by Church, the living ear to the living word. Thus Catholic orthodoxy taught that baptism saves; Tertullian loved this teaching so much that he taught, heretically, that heretics must be baptized again. The heresy dearest to our hearts is called liberalism, and at the heart of liberalism is a theological claim which argues that the goods man receives by grace are not received by grace at all, but possessed by nature, where “nature” is presumed to mean that being and life which man has for himself, apart from God.
This is an over-extension of a Christian doctrine of “natural law” and the Thomistic principle of “the act of existence,” which argue that man does indeed “belong to himself” and that his reason is capable of discerning the existence and goodness of a Creator. But orthodoxy understands man’s self-belonging to be a constantly-given gift of the Creator, not a one-time endowment. It insists that his reason is an image of, and a communion with, his God, not a lonely island of purely human figuring. The Church has ever argued that the natural law only attains to the truth insofar as it participates in God’s eternal law — a participation which, according to Aquinas, was severely compromised “because the law of nature was destroyed by the law of concupiscence.” [4] The heresy of liberalism is characterized, but not exhausted, by a denial of these positions, and the counter-assertion that man has the natural law for himself; that he has a secular, “public morality” and a god-free space of freedom from which he then, in a subsequent move, decides to be religious; that he lives, moves and breathes in a world God created for him — but from which God is bracketed. Liberalism takes its ultimate form in Deism, wherein God starts the great mechanism of existence, and then departs from it, like a cosmic CEO who, having outsourced all his tasks to a management machine, retires to a life of income-collection and yacht design. It is, I believe, the great, unspoken malaise of that horribly over-discussed subject, “the Christian in the modern world,” in his suspicion that, after all, the world-machine chugs along quite well without God — so why make such a fuss about Him?
3. THat the corruption of the golden rule shows the folly of liberalism
It is difficult to see ourselves mirrored in the fathers of liberalism, because we are trained to believe that our current, unthought liberal humanism is not Christianity. Whenever we hear Jefferson, Locke or Berkeley pontificate from the Scriptures, we assume that this is not yet post-Christianity — and thus not yet us. But if it is true that we are not living a form of post-Christianity, but a Christian heresy, then it is necessary to return to the liberal canon of which we are the progeny and interrogate its Christian message in order to find the secret about ourselves.
For instance, Robert South says, “that great Rule, of doing as man would be done by...is as old as Adam, and bears date with humane Nature itself, as springing from that Primitive Relation of Equality, which all men as fellow creatures and fellow Subjects to the same Supreme Lord, bear to one another." [5] We read “Supreme Lord” and assume Robert South is a believer — no Patriarch of Post-Christendom. But the fundamental novelty of this thought is the theoretical detachability of this Golden Rule from the Supreme Lord, which can now be known thanks to the natural deduction of a “primitive relation of equality” which accrues to us by virtue of being fellow creatures of the same species. This (still pious!) thought is secularized by Locke, who takes up this theoretical detachability of law from Lord and detaches with gusto, arguing that there is “nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank...should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection.” Equality needs no theological justification, as it is “evident in itself, and beyond all question.” [6] Why then, did no one in the history of the slave-owning world experience this self-evidence prior to the influence of Christianity? Locke does not address this question. Rather, Christ’s command is ingested and claimed concomitant with natural reason, allowing Locke’s progeny to be Christians by blood rather than by faith. Christ becomes the one who mentioned what we could have figured by other means; God becomes the one who ensures the unity of man, though this unity is deducible without reference to him.
But the digestion of Christ’s teaching into the gut of human reason alters its substance. The Golden Rule is bronzed over by being detached from its origins as a law of Christ. To show its gradual decomposition from a theology of love into tit-for-tat reasoning would require its own essay, beginning with the Old Testament and making its way to the current totalitarian, bumper-sticker glee over the “discovery” that “all the major religions have preached the Golden Rule in some form or another” — thus allowing all the major religions to be equally negated. But we can already point to the formal difference between Locke and the Rule in the Gospels, where “whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” (Matthew 7:12) is a law given precisely for those who, in Christ, fulfil “the law and the prophets” (7:12). It is not given offhandedly, but as the capstone and conclusion of an exhortation to a kind of life which fundamentally alters “whatever you wish that men would do to you” from a natural wish for well-being to a supernatural wish for “good things from the Father in Heaven” — who does not give gifts according to desire, but according to the good. What the Christian must wish for himself now includes all manners of goods that natural reason couldn’t have dreamed up: to be loved by his enemies, to be struck on the other cheek after having been struck once before, to be stripped of his love for money, and all manner of absurdities.
Apart from Christian holiness, the Golden Rule is ambivalent. Sadomasochists become as praiseworthy in their “doing unto others” as St. Francis. Augustine made a clear note of this, arguing that “one might desire some crime to be committed for his advantage, and should so construe...that he ought first to do the like to him by whom he would have it done to him. It were absurd to think that this man had fulfilled this command.” [7] Already in Richard Hooker, whom Locke quotes with glowing approval, we see “natural reason” transform the substance of the verse from an exhortation to extend Christian love to all men (wherein “do unto others” receives the emphasis) into a guide for attaining the ends posited by natural selfishness (in which “what you wish from others” receives the emphasis):
“[H]ow should I look to have any part of my desire herein satisfied, unless myself be careful to satisfy the like desire, which is undoubtedly in other men weak, being of one and the same nature: to have anything offered them repugnant to this desire must needs, in all respects, grieve them as much as me; so that if I do harm, I must look to suffer, there being no reason that others should show greater measure of love to me than they have by me showed unto them; my desire, therefore, to be loved of my equals in Nature, as much as possible may be, imposeth upon me a natural duty of bearing to themward fully the like affection.” [8]
My desire to be loved imposes on me a duty to love others. My fear of suffering stays my hand from doing harm. But from where has Hooker derived this duty? Could we not do away with the facade of religion entirely, and argue, from Hooker’s own reasoning, that there is no duty that binds us to love, only our own desires and fears which make loving other people into a practical necessity? Who calls us to treat others as we would like to be treated? Not God, not his Christ, not his Law, not even the Old Law — only our self-interest.
