Christianity

When they get into how the first converts were mostly women, I was reminded about how, today, it is still females who are attracted to Christianity...and the young, the ill, the feeble, the old, and the effete.

It was "their willingness to die" which impressed the Romans.
Nihilism must have flabbergasted those men who loved life so much, and who would go down fighting.

Evola and Xt. Mysticism:

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The Wowman and the Cultist wanted consideration on
Kierkegaard...

Kierkegaard 1.

Quote :

"The type of Christianity that underlies his writings is a very serious strain of Lutheran pietism informed by the dour values of sin, guilt, suffering, and individual responsibility.

For Kierkegaard Christian faith is not a matter of regurgitating church dogma. It is a matter of individual subjective passion, which cannot be mediated by the clergy or by human artefacts. Faith is the most important task to be achieved by a human being, because only on the basis of faith does an individual have a chance to become a true self. This self is the life-work which God judges for eternity.

The individual is thereby subject to an enormous burden of responsibility, for upon h/er existential choices hangs h/er eternal salvation or damnation. Anxiety or dread (Angest) is the presentiment of this terrible responsibility when the individual stands at the threshold of momentous existential choice. Anxiety is a two-sided emotion: on one side is the dread burden of choosing for eternity; on the other side is the exhilaration of freedom in choosing oneself. Choice occurs in the instant (Øjeblikket), which is the point at which time and eternity intersect—for the individual creates through temporal choice a self which will be judged for eternity.

But the choice of faith is not made once and for all. It is essential that faith be constantly renewed by means of repeated avowals of faith. One's very selfhood depends upon this repetition, for according to Anti-Climacus, the self “is a relation which relates itself to itself” (The Sickness Unto Death). But unless this self acknowledges a “power which constituted it,” it falls into a despair which undoes its selfhood. Therefore, in order to maintain itself as a relation which relates itself to itself, the self must constantly renew its faith in “the power which posited it.” There is no mediation between the individual self and God by priest or by logical system (contra Catholicism and Hegelianism respectively). There is only the individual's own repetition of faith. This repetition of faith is the way the self relates itself to itself and to the power which constituted it, i.e. the repetition of faith is the self.

Christian dogma, according to Kierkegaard, embodies paradoxes which are offensive to reason. The central paradox is the assertion that the eternal, infinite, transcendent God simultaneously became incarnated as a temporal, finite, human being (Jesus). There are two possible attitudes we can adopt to this assertion, viz. we can have faith, or we can take offense. What we cannot do, according to Kierkegaard, is believe by virtue of reason. If we choose faith we must suspend our reason in order to believe in something higher than reason. In fact we must believe by virtue of the absurd.

Much of Kierkegaard's authorship explores the notion of the absurd: Job gets everything back again by virtue of the absurd (Repetition); Abraham gets a reprieve from having to sacrifice Isaac, by virtue of the absurd (Fear and Trembling); Kierkegaard hoped to get Regine back again after breaking off their engagement, by virtue of the absurd (Journals); Climacus hopes to deceive readers into the truth of Christianity by virtue of an absurd representation of Christianity's ineffability; the Christian God is represented as absolutely transcendent of human categories yet is absurdly presented as a personal God with the human capacities to love, judge, forgive, teach, etc. Kierkegaard's notion of the absurd subsequently became an important category for twentieth century existentialists, though usually devoid of its religious associations.

According to Johannes Climacus, faith is a miracle, a gift from God whereby eternal truth enters time in the instant. This Christian conception of the relation between (eternal) truth and time is distinct from the Socratic notion that (eternal) truth is always already within us—it just needs to be recovered by means of recollection (anamnesis). The condition for realizing (eternal) truth for the Christian is a gift (Gave) from God, but its realization is a task (Opgave) which must be repeatedly performed by the individual believer. Whereas Socratic recollection is a recuperation of the past, Christian repetition is a “recollection forwards”—so that the eternal (future) truth is captured in time.

Crucial to the miracle of Christian faith is the realization that over against God we are always in the wrong. That is, we must realize that we are always in sin. This is the condition for faith, and must be given by God. The idea of sin cannot evolve from purely human origins. Rather, it must have been introduced into the world from a transcendent source. Once we understand that we are in sin, we can understand that there is some being over against which we are always in the wrong. On this basis we can have faith that, by virtue of the absurd, we can ultimately be atoned with this being. The absurdity of atonement requires faith that we believe that for God even the impossible is possible, including the forgiveness of the unforgivable. If we can accept God's forgiveness, sincerely, inwardly, contritely, with gratitude and hope, then we open ourselves to the joyous prospect of beginning anew. The only obstacle to this joy is our refusal or resistance to accepting God's forgiveness properly. Although God can forgive the unforgivable, He cannot force anyone to accept it. Therefore, for Kierkegaard, “there is only one guilt that God cannot forgive, that of not willing to believe in his greatness!”." [Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy]

Kierkegaard 2.

