AND WHEN SHE WAS… GOOD, SHE WAS HORRID!

Here is another excerpt from the Religion section of my book Nunc Dimittis.

Christianity As A Coat Of Many Colors.
Among all world religions, Christianity is generally declared as the most ‘popular,’ counting well over two billion adherents. And yet, no other religion is splintered into so many diverse, mostly incompatible groups, often giving no recognition to each other, in fact, treating each other worse than they would ever treat any of the non-Christian religions which deny the most fundamental tenet of the Christian dogma: the divinity of Jesus Christ.
To be truthful to reality, there is no way to treat Christianity as one religion, as there is no way to describe the monotheistic triad of Judaism-Christianity-Islam as one religion either, on the sole basis of all three of them recognizing the Torah as Holy Scripture. From my personal experience with them, in the eyes of any Baptist, a Jewish believer in a non-Christian Messiah yet to come, who considers the Trinity a theological blasphemy and denies that Jesus Christ is God, is more theologically acceptable than, say, a Mormon who shares the Baptist’s Christian heritage.
It is, therefore, nonsensical, for all intents and purposes, to view Christianity as a single religion, except for the self-gratifying pleasure of rejoicing in the pseudo-Pythagorean magic of a large number. And, needless to say, I am not going to be among those who indulge in such perverted fantasies.
As I have already made clear, I draw sharp lines of distinction between Russian Orthodox Christianity, on the one hand, and the American brand of Evangelical Protestantism, habitually passed off as Christianity in this nation’s linguistic usage. (Catholicism and several other types of Christianity are habitually identified specifically, rather than generically, that is to say, the term “an American Christian” denotes a born-again believer, and ostensibly excludes the Catholics, and others.)
There is another unpleasant aspect to Christianity, which led Søren Kierkegaard to his famous expression of willingness to worship with a sincere pagan rather than with a fellow-Christian; which also led Nietzsche to his stunning one-liner: “The word Christianity is already a misunderstanding: in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross”; which also led Mahatma Gandhi to confess with mild sarcasm that he could have considered Christianity as a religion had he met at least one Christian among those professing to be such. That unpleasant aspect is the great political power enjoyed by Christianity in its different forms ever since it first became the state religion of the Roman Empire, under Constantine the Great.
Guilt by association. This is what happened to the whole Christian religion as a result of its “malpractice” in every single place, where it was corrupted by its own power. Leaving Russian Orthodox Christianity aside, for the moment, I will concentrate on this last aspect of Christianity as a political force, which has made it so much exposed, and usually deservedly so, to moral condemnation.
Which is, of course, going to be the subject of a few subsequent entries.

“…And When She Was Good, She Was Horrid!”
One of the worst allergies that can afflict an honest man is an allergy to hypocrisy. Among its most severe symptoms is the crooked mirror effect: you are looking at something proper, socially acceptable, nice, and pleasant, and suddenly, you shudder as the heavenly angel’s reflection in that mirror stares at you with the face of a demon. And conversely, something utterly terrible, shocking, socially destructive, something like that infamously wicked Russian nihilism, which was so attractive to Nietzsche, suddenly becomes your pet darling, and not because it allows you to feel comfortable, far from that, but only because, by the virtue (or should I say vice?) of its frightening nature, it terrifies Tartuffe.
Consequently, the best deluxe and unabridged authorities on language, the Websters and the Oxfords, now become useless and must be thrown away, as the words change their meanings to the opposites.
It is with this noteworthy preamble in mind that I suggest reading the following excerpt from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo: Why I am a destiny, Section 4:
"In the great economy of the whole, the terrible aspects of reality (in affects, in desires, in the will to power) are to an incalculable degree more necessary than the form of petty happiness which people call goodness. ...Zarathustra, who was the first to grasp that the optimist is just as decadent as the pessimist, and perhaps more harmful, says: “Good men never speak the truth.” In this sense, Zarathustra calls the good, now “the last men,” now the “beginning of the end,” he considers them the most harmful type of man, because they prevail at the expense of truth and at the expense of the future."
Once again we are getting the proof that Nietzsche is allergic (and justifiably so!) to the sin of hypocrisy, that same ugliness that led Kierkegaard to come up with his ‘outrageous’ declaration that he would rather worship with a sincere pagan, than with a hypocritical fellow-Christian. And I shall always respond with ‘Amen’ to Nietzsche’s wicked paradox “Good men never speak the truth,” if we agree to view his words as here stipulated.
But wait, there is much more! In his follow-up to that very same passage Nietzsche goes on to propose the existence of an irreconcilable antagonism between ‘the good’ and Jesus Christ! God being the Truth, now we can discern Nietzsche’s philosophical consistency in his already profusely quoted by us dictum: “Good men never speak the truth.” Here is that follow-up:
“The good are unable to create; they crucify him who writes new values on new tablets; (another powerful allusion to the Only Christian Ever, the One Who died on the cross!) they sacrifice all man’s future. And whatever harm those do who slander the world, the harm done by the good is the most harmful harm.”
Which may sound like an awfully-wicked condemnation of goodness, but not if we put it into an authentic Biblical context, such as the following: “Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven.” (Matthew 12:39.)
What else could be meant by blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, if not the abominable sin of hypocrisy, or posing as the good, and using God’s name in vain, that is, without sincerity, which is committing evil acts in the name of goodness?

