Plato: A.E. Taylor vs. P.E. More

To the newcomer to the study of Plato it is remarkable how much disagreement there is, among even the most respected authorities, as to what Platonism actually is. For example, A.E. Taylor cited Paul Elmore More (see July 13 post) as one of the indispensable authors on Platonism, yet Taylor's interpretation is in at least one crucial way almost the opposite of More's.

An essential feature of More's Platonism, as found in his book of that same name, was that it was dualistic, holding that God formed the world out of a non-divine matter ruled by "necessity" (and thereby resembling matter as now understood by physics). This dualism represented a definite advance, More believes, over the monistic pantheism of the pre-Socratic Parmenides and his defender Zeno. It is a kind of middle way between pure materialism and pure idealism. Such dualism provides a solution to the problem of evil: evil is the fault of the resistance of matter to being formed into a perfect cosmos. This seems like an attractive solution in that it avoids the need, fraught with spiritual danger, to postulate the existence of a malevolent second god, as in Manichaeanism or other kinds of Gnosticism (or for that matter the Christian idea of the Devil). No such malign higher power is necessary to account for evil; one must only grasp the tendency of matter to relapse into chaos if left to its own devices, or in the terms of modern science, entropy. In the words of More, the world is a good, ordered place insofar as is allowed by "natural necessity consenting and yielding to the persuasion of reason."

For More, Platonic dualism also covers ethics, which he regards as the central concern of Platonism and the key to understanding it as an integrated whole. (For example, the Republic is on one level a utopian blueprint, but more essentially, More holds, it is an examination of the otherwise hidden inner natures of various kinds of individual souls by drawing analogies with the more visible and familiar structures of various kinds of city-states.) Each of the three pairs of ethical concepts,

pleasure	happiness
virtue	morality
opinion	knowledge

indicates two fundamentally different entities—though this does not mean that the two (for example, pleasure and happiness) can never be found together. The first member of each pair is the natural counterpart of the second, 'divine' member. And each of these three natural attributes is associated with the mortal, pleasure-driven component of a dualistic Platonic soul, while each divine attribute is linked to the higher, immortal part of that soul.

By contrast, A.E. Taylor (in Platonism and its Influence) in effect regards dualism, at least as far as the doctrine of Creation is concerned, as merely an Aristotelian deviation from Plato. "Plato . . . teaches 'creation' in the sense that he regards the existence of the whole universe and everything in it as an effect of one single cause, the divine goodness, exactly as Thomas [Aquinas] himself does." Aristotle on the other hand "makes the universe a resultant of two equally eternal causes, God, the source of the motion by which 'Form' or 'structure' is evoked or induced, and the structureless 'first matter,' . . . from which or upon which the First Mover evokes or superinduces 'Form.' (pp 123–124). Each author praises Plato for holding the view which that author favours, but the two views do not seem compatible.

(To further add to the confusion, More regards the neo-Platonists as having regressed from dualism to monism, while Taylor seems to overlook any basic distinction between Plato and the neo-Platonists on this point.)

Half of kids in Ontario Crown care are drugged

Here are some edited extracts from a Globe and Mail article (June 9, subscription only) on the officially sponsored doping of children in Canada, with particular reference to those who find themselves wards of the Crown in Ontario. (H/T: Epoch Times. Full article, by Margaret Philp, obtained from Psychdata.) One one hand, the problem seems rapidly to be getting worse; on the other, at least some people in authority acknowledge its existence.

Overall, Canadian prescriptions for psychotropic medication rose 32% in the four years ending in 2006, to 51 million. Ritalin prescriptions, most to children, rose more than 47%, to 1.87 million. A new generation of antipsychotics "increasingly prescribed to children" rose 92% to 8.7 million.

Ritalin, the brand name for the central-nervous-system stimulant methylphenidate hydrochloride, has been the drug of choice to treat children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, beginning in the 1960s. Worldwide, about 75% of Ritalin prescriptions are for children, with four times as many boys on it as girls. Research out of Atlantic Canada found that about 5.3% of children in Grades 7–12 had been prescribed Ritalin (while 8.5% had taken it recreationally).

