(This entry ought to be immediately following its natural precedent on Christian Fundamentalism. It is very important to understand, though, why this entry belongs in Religion, and not in Philosophy. St. Augustine’s and Luther’s doctrines were not projected as philosophy for the few, but as popular theology for the masses, even if some aspects of St. Augustine’s theory in particular sound overly arcane. His least comprehensible ideas are perhaps meant for the more sophisticated pastors of the sheep, but their end consumers are still the sheep. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, is a great philosopher for the elite, but in the passages quoted at length in this entry his subject of analysis is religion, and not philosophy, either.)
If the Bible were indeed the literal word of God, the horrors awaiting the sinners in afterlife, the gruesome never-ending torture, the agonizing never-ending pain and the somber promise that "there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth" (Matthew 13:42) are an outcome of God’s Creation that needs to be looked at from at least two sides, man’s and God’s. Let us take man’s side first. What is God’s purpose in telling us these things? Are we to be thus comforted that our offenders in this life would be properly punished in the next? Which leads us to another question of (literally) vital importance: Are we, thus, sufficiently deterred from doing evil deeds by this Biblical promise of horrific punishment? Having all of us sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, quid sum miser tunc dicturus, quem Patronem rogaturus, dum vix iustus sit securus? (the latter portion quoted from Thomas di Celano’s Dies Irae.)
Aha, but here is the wonder of Amazing Grace! Just say “Salva me, Iesu!” and your sins shall be forgiven. It is that simple. Repentance is not some doing-time at a maximum-security prison. It is a call for grace and voila, your slate is now wiped clean, and your soul, as white as snow.
Alas, this theological concept of grace defeats the dual purpose of the threat of punishment. If Salvation is indeed free of charge the deterrence factor is watered down to the efficacy of a timely repentance: don’t be too late, don’t miss the train! By the same token, if we can in this fashion escape from punishment, so can also our offender. Needless to say, none of us can do better or worse than we are predestined to do, so why try to wrestle with the inevitability of our fate at all?
From God’s side, the desire to inflict bodily torture on the sinners makes no sense either. If some of us are the elect (to use Calvin’s word), by predestination, it is so much easier on the soul to imagine that all this evil going on in the miserable world of ours is just smoke and mirrors, conjured up by God for our benefit and rehabilitation. Let the evil ones evaporate, like the smoke they are. I may rather be comforted by their substantial unreality than by their actual punishment in reality. My concept of God’s absolute Goodness is not consistent with a Divine design of eternal torture incorporated into the fact of Creation.
In other words, I would have been terribly disturbed by the idea, had I subscribed to it even hypothetically, that the Word of God, which in my native culture is the Russian Orthodox Bible, is the literal, rather than an allegorical message of God to man. I would rather look at the tragedies of my present life in the real world as a concurrent expiation of my sins. But, after all, one’s personal faith can never be identical with the religious dogma of one’s culture. What can be hoped for, is that these two would somehow be reconciled by the wise cultural compromise, in which we accept the absurdity of some elements of the latter as mythology and let it go at that.
The subject of Predestination and Grace, under the same as mine angle of literal versus allegorical, gets an outstanding treatment from Schopenhauer in his essays on Religion, in Parerga and Paralipomena. The following highlighted passage is perhaps too long, but I would hate to shorten it more than I already have, because everything in it is of great value to this discussion:
When the Church says that, in the dogmas of religion, reason is totally incompetent and blind, and its use is to be reprehended, it is in reality attesting the fact that these dogmas are allegorical in their nature, and are not to be judged by the standard which reason, taking all things sensu proprio, can alone apply. Now, the absurdities of a dogma are just the mark and sign of what is allegorical and mythical in it. In the case under consideration, however, the absurdities spring from the fact that two such heterogeneous doctrines as those of the Old and New Testaments had to be combined. The great allegory was of gradual growth. It was finally completed by Augustine, who penetrated deepest into its meaning, and so was able to conceive it as a systematic whole and supply its defects. Hence, the Augustinian doctrine, confirmed by Luther, is the complete form of Christianity.
(I need to point out that, although neither St. Augustine nor Martin Luther are accepted as Prophets in the Christian theology, and their findings are not considered as perfectly infallible by either the Catholic or the Protestant Church respectively, the Augustinian doctrine, confirmed by Luther, follows with indisputable logic from the fundamentalist presumption of Biblical interpretation, which is in fact the subject of present discussion.)