The Second Coming Of God.
Savonarola was a match stricken against the wind. The match was too small, the wind, too great. Half a millennium later, the forces are more evenly matched. What used to be the glory of Western Civilization is steadily eroding, due to a severe internal conflict between its traditional Christian morality, undermined by the inherent hypocrisy of the “established” religion, identified by Kierkegaard, and the nasty onslaught of militant immorality, as represented by the doctrine of Globalism and characterized by Godlessness, not in the sense of some atheistic doctrineering on its part, far from it, but by its utter trivialization of religion, in which the latter is reduced to the role of a circus for that part of the masses which still needs an alternative to the circus of pornography.
This self-contradiction, this irresolvable conflict, which can be called the fatal flaw of traditional Western Christianity is, of course, the centerpiece thesis in my Capitalism & Christianity.
On the other side of the struggle we have the new Savonarola, the rise of radical Islam, made invincible by its political alliance with the Russians. Whereas the luckless Florentine was forced to take on the power of The Papal Rome without any logistical support for himself whatsoever, the Islamic world today has found a good friend in The Third Rome, creating a truly unbeatable combination!
How silly it is on the part of our American scholars to represent this Clash of Civilizations as a World War of Religions, when at the heart of the struggle is the rebellion of Religion against Irreligion, which allows the centuries-smart Russians to pull their scrumptious political chestnuts out of the fire.
This new cataclysmic (and hopefully, cathartic!) development has been prophetically foreseen by Nietzsche in Zarathustra’s Apocalyptic visions, but only vaguely, as it turns out, because he seems to have failed to appreciate the staying power, the resilience of religion, as the humanity’s quest for absolute morality, and had his vision of things to come set in reverse!

“Does God Want You To Be Rich?”
Such was the front page title on the cover of the Time Magazine some time ago. This, and all similar “God-related” questions are quite common nowadays, in the “what would Jesus wear?” vein, but to me they sound much like blasphemy.
Does God Want You To Be Rich? Who is the “you” here? Is this a generic or a personal question? Some people are destined to be rich, others, to be poor, their individual fates and circumstances are so different in every respect that it is utterly obscene and ridiculous even to pose such a question. God merely wants you “to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God” (Micah 6:8), and nothing else. And yet how many of our devout Bible-quoting American Christians would be honestly offended by the substance of the “Does God Want You To Be Rich?” question, if any at all?
Finally, the whole line of what would Jesus do? questions that I mentioned before, is just as inappropriate. It subconsciously takes the focus away from one’s own actions, and effectively dilutes the directness of the fundamental ethical question we must ask ourselves, what ought I to do? As long as we are allowed to ask this about Jesus, we are ready to go astray in our own behavior with the readily available excuse that all of us are sinners, fallen short of the glory of God. No more personal responsibility and accountability for our own actions. Remembering Terentius, “Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi”!

Religion And Mythology.
In describing all legitimate religions as monotheistic and all polytheistic religions as mythology, I remind myself of the great philosophers of Greece and their concept of God. Living in a pronouncedly polytheistic society, mind you, they seem to ignore the Olympian “division of labor” among those numerous little and big gods and goddesses, and always speak of their Deity as something whole, timeless and infinite, beyond all dimensions and locations, something absolute, above all human emotions, monistic, ergo monotheistic, whereas the popular gods are relative, limited, and all-too-human, ergo polytheistic. It should not be at all shocking then for anyone to assert that all polytheistic religions are essentially not-at-all-serious religions. Their whole idea is not to dilute and trivialize the concept of Absolute Deity, which, as I just said, must be monistic, and therefore monotheistic, by sheer logical-philosophical necessity (if “The All” comes from one source, the essence of Divinity cannot be anything but monistic as well!), but only to create a whole class of superheroes of very questionable morality, and therefore, unfit to serve as absolute standards for anything, superheroes whose superhuman strength and apparently excellent health (they require their physician-god Asclepius mostly to tend to their wounds, a very appropriate occupation for this bunch of “warrior-gods,” presiding over a warrior-society of humans) glorify exactly that kind of master morality, which who else but Nietzsche described with such exceptional insightfulness in his Genealogy of Morals, referring to the development of social, “historistic,” if I may use such a word, morality. In fact, this is precisely what the Greeks have done: in order to glorify their heroes, their ideal of manly strength and warrior fitness, they even traced the origin of their heroes to those polytheistic gods and their down-to-earth pursuits of mortal pleasures. Thus, in summary of what I have said about the Greeks, all polytheistic religions seem to have no connection to the philosophical concept of the Deity. When an occasional Greek poet/philosopher sings praise to Zeus as the Absolute God, it is an exception, a misnomer, a matter of sheer convenience. Such an Ode to Zeus (by Cleanthes, in this case) is inherently monotheistic, and none of such instances should ever be cited in defense of any kind of polytheistic Absolute, which would of course be a contradiction in terms. The same goes for Hesiod, the great ancient author of Theogony and Works and Days. Hesiod’s Zeus is no Homer’s Zeus. He is the supreme and moral ruler of the Universe, practically, the monotheistic God:
“Through him mortal men are famed or unfamed, sung or unsung alike, as great Zeus wills. Easily makes he strong, and easily brings he the strong man low; easily humbles he the proud and raises the obscure. So there is no escape from the will of Zeus.”
But even in Homer, though, there is a constant reference to a power higher than the polytheistic gods, call it Fate or something else, but there is at least some persistent gravitation toward the concept of One Deity, far greater than Zeus himself and all his Olympus put together.
One of my Apte Dictums thus sums this up: “All philosophy is necessarily monotheistic, and so is authentic religion. Even atheism is monotheistic. Polytheism is not a religion, but a mythology.”

