The Mind-Forged Wall

Lost in all the celebrations, eight years back, of the new century we were entering was the fact that the 21st century is the first of the post-Christian centuries. Christianity was certainly in trouble at the beginning of the 20th century, but by no stretch of the imagination could it be called dead. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the old time religion can certainly be certified as dead.

And it is striking to me how easily the intellectuals of both the Catholic and the Protestant denominations have succumbed to Satanism. By isolating man’s intellect from his other faculties, they have left him at the mercy of the dialectic, and it is in the dialectic mode that Satan thrives.

Satan’s task, when he confronted Adam and Eve in the garden, was to get them to disobey God’s command not to eat from the forbidden tree. He needed to engage them in a dialogue if he was to succeed. Once he persuaded Eve, and through Eve, Adam, to look on God’s command as something abstract and debatable, he had them both hooked.

That original sin – the pride in our own isolated abstractions and the desire for the power we think our prideful cogitations will bring – is always with us; it is part of our sinful nature. And it must be fought tooth and nail lest it consume us. Yet the very guardians of the citadel of Christ have encouraged us to indulge our sinful appetites to abstract and depersonalize. We have depersonalized man and we have depersonalized the living God. ‘Our Father who art in heaven’ has become ‘Our abstracted, derivative By-Product who art everywhere and nowhere.’ When, following the lead of the clergy, we depersonalize God; we have created, to paraphrase Blake, a mind-forged wall between God and man.

The mind-forged wall was built over time by clerics, academics, and self-styled wise men who professed to be Christian but who still thought like Greeks. In the Greek culture the goddess of wisdom sprang from the head of Zeus; she bypassed the blood. In contrast, Christ, the font of all wisdom, came to us through the blood. Therefore, to the Christian, all true knowledge comes to us through the spirit-infused blood of Christ.

The modern Gnostic Christian views any mention of the blood as superstitious and barbaric. His God word is 'reason'; in fact, his God is the rational, autonomous man. Rational man will welcome Christ into his club, but only if Christ agrees to behave rationally. For reason, as Aquinas tells us, is the final arbiter. And if there is a power higher than God, is not that power God? But if we turn from the Greek mode of perception and look at the Hebraic mode of perceiving reality, we see something quite different from the men behind the wall. We see that the spirit of man can only be animated through the blood. Blood without the animating spirit is barbaric, mere voodoo superstition, but when the spirit and the blood are united the mind-forged wall between God and man disappears. And the unholy worship of our ratiocinations is stripped of its religious halo and seen for what it is: blasphemy.

So long as the mind-forged wall of bloodless Christianity exists, there will be a conflict between Christians of the blood and the Gnostic post-Christians in control of the churches. The post-Christians will continue to treat the black man as an object to be worshipped on the one hand (because he has the blood that they lack), and to be converted on the other hand (because he lacks the spirit, which the Gnostic has falsely linked to the intellect, that they possess).

The difficulty in converting the Gnostic post-Christian comes from the fact that the Gnostic has placed himself beyond the ken of humanity. By uniting his spiritual life to the mind rather than to the blood, he has thrown in his lot with the great enemy of mankind. The great poets have always seen Satan as the sneering intellectual, standing aloof from mankind.

And it does little good to hand a Gnostic the Gospel of Christ. He knows the story, but he has redefined it. He is no more open to the Gospel of Christ than he is to a tale from the Brothers Grimm. Both, to the modern Gnostic, are "fun" stories to play mind games with.

Miguel de Unamuno stated the problem clearly. It is first necessary to awaken a tragic sense of life in an individual before he can be convinced to turn to the Gospels and treat them as something other than a series of crossword puzzles. To put it simply – a man needs to believe he is sick before he will seek an antidote for his sickness.

If an individual only looks on death as tragic because it comes too early or because it causes pain and not because it extinguishes a personality, then that individual has no need of a loving, personal God. He needs modern science to prolong life and alleviate pain, but he does not need Christ. Only those who have not forsaken their blood and retreated behind the mind-forged wall can know Christ. Such individuals still feel pain at the loss of the "touch of a vanished hand" and still yearn for the "sound of a voice that is still." One has to feel that Cordelia’s death in King Lear was tragic before one can feel the joy of Thaisa’s resurrection in Pericles.

The tragic sense of life is intimately connected to a fairy tale appreciation of life. In the fairy tale, the hero conquers death and lives happily ever after. The modern man has no need for fairy tales, for castles in the sky; instead, he has self- help books and reads success stories. How petty his dreams are and how superficial his yearnings.

