From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Sat 03 May 2003 - 03:44:17 GMT
II. The Church as State
During the first few hundred years after the life of Jesus, the thesis
of Gods presence was accepted by many. These people
worshipped first in secret, and oppression by a state (the Roman
state) unified these believers in martyrdom and as conspiracy of
clandestine religious communion. When however, Constantine the
emperor of Rome accepted Christianity and proclaimed it the
official religion of the Roman Empire, a unifying structure
became necessary. Since the dominant structural model present at
the time was monarchy, a monarchial form was adopted.
This choice fitted in very well with the idea of a sovereign God,
and allowed the bishops of each area to speak for their people.
Soon the bishop of Rome was recognized as Pope, and all
Christians spoke with one voice. That voice, however, was many
times not what many would have chosen; many times it spoke for
itself and the people of Christianity were coerced into accepting
the trappings of totalitarianism as incomprehensible to them, but
ordained of God as the best way. God, after all, could not be
wrong; God was Perfect Mind. But none of the elaborate ritual of
the Roman Catholic Church, and none of its clerical hierarchy,
were outlined by Jesus. It was created by the elite, and much of it
for the elite. For instance, the people of the church have no say in
choosing this elite; it is chosen by itself. Popes choose cardinals;
when the Pope dies the cardinals choose a new one. Election and
popular vote was never even considered as far as the laity were
concerned; appointment by a superior was and is the method of
clerical advancement. The only election is to the highest office, by
those immediately beneath, and it is for life. Diplomatic ties with
other sovereignties were formed with the intention of having the
sovereignty of the Church recognized by the states, so that dual
sovereignty was demanded of their people; allegiance to both
King and Pope, and the Pope first. Vast lands and riches, the price
of heaven, were amassed.
Salvation was bought and sold for what the buyer possessed, be it
wealth or widows mite. Finally, a Pope granted himself
infallibility when speaking ex cathedra, thus grounding
totalitarian authority upon the declaration of the declarer.
There were difficulties encountered along the way. The Roman
Empire fell. There was a great schism and the Russian and Greek
churches broke away. The iron demands of conformity to the
party line and subservience to the religious sovereign and his
clerical nobility were refused by those who disliked what the
Catholic Church had become.
Martin Luther sparked a Reformation that was actually a religious
revolution; the Pope was denied sovereignty over both Protestants
and Anglicans, who spurned Roman Catholicisms claim to be the
temporal arm of God. Monarchy was opposed by democracy, and
conformity by freedom of religious choice. Now Christianity is a
faith embodied in a multiplicity of expressions and the Roman
Catholic Church, while still the largest voice, is one of many
which people are free to choose to or not to heed in most areas.
Only in a few countries is the manner of Christian expression not
a matter of personal choice. It is significant to note that such
freedom has never been given, only taken. Spain and Portugal,
until recently authoritarian states welded to an institutional
church, are the most recent to take such freedoms for their people,
but only after the people took their freedoms from the state.
III. The State as Church
Marx, like Jesus, had not specifically outlined a form for Marxism
to take. He had stated the purpose of his call for revolution, true; a
communist economic system maintained for the fair distribution
of the products of labor (goods and services), centrally
administered and collectively owned. But the structures of
responsibility, decision and communication had not been
patterned out or their interrelations delineated. Jesus preached
mutual love between people through mediation of Mind and Marx
preached mutual service between people through implementation
of Matter. Jesus assumes that upon the Apocalypse, which he
expected soon, governmental forms would be unnecessary, and
Marx assumed that upon the advent of communism that a
temporary post-revolutionary organizing authority, the
dictatorship of the proletariat, would quite voluntarily wither
away.
The Russian Revolution took the Marxists by surprise. Marx was
dead and could not lead; Lenin took command. He possessed a
faith, the shambles of a monarchial system, and many millions of
religious people.
He instituted a dictatorship of the proletariat modeled on the
monarchial structure, abolished private property, purged the
opposition, and installed himself as leader of a monarchial
economic state. Successors were to be chosen by the majority vote
of commissars that the previous leader appointed, and all
members of the government were to be members of the one party
allowed, the Communist Party. The Soviet government was built
in the image of the Roman Catholic Church, and Lenin became its
first Pope. The communist parties in other nations were required
to accept the soviet party as absolute sovereign and not to be
questioned. Things move more quickly these days, for thirty years
after the Soviet republic was born Marshal Tito, the first harbinger
of schism, appeared on the scene. Soon after, we had socialist as
well as communist states, as we have predominately catholic and
predominately protestant countries; the Socialist Reformation has
taken place before our eyes, despite attempts by the Soviet
Republic to repress same in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
It is significant to note that communists may form parties within
socialist countries, but until recently, when the issue was forced,
not the other way around. This is a duplication of the Catholic-
Protestant paradigm of one-way (or predominately one-way)
discrimination.
IV. Church-State vs. People
Both of these systems of belief, as practiced by their dominant
organs, are monarchies - but not genetic ones. They are
ideological monarchies. Neither has much use for the criticisms of
philosophy, which they both distrust because they cannot control
it. Both have three dogmas that correlate nicely. They are: (1) the
Statement of Faith (Catholic - God is, and subsidiary dogma;
Communist - God is not, and subsidiary dogma), (2) the Personal
Admonition (Catholic - love others; Communist - labor for
others), and (3) the Acknowledgement of Authority (Catholic - the
church/Pope is infallible; Communist - the Party/President is
infallible). One joins them only by publicly endorsing their
doctrines, and advances by being perceived by ones superiors as
passionately conforming to them. The laity of each lack the power
to dictate the course of church-state actions; power issues from
the apex - the crowned head of the controlling minority of the
ideological elite.