Moses And Aaron: The Leader And The Priest.
Moses the Leader and Aaron the Priest… Who can say even in their densest ignorance, that the Leader in this case represents Caesar, and the Priest represents God? Moses, not Aaron was the one talking to God. Moses, not Aaron brought his people the Ten Commandments. Moshe Rabeinu, not Aaron is venerated as the first and greatest Rabbi of Israel. So much for the dichotomy of the Leader and the Priest!
Here is a Biblical endorsement of the church-state situation, in which the leader has not only political, but also religious supremacy over the priest.

The Stumbling Stone Of The Christian Canon.
It is never my intention, here or anywhere else, for that matter, to introduce lengthy quotes from the greatest philosophers of all time, as there is a proper place allotted to such passages, supplied with my comments, in the prospective S&C Folder. However, in this case I am making an exception, not only out of the desire to keep all important annotations in one place for the time being, but also because I ought to write an extended essay on the hugely important, yet dramatically underrated subject of the Christian Canon, and if it expands into a larger thesis, the considerable length of this quotation from Hobbes ought not to present any problem. The quietly acknowledged, but deliberately downplayed incongruity of the Christian Canon throughout the Christendom is an awkward phenomenon with great philosophical implications, which need to be brought to light, and put in sharp focus.
“By the Books of Holy Scripture are understood those which ought to be the canon, that is to say, the rules of Christian life. And because all rules of life, which men are in conscience bound to observe, are laws, the question of the Scripture is the question of what is law throughout all Christendom, both natural and civil. For though it be not determined in Scripture what laws every Christian king shall constitute in his own dominions; yet it is determined what laws he shall not constitute. Seeing therefore I have already proved that sovereigns in their own dominions are the sole legislators; those books only are canonical, that is, law, in every nation, which are established for such by the sovereign authority. It is true that God is the Sovereign of all sovereigns, and therefore, when he speaks to any subject, he is the one who ought to be obeyed, whatsoever any earthly potentate command to the contrary. But the question is not of obedience to God, but of when, and what God has said; which, to subjects that have no supernatural revelation, cannot be known but by that natural reason which guided them for the obtaining of peace and justice to obey the authority of their several Commonwealths; that is, of their lawful sovereigns. According to this obligation, I can acknowledge no other book of the Old Testament to be the Holy Scripture but those which have been commanded to be acknowledged for such by the authority of the Church of England. What books these are is sufficiently known without a catalogue of them here and they are the same that are acknowledged by St. Jerome, who holds the rest, namely, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Judith, Tobias, the first and the second of Maccabees (though he had seen the first in Hebrew), and the third and fourth of Esdras, for Apocrypha. Of the canonical, Josephus reckons twenty-two, making this number agree with the Hebrew alphabet. St. Jerome does the same, though they reckon them in different manner. For, Josephus numbers five books of Moses, thirteen of prophets that writ the history of their times (how it agrees with prophets’ writings contained in the Bible, we shall see hereafter), and four of Hymns and of moral precepts. But St. Jerome counts five Books of Moses, eight of the prophets, and nine other which he calls Hagiographa. The Septuagint, who were the seventy learned Jews, sent for by Ptolemy, king of Egypt, to translate the Jewish law from Hebrew into Greek, have left us no other Holy Scripture in Greek, but the same that is received in the Church of England. As for the books of the New Testament, they are all equally recognized as the canon by all Christian churches and by all sects of Christians that admit any books at all for canonical.”
This passage in Leviathan, Chapter XXXIII, is important because it points to the existence of major Canon differences of principle, between three major Christian denominations: Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant, all being in an irreconcilable disagreement on the most basic question of the Christian faith: which Books of the Bible are to be considered the true word of God, and which are not to! I remember talking about this subject with some Baptists, who showed me their ignorance and even expressed certain displeasure with the “wicked me” daring to touch upon something too close for their dearly cherished spiritual comfort. Yet, this is a very important subject indeed, wherein the non-uniformity of Canon shows a glaring deficiency of the great religion of Christianity, unless we were to adopt here the position of the Russian Orthodox Church, which claims that only its Canon, being the most complete, is also the true Word of God, whereas all the others, including the Catholic Bible, (which is much longer than the Protestant Bible, but apparently, not long enough) suffer from the deplorable, if not lethal, flaw of incompleteness.
In this respect, it certainly makes an interesting point of argument, how the Epistle of Jude, recognized as Canonical by the Protestants, and, of course, by everybody else in the Christian world, and therefore, as the true Word of God, contains direct quotations from the Book of Enoch (“And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousand of his saints,” etc. [in Jude 1:14]), which is part of the canonical Slavonic Bible, but is relegated to the Apocrypha elsewhere.
Philosophically, such an exclusion particularly by the Protestants does not make sense. If the Book of Jude is the Word of God to them, should not the text, quoted in the Word of God, be sacred as well? And yet, it remains rejected, and there is not enough controversy, not even a recognition that, perhaps, Martin Luther could be wrong, and a new look at the “abridged” Canon is in order, and long overdue?…
The point of my entry here is not in any way to resolve the irresolvable conflict of the Church Canons but to prove once again that in all matters outside the respective realms of particular religions, be that politics or general philosophy, or any other matters of social practice and statecraft, one must not try to go ‘outside his religion,’ (as Judge Roberts put it, in his Confirmation Hearings for the position of Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, but to try to rise above and beyond individual religions to the concept of the Absolute Deity, where any such controversy, as this one about the Christian Canon, would not threaten the foundations of the dogma, as, in fact, the incongruity of the Canon does, but would appear overall irrelevant and insignificant in the larger theological-philosophical context.