In Canada, following closely on developments in the U.S., Ritalin prescriptions in the 1990s were up 500% "from the previous decade." Worried pediatricians recommended in 2000 that Ritalin be prescribed only in very limited circumstances, and, even then, only for as long as necessary.

The numbers for Crown wards, almost half of whom are on psychotropic medication, are more than triple the rate of psychiatric drug prescriptions for children in general.

The Ontario government is attempting to develop standards of care for administering drugs to children for whom it is responsible. This comes after the case last year of a now-13-year-old boy in a group home outside Toronto came to light. The boy was saddled with four serious psychiatric diagnoses, including "oppositional defiant disorder" [did someone set out to sound like a Soviet prison psychiatrist here?] and Tourette's syndrome, and doused daily with a cocktail of psychotropic drugs before his grandparents came to his rescue. Marti McKay, a Toronto child psychologist who was hired by the local CAS to assess the grandparents' capacity as guardians [sic], discovered a child so chemically altered that his real character was clouded by the side effects of adult doses of drugs. Now living with his grandparents, the body is free of diagnoses and drugs.

The report from a government investigation into the case obtained by The Globe uncovered group home staff untrained in the use and side effects of the psychotropic drugs they were doling out; no requests from the psychiatrist to monitor the boy for problems, and little evidence of efforts to treat the boy's apparent mental-health issues other than with heavy-duty pharmaceuticals.

With few specialists available, growing numbers of child-welfare workers are turning to family physicians, typically with next to no training in psychiatric disorders and no expertise in the new cutting-edge psychotropic drugs. Researchers have found that nationally, most recipients of psychotropics were diagnosed with mental-health disorders by a family doctor, and never visited a child psychiatrist or another doctor for a second opinion. In any case, many drugs have never been tested on children by the pharmaceutical companies funding most of the research; have been studied for only short periods that fail to measure the impact of prolonged use; and are not formally approved to treat the condition being addressed.

The central position of Plato

The now little-known Paul Elmer More (see for example this article by Brian Domitrovic) was one of the leading American conservative thinkers of the early part of the twentieth century. His major work was a series of volumes on "the Greek tradition from the death of Socrates to the Council of Chalcedon", an attempt to provide a philosophical history of Western culture, through both its Hellenic and Christian phases, that has some parallels to Voegelin's (much larger) project. More's work seems more accessible, however, than that of Voegelin, whose manner is often less that of a systematic teacher than of someone discussing ideas with which the reader is assumed already to be familiar. Reading More might be a good way of learning about Platonist philosophy.

Here is More issuing a kind of "Platonist manifesto":

I can foresee no restoration of humane studies to their lost position of leadership until they are felt once more to radiate from some central spiritual truth. I do not believe that the aesthetic charms of literature can supply this want, nor is it clear to me that a purely scientific analysis of the facts of moral experience can furnish the needed motive . . . . Only through the centralizing force of religious faith or through its equivalent in philosophy can the intellectual life regain its meaning and authority for earnest men. Yet, for the present at least, the dogmas of religion have lost their hold, while the current philosophy of the schools has become in large measure a quibbling of specialists on technical points of minor importance, or, where serious, too commonly has surrendered to that flattery of the instinctive elements of human nature which is the very negation of mental and moral discipline.

It is in such a belief and such a hope, whether right or wrong, that I have turned back to the truth, still potent and fresh and salutary, which Plato expounded in the troubling and doubting days of Greece—the truth which is in religion but is not bounded by religious dogma, and which needs no confirmation by miracle or inspired tradition.

—From the preface to Platonism, 1917.