Quote :

"In ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism,’ the celebrated existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre defines existentialism as characterized by the belief that the human existence comes before its essence.

Sartre says that if God the Creator does not exist, then there can be no imbued meaning inherent in human beings. There is no significance organic to our existence – we simply are, and from that starting point, create meaning for ourselves; hence, our existence comes before our essence. The conclusions Sartre arrives at – that we are then completely free to define our own meaning, and also fully responsible for the choices we make – clearly echo Kierkegaard’s carefully developed notion of choosing oneself into being. Sartre’s arguments that “man chooses himself” and that our choices are “a commitment on behalf of all mankind” sound like they are lifted directly off of one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, and there is little room for doubt that Kierkegaard would accept Sartre’s definition of existentialism.

Kierkegaard argues that God created man in complete freedom. We are completely free to choose and therefore completely responsible for our sin. To him, it could not be otherwise, for if we did not have total freedom within our given situation, we could not be held culpable for our sin. Since we have a creator who intended the kind of total freedom Kierkegaard demonstrates to be ours, then it follows that the ‘essence’ or meaning of our lives is not in any way predetermined.
We exist (by virtue of God’s creating us, certainly), but not with any predetermined essence or purpose, for God has left these things to us in freedom to determine for better or for worse. Exploring the ideas of ‘necessary’ and ‘sufficient’ conditions, Kierkegaard even argued that any kind of ‘essence’ could not possibly be necessary. This is because nothing that is necessary can have undergone any kind of change, and by the act of coming into existence, human beings have undergone the fundamental change of being. In Kierkegaard’s view, there is nothing in humanity that is necessary, because we have all undergone a change of being. In this way, Kierkegaard upheld the existence of God while simultaneously demonstrating that no necessary human essence exists, and that freedom necessitates that choosing our essence succeed the fact of our existence."
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Kierkegaard 3.

Quote :

"For Kierkegaard God is the fact of possibility: what makes us free – but also gives rise to anxiety

in The Sickness Unto Death his pseudonym Anti-Climacus offers a surprising description of God:

"Inasmuch as for God all things are possible, it may be said that this is what God is: one for whom all things are possible … God is that all things are possible, and that all things are possible is the existence of God."
This alludes to a teaching that is recorded in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. When Jesus tells his disciples that 'it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,' they ask, in amazement, 'Who then can be saved?' Jesus replies, "With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible". Kierkegaard seems to have been fascinated by this biblical text, for he echoes it in several of his works, including Fear and Trembling. However, in The Sickness Unto Death he goes beyond it, claiming not just that all things are possible for God, but that God is this possibility – and that believing in God means believing in possibility.

For Kierkegaard, possibility is integral to human life – and his own use of pseudonyms and fictional characters enables him to dramatise different philosophical or existential possibilities. In The Sickness Unto Death he states that the human being is a synthesis of possibility and "necessity", which in this case means actual, concrete existence. At any moment in time, in any situation, there are facts of the matter: right now, for example, I am sitting at home in Manchester, writing; it is raining. But we also reach out into the future to envisage various possibilities: if I finish my work in time, and if it stops raining, I might go out for a walk this afternoon. Even the past is haunted by possibility, since things might have happened differently. Possibility fills each present moment with meaning. Of course, some possibilities are more significant than others. But Kierkegaard's point is that human existence is not confined to concrete, factual actuality, but opens out onto the dimension of possibility. This, he thinks, is what makes us free – but it also gives rise to anxiety.

If the human being is a synthesis of possibility and necessity, then both of these aspects are equally important. When he discusses despair in The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard identifies several different forms of despair. In one case, a person lacks concrete actuality: he loses himself in imagining, reflecting on and dreaming about different possibilities, without actualising any of them. In the opposite case – which seems to be the most common – a person loses himself in concrete things. This is the despair that lacks possibility:

"When one faints, people shout for water, eau de cologne, smelling salts; but when one is about to despair the cry is, Get me possibility, get possibility! Possibility is the only saving remedy; given a possibility, the desperate man breathes once more, he revives again, for without possibility a man cannot, as it were, draw breath."

For Kierkegaard, this psychological or spiritual "drawing breath" is understood religiously. "To pray is to breathe," he writes,

"and possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing. But for possibility alone or for necessity alone to supply the conditions for the breathing of prayer is no more possible than it is to breathe pure oxygen or pure nitrogen alone. For in order to pray there must be a God, there must be a self plus possibility … for God is that all things are possible."

In The Sickness Unto Death, the despair that lacks possibility is described as 'spiritless philistinism', which both "tranquilises itself in the trivial" and "imagines itself to be the master". In our own world, this takes many different forms: the reduction of spiritual teachings to rigid dogmatism; the commodification of romance; the stifling of intellectual life by a fixation on measurable "skills", "outputs", and "impacts". In our universities, the threats currently posed to the humanities – and to Philosophy in particular – provide all-too-concrete evidence of this philistinism. In such times, Kierkegaard reminds us that without possibility we are not fully human. If God is "that all things are possible", then the question of what it means to relate to God cannot be separated from the question of what kind of life we want to lead, and what kind of world we want to live in."
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Kierkegaard 4.