Judaeo-Christian Tradition?
Before leaving the subject of the monotheistic tradition, that ties together Torah Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in a formal way, at least one loose end needs to be looked at, tied in, if it belongs, or cut off, if it does not.
The phrase Judaeo-Christian Tradition has become quite fashionable in America lately. It is being used so glibly, and with such casual nonchalance, as if it were something trivial or completely self-evident, that it is almost a venial sin of stupidity to wonder about, and question, its exact meaning.
And yet, I keep wondering, and now is, perhaps, the right time and place to take a closer look at it.
What is this Judaeo-Christian Tradition? Is it a broader cultural, or a purely theological tradition?
If it is thought to be cultural, no wonder our Western Civilization has been so much confused lately! Having learned religion only from the Jews, most of our culture comes from the Greeks, most of our science comes from the Arabs, most of our jurisprudence comes from Rome (or rather from Constantinople, if we consider the geographical location of Emperor Justinian at the time of Codex Justinianus)... Besides, ask any Jew about a Judaeo-Christian Cultural Tradition, and he or she will laugh in your face!
In that case, it has to be a Judaeo-Christian Religious Tradition? Again, ask any sincerely religious Jew and he or she will be seriously offended. Religiously, Judaism has a close connection to Islam (both follow strict religious laws of circumcision and dietary prohibition, totally absent in Christianity, both claim their physically descent from Abraham, and of course both view the fundamental tenet of Christianity, namely the divinity of Jesus Christ, as a religious blasphemy). In other words, it is much more appropriate to speak of a Judaeo-Islamic religious tradition than about a Judaeo-Christian tradition, although such reorientation must instantly expose the ridiculous nature of such a generalization.
Well, historically, Christianity was indeed a “Jewish religion” at first, but immediately broke away from the traditional Judaic religious and cultural mold. At best, a radical allegorical reinterpretation of the old Jewish tradition (inasmuch as the New Testament can be called a reinterpretation of the Old Testament) it was at worst a repudiation of the old Judaic tradition, as the scribes and Pharisees were quick to point out to Jesus himself---
"Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? (!) For they wash not their hands when they eat bread." (Matthew 15:2.)
Jesus does not deny the fact of this deliberate transgression, but he retorts with a counter-question---
"Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition? For God commanded saying honor thy father and mother... (Matthew 15:3-4.)
It is remarkable that the scribes confront Jesus with a violation of a distinctively Judaic religious tradition, given to Moses by God at Sinai for the Jewish people only, while Jesus appeals to a commandment, which carries force not only in Judaism, but in all great religions, and thus points to an ethical commandment for all humanity, brushing off the specificity of the Judaic Tradition proper, and with it, any specific religious connection between Judaism and Christianity, which would not be part of God’s universal Commandment to all descendants of Adam and Eve, who also include the Buddhists, the Hinduists, and, generally speaking, the adherents of all great national religions of the world.
And finally, the word Tradition has its special theological meaning in world religions, which makes them either completely irreconcilable and usually outright antagonistic, or, when generalized to the point of their sufficient harmonization, it makes no sense to single out some kind of separate Judaeo-Christian connection within the comprehensive general design of total religious interconnectedness. For my part, I see a definite interconnectedness among all great religions, and it makes more sense, in our troubled world, to highlight this interconnectedness than to take two of these religions, conspicuously irreconcilable over the question of the divinity of Jesus Christ, and to pretend, for whatever reason, that a special connection exists between them which leaves everybody else outside their circle.

Pantheism As An Attempt At Transcendence.
Spinoza’s great skepticism about Freedom is only one of the aspects of his attractiveness to me. There is yet another point of interest about his philosophy, which makes him particularly relevant to the subject at hand. Considering that he was a man of complicated multi-culturalism, it can well be true that even though he was philosophically-religious, he had lost his connection to “cultural religion,” and was trying to get back to the concept of God not by the natural course of starting at the roots of a cultural tradition, but by bypassing the roots, in order to arrive at a more artificial, yet still philosophically acceptable concept of God. In that case, what if his pantheism is a search akin to mine, to reach the Absolute by transcending the God of Religion? Thus, I can probably formulate this short, but deeply searching query as follows: Spinoza’s pantheism was a peculiar attempt on his part at transcendence from the “religion-specific” to the Absolute.