Pagan transcendentalism

(Revised post)

On p. 30 of "Eric Voegelin and Christianity" (see earlier post), Glenn Hughes says,

But Christian revelatory insight into divine reality, Voegelin asserts, is also in another sense a completion or fulfillment of the philosophers' quest . . . . Voegelin, while extolling the unique accomplishment of Greek philosophy . . . still asserts that the Greek philosophical enterprise finds its fulfillment only through the full manifestation of the Logos in Christ, in whom divine reality is "maximally differentiated" for the truths of transcendence.

That "maximal" differentiation reveals, through the Mosaic and prophetic epiphanies culminating in Jesus, a divine ground radically distinct from the finite world: a transcendent divinity who creates the universe ex nihilo. Nothing in the Greek discoveries of transcendence, in the conceptions of Plato's Agathon or the Platonic-Aristotelian Nous, so radically separates the divine ground from the cosmic stream of things. There is no notion of a creation ex nihilo in classical philosophy, because there is no conceptual removal of divine presence from the world to the degree it is found in the Judeo-Christian teaching.

Voegelin, according to Hughes, goes on to identify this uniquely Judeo-Christian concept as the basis for respect for the individual as such, independent of "physical or social facts"—a moral principle which also "lay beyond the experiential and conceptual orbit of classical philosophy." To back up these points, Hughes does not supply specific references to Voegelin's writings; but they sound uncontroversial to me. I believe the assertion that creation ex nihilo is absent in Greek paganism is also in accordance with widespread Christian opinion.

So it came as some surprise to find the following passages in the Timaeus:

(I)

. . . was the world, I say, always in existence and without beginning? or created, and had it a beginning? Created, I reply, being visible and tangible and having a body, and therefore sensible; and all sensible things are apprehended by opinion and sense and are in a process of creation and created. Now that which is created must, as we affirm, of necessity be created by a cause. But the father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible. And there is still a question to be asked about him: Which of the patterns had the artificer in view when he made the world--the pattern of the unchangeable, or of that which is created? If the world be indeed fair and the artificer good, it is manifest that he must have looked to that which is eternal; but if what cannot be said without blasphemy is true, then to the created pattern. Every one will see that he must have looked to the eternal; for the world is the fairest of creations and he is the best of causes. And having been created in this way, the world has been framed in the likeness of that which is apprehended by reason and mind and is unchangeable, and must therefore of necessity, if this is admitted, be a copy of something. Now it is all-important that the beginning of everything should be according to nature. And in speaking of the copy and the original we may assume that words are akin to the matter which they describe; when they relate to the lasting and permanent and intelligible, they ought to be lasting and unalterable, and, as far as their nature allows, irrefutable and immovable--nothing less. But when they express only the copy or likeness and not the eternal things themselves, they need only be likely and analogous to the real words. As being is to becoming, so is truth to belief. If then, Socrates, amid the many opinions about the gods and the generation of the universe, we are not able to give notions which are altogether and in every respect exact and consistent with one another, do not be surprised. Enough, if we adduce probabilities as likely as any others; for we must remember that I who am the speaker, and you who are the judges, are only mortal men, and we ought to accept the tale which is probable and enquire no further.

(II)

Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable. Wherefore also finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order, considering that this was in every way better than the other. Now the deeds of the best could never be or have been other than the fairest; and the creator, reflecting on the things which are by nature visible, found that no unintelligent creature taken as a whole was fairer than the intelligent taken as a whole; and that intelligence could not be present in anything which was devoid of soul. For which reason, when he was framing the universe, he put intelligence in soul, and soul in body, that he might be the creator of a work which was by nature fairest and best. Wherefore, using the language of probability, we may say that the world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God.