Quote :

"In one of his last philosophical works, Kierkegaard (hereafter K) exclaims: ‘Oh, to what degree human beings would become – human and lovable beings – if they would become single individuals before God’. This exclamation expresses a main goal of K’s literary efforts, early and late: to invite readers to ‘become single individuals before God’ (1851a, 11). Accordingly, he remarks: ‘To me, not personally but as a thinker, this matter of the single individual is the most decisive’ (1859, 114). He also puts this goal as: ‘To come to oneself in self-knowledge and before God’ (1876, 106). A key limitation on K’s invitation to self-knowledge before God is that ‘I cannot make my God-relationship public’ in a way that disregards its ‘purely personal inwardness’ (1859, 25)."
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Quote :

Perennialism amounts to turning this interpretive activity as a spiritual path in itself - a quest for eternal Truth, self-liberation, union with the divine, higher consciousness of pure bliss.

Its what makes Dugin, embrace Evola and Guenon as pro-Orthodox.
In one of his [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], its easy to see how he uses Tradition - with a capital T.

When you define the modern problem as a battle for the 'human' spirit, then one remains such a Traditionalist, with a capital T.

Traditionalism: This is the Enemy!
Guillaume Faye

Quote :

In the circles of what we might euphemistically call the “revolutionary right,” or more broadly the “anti-liberal right,” one can observe the recurrent rise—like outbreaks of acne—of what one can only call “metaphysical traditionalism.”

Authors like Evola or Heidegger are in general the pretexts—mark my words: the pretexts—for the expression of these tendencies, many aspects of which seem to me negative and demoralizing. These authors themselves really aren’t the problem. To speak only of Evola and Heidegger, the works of neither author—whose true ideas are often extremely distant from those of the “Evolians” and “Heideggerians”—are susceptible to the criticisms that apply to their right-wing “disciples” who are in question here.

How do we characterize this “deviation” of metaphysical traditionalism, and what are the arguments against it? This mentality is characterized by three axiomatic presuppositions:

1. Social life must be governed by “Tradition,” the forgetting of which brings about decadence.
2. All that relates to our time is darkened by this decadence. The further back one goes in the past, the less decadence there is, and vice versa.
3. Ultimately, the only things that matter are “inner” preoccupations and activities, turned towards the contemplation of a certain something usually called “being.”

Without lingering over the relatively pretentious superficiality of this outlook which prefers, instead of true reflection and clarity, the facile obscurity of the unverifiable and the free play of words, which—under the pretext of depth (and even, in certain authors with strong narcissistic tendencies, of “poetry”)—ignores the very essence of all philosophy and all lyricism, one should especially recognize that this metaphysical traditionalism is in profound contradiction with the very values it generally claims to defend, i.e., counteracting the modern ideologies, the spirit known as the “European tradition,” anti-egalitarianism, etc.

Indeed, in the first place, the obsession with decadence and the dogmatic nostalgia that it induces make it seem like a reverse progressivism, an “inverted” linear vision of history: the same frame of mind, inherited from Christian finalism, of all “modern” progressivist ideologies. History does not ascend from the past to the present but descends.

Only, contrary to the progressivist doctrines, traditionalism cultivates a profoundly demoralizing pessimism toward the world. This pessimism is of exactly the same type as the naive optimism of the progressivists. It proceeds from the same mentality and incorporates the same type of vanity, namely a propensity to verbose prophecies and to set oneself up as a judge of society, history, and the like.

This type of traditionalism, in its tendency to hate and denigrate everything in the “present day,” does not only lead its authors to bitterness and an often unjustifiable self-conceit, but reveals serious contradictions that make its discourse incoherent and unbelievable.

This hatred of the present day, the “modern age,” is absolutely not put into practice in day to day life, unlike what one often sees, for example, in Christianity. Our anti-moderns can perfectly well benefit from the conveniences of modern life.

By this they reveal the true meaning of their discourse: the expression of a guilty conscience, a “compensation” carried out by deeply bourgeois souls relatively ill at ease in the current world, but nevertheless unable to get beyond it.

In the second place, this type of traditionalism usually leads to an exaggerated individualism, the very individualism that their “communitarian” vision of the world claims to denounce in modernity.

Under the pretext that the world is “bad,” that their contemporaries are patent decadents and imbeciles, that this materialist society “corrupted by science and technology” cannot understand the higher values of inwardness, the traditionalist, who always thinks of himself as standing on the mountain tops, does not deign to descend and accept the necessity of combat in the world, but rejects any discipline, any solidarity with his people, any interest in politics.

He is interested only in his hypertrophied self.