Birth Of Great Religions And Their Maturity Elsewhere.
How come that the nations most closely associated with the great religions of the world are “foster nations,” who have adopted them from elsewhere. Christianity was born among the Jews, but had not stayed with the Jews. (As for the original native Torah Judaism of Moses and Aaron, it no longer exists!) Exiled from India, Buddhism took root in China, and elsewhere. Even with Islam, its strongest adherents and promoters were the Turks, and indirectly the Persians, rather than the Arabs themselves. Truly, it has been said that there is no honor for a prophet in his own homeland. As for religions themselves, born in one place, it is in a wholly different place that they reach their maturity and flourish. Putting it in other words, it is not in the homeland of their founders that religions grow to their full potential, but in the foster homes of others whose spirit and historical destiny are more attuned to their message.

Argument From Authority.
The question of how Neo-Platonism virtually infected early Christian thought and scholarship is far larger than its specific answer, as it tells us something about the power of the argument from authority, which can coax a pillar of religious orthodoxy into a wholehearted acceptance of any kind of heresy, provided that the credentials are presented in the form of two words: ipse dixit!
They say that it was Plotinus, who unwittingly reconciled Christianity with Plato, by creating an acceptable form of Platonism, known as Neo-Platonism, where all religiously offensive elements of Plato’s teachings were removed, and the more compatible elements were reinterpreted into an even more compatible mold. But to me, it was the work of the devilishly clever impostor, presenting his Neo-Platonic heresies under the guise of the Biblical authority (Acts 17:34) Dionysius the Areopagite, also known as St. Denis. No less an authority than St. Thomas Aquinas bought the hoax, having quoted this Pseudo-Dionysius some 1700 times in his own works, thus giving him even further legitimacy. (The forger’s real name is still unknown, but the fact that he was indeed an impostor has subsequently been revealed. This, however, never resulted in any kind of repudiation of the heresy itself, as by that time it had been endorsed by the unimpeachable authority of the authentic Doctors of the Church.)
No matter how scandalous this story may sound to us, it is hardly surprising. Since its inception Christianity relied on the discipline of recognized authority, rather than on the substance of its dogma. The difference in principle between heresy and dogma was merely on whose side the majority of the votes would be, and very often that majority was razor-thin, or nonexistent, as the power of the sword would cast the decisive vote.
Should we, then, condemn the fact that even the greatest scholastic philosophers relied on authority of ipse dixit, rather than on the power of the intellectual argument, or perhaps even their own secret conviction? We can hardly isolate such submission from the dogmatic submission of reason to faith with the latter becoming a substitute for instinct. This is the situation where the Church takes control of all forms of life and activity, including philosophy and common sense. Great power always corrupts, and as the great Kierkegaard keenly noted, the great power of the Church, not just in the Dark Ages, but even much later on, including present time, was bound to corrupt official Christianity.