Each is plagued with the wide propagation of a more democratic
alternative (Protestantism, Socialism), which it regards as an
obstreperous and irreverent stepchild, for although each wants the
world to accept its views, each also desires the final disposition of
them. Dissent is either treasonous (contra people) or blasphemous
(contra God); one punishes it directly in this life, one indirectly
through disposition of a believed-in next. To join either is to
forfeit it your rights. One is world negating the other is other-than-
world negating. Each asserts that the only way to be truly human
is to embrace its faith. Both have collectively deterministic views
of history; one is determined by Mind (what happens is ordained
of God) and the other is determined by Matter (the evolution of
the distribution of material is the guiding force of history), and
both culminate in utopia. Both have a person to worship and a
book to read, and both have trained experts to communicate the
orthodox meaning of each to the mass herds, and to denounce
forbidden concepts and conceivers. The masses of each are
constrained to take their words at face value, the words of
ideologues commissioned to propagate the Faith.
That such similarities should manifest themselves in the relational
structures between these belief systems and their respective social
masses is not surprising. Correlative opposites mutually and
symmetrically define from a neutral or uncommitted perspective;
us-them only manifests itself after a Leap - in either direction.
Marxism would have to have a governmental system of absolute
authority from below to be in good faith with itself. Lacking time
and a practicable paradigm from which to develop such a system,
the closest available, complementary alternative was employed - a
governmental system of absolute authority from above, the model
of its ideological antithesis and methodological twin, Christianity.
The adoption of this internal self-contradiction festered in the
heart of the Soviet system, and in the end, facilitated its demise.
V. The Social Subsumption
Feuerbachs work was brilliant and insightful, and at first one
might suspect that Marx had betrayed him by placing the God of
Matter upon the throne from which Feuerbach had only recently
removed the God of Mind. Actually, Feuerbach had only dealt
with one side of the question, and Marx embarked upon the first
movement of the other side when he crystallized Matter into an
icon. That Apollo had been given away, missed, and reclaimed by
humanity we an incomplete resolution of the situation; the same
dialectic had to be traversed in Dionysian terms. Chaos and Order
are co-primordial, and neither can be apprehended absolutely by
humankind, only believed in (a major problem in computer
science is the inability to construct a truly random number
generator; any pattern - including the Kantian categories of space,
time and causality - necessarily begets pattern). At the same
instant that humanity became aware of mind, that is, when
humanity began to become human, humanity also became aware
of body - a body that Marx had enshrined and thus stolen from
them. The thesis of Jesus, the crystallizer of Mind, had been
dialectically resolved by Feuerbach; who would resolve the
Marxian thesis.
It has been done, by Friedrich Nietszche. The majority of his work
concerns how humanity had divorced itself from its body.
Nietszche missed this body, and reclaimed it in his monumental
work THE WILL TO POWER. Nietszche did not write as
Feuerbach did; he wrote not with the Apollonian clarity of the
dialectic, but with the Dionysian passion of the hammer.
Feuerbach and Nietszche, the humanizers of Jesus God of Mind
and Marxs God of Matter, the Promethean reclaimers of Order
and Chaos, formulated the restated thesis and antithesis of God
is and God is not, which really said Mindgod is and
Mattergod is not and Mattergod is and Mindgod is not. Their
statements are, respectively, Mindgod is human and Mattergod
is human. Now these must be combined into the next synthesis,
the synthesis not yet widely spoken but of which the world is
already implicitly aware. It is this: Mindgod and Mattergod are the
thesis and antithesis which are synthesized in humanity.
This can be intuited even in Aristotles hylomorphic composition
of the world, although he did not apply it to humanity. For
Aristotle, things are contingent phenomenal syntheses of
noumenal absolutes. So are humans, but incredibly enriched!
Human contingency is the dynamic and never-completed synthesis
of opposing absolutes, which itself can only apprehend in
contingent terms, but in two opposing yet complementary
directions. There are in constant interplay with each other and
their names are intuitive right-brain synthesis into unity (from
Matter to Mind) and intellectual left-brain analysis into
multiplicity (from Mind to Matter). In these two modes of self-
consciousness, which are synthesis reflecting upon analysis
(which assumes the synthetic whole in order to analyze) and
analysis reflecting upon synthesis (which assumes the analytic
parts in order to synthesize), the former views their human
conjunction as Mind ruling Matter and the latter views it as
Matter ruling Mind. Each, like Jesus and Marx, Feuerbach and
Nietszche, is partly right and partly wrong, for each focused on a
single aspect of the human coin. Neither rules and both do, each
by consent of the other. This is the paradox of contingency, which
frees history from the determinism of either side alone while still
allowing for the interplay of trends, and humanity from the
imperative to follow one side of existence exclusively, while still
leaving humanity its humanness. The bare existence or lack of
same of either absolute is nonrelational to humankind, which is
free for each of its individual members to subjectively and
intersubjectively experience the plenitude of contingent
synthanalytic existence.
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