On the uselessness of Christianity

All the above of course applies to the primitive form of Christianity (for lack of a better word), the one emerging from the Gospels, or to be exact from the sayings of Jesus as recorded in these Gospels. Everything else is an accretion (even Jesus' words may have been twisted, come to think of it). And especially the Pauline version which is a rude imposition, lacking completely in the simplicity and the humility we find in the original message. Paul is pure conceit and self-importance masquarading under a fake confession of abjectness in the presence of his redeemer. His ostentatious emotionality is wielded as a weapon of terror. It is an irritating inflation of his own ego, in the exact same manner as his follower Augustine. It is just the rhetoric of power, or more precisely the power that dreams of its eventual elevation to world domination. With Paul the charisma has been already routinized into utter boredom. He is a rule-smith and behind the filigree of his injunctions there already gapes a disheartening void. His command that existing authority must be obeyed unquestioningly by "all souls" (πᾶσα ψυχὴ ἐξουσίαις ὑπερεχούσαις ὑποτασσέσθω) lays the groundwork for the transformation of Christianity itself into a system of authority. It did that by latching on to the existant political structures. This announces the sorry and sordid future. Paul turned Christianity (for lack of a better word) into a church and a theology, that is into a set of cognitive and moral fetters. And by becoming that it ceased to be a living and redeeming faith.

But the the original "good news" was not a dogma, but a kerygma. It was the slave's mode of being, his coming to terms with his unfreedom sub specie libertatis and his attempt to share it with others. His subjection to external authority was not by way of validating it, but an act of inner defiance that sapped its foundations. This slave was a silent rebel, and not a salivating would-be king waiting for the moment when he would bestride the summit of worldly power. This is the valuable and abiding existential core of the Christian world-view, the one salvaged by Kierkegaard in modern times. But it was this that fell by the way as Christianity became an imperial religion and thus embarked upon its own stretch of vile deeds, the first in the series being its brutish assault (on the instigation of newly Christianized kings) upon the standing legacy of the classical spirit, smashing its temples, statuary etc. The acts of Christian rulers in subsequent centuries were just as unyieldingly rational, and as a result criminal, as any of those of Hellenic antiquity. They worshipped the logic of power, just as absolutely as any of the monsters portrayed by Thucydides or Suetonius. That -maybe- they experienced a more complicated inner torment does not mitigate their iniquity. It rather magnifies the signal hypocrisy of their conduct. Against this backdrop, the medieval "mirrors" of the Christian prince can only be read either as a parody or as an indictment.

This triumphant, official Christianity is, compared to Hellenic culture, an enormity and eyesore. Its advent drastically impoverished humanity. It drained it of all cognitive grandeur and moral earnestness. For it could now allegedly count on guaranteed salvation, provided one recited some incoherent mumbo-jumbo, made some funny motions and bribed the absent Father. The believer, you see, had now money in the heavenly bank with guaranteed interest accruing for all eternity. It all became so easy. And predestination made it even easier: for self-righteousness is the commonest of human propensities. Everyone can convince oneself of one's own self-evident goodness. And this is "proof" that one's precious self definitely counts among the "saints". This led to an ethos of passivity loaded with a bogus self-importance. This vulgarly political Christianity killed politics. For it abjured praxis in the world, and placed all creative endeavor in the whim of an alien being. Nothing depends on our initiatives, so we might just lie back and wait for our justification to descend from above. For we are, of course, certain that we have it in our pocket. This is such a convenient laziness.

As for the Christian aesthetic, I have always thought that both its Byzantine repetitive formalism and its Gothic extravagance are shallow and boring. The suffering here is cheap and artificial. It is made to order to induce self-loathing and terror. Its exaggeration just makes one laugh, or retch. This is not art, but just mechanical technique meant to regiment and to cow. It does not even want to know itself as art, so why insult it with a tag that it resents. Art is the refinement of pleasure. And pleasure here is forbidden. In the medieval epics, such as the Chanson de Roland, the Nibelungenlied or El Cid, what is of artistic worth comes through the depiction of brutality and violent emotion, the raw physicality of existence. To the extent that they are genuine works of art they are, for all the pious pretense, anti-Christian. The same goes for the philosophy of the time. To the extent that it exhibits true thinking it works against the grain of the theology. Whatever is of value there is a fresh pantheistic naturalism, its bold heretical gestures. The doctrine of "double truth" is an indictment of official theology, the death knell of Christian smugness. Living thought pines for the return of Hellenism, the return of man.

