Internet TV (1)

Just discovered: a huge archive of about 2,700 high-quality educational documentaries, covering the arts, current affairs, science, etc., at The Research Channel, which seems to be a project of a consortium of American universities and other institutions. These videos are apparently all at sufficiently low resolution to be able to stream over a basic cable connection, such as the one I'm using, even when it's a bit busy. Probably a 56kbps modem could handle them as well.

This collection is so wide-ranging, though, that one might be better off doing a video search on Yahoo for the subject one is interested in.

See also the audio links in my sidebar and Internet radio (III).

On The Growth of the Liberal Soul

(Comments based on a hasty reading)

This 1997 book, by David Walsh, is strongly influenced by Voegelin (see preceding posts), but has a more self-consciously liberal point of view. Walsh sees liberalism—the adoption of liberty as the foundation of the political order—as the only remaining viable political tradition in the West and, indeed, the world; at the same time, he recognizes that it is in a state of crisis. Walsh's basic point is that if it is to survive, it necessary for liberalism—which is a kind of secularized Christianity, as Hegel seems to have been the first to point out—to recognize that it rests on transcendent values. Historically liberalism has failed to investigate its own foundations adequately because it developed as a kind of pragmatic compromise among specific conflicting religious beliefs. Under such circumstances, it was safer, as well as unnecessary, to avoid examining the bedrock assumptions of the political order: such examination would have been likely only to stir up the ashes of ideological conflict. But this meant that there grew up the illusion that liberalism was value-neutral; and this neutrality, now carried to absurd lengths, has come to be seen as the core of liberalism. But a value-neutral civic theology, a credo of pure tolerance, will merely amount to license—such as we are now seeing—and will soon disintegrate. Unless people are capable of using their freedom wisely, it may be their downfall. Nevertheless, Walsh seems to concur with Voegelin that freedom is of such overriding importance that one should accept even the possibility of ruin rather than limit freedom. Everyone over 18 is to be treated as a mature, morally independent adult, even if this should have little basis in reality.

Unfortunately Walsh does not seem to have any suggestions as to how the crisis of liberalism might be resolved, other than to exhort people to spiritually transform themselves. Since we should in any case (regardless of political considerations) presumably be attempting to spiritually transform ourselves, this political prescription appears to amount to precisely nothing. Hence, the book is profoundly unsatisfactory. The material on thinkers such as Hegel and Rousseau, which emphasizes the attractive sides of their doctrines, may be of interest, though.

Walsh may also not have fully disentangled himself from the contemporary "neutral" liberalism he is opposing. There seems to be a failure in the book to appreciate the distinction between democratic government and individual liberty: for Walsh, the first of these is simply the collective dimension of freedom. But in reality it is more important that government be limited than that it be democratic. Government is inherently restrictive of individual freedom, whether its decisions are made democratically or not. The unlimited "collective freedom" of unlimited democracy simply amounts to totalitarian enslavement of the individual. I don't think Walsh acknowledges this.

A vivid metaphor from Walsh (p. 278), describing the predicament of liberal societies without an animating conviction of moral duty:

The paralysis of the central nervous system has left the victim powerless to do anything to defend himself against the myriad small assaults against his flesh, although he remains perfectly conscious of the process for a very long time.

Eric Voegelin (3)

The Christian "vacuum"

As mentioned in the preceding post, Voegelin's reservations regarding Christianity stem largely from its lack of a firm and compelling position on political matters, a "civil theology", which leaves the way open for essentially un-Christian utopian political movements (whether these take a Christian or non-Christian guise). At a more basic level, he believes that Christianity sets up a kind of existential tension. The world as a whole is "de-divinized", as Christian adherents are required to worship a transcendent, invisible God rather than either the more tangible pagan deities formerly attached to natural objects or god-emperors. Christian worship is more difficult than nature-worship and, for a great many Christians, is a matter of accepting the authority of others rather than of personal experience. (This is especially the case, Voegelin suggests, since mystical and scholastic theology were divorced from each other in Western Christianity in the Middle Ages. Perhaps this accounts for some of the interest in Voegelin in Eastern Orthodox circles.) . . . CONTINUE Such Christians are liable to assuage their chronic spiritual hunger with various forms of worldly idolatry, especially if this can be presented as something other than "religion" so that it does not come into open conflict with Christianity. They may also embrace religious gnosticism, which may or may not be regarded as a heresy by the Church. It seems indisputable, for example, that the primitive Church was for a long time convinced that the Second Coming was always just round the corner.