He transmits “his” thought to future generations like a bottle in the ocean—without seeing the contradiction, since they are supposedly incapable of understanding it because of increasing decadence.

This individualism thus leads logically to the very reverse of the original ideology, i.e., to universalism and implicit globalism.

Indeed, the metaphysical traditionalist is tempted to believe that the only associations that count are “spiritual,” the communication of great thinkers, which is similar throughout the world, regardless of their origin and source, provided that they seem to reject “Western modernity.” They replace the service of the people, of politics, of community, of knowledge, of a cause, not only with the service and contemplation of the self, but with the service of mere abstractions.

They defend “values,” no matter what their place of incarnation. From this, for some, comes a captivation with Orientalism; for others, a militant globalism; and for all of them, a disillusioned disinterest in the destiny of their people.

One even arrives at straightforwardly Christian attitudes—on the part of “philosophers” who usually busy themselves fighting Christianity.

Some random examples: the choice to prize the intention over the result; the choice to judge an idea or a value in terms of their intrinsic characteristics rather than their efficacy; a spiritualistic mentality that judges all cultures and projects in terms of their spiritual “value” rather than their material effects.

This last attitude, moreover, obviously has very little to do with the European “paganism” that our traditionalists often profess.

Indeed, by looking at a work, project, or culture from an exclusively “spiritual” point of view, one posits the Christian principle of the separation of matter and spirit, the dualistic dissociation between the pure idea and the concrete product.

A culture, a project, a work are nothing but products, in the concrete and dynamic sense of the term.

From our point of view there is no separation between the “value” and its “product.” The lyrical, poetic, aesthetic qualities of a culture, work, or project are intimately incorporated in its form, in its material production. Spirit and matter are one and the same thing. The value of a man or a culture lies in their acts, not in their “being” or their past.

It is precisely this idea, going back to the most ancient sources of the European tradition, that our metaphysical traditionalists—so imbued with their spiritualism and their monotheism of the “tradition” or their quest for “Being”—readily betray.

Paradox: nobody is further from European traditions than the traditionalists. Nobody is closer to the Near Eastern spirit of the monastery.

Everything that characterizes the European tradition, everything the cults from the East tried to abolish, is exactly the reverse of what today’s European traditionalists defend.

The European spirit, or that in it which is the greatest and the most civilizing, was optimistic and not pessimistic, exteriorized and not interiorized, constructivist and not spiritualistic, philosophical and not theological, open to change not settled and complacent, creator of its own traditions and forms or immutable ideas, conquering and not contemplative, technical and urban and not pastoral, attached to cities, ports, palaces, and temples and not to the countryside (the domain of necessity), etc.

In reality, the spirit of today’s traditionalists is an integral part of Western, commercial civilization, as the museums are part of the civilization of the supermarket. Traditionalism is the shadow self, the justification, the living cemetery of the modern bourgeois.

It serves as a spiritual supplement. It makes him believe that it doesn’t matter if he likes New York, television serials, and rock ’n’ roll, provided that he has sufficient “inwardness.”

The traditionalist is superficial: the slave of his pure ideas and contemplation, of the intellectual games of philosophical poseurs, at bottom he believes thought is a distraction, an agreeable but ultimately pointless exercise, like collecting stamps or butterflies—and not a means of action, of the transformation of the world, of the construction of culture.

The traditionalist believes that values and ideas preexist action. He does not understand that action precedes all, as Goethe said, and that it is through the dynamic combination of will and action that all ideas and values are born a posteriori.

This shows us the true function of traditionalist ideologies in the anti-liberal “right.” Metaphysical traditionalism is a justification to give up any combat, any concrete project of creating a European reality different from the present day’s.

It is the ideological expression of pseudo-revolutionaries. Its regressive utopias, hazy and obscure considerations, and pointless metaphysics do more than cause fatalism, inaction, and enervation. They also reinforce bourgeois individualism by implicitly preaching the ideal type of the “thinker”—if possible contemplative and disembodied—as the pivot of history. Men of action—the true historical personalities—are thus devalued.

Because the traditionalist ultimately does not support the “community,” he declares it impossible hic et nunc and turns it into a utopian and regressive fancy lost in the mists of who knows what “tradition.”

In this sense, “anti-modern” and “antibourgeois” traditionalism belongs objectively to the system of bourgeois ideologies. Like these ideologies, its hatred of the “present” is a good way, a skilful pretext, to reject as impossible any concrete historical construction, even those opposed to the present.

At the heart of its discourse, traditionalism maintains an absurd confusion between the “modernity” of European technological-industrial civilization and the “modern spirit” of egalitarian and Western ideologies (which are arbitrarily linked to each other). Thus traditionalism disfigures, devalues (sometimes to the profit of an idealized “traditional” Third World), and abandons the Western and American spirit, the very genius of European civilization.