The theologically based narcisssism promoted by Christianity is far more dangerous than the egomania of an Achilles. For it leads to a murderous free-for-all, in which all clashing parties claim to have the one true God on their side. The Greek gods, on the contrary, were divided among themselves. They were a mirror of fragmented humanity on the highest aesthetic plane. The Greeks, in any case, never fought for Apollo or Athena. They fought for the interests and the ideals (which was the same thing) of their Polis. The "holy wars" of cross-bearing hulks and paupers (and all other such wars derived therefrom) are on the contrary the exemplar of ugliness, of deformity. A figure like Richard Coeur-de-Lion is indeed interesting as a politician and war-lord and the atrocious massacre he perpetrated at Acre just as tragically despicable as the slaughter at Plataea or Melos. But in all this his "Christianity" is beside the point. The unchanging human nature that Thucydides depicts cut through the pointless theological babble of those times or any other, and brings to the fore the the savage beauty of the raw deed, exposing by and bye the superfluousness of the Christian pap. Compared to the sublime pathos of Greek tragedy the myriad of heavy tomes of abstruse Christian theology are not worth a fart. When this finally dawned on Christian "thinkers" they tried to bring Greek reason back in through the back door. But without abandoning their πρώτη πλάνη, namely the claim of epistemological priority for their bizarre "revelation". But this won't do. And Enlightenment criticism readily showed the emptiness of this pretense.

But there was another original sin affecting, this time, all Christianity (for lack of a better word), including its innocent, primitive form. The Christians rightly diagnosed the Hellenic world as immoral. But they misidentified its essential fault. With remarkable single-mindedness they located it in its sexual licentiousness and "perversity" (meaning male love, τὰ παιδικά). They heap a torrent of violent invective upon the religion of antiquity as stemming from and promoting erotic misconduct. The Alexandrian apologists, for instance, have no eye for any other aspect of Greek art or culture, apart from the lewed writhing of its naked bodies. And what a prurient eye it is. Their pornographic imagination gets terribly swollen by this spectacle to which they attribute the collapse of the ancient world. But behind this primness (exemplified by the self-castration of an Origenes, for instance) is in fact hidden an obsession with the biological functions, an intense undercurrent of animal hedonism. This may be sublimated, in the monasteries in paricular, as the love of the Virgin (what an image of supressed but imperative sexuality!), but it also breaks through to the surface with a surfeit of illicit erotic acrobatics. This, in its various forms, including the criminal one, has been an essential ingredient of the Christian experience throughout the centuries. Homoerotic "perversion" is in fact a substantial element of this sustained delinquency. The Christians themselves are the most trenchant accusers of their own doctrines.

It is, hence, exceedingly shameless for them to indict the Greeks with respect to their sexual propensities, and another proof of their intolerable hypocrisy. In truth, the emancipated libido was one of the most valuable, and tragic certainly, features of Hellenic life. In its extreme manifestations it led to grotesque suffering and injustice. When Caligula was murdered he was repeatedly stabbed in the genitals -and he certainly deserved it. But in the pre-Christian world the erotic was out in the open, acnowledged, contemplated, depicted in literature, theorized about, moulded into philosophy, the object of its creative agony. And poetry was at hand to process the matter of obstreperous desire into vivifying images of both suffering and delight. The human image was not at that time mutilated. The Greeks grappled with it in the totality of its powers and inclinations, without shying away from their excesses. This is infinitely more sane and natural, compared to the real perversity that Christian thanatophilia introduced into our culture, with monasticism as its most egregious manifestation. "Saint" Gregory of Nazianus' ode to chastity is, for all its impeccable Greek, a monument of inhuman ferocity. Only an enemy of the human race would pen such a perverted diatribe.