A United Church Of Christ?
One of the bitterest ironies of Christianity is its shattering fragmentation into a myriad angry little pieces, all so antagonistically hostile to each other that among the Evangelical Christians the word “Catholic” elicits so much hatred that one might think they are talking about the devil, whereas, say, Judaism, with its categorical denial of the divinity of Jesus, has virtually become to them an older-sister religion.
Mind you, I am not saying that all is well with the non-Christian religions. The Moslems, too, are famously split into the Sunni and the Shia, currently kind of united only by their common hatred of Israel. Judaism, as our next example, is also split into at least two irreconcilable branches of Orthodox and non-Orthodox (that is, Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist, which may have slight differences among themselves, but are equally anathema to the Orthodox), in which hostility violence has given way to utter contempt, overt on the part of the Orthodox and subtly understated on the part of the others. With regard to such other religions as Buddhism, Hinduism, Chinese and Japanese religions and a few other national culture-oriented religions, one can safely say that these are not the kinds of religions that quarrel with each other over legitimacy and supremacy: being largely cultural-ritualistic or introspective, they have never competed with the Abrahamic religions in the intensity of violence, and the self-righteousness of dogma.
Having said all that, the subject of our entry is the division within Christianity, and a few questions it raises, such as how and why this division has occurred, and whether a Christian reunification might be a good thing or not.
To begin with, early differences between diverse Christian groups were inevitable and quite natural because of their considerable geographical spread and the unsettledness of St. Paul’s Christian dogma, which left too many details questionable and effectively unattended, encouraging each small Christian sect to address them separately from each other, that is, literally, to think for themselves.
Until the year 313 AD, Christianity was illegal in the Roman empire, and, therefore, no Christian assemblies on a larger than local scale were allowed. The situation changed dramatically twice in a short period of time between Emperor Constantine’s Edict of Milan, issued in that year, which legitimized the Christian Church, and allowed it the freedom of assembly, and the convening of the first formal Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325, presided over by Emperor Constantine himself. By that time the question of heresies was already the most important one facing the Church (in the year 314, with the help of Constantine the Christian Church of Rome had already defeated the heresy of Donatus at the Synod of Arles, but that victory had not yet been an ecumenical one, strictly speaking, as Donatus was the leader of the North African Christian community, and it was only in 347 AD that Donatus could be removed from his church and exiled in Gaul, where he died).
It must be said that the Christian Church from the very beginning understood the importance of rooting out dissent, and as it had become the State Church of the Roman Empire, its internal unity was giving assurance to the political unity of the State, which it was designed to be the uniting force for, in the first place. But the political-administrative split of the Roman Empire itself into East and West which was already happening at the time, was bound to create a political crisis within the Church and it did, when the Church of the West, in Rome made her move to subjugate the Eastern Churches, demanding a collective episcopal decision-making process. As a result of this conflict, the first major split of Christianity into the mutually antagonistic Roman Catholic (Western) and Greek Orthodox (Eastern) branches thus occurred, followed by a speedy rise of the Russian Orthodox Church after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. The next “anti-ecumenical” event in the history of Christianity was, of course, Martin Luther’s Reformation. Politically motivated and encouraged, Protestantism was never intended to become a unified entity on a par with the Roman Catholic Church. Needless to say, John Calvin was never an obedient follower of Luther, nor were the other leaders of the Reformation, and heretics were burnt at the stake among the Protestants, too. And soon thereafter, the English Reformation of King Henry VIII was to show the world that Christianity had been split forever and beyond an even theoretical rehabilitation.
Under such adverse historical circumstances, it is simply mind-boggling that anybody should have come up with an idea of putting the Christian Humpty-Dumpty together again. It is one thing to attempt an interfaith reconciliation of sorts (a permanent religious ceasefire, like the Peace of Westphalia accommodation, or the more modern broader effort at inter-religious coexistence) but how could one expect even in a perfect world of sweet dreams, to bring back all those countless millions of wayward sheep into the fold of their erstwhile Roman shepherd, and then, for what purpose?!
And, even worse, it seems impossible to imagine any religiously sensitive Russian who would honestly, and even passionately, propose a Christian reunification under the aegis of the Roman Pope, that is, propose that every Russian Orthodox Christian should happily submit himself (and herself) to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church merely for the sake of a questionable Christian unity. Where does that leave the Protestant branch of Christianity, for instance? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And yet, there was such a Russian, and to make this even more incredible, he was never anathemized by the Russian Church, nor ostracized by the Russian Orthodox community, but, on the contrary, was and remains an icon of Russian religious philosophy and mystic poetry, having influenced several generations of Russian mystic thinkers from Leo Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely and Vyacheslav Ivanov to Nikolai Berdyaev and the Orthodox theologians Sergei Bulgakov and Pavel Florensky, among others. He was only mildly criticized for his outrageous idea of Christian Catholization by his contemporaries, which is already the first clue to one of the reasons why he had come up with this idea in the first place.
In order to get acquainted with this rather strange, but very interesting figure, I am sending the reader to my Russia section, where the Solovyev entry can be found under the title The Meaning Of Love, after one of his own famous book titles. In the remainder of this entry I shall discuss the reasons how Solovyev’s seemingly outrageous idea had become possible in the mind of a consummate Russian intelligent.
Like all Russian thinkers, Solovyev was looking for a solution to the world’s problems, and found it in the supranational universalist idea of Sophia, God’s Wisdom, which calls for Theocracy, which means that the ideal world of the future will be ruled not by man’s laws, but by God’s divine laws. Theocracy, in his mind, demanded a unification of Christianity, and its centralization. Apparently, he considered the Russian Church incapable of assuming world leadership, being subjected to secular control of the Russian State (agreeing to Russian Church’s international leadership role, under such circumstances, would be tantamount to accepting the Russian Tsar as the spiritual leader of the Christian world, something understandably unacceptable to all non-Russian Christians!), whereas the Pope, in his opinion, had no secular authority to answer to, in fact, he was the only transnational figure of authority who might be acceptable in the role of the spiritual leader of the world. Keep in mind that in Vladimir Solovyev’s lifetime there was no Patriarch in the Russian Church (the position was abolished by Peter the Great, and reestablished only in 1918, sic!), and the official head of the Russian Church was the Ober-Prokuror (or Chief Procurator) of the Holy Synod, or in plain words a lay functionary of the Russian Tsarist Government.
Thus idealistically merging Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy, Vladimir Solovyev was innocently dismissive of all Protestant denominations, which was characteristic of the general Russian attitude towards Protestantism: more as a quirk, and a subversive religious virus, than as a legitimate branch of Christianity. Our next question is therefore, what about the other world religions: how were they supposed to fit into his scheme?
He believed that, first and foremost, the Christian world of his time was so overwhelmingly more powerful than the non-Christian rest of the world, that it was up to the Christians to call the shots in the coming world order. He also believed (as will be further illustrated in his special entry The Meaning Of Love) that Christ’s power, once established in that manner in the Christian world, would be able to project such strong ethical values that the rest of the world will be compelled to change for the better.
So goes Vladimir Solovyev’s religious utopia, and yet I have not placed this entry into the Wishful Thinking section, because as a utopian dream it is not as interesting as the purely religious question of the possibility of somehow putting an end to the Christian fragmentation and the internecine hostility within Christianity. It is here, I think, that Solovyev makes the critical mistake of dreaming up a supranational and supra-cultural religion, calling it Christianity. The fact of the matter is that such a super-religion does not exist and cannot possibly be recreated. There is a dramatic and unbridgeable cultural divide among the different branches of Christianity, and trying to impose a common super-religion on the Christian nations very much reminds me of the efforts of certain linguists of fairly recent history trying to impress the common language Esperanto on the nations of the world, who did not even have to resort to kicking and screaming to bury the miscreant idea.
And herewith I am going to repeat my by now familiar ‘mantra.’ To each nation, to each established culture belongs its own historically established religion, and it is incredibly foolish to try to tinker with religions or cultures, in order to reach a mutually acceptable enlightened accommodation. What needs to be done is for the nations of the world to transcend individual “ground-floor” religions of each other, and ascend to the upper floor, where all individual religions are distilled into a common philosophical realm of a heightened spirituality and enlightened ideas, all rooted in individual religions, but now reaching together toward the same God whom Vladimir Solovyev was also trying to reach, but, alas, took a wrong path.