(III)

Now, when all of [the gods], both those who visibly appear in their revolutions as well as those other gods who are of a more retiring nature, had come into being, the creator of the universe addressed them in these words: 'Gods, children of gods, who are my works, and of whom I am the artificer and father, my creations are indissoluble, if so I will. All that is bound may be undone, but only an evil being would wish to undo that which is harmonious and happy. Wherefore, since ye are but creatures, ye are not altogether immortal and indissoluble, but ye shall certainly not be dissolved, nor be liable to the fate of death, having in my will a greater and mightier bond than those with which ye were bound at the time of your birth. And now listen to my instructions:--Three tribes of mortal beings remain to be created--without them the universe will be incomplete, for it will not contain every kind of animal which it ought to contain, if it is to be perfect. On the other hand, if they were created by me and received life at my hands, they would be on an equality with the gods. In order then that they may be mortal, and that this universe may be truly universal, do ye, according to your natures, betake yourselves to the formation of animals, imitating the power which was shown by me in creating you. The part of them worthy of the name immortal, which is called divine and is the guiding principle of those who are willing to follow justice and you--of that divine part I will myself sow the seed, and having made a beginning, I will hand the work over to you. And do ye then interweave the mortal with the immortal, and make and beget living creatures, and give them food, and make them to grow, and receive them again in death.'

In his anti-Christian tract Against the Galileans, the Emperor Julian quoted parts of these passages to argue that Platonism had originated the idea of creation ex nihilo, and that this concept was absent from the Jewish and Christian scripture. (He argued that Genesis "does not say that the deep was created by God, or the darkness or the waters": these substances seem to have been pre-existing. Nor, Julian said, does Genesis mention the creation of the angels, which are the Jewish versions of Plato's subordinate deities. "It follows that . . . God is the creator of nothing that is incorporeal, but is only the disposer of matter that already existed. For the words, 'And the earth was invisible and without form' can only mean that he regards the wet and dry substance as the original matter and that he introduces God as the disposer of this matter"—Loeb edition, p. 333.) Plato, not the Jewish prophets, was then the true transcendentalist. My first reaction to the excerpts from the Timaeus was similar to Julian's, although the passage beginning "Wherefore also finding the whole visible sphere not at rest . . ." (omitted by Julian) seemed to depict the Creator more along the lines of a potter moulding pre-existing clay. However, scholars who have studied the Timaeus a great deal more closely than myself appear to agree that it does not describe creation ex nihilo, and one must defer to their judgment.

Nevertheless, even if Plato is not describing true creation ex nihilo, it seems clear that the 'raw material' on which Plato's Creator worked is so formless that it must make little difference to his transcendent status. If the Creator is 'in' the world, it is only the world in an utterly chaotic and dead form, not the world with which we are familiar. In the Timaeus, even the immortality of the gods, let alone the immortality of the souls of mortals, remains dependent on the goodness of the Creator; it is not an inherent property of souls. This concept of contingent immortality is also, I think, generally considered to be a contribution of Judaism and/or Christianity. Note also how Plato distinguishes the divine part of man, created directly by the Creator, from man's mortal components, the creation of which is delegated to the lesser gods. Should this belief not strongly encourage respect for the essential core of the individual, irrespective of "physical or social facts"? Does this not call into question Voegelin's claims about the key advance in consciousness represented by Christianity?

D.H. Lawrence on Christianity

Lawrence's Apocalypse, written when he was dying, contains his insights into the Book of Revelation. Basically he sees this as the highly influential foundation of a kind of shadow-side to the religion of love, Christianity—though he also finds in it some positive aspects, including interesting residues from lost pagan materials which he believes were used in the construction of the later Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writings. In condemning the Book of Revelation, Lawrence issues a radical denunciation of Christianity as a whole, comparable to Nietzsche's. It is difficult for me to tell whether his claim is a powerful but dangerous truth or a powerful and dangerous lie, but in either case it seems an important one.