Like Judeo-Christianity, but for different reasons, the traditionalist says “No” to the world and consequently undermines the tradition of his own culture. Ultimately, a traditionalist is someone who always already knows that there is only one tradition, as an idealist always already knows that everything is an idea.

Finally, from the point of view of “thought”—that war-horse of metaphysical traditionalism—what could be more detrimental to the spirit, more incompatible with the quality of intellectual debate and the reflection that makes one free and contemplative, than to disembody them from all “political” projects (in the Nietzschean sense) and divert them into the elitism of bibliophiles and salaried autodidacts?

Let us dare to liquidate the Evolians and Heideggerians.

But let us read Evola and Heidegger: to put them in perspective, rather than mount them on waxed paper.

“Le traditionalisme: voilà l’ennemi,” Lutte du Peuple, no. 32, 1996.

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Lyssa wrote:

Kierkegaard 3.

Quote :

"For Kierkegaard God is the fact of possibility: what makes us free – but also gives rise to anxiety

To Heidegger, Kierkegaard's indulgence in the above is only one more example of modernistic, nihilistic subjectification; the possibility of 'God' as the possibility of 'God-For-Me'...

Quote :

"The fact that thinking becomes something proper to the human subject also plays an important role. In this process of subjectification, degodization introduces another phenomenon: namely, religious feeling. Metaphysics in modernity goes along with religious experience. The relation to the divine becomes a subjective-affective mood in man. Religion loses the framework in which the religious can be thought as an objective reality. As the objective system of metaphysics disappears in the sub- jectification of the modern age, so too does the relation to the divine become a purely subjective matter. God is no longer seen as something that is present in reality. Reality itself loses its sacral dimension. The last place for the divine is the sub- jectivity of the believer. The domain of the divine is indicated as feeling, personal experience, individual conviction, and existential pathos.

Therefore, the gods are fled once religion has become reli- gious feeling. Because religion withdraws in subjectivity, it is withdrawn from the world. Even though the religion of subjectivity protests against the degodization of the world, degodization is actually a symptom of the very religion that protests against it. The logic of subjectivity rules in both degodization and mod- ern metaphysics. Christendom itself stimulated the subjectification of metaphysics.

“The fact that the transformation of reality to the self-certainty of the ego cogito is determined directly by Christianity, and the fact that the narrowing of the concept of existence is indirectly determined by Christian factors only proves how Christian faith adopted the fundamental trait of metaphysics and brought metaphysics to Western dominance in this form.”
Thus Heidegger identifies Kierkegaard and Hegel within the same perspective.34 Kierkegaard is called a religious writer who corresponds to the destiny of his era. He writes dur- ing the same time in which Hegel’s metaphysics and Marx’s system rule. It is the era in which we still are: the era in which subjectivity rules in Western thinking. Although Kierkegaard as a religious writer and Hegel as a thinker are deeply differ- ent from each other, both belong to the same paradigm of Western philosophy: in one giving rise to a religious subjectiv- ity and in the other a rational subjectivity. Both are located in the degodization of the world. Even though the subjective feel- ing resists the increasing degodization, in the end it is a symptom of it." [Vedder, Heidegger's Philosophy of Religion]

Quote :

"So the process of degodization appears in two forms. It appears in the figure of rational subjectivity by way of Descartes, Kant and Hegel. And we find the figure of passionate subjectivity in the line that includes Pascal, Jacobi, and Kierkegaard. The essence of modern religion and modern metaphysics are connected. Both lines express a deeper process: degodization, which is the result of the ontotheological structure of meta-physics, and the modern thinking of subjectivity that is connected with it.

The disappearance of the divine from the world has as a consequence the commencement of historical and psychological research of myth and religious phenomena. By the sociological and historical study of religion, one can indicate in what way religion still exists, but this is nevertheless a symptom of degodization. The modern scientific analysis of religious representation, both individual and collective, is also connected to the culture of subjectivity, because the question of being of the gods is no longer raised. The scientific and the philosophical approaches to religion are highly reductionistic. Mostly the religious is understood from the perspective of nonreligious phenomena using words like projection, ideology. However, the scientific approach to religion is not, according to Heidegger, the cause of degodization. The emptiness in which degodization arises creates space for the reductionistic approach. The relation with the divine is replaced by a scientific explanation of the history of religion. This becomes obvious in biblical research and the psychological and sociological research of what historically is understood as mythical. As myth, religion is neutralized and degodded. Such an approach is only possible when the gods are fled. This flight, however, has its grounds in what is called the essence of metaphysics." [ib.]

Ananda Coomaraswamy and the gnostic Perennialism behind the Xt. 'If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." [Luke 14:26] :

Coomaraswamy wrote:

"That in this day and age, when “for most people religion has become an archaic and impossible refuge,” [1] men no longer take either God or Satan seriously, arises from the fact that they have come to think of both alike only objectively, only as persons external to themselves and for whose existence no adequate proof can be found. The same, of course, applies to the notions of their respective realms, heaven and hell, thought of as times and places neither now nor here.