Creation And Evolution.
This is just one of several entries on the subject, but, being short and to the point, it is undoubtedly the most definitive of them all.
Creation and evolution. These days, they are treated as comparable propositions, but in fact, they are worlds apart. Evolutionism has evolved scientifically from a scientific hypothesis, but creationism has always been, and still is a matter of belief. Unless we are trying to subject belief to a scientific scrutiny, which will be bad for both of them, they ought to be kept distinctly separate, as a matter of principle. Leave to religion what is religion’s, and to science what is science’s. It is that simple.

Religion And Absurdity.
In various sections of this book I am offering comments on the concept of the absurd. This concept plays an important role in philosophy, but it is also quite significant insofar as religion is concerned. First introduced into serious conversation by Kierkegaard, who was, of course, both a philosopher and a theologian, there is no way for us to avoid talking about it here.
This is how Kierkegaard talks about the absurd in his Journals (1849):
"What is the Absurd? It is, as may quite easily be seen, that I, a rational being, must act in a case where my reason and my powers of reflection tell me: you can just as well do the one thing as the other, that is to say, where my reason and reflection say: you cannot act, and yet here is where I have to act... The Absurd, or to act by virtue of the absurd, is to act upon faith ... I must act, but reflection has closed the road so I take one of the possibilities and say: This is what I do, I cannot do otherwise because I am brought to a standstill by my powers of reflection."
The gist of philosophical absurdity is the fact that man has been searching since the beginning of philosophy (not always clearly and distinctly, but incessantly nevertheless) for the meaning of life, but has failed to find it in a straightforward fashion. It has finally been realized thanks largely to Kierkegaard, that the meaning of life cannot be found by a rational process, because there is an inflexible irrational element standing between the individual and the outside world, which creates irrational challenges to our quest for the meaning, and it is well understood that irrational obstacles cannot be overcome by rational means. (In geometry, it has been known for almost three millennia now that the hypotenuse of the simple right-angled triangle, with each side equal to 1 cannot be expressed by a rational number thus infusing the unavoidable irrational element into an otherwise rational picture.) What happens now, as a result of this discovery, becomes clear as we look for a dictionary definition of “absurd” and find its first meaning as “contrary to reason.” Now, if a rational quest for the meaning of life has failed thus making it inaccessible to reason, perhaps a non-rational quest may do better, and what is more non-rational in the world than our religious sense, based on faith, or instinct, rather than on reason?
The point of the previous discussion now becomes clear, as we see that from the logic of the above, the way to find the meaning of life is through religion and in religion. The absurd is the clash of our rationality with the non-rationality of the object of our quest, ergo, religion is the answer. Those who still wish to access the meaning of life rationally, are welcome to keep trying, if the utter historical failure of such an effort has not taught them anything… (Although Kierkegaard expresses all this somewhat differently from my exposition of the problem, his conclusion is inevitably the same.)
This conclusion is very tempting and appealing to a person with religious sensibilities, but, philosophically speaking, it has two flaws. One of them is that we have assumed that the non-rational approach to our non-rational problem is only through faith, whereas non-rationality is by no means limited to religion and can be theoretically achieved via instinct and intuition, where religious faith per se does not play a major role. And the other flaw of this approach is that it represents a resignation to the problem. We have found ourselves a convenient copout, and stopped digging into the problem any further. Case closed.
Having said that, I do not specially favor Camus’ non-religious approach to the problem of the meaning of life, leading him to the well-known formulation of the philosophy of absurdism, which he is famous for (see my discussion of it in the earlier-mentioned entry in the Philosophy section). But what I like most about it is that he has not stopped delving into the problem, and has given us some excellent food for thought in search for alternative paths. Furthermore, he has alerted us to the depths of the meaning of the term absurd, where Kierkegaard, although making the first step, did not go far enough, either in this term’s basic definition or in its application.
It can hardly be argued that Sisyphus need not look for a meaning of his ‘life after death’ in eternity, as long as he can persuade himself to feel happy about his senseless task. But such an attitude smacks too much of a resigned self-delusion.
On my part, I am quite satisfied with Kierkegaard’s irrationality through religious faith but only as long as it can be complemented by an infusion of rationality, which comes from the identification of “patriotism,” that is love of one’s country, as a necessary component of the meaning of life. An alienated individual cannot be competent enough to fight against the absurdity of life by any means, including those suggested by Camus. I see the solution to this problem in the familiar phrase “God and Country,” where both sides of the quest, the rational, love of country, and the irrational, love of God, unite in a wholesome whole. For those who wish to find happiness in just one of these two components and not in the other, there is definite sense there too, but those who are given such a choice (of one or the other or both) are never going to pretend to find happiness in senselessness, as Camus’ Sisyphus allegory suggests, which, for Camus, is the only sensible way to avert suicide as the most radical solution to absurdity.
And finally, I can be reproached, or else suspected of a horrendous oversight, in having not spoken at all yet about human love, or sexual love, of which Vladimir Solovyev wrote as of the only cure against selfishness. (See my entry The Meaning of Love in the Russian section.) It can well be argued (as far as I know, I am the only one so far arguing in this manner) that selfishness is what constitutes the essence of absurdity in man’s search for the meaning of life. But while I may somewhat agree with Solovyev’s implication that our love of God may well be rooted in our selfishness, I would strongly disagree if the same is said about the patriotic love of one’s country. Patriotism comes from a sense of collectivity (whereas love of God often disguises a sense of personal uniqueness and electivity). But coming back to sexual love, plus the love of family and of one’s children, such a love is highly commendable, but it is extremely dangerous to find the meaning of life in it, as it is too fragile, and even a temporary disappointment of such a love may quickly lead a person who had invested the meaning of life in it, exactly to that selfsame suicide, which both Kierkegaard and Camus were seeking to prevent by finding an alternative to it, and which is the main reason why we are so much concerned about the problem of the meaning of life in the first place.

