The uses of Christianity

Viciousness as high art : notice the smile on his face (from Delphi)

More of the same 

Hegel says that Christianity was the religion of the slaves. Nietsche concurs, but loads this description with all kinds of negative evaluations. But why? Slaves need their religion, too. Actually it is a form of their liberation, a mental prehension of their turn at playing masters. This primitive Christianity was, thus, -I am reluctant to say- kind of salutary. It boosted the energy of the docile masses. Belief is not innocent; it brings about action. And some of the action that this new-fangled, childish belief brought about was in fact beneficial at the time.

We tend to idolize and idealize the classical era. But this is actually to miss its point and in fact devalue it. Hellenic antiquity was a raw and rough place and time to be. It was full of docile masses, except that they do not raise their heads above the parapet of out adored classical literature. One can catch a glimpse of them, if one wishes to. But we do not ordinarily wish to. Also its heroes are not exactly the avatars of pure humanity that we mythologize them into. To say that Achilles, for instance, was a butcher, the very paradigm of narcissitic fury wreaking destruction all around is not a sacriledge. It is a factual description, a plain truth that one can glean easily from the pages of Homer himself.

We ordinarily refer to some "dialogue" that took place in 416 B.C. between Athenians and Melians. Of course it was no such thing. It was pure savagery, the brutal assertion of might that laid waste an entire human community. One only needs to peel the thin wrapping of rhetoric to perceive the awfulness of it all. Ditto with respect to the Lacedemonian's treatment of the Plataeans in 427 B.C. We have the consummate speeches as concocted by Thucydides. And in the end what? Once again the brutal execution of two hundred Platean captives that gave themselves up as ἱκέται hoping for just and humane treatment. The more one delves into our cherished classicism the more one comes face to face with the very dregs of humanity's motivation and conduct. If we look at the sublime art of that age with a sober eye, i.e. clearing away the brush of mere aesthetics (or rather kallistics), then what are we staring at? Mostly, again, the foulest excesses of brutality; murder most foul (on all sides). Of unspeakable Rome one had better not speak. That Hellenic art was able to transmute these despicable deeds, the treatchery, the assassination, the rape, the disembowelments, the decapitations, the hacking of the enemy's limbs and the rest of it, into exquisite and eternal forms is no absolution of any kind. The reality behind the stupendous facade remains tainted. Simply because it was reality all too human, and for no other reason. The greatness, in fact, of Hellenic antiquity was that it was able to fashion a glorious culture out of such filthy matter.

The foolishness of primitive Christianity was an antidote of sorts to the mayhem engulfing the tormented and fragmented Hellenic world (that it was truly foolishness, μωρία, we have the word of Paul himself). It signified the Aventine secession of the slavish myriads from the works and the wealth of their raging, effete and brilliant masters. This exclusion was real fact inflicted upon the greatest segment of society by those masters themselves. But through the new faith that external fact became internalized as a willed rejection of that famed legacy by those that were never its beneficiaries.

The will of the slave begins to revolt the very moment the slave perceives himself as a slave. At that point he realizes that his slavery is his strength, for it is his unfree labor that props up the master's throne (Hegel). Christianity enabled him to cash in on this awareness, to metabolize his unfreedom as a higher, more potent freedom. The slave, through Chtistianity, began thus to revel in his slavery, which was now theorized into the human condition as such. "We are all slaves", the word went around. Including the cruel masters who are slaves of their passions and also slaves of an omnipotent God whom they do not acknowledge, but who will in good time smite them to smithereens. Slavery is the very definition of being human. We are slaves to physical necessity, slaves to death. Through that prism everything indeed, including the greatest wonders of Hellenic achievement, is just vanity, ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων τὰ πάντα ματαιότης.

We must not blind ourselves to the fact that there is a serious degree of factuality in this assertion. The Christians have harsh physical reality on their side. Modern science is the most persuasive proponent of their worldview: when the sun eventually implodes, we will see then what happens to the brilliance of ages past. To me, that the Parthenon will in the very long run be annihilated in the general breakdown of the present physical set up is a thought that occasions fright. It is enough, almost, to turn one into a Christian.

So it is true to say, and fair to concede, that the hour of Christianity had duly come. It came at the historically appointed time. And it was its great enemy, Hellenism, in its convulsions and its revulsions and its monstrosites, that brought it forth. The Christianization of the Hellenized Oecumene is one of the most baffling historical outcomes. How was it that the elites, eventually, of that supremely sophisticated and sceptical age decided to turn belly up and commence their after-life now as fools? What prompted them to don the madcap? How was it that Greek rhetoric began now to spew forth the garbage of the Christian dogma? How come philosophy degaded itself into puerile mumbling about miracles and saints? The Greeks had their theologies and their mysteries of course. But their gods were the summits of the visible and the sensible. Their mysteries were but the nether regions of physical matter.

Historically this transformation is not fully explicable. But philosophically it is clear as the sun. In Platonic terms, it was the revolt of the ἐπιθυμητικὸν and the θυμοειδὲς against the λογιστικόν. Reason, having reached the peak of its self-unfolding, now doubled on itself. Yes, it imploded under the weight of its stupendous achievement. The supreme flower of its development was scepticism, the doubting of its very own being. The sweep of this doubt was so powerful, that it laid low the cognitive and moral certainties of former times. And rulers, such as Alexander, freed now from the weight of these constraints began to identify themselves as gods. Their wordly action was still supremely rational: to rule the Egyptians one had to become Egyptian himself in mind and in habit. But this signified the emancipation of Egyptian (Oriental, generally) sensibility from any Hellenic pretenses. When everything is doubtful the only certain thing is faith. This, and the cruelty of the deeds of the masters.