It is possible to regard Lawrence as refuting Eric Voegelin's argument about the advance in human consciousness represented by Christianity over Platonic philosophy (though, one should add, Lawrence does not seem too enamoured of the late phase of paganism represented by Plato, either). Recall that for Voegelin, the unprecedented separation of the Christian God from the created universe implied a distinction between the frequently negligible worldly role of the person and his ultimate significance: in fact, this separation made it possible for Christianity to assert that "every individual has an essential share in the gift of divine presence . . . each person is equally the beloved creation of the Creator to whom he or she is uniquely related"—provided at least that he does not close himself off from the transcendent, which is such a private matter that in social terms it does not detract from Christian egalitarianism. Christianity thus tends to elevate everyone, regardless of worldly circumstances, to the dignified status of an "individual". Lawrence, however, attacks this conception head on:

Because, as a matter of fact, when you start to teach individual self-realisation to the great masses of people, who when all is said and done are only fragmentary beings, incapable of whole individuality, you end by making them all envious, grudging, spiteful creatures.

. . . . No man is or can be a pure individual. The mass of men have only the tiniest touch of individuality: if any. The mass of men live and move, think and feel collectively, and have practically no individual emotions, feelings or thoughts at all. They are fragments of the collective or social consciousness. It has always been so. And will always be so. [Ch. 23]

Such envy and spite, Lawrence asserts, comes out in spades in Revelation, which is an expression of "the self-glorification of the humble" (Ch. 2). Its central theme, in Lawrence's view, is the hope for "the destruction of the whole world, and the reign of saints in ultimate bodiless glory. Or it entails the destruction of all earthly power, and the rule of an oligarchy of martyrs (the Millennium)." In other words, it promises lordship to the obscure members of what was then the small Christian sect. The book is a revelation and sanctification of the will-to-power of the weak.

Renunciation and love is a religion only for a spiritual aristocracy: of those who feel themselves to be strong. The religion of those who feel weak is the glorification of the poor ("the poor may be obsequious, but they are almost never truly humble in the Christian sense"). Because the weak outnumber the strong, this is the historically predominant form of Christianity, for which the Revelation of John of Patmos is the founding text.

Jesus taught the escape and liberation into unselfish, brotherly love: a feeling that only the strong can know. And this, sure enough, at once brought the community of the weak into triumphant being; and the will of the community of Christians was anti-social, almost anti-human, revealing from the start a frenzied desire for the end of the world . . . ; and then, when this did not come, a grim determination to destroy all mastery, all lordship, and all human splendour . . . [Ch. 4]

Revelation also contains what is probably the prototype of the Christian Hell—which made the old Jewish hells seem mild by comparison. The likes of John of Patmos could not be happy in heaven unless they knew their enemies were suffering in Hell (Ch. 13). According to Lawrence, the book also takes the Great Goddess of the East, known to the Romans as Magna Mater, and turns her into the "great whore of Babylon", envied and hated.

The Book of Revelation is a necessary part of Christianity, not a mistake. The alternative to enforced individuality would be for the weak, for their own benefit, to pay homage to natural power (Ch. 3), and to derive their sense of meaning in life from participation in a worldly community under the rule of the natural leaders. This, however, would be paganism, not Christianity. A second reason Lawrence sees for the necessity of Revelation is that Jesus, in his aristocratic individuality, ignored the question of governance; the task of formulating the vision of the Christian state fell instead to John of Patmos (Ch. 23). The result was not pretty.

Lawrence's condemnation of Christianity does not stop with its unsuitability for the spiritually weak. Even the strong, Lawrence emphasizes, are not simply individuals: they are also citizens of a State which, obliged to guard its own power, cannot be Christian. As citizens of such a State—in the collective aspect of their lives—weak and strong alike must derive their fulfilment from the gratification of their "power-sense". Christian doctrine ignores this reality of the collective aspect of the self. But

To have an ideal for the individual which regards only his individual self and ignores his collective self is in the long run fatal. To have a creed of individuality which denies the reality of the hierarchy makes at last for more [mere?] anarchy [Ch. 23].

Lawrence also alleges that Christian individuality is inherently incompatible with Christian love. "To yield entirely to love would be to be absorbed, which is the death of the individual . . . . So that we see, what our age has proved to its astonishment and dismay, that the individual cannot love" (Ch. 23), whether in an intimate or neighbourly sense. "If you are taking the path of individual self-realisation, you had better, like Buddha, go off and be by yourself, and give a thought to nobody."

