Christian Revolution

2009-06-13T17:05:00.062+01:00

Christianity emerged amongst the economically oppressed proletariat within the Pharisaic group in Palestine. Revolutionary aspirations within this group took the form both of political revolts as well as in all sorts of religious-messianic movements.

"While the Zealots and Sicarii endeavored to realize their wishes in the sphere of political reality, the complete hopelessness of realization led the early Christians to formulate the same wishes in fantasy. The expression of this was the early Christian faith, especially the early Christian idea concerning Jesus and his relationship to the Father-God.”2

In his ground-breaking essay 'The Dogma of Christ', first published in 1963, Fromm asserts that the early 'adoptionist' relationship between Jesus and God the Father expressed an unconscious revolutionary wish. In its early adoptionist form the concept of Jesus was of a man who becomes divine. That Man could become a god, at the same time as elevating the status of Man from something purely temporal, was also a form of deicide; it represented, in Freudian terms, the desire to kill 'the father', or, in political terms, to destroy the prevailing oppressive patriarchy.

"About the middle of the second century, Christianity began to win followers among the middle and higher classses in the Roman Empire. Above all, it was women of prominent position, and merchants, who took charge of the propaganda; Christianity spread in their circles and then gradually penetrated the circles of the ruling aristocracy. By the end of the second century, Christianity had already ceased to be the religion of the poor artisans and slaves. And when under Constantine it became the state religion, it had already become the religion of larger circles of the ruling class in the Roman Empire." 3

The changing demographic of the Christian community was accompanied by a change in the concept of Christ. There was a move away from the adoptionist model and towards a 'pneumatic' viewpoint. "A man was not elevated to a god, but a god descended to become a man."4 This process led to the doctrine of Athanasius, which was subsequently adopted by the Nicene Council: Jesus, the Son of God, begotten of the Father before all time, of one nature with the Father. The Arian position, that Jesus and God the Father were of similar but not identical nature is here rejected in favour of a logically contradictory doctrine that two natures, God and his Son, are only of one nature.

"Being God, he became a human being: and then as God he raised the dead, healed all by a work, and also changed water into wine. These were not the acts of a human being. But as a human being, he felt thrist and tiredness, and he suffered pain. These experiences are not appropriate to a deity."5 Athanasius's ontological argument rests on a soteriological foundation. In other words it is salvation through Christ that is proof of Christ's divinity, whilst Christ's humanity remains intact.

So early Christianity was hostile to authority, because of the social and economic oppression suffered by its first followers, and expressed this hostility in a symbolic form through elevating man to the status of a god. The Christianity that became the official religion of the Roman Empire served a different function and had to dispense with its early revolutionary symbolism. Christianity was now the religion of the masses as well as their rulers. Hostility towards patriarchal authority gave way to a passive tie to the father. The masses gave up any expectation of an imminent, collective and essentially political change, which had been previously seen as central to Christ's teachings. Instead people began to believe that deliverence had already taken place. "They rejected the fantasy which represented hostility to the father, and accepted another in its place, the harmonizing one of the son placed beside the father by the latter's free will...Christianity fulfilled the function which the emperor and the Mithras cult could not nearly as well fulfill, namely, the integration of the masses into the absolutist system of the Roman Empire." 7

In coming to terms with the evolution of religious thought we often find rather inadequate justifications for the shifting of ideas from the apologists of orthodoxy. As Elaine Pagels points out, "Traditionally, Christian theologians have declared that 'the Holy Spirit guides the church into truth'-- a statement often taken to mean that what has survived must be right".8 There is a deeply paradoxical hint of Natural Selection in the notion that theological concepts survive if they are 'true', quite apart from the fact that it is surely the self-justification of any absolutism that the right to power (or truth) is indistinguishable from its possession. Or as Marx put it, "Such a primordial condition does not explain anything; it merely removes the question into a gray and nebulous distance. It asserts as a fact or event what it should deduce, namely, the necessary relation between two things; for example, between the division of labour and exchange. In the same way theology explains the origin of evil by the fall of man; that is, it asserts as a historical fact what it should explain."9

But if we shift our gaze from the brittle rationalizations of religious orthodoxy we find plenty of scope for fresh and meaningful interpretations of traditional symbolic systems. None is more convincing that that of Joseph Campbell. The following quote will for the time being suffice to gently point the way to a new progressive Christian revolution:

"But Pelagianism today is the only brand of Christianity with any possibility of an Occidental future. For who, outside of a convent, actually believes today, in his heart, that every child born of woman, throughout the world, will be sent to an everlasting hell, unless somebody of the Christian faith splashes water on its head, to the accompaniment of a prayer inthe name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? Furthermore, since there was no Garden of Eden c.4004 B.C. -- nor even c. 1,800,000 B.C. in the period of Zinjanthropus -- no, Adam and no Eve back there, no serpant speaking Hebrew and, consequently, no Fall -- no guilt -- then what is all this talk about general atonement? Unless Fall and Redemption, Disobedience and Atonement, are poetic names for the same psychological states of Ignorance and Illumination that the Hindus and the Buddhists also are talking about! In which case, what happens to the doctrine of the unique historical importance of the Incarnation and Crucifiction of Christ?"10

1. Dogma of Christ, Erich Fromm p.40
2. Ibid p.41
3. Ibid p.53
4. Ibid p.61
5. Athanasius The Christian Theology Reader Alister McGrath p.256
6. Dogma of Christ, Erich Fromm p.63-4
7. Ibid p.62
8. Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels p.76
9. Marx's Concept of Man, Erich Fromm p.79
10. Flight of the Wild Gander, Joseph Campbell p.170

Ballard and a Glass Half Full

2009-05-23T12:28:00.002+01:00

There is an interesting piece by Ian Christie in the Theos Think Tank archive that takes a brief look at the life and work of J G Ballard from a 'religious' standpoint. Christie praises Ballard as someone who was both true to the landscape of modern industrial society, with its "suburbs, motorways, airports, perimeter roads, shopping malls"1, as well as for being an author who fully acknowledged mankind's propensity for violence and brutality. In unflinchingly depicting Man's brutality and destructiveness Christie sees Ballard as pointing to Man's 'fallen' nature, and his 'original sin'. Without the transcendence of a divine power Man is doomed to follow his destructive impulses. Superficially perhaps Christie seems to employ a basic formula: modern society is Godless + modern society is violent and cruel = Man needs God in order to transcend his own corrupt nature.

In his fiction Ballard embraced the landscape of contemporary society, with its dominating structures and processes that exclusively fulfill the needs of mass production and regimented living.

"One of the reasons the churches have been in decline for half a century and more is the rise of such commercial, social and built environments that crowd out spirituality and sociability. Ballard shows how they contribute to the deadening of the modern soul (“the death of affect”) and to its search for new forms of revitalisation, leading to violence and perversity"2

This 'search for new forms of revitalisation' suggests a similar understanding of Man's evil to that of Erich Fromm. For Fromm, mankind's predicament of being of nature but also a part from nature, creates in Man a vital need to formulate a response through the act of living. Man is thrown into the world at a time and place not determined by his will, and he is taken from the world at a time that is not of his choosing; he has consciousness and an understanding of the limits of his powers; he can be seen as being motivated by a need to establish, or in evolutionary terms to re-establish, a unity with nature that can provide an answer to his existential predicament.

"The truth is that all human passions, both the 'good' and the 'evil', can be understood only as a person's attempt to make sense out of his life and transcend the banal, merely sustaining existence. Change of personality is possible only if he is able to 'convert himself' to a new way of making sense out of life by mobilizing his life-furthering passions and thus experiencing a superior sense of vitality and integration to the one he had before."3

Whilst praising Ballard for his unflinching depiction of modern banality and human destructiveness, Ian Christie's also notes that Ballard "sensed transcendence in art, love and the imagination, and drew energy and inspiration from that, rather than from God or faith."4. This is an important acknowledgement because it accepts the humanist notion that Man carries within himself the potential to transcend the evils of egotism, sadism and boredom that manifest when human creativity and productivity are restricted.

1. '(How) should we celebrate JG Ballard', Ian Christie, Theos Think Tank
2. ibid
3. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm 1974 p.31-2
4. '(How) should we celebrate JG Ballard', Ian Christie, Theos Think Tank

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/(How)_should_we_celebrate_JG_Ballard.aspx?ArticleID=3058&PageID=47&RefPageID=11

Trifles and Bugbears

Christian Revolution

Ballard and a Glass Half Full