To feel abandoned and forsaken by God is a terrible thing. To feel estranged from God because of unresolved problems with some particular sin is also a terrible thing, but to feel no need for God, for the Man of Sorrows and the Risen Christ, is to be in the most unenviable state imaginable. And such is the state of modern man.

All of existence depends on one central issue: Can we feel, with Lear, the true tragic dimensions of Cordelia’s death? If the answer is yes, then all else will follow and we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Dead on Arrival

“What your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light.” --from William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing

“Since you have a good heart, and are willing to divide what you have, I will give you good luck. There stands an old tree; cut it down, and you will find something at the roots.” – from the Grimm Brothers' tale “The Golden Goose”

In the classic film noir, D.O.A., Edmund O’Brien plays a man who has been fatally poisoned and has only 48 hours to live. In those 48 hours, he attempts to find the “who, what, where and how” of the poisoning.

The existential moral is obvious. We are all D.O.A. from the moment we are born. And, according to the existentialists, all we can do is struggle nobly until we succumb. Well, at least the existentialists spare us the sentimental slop: “Dying is perfectly natural; there is nothing to it.” Or how about the Blood, Sweat and Tears line? “There’ll be one child born in this world to carry on.” It’s all sheep-dip. The existentialists are preferable to the false comforters.

However, there used to be a religious Faith that didn’t seek to ignore the existential view of life. Quite the contrary, this faith absorbed it, made it its own, and then transcended it. Camus’ Sisyphus was transformed into Christ carrying his cross to Calvary.

What the Christian churches have succeeded in doing over the centuries is to take a mystery religion in which the Hero conquered death through divine charity and make it into a Coca-Cola commercial. The existential view of life is not confronted and transcended in modern Christianity; it is simply covered over with artificial Log Cabin syrup.

I have given various names to the artificial ‘syruping’ process over the years: the ‘dislocated intellect’, the over-intellectualization of the Faith, Gnosticism, and the Triumph of the Greeks. Since the last is most recent, let’s go back to the Greeks.

The existential view of life, which sees man as worth something but doomed to die and sink into nothingness, was presented by Aeschylus and Sophocles. The more cynical view that man was worth little and doomed to die and sink into nothingness was presented by Euripides. Camus is in the Aeschylus/Sophocles line, while Beckett (Waiting for Godot, etc.) is in the Euripides line. I side with Aeschylus and Sophocles; I think their view of existence, sans Christ, is the more correct one, and I think they represent ancient Greek culture at its best.

Now we come to the intellectuals, the self-proclaimed “the best and the brightest.” Plato and Aristotle stand at the front of a long line of intellectual giants who have offered us solutions to the existential dilemma, “I am a man, and I must die.” Plato is at his best when he breaks his own injunction against the poets and waxes poetic about the cave, intuiting a divine force. And for this reason he was considered by the early Church Fathers and Christian intellectuals to be compatible with Christianity. Aristotle, on the other hand, was not considered to be compatible by the early Church Fathers: there was no mystical element in Aristotle; he was a straight materialist, the first great cataloguer, an entomologist, a systems analyst man, the man with a white lab coat. Aquinas, at first opposed fiercely by the Platonists, managed to get Aristotle into the Catholic pantheon by showing that the real and the particular were the nuts and bolts of Christianity and not the nebulous mysticism of Platonic philosophy. But both Plato and Aristotle are harmful. And the Church, by attempting to pour Christianity into the faithful using classical cups, over time gradually poisoned the faithful. The salvation process was reversed: we once were saved but now are lost. Or, to use the existential parlance, we are again D.O.A.

To see why the classical-Christian mix has been so damaging to Christianity, let us look back to the Roman Empire shortly before the coming of Christ. What type of religion prevailed? Was it the borrowed Greek religion of Zeus, Hera, Apollo, etc.? No, that religion was given mere lip service. Was it the religion of the philosophers? No, there were some Platonists, Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics among the intelligentsia, but those faiths did not move the masses. The great mass of people were attracted to the oriental mystery religions emerging everywhere throughout the Roman Empire. And what did these mystery religions provide that the philosophic systems did not? Personal contact with the deity.