This criticism that Christianity, in its puritanical monotheism, de-divinizes the world, is not limited to ancient pagan writers such as Celsus; V.S. Naipaul, for example, has criticized monotheism's recent effects on traditional pagan cultures in similar terms (with emphasis on the even more rigorously monotheistic Islam). Some contemporary Christian apologists claim that their religion, with its God-made-flesh, is pre-eminently the religion of worldly divinization, and this may be true in principle. In practice, however, Christianity has rarely been interested in the details of subjecting nature to divine law. One might mention here its attitude to sexuality, which it has generally regarded as an unavoidable evil, to be kept rigorously separate from religion, rather than as a field to be transformed in the Divine image. Probably this attitude to worldly idols was necessary when the surrounding culture was actively worshipping them. By now, however, the natural world has become thoroughly deadened for Westerners as a result of centuries of Christian monotheistic rigour followed by more centuries of mechanistic physical science (and now industrialization). The need now would seem to be to revive some sense of the natural world as richly alive, rather than to stop people from worshipping it. The early Christians may have had no choice but to change the pagan gods into demons; it might now be desirable to restore them as subordinate deities, if they had not died out in the meantime. (Voegelin, incidentally, observes that Philo Judaeus attempted to turn Judaism into a pan-Roman religion that would have been a rival to Christianity, by relegating the Roman gods to the status of subrulers under a Jewish "king of kings".)

I wonder if some form of religious, rather than political, "gnosticism" might not be a solution to the problem Voegelin identifies. If nothing else, it might divert people's attention away from political fanaticism. Personal cultivation through such techniques as yoga may be a way of satisfying the need for relatively accessible spiritual or emotional experience which does away with the need for political substitutes such as the Nuremberg rallies. Yoga, specifically, is probably fundamentally inconsistent with Christianity, and ultimately spiritually dangerous, at least for Westerners (or so most orthodox Christian critics claim). On the other hand, a number of Christians who are familiar with the matter seem to be quite comfortable with the possibility of a combination of Taoism and Christianity. (The book Christ the Eternal Tao is said to examine this possibility, though I have not read it as yet.) Taoism is strongly oriented towards the natural world, and so would seem to make up for that gap in Christianity; it also seems, like Christianity, to be suitable for large numbers of practitioners, rather than a small spiritual élite as seems to be the case for yoga in its authentic form (see my Chi Gung post).

None of this would do anything to make good on Christianity's lack of a "civil theology". But this lack is not necessarily a bad thing. Ideally our political beliefs should rest on a foundation of broad classical philosophical and Christian (or "Judeo-Christian") principles, but not be cast into any more rigid, specific form that would leave society unable to adjust to changing conditions. Our current cultural problems result largely from our failure to establish such a foundation for our dominant liberal political practices. (David Walsh's The Growth of the Liberal Soul (1997), influenced by Voegelin, is an attempt to address this problem.)

Eric Voegelin (2)

Voegelin and Christianity

(As in the preceding post, these impressions are gleaned mostly from Voegelin's The New Science of Politics along with Michael Federici's overview, Eric Voegelin: The Restoration of Order.)

Any fundamental examination of Christianity from a more or less conservative point of view may be of key importance, because on a conservative's attitude toward Christianity can hinge the difference between, for example, a pathological ideology such as Nazism, with its attempt to replace Christianity by aggressive neo-paganism; Burkean conservatism, with its tolerance of different religious forms; and Catholic traditionalism, which would be relatively intolerant but at the same time presumably restrained by its own Natural Law in the methods by which it suppressed rival belief-systems, . . . CONTINUE provided at least that these did not constitute an existential threat to Catholic traditionalism. (Incidentally, many conservatives regard Nazism as essentially a left-wing phenomenon, but it seems more accurate to call it a mixture of leftist and conservative elements—a matter which I will not go into here.)

Voegelin, who seems to have been more of a Platonist philosopher than a Christian in the traditional sense, had a highly nuanced and personal view of the historic role of Christianity, seeing it both as an advance in man's consciousness of fundamental importance and as the carrier of tendencies towards fanatical political millenarianism. These two aspects stem from two apparently separate ideas introduced by Christianity into the Roman world (though both originated in Judaism). On the one hand, Christianity was the religion of "condescending grace"—of God's extension of Himself in friendship toward man. The Platonic-Aristotelian God, by contrast, had been remote, impersonal, indifferent to how His Creation was playing out, and could never have been in a relationship of friendship (which for Aristotle presupposed equality) with anyone.