But the bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it; accordingly, they parade their doctrine in all seriousness as true sensu proprio, and as absurdities form an essential part of these doctrines, you have the great mischief of continual fraud. And, what is worse, the day comes when they are no longer true sensu proprio and then there is an end of them; so that, in that respect, it would be better to admit their allegorical nature at once. But the difficulty is to teach the multitude that something can be both true and untrue at the same time. And as all religions are in a greater or less degree of this nature, we must recognize the fact that mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity, that absurdity is an element in its existence.
(I have actually pointed to this duality of literal untruth and allegorical truth in quoting from John 7:38 in my previous entry on Christian fundamentalism: “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” I cannot imagine anyone in the world, in any age, taking this obvious allegory in the literal sense, thus automatically refuting the literality claim in toto.)
Among the examples which illustrate what I mean, I may cite the Christian doctrine of Predestination and Grace as formulated by Augustine and adopted from him by Luther. According to it, one man is endowed with grace, and another is not. Grace, then, comes to be a privilege, received at birth and brought ready into the world; a privilege, too, in a matter second to none in importance. What is obnoxious and absurd in this doctrine may be traced to the idea contained in the Old Testament, that man is the creation of an external will, which called him into existence out of nothing. It is quite true that genuine moral excellence is really innate, but Augustine’s dogma of Predestination is connected with another dogma, namely, that the mass of humanity is corrupt and doomed to eternal damnation, that very few will be found righteous and attain salvation, and that only in consequence of the gift of grace, and because they are predestined to be saved; whilst the remainder will be overwhelmed by the perdition they deserve.
(The selectivity of Grace, mentioned in this paragraph is just as absurd in its logic as the totality of Grace, to which most Evangelical denominations of Christianity explicitly subscribe, and therefore, there is little sense in delving into the contradiction between selectivity and totality, which this paragraph invites.)
Taken in its ordinary meaning, the dogma is revolting, as it condemns a man who may be scarcely twenty years of age, to expiate his errors, or even his unbelief, in everlasting torment. Even worse, it makes this almost universal damnation the natural effect of original sin, and therefore the necessary consequence of the Fall. This is a result which must have been foreseen by him who made mankind, and who, in the first place, made them not better than they are and secondly set a trap for them into which he must have known they would fall; for he made the whole world, and nothing is hidden from him. According to this doctrine, then, God created out of nothing a weak race prone to sin, in order to give them over to endless torment.
(I find this argument above all compelling from the teleological perspective, not from the standpoint of those who shall be saved, but from that of the damned. It makes better sense for me to have Evil as a smoke part of the Creation (see my previous comments on smoke and mirrors) than to have it created for real, just for the sake of its subsequent punishment.)
And as a last characteristic, we are told that this God, who prescribes forbearance and forgiveness of every fault, exercises none himself, but does the exact opposite; for a punishment, which comes at the end of all things, when the world is over and done with, cannot have for its object either to improve or deter, and is, therefore, pure vengeance. So that on this view the whole race is destined to eternal torture and damnation and created expressly for this end, the only exception being those few persons who are rescued by election of grace, from what motive one does not know.
Putting these aside, it looks as if God had created the world for the benefit of the devil! It would have been so much better not to have made it at all. So much, then, for a dogma taken sensu proprio.
But look at it sensu allegorico, and the whole matter becomes capable of a satisfactory interpretation. To remove the great evil arising from Augustine’s dogma, and to modify its revolting nature, Pope Gregory I, in the sixth century, prudently matured the doctrine of Purgatory, the essence of which already existed in Origen. The doctrine was regularly incorporated into the faith of the Church, so that the original view was much modified, and a certain substitute provided for the doctrine of metempsychosis; for both the one and the other admit a process of purification. To the same end the doctrine of apokatastasis, Restoration of all things, was established, according to which, in the last act of the Human Comedy, the sinners one and all will be reinstated in integrum. It is only Protestants, with their obstinate belief in the Bible, who cannot be induced to give up eternal punishment in hell. If one were spiteful, one might say, “much good may it do them,” but it is consoling to think that they really do not believe the doctrine; they leave it alone, thinking in their hearts, “It can’t be so bad as all that.”