We, children of the digestion of Christ, believe ourselves to have overcome the sectarian trappings of the Golden Rule. Having liberated it from the Bible to its proper place on the bumper sticker, it can now serve as a universal principle of reason by which to live ethically in the modern world. But the Golden Rule, digested by the theology of liberalism, has become the rule of Game Theory, of the Hobbesian state of war, and of Austrian economics, in which all my actions are described as self-interested — and I love my wife because it is the only way “to have any part of my desire herein satisfied.”
This helps to understand why liberal-capitalistic states describe and govern man as economically-motivated actors — not, as it is naively believed, because the theories that gird capitalism have uncovered the “real truth” of human motivation. Liberal-capitalistic states are better described as Christian peoples living under the material heresy of liberalism, through which the commands of Christ are re-defined as reasonable deductions issuing from the human heart. Christ is not given to self-interest, and so, from his mouth, the Golden Rule keeps its worth. The human heart is given to the vice of self-interest, and so, re-described as a “natural law,” the golden rule grows dim. The competitive, free-market economy benefits from a tarnished golden rule, and suffers from the golden rule of Christ. It doesn’t take a particularly incisive Marxist to explain why Hooker’s and Locke’s naturalizing biblical exegesis takes cultural precedence over Saint Matthew.
4. That the fascists are coming
As with the Golden Rule, so with the rest of Christianity: its hard-won constructions are discursively re-described as belonging to man by nature, and subsequent generations are deluded in the belief that nothing fundamental has changed in the switch. In this sense, it is a kind of arch-heresy, one that does not simply over-extend this or that doctrine of the Church, but argues that Christian doctrine itself is the private property of reasonable men. Thus liberalism damns itself, locking the doors of salvation from the inside, because the very way back into the fold of orthodoxy is precisely what has been re-defined as belonging to the heretic’s powers of reason. If the teachings of Christ, the law of the Scripture, the doctrines of the Church all have their apotheosis in the advent of the liberal mind, how then, can a liberal convert? Only, I would argue, by recognizing that this is an illusion — and that the goods won by Christ are not unchanged when they are re-described as the products of human reason, but corrupted.
And this — this is the great fear of the orthodox as they survey the field which has been so thoroughly won by Christian heresy. That, just as the Golden Rule is not-so-subtly dissolved into the Law of Self-Interest, so the other constructions of Christianity which liberals hold dear will be and have already been corrupted. What will become of our natural, reasonable horror of slavery? Our egalitarianism? Our love for the weak, the sick, the poor? Christianity brought these virtues into the world, slaying the gods of strength, but Christianity is undone in the liberal digestion — undone, without anyone recognizing it, having taken heresy for her nature. Already, the strong gods stir from their graves, having heard that their great foe has laid down her divine weapons, believing herself to be sufficient. Already, the nights grow longer.
But even in this darkness, there is hope. Because liberalism is a Christian heresy, it has held and still does hold the breach between the peace and the coming darkness, when anti-Christian technocratic power will be all in all. [9] And in this time that liberalism has bought us, we can act, pray, and by the power of the Holy Spirit convert ourselves and all those bored and dreary in the material heresy of liberalism. Likewise, we can drop the pretense that we are butting heads with post-Christians, of which the “new atheists” (already so old) are the grave and final evolution, becoming instead apostles to a hyper-christian West.
There is a great freedom here, for if it is true that, by and large, our dear friends and families are not pagans, but quasi-heretics, then we need not limit our charitable contention with them to arguments rudely reduced to the secular, bandying pale abstractions about how “religion is good for your health” and how “we all miss you at church.” We can speak with them as our dearly beloved — as wrongheaded sectarians of the universal Church.
René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning: “The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims.”
Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State, pg. 31. http://ldataworks.com/aqr/H_Belloc_The_Servile_State.pdf
Wilhelm, J. (1910). Heresy. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved January 26, 2019 from New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07256b.htm
Aquinas, Collationes in decem praeceptis. “Quia ergo lex naturae per legem concupiscentiae destructa erat, oportebat quod homo reduceretur ad opera virtutis, et retraheretur a vitiis: ad quae necessaria erat lex Scripturae.” https://dhspriory.org/thomas/TenCommandments.htm
Robert South, “The Fatal Imposture, and Force of Words set forth in a sermon preached on Isaiah V.20, May the 9th 1686”, in Twelve Sermons Preached on Several Occasions, First Volume (London, 1692), pp. 448–9. I found this citation in a very insightful dissertation by Julia Ipgrave (2012) entitled “‘First the Original’: the Place of Adam in Seventeenth Century Theories of the Polity.”
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, pg. 106. http://www.yorku.ca/comninel/courses/3025pdf/Locke.pdf
Quoted in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, Matthew 7. https://dhspriory.org/thomas/CAMatthew.htm#7
Locke, Second Treatise, pg. 107
More on this soon, my friends.