Providing some relief from this otherwise ugly picture, the contradictions of Christianity, Lawrence believes, were briefly held in check by the medieval Church, with its elements of nature-worship, its "balance, in the early days, between brotherly love and natural lordship and splendour" (Ch. 4), and its institution of marriage. But the Reformation, with its intentional return to primitive Christianity, re-activated "the old will of the Christian community to destroy human worldly power"—under the influence of which, in the form of what Voegelin called the gnostic political movements, we still unfortunately find ourselves, even in an outwardly post-Christian era. (It is interesting that Voegelin also seems to regard medieval Christianity as representing a high point in civilization.) This early Christian hope for the destruction of worldly power as expressed in Revelation, Lawrence observes, fully justified the Romans in regarding the Christian sect as the common enemy of mankind.

Eric Voegelin (15)

Glenn Hughes on "Eric Voegelin and Christianity"

Voegelin has important things to say about Christianity but they may tend to remain buried among his copious writings. A valuable 2004 Intercollegiate Review article by Glenn Hughes, available here as a pdf file, summarizes Voegelin's assessment of the place of Christianity in the development of human consciousness.

According to Hughes, one of Voegelin's criticisms of historical Christianity is that it attempted to monopolize 'revelation', denying that other sources of truth could be on any comparable level to its own (in contradiction to its own concept of the eternal, and therefore pre-Christian, existence and activity of Christ). Christianity did eventually acknowledge limited truth in Greek philosophy, but classified this as human reason rather than divine revelation. Ironically, this depreciatory view of philosophy—the separation of reason from faith—has been preserved despite the eclipse Christianity has suffered among intellectuals. Voegelin, by contrast, regards Greek thought as revelation in its own right. Hughes says that there is, in fact, a common core of Hellenic and Judeo-Christian experience, including these four convictions:

• The divine ground (i.e., God) transcends spatio-temporal limits.
• The truly divine is known "within" by meditation of that faculty in consciousness (nous or pneuma) which can reach toward divine transcendence.
• The glory and responsibility of human existence is that it is a tension of divine-human encounter, in which one can find or miss the direction of meaningful life.
• Awakened existence is a movement of intensifying conscious participation in the divine ground (a movement from mortality toward immortality).

Nevertheless, the Gospels are unique in that Jesus's "response to the divine appeal was of unparalleled completeness". On p. 30 of the essay, Hughes describes the specific differences between the Hellenic and Hebrew-Christian 'differentiations'.

In one sense, the two traditions are complementary. The philosophers' attention falls mainly on the process of seeking (on the rational, the 'noetic') and on human participation in the divine. Hebrew-Christian prophetism focuses on the divine drawing: on the human (spiritual or 'pneumatic') faculty of loving response to the divine appeal.

In another sense, however, Christian insight is a completion of the philosophers' quest. It is a more thorough 'differentiation' of the divine nature, illuminating more profoundly "the absolutely loving, absolutely transcendent, absolutely free and creative source and object of the human search of meaning."

In particular, the Hebrew-Christian divinity creates the universe out of nothing. Nothing in the Greek discoveries so radically separates the divine ground from the created cosmos. There is no notion of creation ex nihilo in classical philosophy, because there is "no conceptual removal of divine presence from the world to the degree it is found in the Judeo-Christian teaching."

This further degree of 'differentiation' in Christianity has crucial ethical implications. It is what made possible "the clear recognition that the criteria of a life properly lived . . . pertain not to physical or social facts, but to the conscious response each individual makes to the divine appeal in his or her soul." That is, the Christian 'differentiation' revealed that "every individual has an essential share in the gift of divine presence; that the one, transcendent divine reality is the source of insight, virtue and goodness in every human soul; and that each person is equally the beloved creation of the Creator to whom he or she is uniquely related. This universalizing of 'true existence' down to the level of the individual soul lay beyond the experiential and conceptual orbit of classical philosophy." Such, it appears, is the key advance made by Christianity, in Hughes's interpretation of Voegelin.