The experience of mutuality in the relation with God, . . . of the grace which imposes a supernatural form on the nature of man, is the specific difference of Christian truth. (New Science of Politics, p. 78.)

This, for Voegelin, is Christianity in the true sense. But from the outset, Christianity also signified a second novel belief, that the Kingdom would come on Earth as well as in Heaven. The truth according to Voegelin is that fulfillment lies beyond nature, not in history, as some Christians, such as St. Augustine (who had to come to terms with an obviously collapsing Empire) recognized. But both St. Paul and the author of the book of Revelations confused the heavenly and earthly Kingdoms, thereby "immanentizing the eschaton", in what has become the best-known sample of Voegelin's personal terminology.

Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy. Things are not things, nor do they have essences, by arbitary declaration. The course of history as a whole is no object of experience; history has no eidos [visible form?], because the course of history extends into the unknown future . . . . The meaning of history, thus, is an illusion; and this illusionary eidos is created by treating a symbol of faith as if it were a proposition concerning an object of immanent experience. (New Science of Politics, p. 120.)

As far as I am aware, Voegelin is the first writer to combine a respect for Christianity, as an advance in human consciousness, with some agreement with those pagan Romans who blamed it for diverting Roman energies away from the preservation of the Empire. At least in its primitive form, Christianity is purely other-worldly in orientation, while at the same time it has insisted on the destruction of the more worldly paganism which it replaced. It leaves a dangerous vacuum, then, in the area of "civil theology": a vacuum which tends to be repeatedly filled by millenarian (or "gnostic") political movements. Voegelin argues convincingly that this tendency has persisted in post-Christian culture, in the form of various secular millenarian "isms" which are even more vicious than their Christian heretical forerunners. It will not be enough to defeat any of these movements on a political level, because in the vacuum left behind by Christianity new gnostic movements will always be springing into existence. Nothing short of a transformation of consciousness, to be achieved through the recovery of genuine philosophical experience, will do.

Some Christians will take offense at Voegelin's denial of any (knowable) meaning in history as a flat rejection of Christian revelation, though there are actually a number of modern Christian writers on the philosophy of history who hold a similar view. And it does seem difficult to reconcile Voegelin's assertion with the orthodox Christian belief in an omniscient God beyond time and space (see my post on Boethius): if God knows the future, who is Voegelin to decree that God will never reveal parts of it, or even its overall pattern, to prophets? Voegelin is also willing to attack the Prophet Isaiah for advocating a reliance on the help of God in place of prudent political decisionmaking. Here too he seems to be on dangerous ground: Jesus himself said that faith could move mountains; the Lord's prayer also asks for God's will to be done "on Earth, as it is in Heaven". Judging by his actions during his lifetime, Jesus, unlike Isaiah, was not referring to meddling in political events. But is the dividing line between actions in the political and spiritual spheres always clear? Is the Christian God really completely indifferent over worldly, political matters—considering, for example, how a certain level of civil peace is indispensable if people are to pursue the life of the spirit? Isn't such a God starting to sound more like the Aristotelian Prime Mover which Voegelin supposedly rejects?

The two Christian innovations, the personalization of the One God and the belief that worldly events are part of a Divine historical scheme, actually seem to be two sides of the same coin. Once one accepts that God extends grace to human beings living in the world, it is difficult to deny that this affects all worldly affairs. Evidently it is true that Christianity and post-Christian culture are subject to recurrent bouts of millenarianism. But such millenarianism is a more subtle distortion of "true" Christianity (and hence even more difficult to avoid) than Voegelin realizes. It is the kind of distortion that results because people are too impatient to wait for the working-out of the genuine Divine historical plan, so that they habitually assume that the plan is going to be fulfilled more quickly than it actually is. People invariably put too much value on their own small segment of history. Whenever some crisis arises, little though it is likely to matter in the grand historical scheme, Christian or post-Christian millenarianists appear on the scene, preaching that the end of the world is (figuratively or literally) at hand. As Voegelin observes, such preaching is typically aimed at the masses, who cannot be expected to have much historical perspective. Moreover, historical perspective may not be of much comfort when one's entire civilization, the vessel of everything one holds dear in the world, may be collapsing. Here, for practical purposes, it might indeed be preferable to regard one's God as working outside history, in some extramundane realm.