Advocatus Christi.
There is a marvelous scientific, logical, and legal methodological tool known as argumentum a contrario. It used to be my favorite tool of approaching philosophical, mathematical, and other problems, and up to this day I am often getting in unnecessary trouble by appearing to argue against a reasonable proposition, which I am actually in full agreement with, just in order to give this proposition an additional irrefutable proof.
Related to argumentum a contrario is the familiar term advocatus diaboli. Becoming devil’s advocate does not really mean that one is defending the devil, but, au contraire, we appear to take up his defense mainly to prove that he is indefensible. “Defending the devil” is our best way to hone our weapons to defeat him, and thus effectively engaging in the logical argumentum a contrario, a supposedly negative activity, we achieve the best positive results.
Unfortunately, my experience in modern America shows to me that this nation has no understanding of what is involved in one’s becoming an advocatus diaboli. Most Americans, even the reasonably educated ones by this nation’s standards, tend to believe that by becoming one you are actually siding with the devil! Believe me, there is no way for us of proving otherwise as the opponent’s mind is instantly cast in pig iron and there is no subtlety in the air he inhales and exhales. The cause of the devil’s advocate is a lost cause.
Ironically, in American Evangelical churches, both in their members’ parlance among themselves and in the proselytizing and other outwardly directed activities, these Christian men and Christian women never fail to assume the role of an advocatus Christi, trying to defend Jesus Christ to the world, as if he needs a defense! What they obviously fail to understand, in the process, that from the logical and psychological point of view an advocatus Christi assumes the role of an advocatus diaboli, and in the minds of the other side, when the other side, of course, possesses at least a minimum of mental sophistication, the passionate defense fails and instead of persuading the opponent to adopt the Christ’s Advocate’s position, the other side dismisses it out of hand.
Don’t get me wrong. I do not advocate that any Christian become a theological devil’s advocate. Such task is a hard and tricky one. What I advocate however is that our Christian zealots stop playing advocati Christi, as their defense most often accomplishes the opposite result.

Khovanshchina.
Until the point of this entry is made fully clear, the question would prevail why this subject is being treated here, in Religion, and not in a presumably more appropriate place, such as, say, the Sonnets, or Russia, or even History?
The answer is clear. Even though the subject of Russian history is seemingly dominant here (the subject of music is certainly secondary, although Mussorgsky’s music is extremely powerful in its own right), religion takes center stage in our particular comment, giving credit, along the way, to Mussorgsky’s personal choice of this particular subject, and to his brilliant story and screenplay, on a par with Wagnerian musical dramas. In fact, this is not just religion as such, but Russian historical development of religious appreciation, as felt by Mussorgsky himself.
Khovanshchina’s creator’s sympathy is clearly with Starets Dosifei and his fanatical followers, the Starover old believers, who are ready to die for their faith, against the reforms of Patriarch Nikon, supported by the Russian State. Why is Mussorgsky so sympathetic toward the Starovers?
The answer is obvious. Mussorgsky was a witness to the steady decline of the prestige of Russian Orthodox Faith, and he was definitely more sympathetic toward Dosifei and his ilk, more akin to the breed of the early Christian believers, standing in direct opposition to the State. He would surely have welcomed the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which was to revive the decaying corpse of Russia’s Christianity, by turning every sincere Russian Christian into a Dosifei, of sorts.
Thus, the moral of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina is that, insofar as true religion is concerned, a zealot must be preferable to a hypocrite. This Kierkegaardian message, although forcefully delivered within the Russian context, cannot be limited to Russia’s context, but transcends it across the board.