We have, in fact, ourselves postponed the “kingdom of heaven on earth” by thinking of it as a material Utopia to be realized, we fondly hope, by means of one or more five-year plans, overlooking the fact that the concept of an endless progress is that of a pursuit “in which thou must sweat eternally,” [2] — a phrase suggestive less of heaven than of hell. What this really means is that we have chosen to substitute a present hell for a future heaven we shall never know.

The doctrine to be faced, however, is that “the kingdom of heaven is within you,” here and now, and that, as Jacob Boehme, amongst others, so often said, “heaven and hell are everywhere, being universally extended…. Thou art accordingly in heaven or hell…. The soul hath heaven or hell within itself,” [3] and cannot be said to “go to” either when the body dies. Here, perhaps, the solution of the problem of Satan may be sought.

It has been recognized that the notion of a Satanic “person,” the chief of many “fallen angels,” presents some difficulties: even in religion, that of a Manichean “dualism” emerges; at the same time, if it be maintained that anything whatever is not God, God’s infinity is thereby circumscribed and limited. Is “he,” Satan, then a person, or merely a “personification,” i.e., a postulated personality? [4] Who is “he,” and where? Is he a serpent or a dragon, or has he horns and a poisonous tail? Can he be redeemed and regenerated, as Origen and the Muslims have believed? All these problems hang together.

However the ultimate truth of “dualism” may be repudiated, a kind of dualism is logically unavoidable for all practical purposes, because any world in time and space, or that could be described in words or by mathematical symbols, must be one of contraries, both quantitative and qualitative, for example, long and short, good and evil; and even if it could be otherwise, a world without these opposites would be one from which all possibility of choice, and of procedure from potentiality to act, would be excluded, not a world that could be inhabited by human beings such as we. For anyone who holds that “God made the world,” the question, Why did he permit the existence in it of any evil, or that of the Evil one in whom all evil is personified, is altogether meaningless; one might as well enquire why He did not make a world without dimensions or one without temporal succession.

Our whole metaphysical tradition, Christian and other, maintains that “there are two in us,” [5] this man and the Man in this man; and that this is so is still a part and parcel of our spoken language in which, for example, the expression “self-control” implies that there is one that controls and another subject to control, for we know that “nothing acts upon itself,” [6] though we forget it when we talk about “self-government.” [7] Of these two “selves,” outer and inner man, psycho-physical “personality” and very Person, the human composite of body, soul, and spirit is built up. Of these two, on the one hand body-and-soul (or -mind), and on the other, spirit, one is mutable and mortal, the other constant and immortal; one “becomes,” the other “is,” and the existence of the one that is not, but becomes, is precisely a “personification” or “postulation,” since we cannot say of anything that never remains the same that “it is.” And however necessary it may be to say “I” and “mine” for the practical purposes of everyday life, our Ego in fact is nothing but a name for what is really only a sequence of observed behaviors. [8]

Body, soul and spirit: can one or other of these be equated with the Devil? Not the body, certainly, for the body in itself is neither good nor evil, but only an instrument or means to good or evil. Nor the Spirit — intellect, synteresis, conscience, Agathos Daimon — for this is, by hypothesis, man’s best and most divine part, in itself incapable of error, and our only means of participation in the life and the perfection that is God himself. There remains only the “soul”; that soul which all must “hate” who would be Christ’s disciples and which, as St. Paul reminds us, the Word of God like a two-edged sword “severs from the spirit”; a soul which St. Paul must have “lost” in order to be able to say truly that “I live, yet not I, but Christ in me,” announcing, like Mansur, his own theosis.

Of the two in us, one the “spark” of Intellect or Spirit, and the other, Feeling or Mentality, subject to persuasion, it is obvious that the latter is the “tempter,” or more truly “temptress.” There is in each of us, in this man and that woman alike, an anima and animus, relatively feminine and masculine; [9] and, as Adam rightly said, “the woman gave, and I did eat”; also, be it noted, the “serpent,” by whom the woman herself was first beguiled, wears, in art, a woman’s face. But to avoid all possibility of misunderstanding here, it must be emphasized that all this has nothing whatsoever to do with a supposed inferiority of women or superiority of men: in this functional and psychological sense any given woman may be “manly” (heroic) or any given man “effeminate” (cowardly). [10]