Eric Voegelin (1)

Voegelin vs. Schuon

The German/American philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) has a small but devoted following who regard him as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. Most of these followers are on the political right, but apparently Voegelin did not identify himself as a conservative, as he distrusted the traditional conservative tendency to substitute dogma for the direct experience of truth. He is also in some ways at odds with traditional Christianity. (One suspects, though, that on the current political spectrum, which has shifted dramatically leftwards in the past 25 years or so—I refer here to attitudes to cultural, rather than comparatively superficial economic, questions—he would fall decidedly at the conservative end.) . . . CONTINUE The basic emphasis in Voegelin's work is probably the analysis of millenarian "political religions" such as Marxism and Nazism, and the argument that to counter the tendency indicated by such movements, a spiritual or philosophical renaissance is necessary, rather than merely political reforms (say, reverting to aristocracy from democracy). A key to this renaissance would be the philosophical or religious treasures of Greece and early Christianity, which may be all that we have to build on once the modern political fanaticisms have finished devastating the cultural landscape, and so have finally discredited themselves. In this sense Voegelin is a strong traditionalist.

It is of interest, then, to try to compare Voegelin with the other traditionalist school represented by Frithjof Schuon. There are a number of points of contact between these two streams of thought, but there are at the same time some fundamental differences. Both are, I think, suspicious of the way in which Christianity has "deviated" from other major religions by emphasizing the possibility of salvation on a worldly plane. Both would probably regard the world in Platonic fashion, as an inevitably poor copy of an ideal that could exist only in the spiritual realm. Both believe in an essentially unchanging human nature. Both probably regard the outward or material achievements of the West as having being purchased at the price of an inward or spiritual impoverishment so dire that it is not far from producing a total collapse even on the material level, appearances to the contrary. Neither thinker shares the classical liberal's faith in freedom of thought as inevitably leading to the victory of Truth: the lie may be more attractive. (Nevertheless, one suspects that Voegelin places so much value on free philosophical inquiry that he would accept even catastrophic social consequences in order to preserve this freedom.) Voegelin writes with respect of the pre-philosophical "cosmological" or mythological religious view: the primitive "cosmological empires", such as that of the Mongols, consisted of those who experienced themselves to be in harmony with the cosmos, and understood themselves as representatives of a transcendent cosmic order. One can imagine Schuon sharing such a standpoint.

Nevertheless, these two thinkers are radically opposed to each other. Schuon admits only the decay of the Kali Yuga. Voegelin, by contrast, acknowledges the possibility, though not the inevitability, of genuine progress. This consists not in the evolution of human nature or experience, but in the deepening of self-awareness of that nature or experience. Greek philosophy and Christianity both represented genuine advances in their illumination of human nature. Hence, Voegelin is free of the Western self-hatred that is apparent at an essential level in Schuon. (Christopher Dawson has a similar view of the relationship of Christianity to older pagan religions, which were oriented towards the outer world rather than the inner self.) Voegelin would probably agree with Reinhold Niebuhr's view of progress: new fundamental developments, such as Christianity, bring with them the potential both for unprecedented good and, when they are perverted into heresy, for unprecedented evil. Thus, there are new things under the sun, yet no such thing as the guaranteed progress in which the nineteenth century naively believed. (Voegelin, incidentally, apparently sees the year 1900 as representing a kind of spiritual nadir, with some recovery of genuine thought in the first half of the twentieth century, impelled by the political turmoil of that era. Would he have seen any continuation of this recovery in the late twentieth century? This seems doubtful to me.)

Stupid statement on Iran by Christopher Hitchens

In an interview with Hugh Hewitt (link no longer valid), Hitchens says that the Iranians want the Bomb "in a sense, to make themselves [be] taken seriously" and are less likely to use it than, say, Saddam would have been if he had owned one. His evidence for this considered evaluation is, in large part, as follows:

Look, the statement, for example, that Israel must be completely destroyed is a very old statement, made by Ayatollah Khomeini. It's been repeated routinely every year on anti-Israel day. I've heard it pronounced many, many times at Friday prayers in Iran. I've been to these routines. I think Ahmadinejead was rather amazed to find what an effect he got for saying it for what to many people was the first time. Of course, he made it nastier by adding vile innuendoes about the Holocaust and so forth, but this is largely rhetoric.

So you see, numerous Iranians repeat their wish to destroy Israel so often—they even have an "anti-Israel day" for crying out loud!—that they can't actually mean it. It's just letting off a harmless bit of steam. Hang on, though . . . could it perhaps be working up steam? Hmm, hadn't thought of that.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, this is about as sensible as saying that if Hitler had actually been anti-Semitic he would never have indicated it so straightforwardly in Mein Kampf. Hitchens might have had a point if Iran had long possessed the means to obliterate Israel and had never used them. But, of course, it has never possessed those means.