One might add that this advance seems to be preserved, for the time being at least, by Western post-Christian culture. However, post-Christian thinking seems likely to forget the other side of this egalitarian coin: that it is only too easy for the individual soul to become "closed", in which case physical and social advantages are of no avail to it.

In this connection, Hughes also provides a powerful passage on the nature of true faith.

But open existence is difficult to maintain. As a response to the appeal of a transcendent ground of meaning, the open soul must suffer the vicissitudes of faith—of affirming that its own meaning depends upon an intangible, unpossessible, essentially mysterious reality. The difficulties of faith—not faith as a fideistic assent to doctrinal propositions, nor certainly as a fundamentalist or absolutist assumption of the certitude of God's favor, but as an existential faith of loving openness to the divine mystery encountered in illumined conscience and gracious persuasion—are notoriously daunting. Basic to faith is the uncertainty involved in understanding that we cannot understand, in any substantive way, the answers to our most searching questions: why we exist, what our performances in life add up to, the direction of historical process, the mystery of evil and of its longed-for resolution. Also basic to it is anxious awareness of the fragility of genuine commitment, of how easily forgetfulness and self-delusion enter into the effort of openness, and of the unendingness of the task, as long as we remain alive, of recovering and reestablishing our existential orientation through love of transcendent reality. While the dignity of personal existence only flourishes through the open soul's consciously responsive bond with transcendent meaning, "[this] bond is tenuous, indeed, and it may snap easily" . . . . [pp 31–32]

Fjordman on the impact of Christianity

Here (from June 19) is an interesting discussion at Gates of Vienna of the "slave morality" element in Christianity and post-Christian Western culture. Essayist Fjordman identifies both the love of feeling persecuted and feelings of cultural guilt, which are now threatening to cripple Western societies, as being rooted in Christian or Judeo-Christian ethics; he notes that our guilt feelings may now be worse than when Christianity was thriving, however, because we no longer have Christ to wash away the sins for which we feel guilty.

The critical comment by "Mike" (Michael W. Perry) following the essay is particularly significant. He points out that G.K. Chesterton saw that with the decline of Christianity, Christian virtues were disconnecting from one another and in some cases, as in the case of pacifism, tending to become grossly exaggerated. We have meanwhile lost the deep Christian sense of the reality of evil, so that we tend to allow evildoers free rein. Thus in Mr. Perry's view the problem is not the Christian inheritance but our abandonment of Christianity. (However, it is unclear what distinction he is trying to draw between desirable "Northernness" and undesirable "Germanic" elements in Western culture . . . )

This is a sensitive subject and it is not surprising that many Christians would become defensive about it. This may explain why some of the commenters seem to have missed the point, which is not that a true, or sufficiently sophisticated, Christianity or Christian-derived ethics must encourage submissive behaviour in the face of aggression, but that latent interpretations or misinterpretations in this direction are built into the religion, and therefore pose a chronic threat to Christian societies. Doubtless it is true that Christian-based ethics have become more dangerous in the absence of Christian belief. It is also true that what Christian belief does remain is now often a "pale, pasty, milquetoast and mealy mouthed concoction" (commenter "Charles Martel")—and that this has probably been the case since the Victorian era, with its emphasis on "gentle Jesus meek and mild". But it is also obvious that the tendencies toward a destructive Christian pacifism or withdrawal from worldly responsibility did not suddenly spring into existence in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries as Christian belief was eroding. The earlier political criticisms of Christianity by such writers as Gibbon and Machiavelli demonstrate this: they were evidently arguing against an interpretation of Christianity which they perceived to have considerable influence. From Imperial Roman times, one might also cite the letter of St. Paulinus.

Update 07/01: A follow-up essay by Fjordman is here. (These essays are also available at The Brussels Journal.)