One knows, of course, that “soul,” like “self,” is an ambiguous term, and that, in some contexts, it may denote the Spirit or “Soul of the soul,” or “Self of the self,” both of which are expressions in common use. But we are speaking here of the mutable “soul” as distinguished from the “spirit,” and should not overlook the extent to which this nefesh, the anima after which the human and other “animals” are so called, is constantly disparaged in the Bible, [11] as is the corresponding nafs in Islam. The soul is the self to be “denied” (the Greek original meaning “utterly reject,” with an ontological rather than a merely ethical application), the soul that must be “lost” if “it” is to be saved; and which, as Meister Eckhart and the Sufis so often say, must “put itself to death,” or, as the Hindus and Buddhists say, must be “conquered” or “tamed,” for “that is not my Self.” This soul, subject to persuasion, and distracted by its likes and dislikes, this “mind” that we mean when we speak of having been “minded to do this or that,” is “that which thou callest ‘I’ or ‘myself,’” and which Jacob Boehme thus distinguishes from the I that is, when he says, with reference to his own illuminations, that “not I, the I that I am, knows these things, but God in me.” We cannot treat the doctrine of the Ego at length, but will only say that, as for Meister Eckhart and the Sufis, “Ego, the word I, is proper to none but God in his sameness,” and that “I” can only rightly be attributed to Him and to the one who, being “joined unto the Lord, is one spirit.”

That the soul herself, our “I” or “self” itself, should be the Devil — whom we call the “enemy,” “adversary,” ” tempter,” “dragon,” — never by a personal name [12] — may seem startling, but it is very far from being a novel proposition. As we go on, it will be found that an equation of the soul with Satan has often been enunciated, and that it provides us with an almost perfect solution of all the problems that the latter’s “personality” poses. Both are “real” enough for all pragmatic purposes here, in the active life where “evil” must be contended with, and the dualism of the contraries cannot be evaded; but they are no more “principles,” no more really real, than the darkness that is nothing but the privation of light.

No one will deny that the battleground on which the psychomachy must be fought out to a finish is within you, or that, where Christ fights, there also must his enemy, the Antichrist, be found. Neither will anyone, “superstition” apart, be likely to pretend that the Temptations of St. Anthony, as depicted in art, can be regarded otherwise than as “projections” of interior tensions. In the same way that Picasso’s “Guernica” is the mirror of Eurpoe’s disintegrated soul, “the hell of modern existence,” the Devil’s horns and sting are an image of the most evil beast in man himself. Often enough it has been said by the “Never-enough honoured Auncients,” as well as by modern authors, that “man is his own worst enemy.” On the other hand, the best gift for which a man might pray is to be “at peace with himself;” [13] and, indeed, for so long as he is not at peace with Himself, [14] he can hardly be at peace with anybody else, but will “project” his own disorders, making of “the enemy” — for example, Germany, or Russia, or the Jews — his “devil.” “From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even from your lusts (pleasures, or desires, Skr. kamah) that contend in your members?” (James 4:1)

As Jung so penetratingly observes: “When the fate of Europe carried it into a four years war of stupendous horror — a war that no one wanted — hardly anyone asked who had caused the war and its continuation.” [15] The answer would have been unwelcome: it was “I” — your “I” and mine. For, in the wordss of another modern psychologist, E. E. Hadley, “the tragedy of this delusion of individuality is that it leads to isolation, fear, paranoid suspicion, and wholly unnecessary hatreds.” [16]

All this has always been familiar to the theologians, in whose writings Satan is simply referred to as “the enemy.” For example, William Law: “You are under the power of no other enemy, are held in no other captivity, and want no other deliverance but from the power of your own earthly self. This is the one murderer of the divine life within you. It is your own Cain that murders your own Abel,” [17] and “self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our fallen state … Satan, or which is the same thing, self-exaltation…. This is that full-born natural self that must be pulled out of the heart and totally denied, or there can be no disciple of Christ.” If, indeed, “the kingdom of heaven is within you,” then also the “war in heaven” will be there, until Satan has been overcome, that is, until the Man in this man is “master of himself,” selbes gewaltic, enkrates heautou.

For the Theologia Germanica (ch. 3, 22, 49), it was the Devil’s “‘I, Me, and Mine’ that were the cause of his fall…. For the self, the I, the me and the like, all belong to the Evil Spirit, and therefor it is that he is an Evil Spirit. Behold one or two words can utter all that has been said by these many words: ‘Be simply and wholly bereft of self.’” For “there is nothing else in hell, but self-will; and if there were no self-will, there would be no devil and no hell.” So, too, Jacob Boehme: “this vile self-hood possesses the world and worldly things; and dwells also in itself, which is dwelling in hell”; and Angelus Silesius:

Nichts anders stuerzet dich in Hoellenschlund hinein
Als dass verhasste Wort (merk’s wohl!): das Mein und Dein. [18]

Hence the resolve, expressed in a Shaker hymn:

But now from my forehead I’ll quickly erase
The stamp of the Devil’s great “I.” [19]

Citations of this kind could be indefinitely multiplied, all to the effect that of all evil beasts, “the most evil beast we carry on our bosom,” [20] “our most godless and despicable part” and “multifarious beast,” which our “Inner Man,” like a lion tamer, must keep under his control or else will have to follow where it leads. [21]