...So, what is the allegorical sense of the “gnashing of teeth” then? It is neither to induce our chronic misery nor a bloodthirsty desire for vengeance on our enemies. It is, perhaps, just to teach us the simple truth that good is right and bad is wrong, in such terms as most of us can best understand.
If the Bible were indeed the literal word of God, the horrors awaiting the sinners in afterlife, the gruesome never-ending torture, the agonizing never-ending pain and the somber promise that "there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth" (Matthew 13:42) are an outcome of God’s Creation that needs to be looked at from at least two sides, man’s and God’s. Let us take man’s side first. What is God’s purpose in telling us these things? Are we to be thus comforted that our offenders in this life would be properly punished in the next? Which leads us to another question of (literally) vital importance: Are we, thus, sufficiently deterred from doing evil deeds by this Biblical promise of horrific punishment? Having all of us sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, quid sum miser tunc dicturus, quem Patronem rogaturus, dum vix iustus sit securus? (the latter portion quoted from Thomas di Celano’s Dies Irae.)
Aha, but here is the wonder of Amazing Grace! Just say “Salva me, Iesu!” and your sins shall be forgiven. It is that simple. Repentance is not some doing-time at a maximum-security prison. It is a call for grace and voila, your slate is now wiped clean, and your soul, as white as snow.
Alas, this theological concept of grace defeats the dual purpose of the threat of punishment. If Salvation is indeed free of charge the deterrence factor is watered down to the efficacy of a timely repentance: don’t be too late, don’t miss the train! By the same token, if we can in this fashion escape from punishment, so can also our offender. Needless to say, none of us can do better or worse than we are predestined to do, so why try to wrestle with the inevitability of our fate at all?
From God’s side, the desire to inflict bodily torture on the sinners makes no sense either. If some of us are the elect (to use Calvin’s word), by predestination, it is so much easier on the soul to imagine that all this evil going on in the miserable world of ours is just smoke and mirrors, conjured up by God for our benefit and rehabilitation. Let the evil ones evaporate, like the smoke they are. I may rather be comforted by their substantial unreality than by their actual punishment in reality. My concept of God’s absolute Goodness is not consistent with a Divine design of eternal torture incorporated into the fact of Creation.
In other words, I would have been terribly disturbed by the idea, had I subscribed to it even hypothetically, that the Word of God, which in my native culture is the Russian Orthodox Bible, is the literal, rather than an allegorical message of God to man. I would rather look at the tragedies of my present life in the real world as a concurrent expiation of my sins. But, after all, one’s personal faith can never be identical with the religious dogma of one’s culture. What can be hoped for, is that these two would somehow be reconciled by the wise cultural compromise, in which we accept the absurdity of some elements of the latter as mythology and let it go at that.
The subject of Predestination and Grace, under the same as mine angle of literal versus allegorical, gets an outstanding treatment from Schopenhauer in his essays on Religion, in Parerga and Paralipomena. The following highlighted passage is perhaps too long, but I would hate to shorten it more than I already have, because everything in it is of great value to this discussion:
When the Church says that, in the dogmas of religion, reason is totally incompetent and blind, and its use is to be reprehended, it is in reality attesting the fact that these dogmas are allegorical in their nature, and are not to be judged by the standard which reason, taking all things sensu proprio, can alone apply. Now, the absurdities of a dogma are just the mark and sign of what is allegorical and mythical in it. In the case under consideration, however, the absurdities spring from the fact that two such heterogeneous doctrines as those of the Old and New Testaments had to be combined. The great allegory was of gradual growth. It was finally completed by Augustine, who penetrated deepest into its meaning, and so was able to conceive it as a systematic whole and supply its defects. Hence, the Augustinian doctrine, confirmed by Luther, is the complete form of Christianity.
(I need to point out that, although neither St. Augustine nor Martin Luther are accepted as Prophets in the Christian theology, and their findings are not considered as perfectly infallible by either the Catholic or the Protestant Church respectively, the Augustinian doctrine, confirmed by Luther, follows with indisputable logic from the fundamentalist presumption of Biblical interpretation, which is in fact the subject of present discussion.)