Update ('06/06/08): Condemnation of Christopher (not to be confused with Peter) Hitchens also comes from the anti-Zionist Christian Right.

Jaw-dropping insanity from the UK

Doubtless this news is already all over the internet, but I can't resist noting it here anyway. The Daily Mail reports that police in England have been instructed to let burglars and perpetrators of other "minor" crimes (such as arson and sex with children) off with a caution, as a means of alleviating the shortage of prison space. It also turns out that violent or sexual offenders given "mandatory life sentences" have been released after as little as 15 months' imprisonment. (And in England you are strongly discouraged from defending yourself against criminal attack. Meanwhile, though, if you publicly say anything moderately critical about certain minority groups, the English police can still somehow find the resources to interrogate you at length—even if there is no crime you can be charged with.) Britain is a deeply, perhaps terminally sick society. One has to keep reminding oneself of this, if one grew up regarding it as the "mother of democracies", as I did. In North America we have so far come down with only comparatively minor symptoms of the same social plague, and there evidence of an "immune system" that is still functioning at some level.

(Via the "Reflecting Light" blog, linked in my sidebar.)

Boethius: Spacetime in the Dark Ages

At the cusp between the ancient and medieval worlds stands the aristocratic Roman writer Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy was until fairly recently a generally known classic. (C.S. Lewis cites it as formative in his own thinking, for example.) Boethius wrote it during a prison term that would end with his execution on the instructions of a barbarian Roman Emperor, though it is not clear that he was aware of this at the time. He is thought to have been a Christian, but it would be difficult to tell this from this book, written just before the disappearance of classical civilization in the West, in which much of the Roman spirit from pre-Christian times is still evident.

What I found most interesting in this work was Boethius's marvellous argument reconciling predestination and free will, in the final few chapters. . . . CONTINUE (Apparently Aristotle gave a similar demonstration several centuries earlier, as well.) The key to the argument is that an omniscient God can be conceived as viewing everything that happens everywhere and at all times—past and future as well as the present. Everything that will ever happen is to God part of an eternal Now; God sees the world as a single picture extending over all space and time, rather than as a sequence of events which appear and disappear, as human beings see things. In other words, time is a dimension much like space, from the point of view of God. It follows that those events that happen at some point in the future are analogous, as far as God is concerned, to those that happen now, but at some distance away from us, from the point of view of ordinary human perception. Now, the mere fact that I can tell what another person is now doing at some distance away from me is irrelevant to the freedom of that other person to choose whether to do it or not. Similarly, then, the fact that God can already see what some person is doing in the future is irrelevant to the question of whether that person is acting freely. Predestination does not abolish free will.

This model of the universe as a single snapshot covering all space and time is also widely adopted in modern (relativity) physics, with its concept of "spacetime", in which space can also be interchanged with time under certain extreme conditions. The modern familiarity with "spacetime" makes Boethius's argument accessible to everyone who knows anything about modern science, or even just reads some intelligent science fiction. I wonder if this is a much wider audience than the one which would have been capable of appreciating Boethius's argument when he wrote. If so, it would show how a progressing knowledge of the natural world can progressively extend our spiritual perception.

Internet radio (III)

Intercollegiate Studies Institute Archive

This private American organization for the preservation of traditional academic values has a large (approaching 200 items) archive of lectures and debates, mostly recorded over the last several years, but also including some "historical lectures" dating back to the 1960s. The archive contains a mixture of audio and video recordings and transcripts, with a majority of the items being available as audio (streaming audio only in some cases). Some of these lectures are by among the world's best historical or political writers, and many seem to be of high quality—worth downloading to a CD or iPod and listening to several times. ISI is politically conservative in orientation but its political debates, for example, give equal time to representatives of the other side of the American political spectrum, and some of the lectures are on non-political subjects. Using this archive is a little like having free access to the lectures of a great university, although the subjects discussed are of general rather than specialized scholarly interest.

See also Internet radio (II).

(A link to ISI also appears with along with other noteworthy audio links in this blog's sidebar.)

Schuon on Christianity and Islam

(Revised post)

Frithjof Schuon, James Cutsinger's mentor, is a strange beast: a believer in the essential infallibility of not just one but of all traditional religions. I think he can make enlightening reading—provided that one keeps in mind that he bears a one-sided hatred of all the West stands for, from the thought of ancient Greece to modern science and technology, and that this hatred makes him ready to overlook or excuse obvious failings of the non-Western cultures he admires. In this respect the arch-conservative Schuon seems, oddly enough, to resemble contemporary liberals.