Even the gods, with whom the believers thought they were uniting themselves in their mystic outbursts, were more human and sometimes more sensual than those of the Occident. The latter had that quietude of soul in which the philosophic morality of the Greeks saw a privilege of the sage; in the serenity of Olympus they enjoyed perpetual youth; they were Immortals. The divinities of the Orient, on the contrary, suffered and died, but only to revive again. Osiris, Attis and Adonis were mourned like mortals by wife or mistress, Isis, Cybele or Astarte. With them the mystics moaned for their deceased god and later, after he had revived, celebrated with exultation his birth to a new life. Or else they joined in the passion of Mithra, condemned to create the world in suffering. This common grief and joy were often expressed with savage violence, by bloody mutilations, long wails of despair, and extravagant acclamations. The manifestations of the extreme fanaticism of those barbarian races that had not been touched by Greek skepticism and the very ardor of their faith inflamed the souls of the multitudes attracted by the exotic gods. – Franz Cumont in Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism <http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/orrp/orrp06.htm >

The Greco-Roman gods and the Greco-Roman philosophies failed to reach the deeper regions of the soul; hence, they were abandoned; but the Oriental religions, while allowing for a more personal contact with a human deity, did not fulfill man’s need for a humane deity. However, the masses were ready, much more so than the intellectuals, for a personal savior, because of their involvement in the mystery religions. They needed Mithra with humanity. And this is the great insight of Europe’s most Christian of writers:

To arouse the hope that there may be a god with a heart like our own is more for the humanity in us than to produce the absolute conviction that there is a being who nade the heaven and the earth and the sea and the fountains of waters. Jesus is the express image of God’s substance, and in Him we know the heart of God. –

George MacDonald in The Miracles of Our Lord

What the Roman masses needed – a humane God who took a personal interest in their salvation – is what we all need, even intellectuals who don’t know they need such a God and who would have us accept a different type of God. I see the entire history of the Church as an attempt by the faithful to cling to the personal over the impersonal and to the incarnate God over the Olympian God. In the Catholic Church this struggle manifests itself in devotions to the Sacred Heart, the cult of the saints, and the cult of the Virgin. Unfortunately, the intelligentsia of the Church often intellectualizes the various devotions until the devotions have little of the original spirit left. In Protestantism, the struggle for the personal savior is seen in the fight for the Gospels as the intimate story of the Christ vs. the Biblical exegetical Gnostics who analyze away the religious content of God’s word.

Christopher Dawson once said that the Catholic-Protestant wars ended with Europe divided and seemingly estranged forever. But he then went on to say that there was a unity that still existed. That unity consisted of the devotion to classical culture shared by both the Protestant and Catholic intellectuals. Dawson suggested that this was a good thing. I disagree, and I would suggest that the conflict is not between Protestant laymen who believe in the Christ of the Gospels and Catholic laymen who say the Rosary, but between Protestant-Catholic peasants and the Greek intellectuals of the Catholic and Protestant worlds.

The reason I claim that Fundamentalism has outlasted Catholicism is because Fundamentalism has preserved more of its peasant faith than has Catholicism. Because of clerical dominance, the former faithful of the Catholic Church have been more thoroughly Gnosticized than remnant Fundamentalists. More ideological peasantry is needed in the Catholic ranks. Whereas Protestantism has its peasant fundamentalist remnant, Catholics instead have only the Platonic Novus Ordo and Aristotelian traditionalism. The former tends to impersonal, Jungian ecumenism and the latter tends to impersonal man-as-insect theology; in both, the personal savior, the God-Man, is lost in Greek vapor.

The old apologists can be forgiven for their over-reliance on the Greek forms. Before Vatican II, the rotting Greek foundations of the Church still seemed strong. But now that the rot is visible, it is not permissible to continue to fuse Christianity with classical philosophy. To do so overlooks the fact that Christ came to deliver us not only from the barbarism of Isis, Cybele, and Mithra, but also from the tyranny of the academy from which devotees of the mystery religions had sought relief. And in fact, there are devotees of Cybele in the Novus Ordo seeking refuge from academic Platonism as well as devotees of Mithra in the traditionalist ranks seeking refuge from academic Aristotelianism. Both groups should seek Christ, and they might still find Him if the Church ever lifts the Greek shroud from His face.

We need, if we are to conquer Greek Gnosticism, to recapture the tragic sense of life. We must turn off the Coca-Cola commercials of the Platonists and Aristotelians and sit with Lear in the hovel and expose ourselves to “feel what wretches feel.” It is a mystery, but it is always in stables and hovels, on our knees, that we see the living God. Tragedy is turned into a triumphant fairy tale ending, but only when we have rejected the Greek way and taken the humbler route through the stables.