But the bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it; accordingly, they parade their doctrine in all seriousness as true sensu proprio, and as absurdities form an essential part of these doctrines, you have the great mischief of continual fraud. And, what is worse, the day comes when they are no longer true sensu proprio and then there is an end of them; so that, in that respect, it would be better to admit their allegorical nature at once. But the difficulty is to teach the multitude that something can be both true and untrue at the same time. And as all religions are in a greater or less degree of this nature, we must recognize the fact that mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity, that absurdity is an element in its existence.
(I have actually pointed to this duality of literal untruth and allegorical truth in quoting from John 7:38 in my previous entry on Christian fundamentalism: “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” I cannot imagine anyone in the world, in any age, taking this obvious allegory in the literal sense, thus automatically refuting the literality claim in toto.)
Among the examples which illustrate what I mean, I may cite the Christian doctrine of Predestination and Grace as formulated by Augustine and adopted from him by Luther. According to it, one man is endowed with grace, and another is not. Grace, then, comes to be a privilege, received at birth and brought ready into the world; a privilege, too, in a matter second to none in importance. What is obnoxious and absurd in this doctrine may be traced to the idea contained in the Old Testament, that man is the creation of an external will, which called him into existence out of nothing. It is quite true that genuine moral excellence is really innate, but Augustine’s dogma of Predestination is connected with another dogma, namely, that the mass of humanity is corrupt and doomed to eternal damnation, that very few will be found righteous and attain salvation, and that only in consequence of the gift of grace, and because they are predestined to be saved; whilst the remainder will be overwhelmed by the perdition they deserve.
(The selectivity of Grace, mentioned in this paragraph is just as absurd in its logic as the totality of Grace, to which most Evangelical denominations of Christianity explicitly subscribe, and therefore, there is little sense in delving into the contradiction between selectivity and totality, which this paragraph invites.)
Taken in its ordinary meaning, the dogma is revolting, as it condemns a man who may be scarcely twenty years of age, to expiate his errors, or even his unbelief, in everlasting torment. Even worse, it makes this almost universal damnation the natural effect of original sin, and therefore the necessary consequence of the Fall. This is a result which must have been foreseen by him who made mankind, and who, in the first place, made them not better than they are and secondly set a trap for them into which he must have known they would fall; for he made the whole world, and nothing is hidden from him. According to this doctrine, then, God created out of nothing a weak race prone to sin, in order to give them over to endless torment.
(I find this argument above all compelling from the teleological perspective, not from the standpoint of those who shall be saved, but from that of the damned. It makes better sense for me to have Evil as a smoke part of the Creation (see my previous comments on smoke and mirrors) than to have it created for real, just for the sake of its subsequent punishment.)
And as a last characteristic, we are told that this God, who prescribes forbearance and forgiveness of every fault, exercises none himself, but does the exact opposite; for a punishment, which comes at the end of all things, when the world is over and done with, cannot have for its object either to improve or deter, and is, therefore, pure vengeance. So that on this view the whole race is destined to eternal torture and damnation and created expressly for this end, the only exception being those few persons who are rescued by election of grace, from what motive one does not know.
Putting these aside, it looks as if God had created the world for the benefit of the devil! It would have been so much better not to have made it at all. So much, then, for a dogma taken sensu proprio.
But look at it sensu allegorico, and the whole matter becomes capable of a satisfactory interpretation. To remove the great evil arising from Augustine’s dogma, and to modify its revolting nature, Pope Gregory I, in the sixth century, prudently matured the doctrine of Purgatory, the essence of which already existed in Origen. The doctrine was regularly incorporated into the faith of the Church, so that the original view was much modified, and a certain substitute provided for the doctrine of metempsychosis; for both the one and the other admit a process of purification. To the same end the doctrine of apokatastasis, Restoration of all things, was established, according to which, in the last act of the Human Comedy, the sinners one and all will be reinstated in integrum. It is only Protestants, with their obstinate belief in the Bible, who cannot be induced to give up eternal punishment in hell. If one were spiteful, one might say, “much good may it do them,” but it is consoling to think that they really do not believe the doctrine; they leave it alone, thinking in their hearts, “It can’t be so bad as all that.”
...So, what is the allegorical sense of the “gnashing of teeth” then? It is neither to induce our chronic misery nor a bloodthirsty desire for vengeance on our enemies. It is, perhaps, just to teach us the simple truth that good is right and bad is wrong, in such terms as most of us can best understand.
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