Schuon is illuminating in that he at least gives some clue as to why some Westerners would be attracted to Islam, or at any rate to their idea of esoteric Islam (Sufism). . . . CONTINUE Islam, he says, is "normative" because it "rests on the natural properties of things with a realism which . . . avoids confusing realms and levels" (Stations of Wisdom, John Murray, London, p. 58), namely the level of worldly struggle and the higher realm of of the spirit. So, in Islam "there are certain tribes of noble character who live partly by plunder and [Western] people feel indignant", but in Christianity there is unavoidable hypocrisy while engaging in comparable behaviour, such as the kind of imperialism Europe engaged in a century ago: "Brigandage is the imperialism of nomads, just as imperialism is the brigandage of big nations" (pp 60–61). Denying the Law of the Jungle (or perhaps the Mosaic law of just retribution, the lex talionis, with which Schuon seems to conflate the Law of the Jungle here) would be to "confuse the earth with Heaven" (p. 61). To the Muslim, Schuon suggests, Christianity represents pious sentiment, while Islam represents the intellect. And if no one is allowed to have any new thoughts in this religion of the intellect, that is fine too, because in orthodox religion all the true thinking has already been done. Islam is "universal", because "it seeks to teach only what has been taught from all times." Insofar as Christianity introduced anything truly new, it is clearly wrong, as there is no such thing as spiritual progress in history. Islam deliberately introduced nothing fundamentally new, and can therefore be regarded as closer to the truth.

For Schuon, Christianity is exceptional among religions in that it represents an "externalized esotericism", in other words a mystical religion (an esoteric development of Judaism in fact), best suited to a small number of monastics, that has been made available in diluted form to whole peoples, with ambiguous results.

[The] externalising of an esotericism was for the West the last plank of salvation, the other traditional structures being for it either exhausted or quite inapplicable; but this 'anomaly' . . . alone can explain the multitude and extent of the errors of the West, or certain paradoxical features such as the habit of swearing and blaspheming, which is singularly widespread in Christian lands, but uknown in the East. This was what Islam . . . implicitly foresaw.

(p. 139.) It is difficult to see how those who follow Schuon along such lines of thought can be genuinely loyal to the Christian tradition, even if they have the appearance of being Christian conservatives. Is Christianity likely to flourish if its stewards regard it as essentially an expedient for dealing with the flaws of their own, singularly ugly Western culture, and intrinsically inferior to other major religious traditions?

The half-truth is more dangerous than the lie, as I think Thomas Aquinas said. Christianity does represent an externalized esotericism (something also noted by Rudolf Steiner). This is why it places what seem to be unreasonably high ethical demands on its followers. But insofar as Christians can succeed in meeting those demands, the religion will bring about great cultural achievements: the abolition of the immemorial institution of slavery, to cite one important example. "Religious democracy" contains the potential for great good.

Meanwhile, Schuon is also interesting on the respective views of Islam and Christianity on the Fall of Man. Christianity, exceptionally, believes in an "infinite fissure" between Man and God which can be overcome only by the Intermediary, Christ. This is because it identifies Man with his will, and Adam's turning of his will away from God, his desire to be godlike himself, was a radical, almost irremediable step. For Islam—much as for pagan Greece and Rome—man is instead identified with his mind, and the Fall comes from the subordination of the intelligence to the passions (p. 59). This is a less radical evil, and can be reversed by man's own efforts. I think there is much to be said for the view that Christianity discourages effort towards self-improvement and obedience to ethical principles, and encourages a destructive self-hatred, by claiming that only Christ has the power to save—that we are too far gone for our own efforts to be worth anything. This seems to be a Protestant rather than Catholic belief, but the Protestants may well have succeeded in returning to the original spirit of Christianity in this respect. But does this mean the Catholic viewpoint is necessarily mistaken?—Only if one holds, as an article of faith, that religions cannot develop after they have been revealed.

Thomas Merton, self-loathing Christian

". . . The culture of the white men is not worth the dirt in Harlem's gutters."
    —The Seven Storey Mountain, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1998, p. 379.

In Merton, we seem to have a relatively deep Christianity—not just the usual leftover post-Christian ethical fragments—causally linked to liberal self-hatred. At the root of this may be an economic illiteracy which sees the rich as ipso facto guilty of causing the plight of the poor. (". . . the rich whose sins have bred this abominable slum.") At any event, it would not be surprising if such Christianity drove many people into paganism.