Even more explicit sayings can be cited form Sufi sources, where the soul (nafs) is distinguished from the intellect or spirit (aql, ruh) as the Psyche is distinguished from the Pneuma by Philo and in the New Testament, and as anima from animus by William of Thierry. [22] For the encyclopedic Kashfu’l Mahjub, the soul is the “tempter,” and the type of hell in this world. [23] Al-Ghazali, perhaps the greatest of the Muslim theologians, calls the soul “the greatest of your enemies”; and more than that could hardly be said of Satan himself. Abu Sa’id asks: “What is evil, and what is the worst evil?” and answers: “Evil is ‘thou,’ and the worst evil ‘thou’ if thou knowest it not”; he, therefore, called himself a “Nobody,” refusing, like the Buddha, to identify himself with any nameable “personality.” [24] Jalalu’d Din Rumi, in his Mathnawi, repeats that man’s greatest enemy is himself: “This soul,” he says, “is hell,” and he bids us “slay the soul.” “The soul and Shaitan are both one being, but take two forms; essentially one from the first, he became the enemy and envier of Adam”; and, in the same way, “the Angel (Spirit) and the Intellect, Adam’s helpers, are of one origin but assume two forms.” The Ego holds its head high: “decapitation means, to slay the soul and quench its fire in the Holy War” (jihad); and well for him who wins this battle, for “whoever is at war with himself for God’s sake, … his light opposing his darkness, the sun of his spirit shall never set.” [25]

‘Tis the fight which Christ,
With his internal Love and Light,
Maintains within man’s nature, to dispel
God’s Anger, Satan, Sin, and Death, and Hell;
The human Self, or Serpent, to devour,
And raise an Angel from it by His Pow’r.
John Byrom

“Spark of the soul … image of God, that there is ever in all wise at war will all that is not godly … and is called the Synteresis” [26] (Meister Eckhart, Pfeiffer ed., p. 113). “We know that the Law is of the Spirit … but I see another law in my members, warring against the Law of the Intellect, and bringing me into captivity…. With the Intellect I myself serve the Law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin…. Submit yourselves therefore to God: resist the devil.” [27] And similarly in other Scriptures, notably the Bhagavad Gita (VI.5, 6): “Lift up the self by the Self, let not self sit back. For, verily, the Self is both the friend and the foe of the self; the friend of one whose self has been conquered by the Self, but to one whose self hath not (been overcome), the Self at war, forsooth, acts as an enemy”; and the Buddhist Dhammapada (103, 160, 380), where “the Self is the Lord of the self” and one should “by the Self incite the self, and by the Self gentle self” (as a horse is “broken in” by a skilled trainer), and “one who has conquered self is the best of all champions.” (Cf. Philostratus, Vit. Ap., I.13: “Just as we break in skittish and unruly horses by stroking and patting them.”)

At the same time, it must not be forgotten that the Psychomachy is also “a battle of love,” and that Christ — to whom ye should be married … that we should bring fruit unto God” (Rom. 7:3, 4) — already loved the unregenerate soul “in all her baseness and foulness,” [28] or that it is of her that Donne says, “Nor ever chaste, except Thou ravish me.” It was for nothing but “to go and fetch his Lady, whom his Father had eternally given him to wife, and to restore her to her former high estate that the Son proceeded out of the Most High” (Meister Eckhart). [29] The Deity’s lance or thunderbolt is, at the same time, his yard, with which he pierces his mortal Bride. The story of the thunder-smitten Semele reminds us that the Theotokos, in the last analysis Psyche, has ever been of Lunar, never herself of Solar stock; and all this is the sum and substance of every “solar myth,” the theme of the Liebesgeschichte des Himmels and of the Drachenkaempfe.

“Heaven and earth: let them be wed again.” [30] Their marriage, consummated in the heart, is the Hieros Gamos, Daivam Mithunam, [31] and those in whom it has been perfected are no longer anyone, but as He is “who never became anyone.” [32] Plotinus’ words: “Love is of the very nature of the Psyche, and hence the constant yoking of Eros with the Psyches in the pictures and the myths” [33] might as well have been said of half the world’s fairy-tales, and especially of the Indian “pictures and myths” of Sri Krishna and the Milkmaids, of which the Indian commentators rightly deny the historicity, asserting that all these are things that come to pass in all men’s experience. Such, indeed, are “the erotika (Skr. srngara) into which, it seems that you, O Socrates, should be initiated,” as Diotima says, and which in fact he so deeply respected. [34]

But, this is not only a matter of Grace; the soul’s salvation depends also on her submission, her willing surrender; it is prevented for so long as she resists. It is her pride (manas, abhimana; oiema, oiesis; self-opinion, overweening), the Satanic conviction of her own independence (asmimana, ahamkara, cogito ergo sum), her evil rather than herself, that must be killed; this pride she calls her “self-respect,” and would “rather die” than be divested of it. But the death that she at last, despite herself, desires, is no destruction but a transformation. Marriage is an initiatory death and integration (nirvana, samskara, telos). [35] “Der Drache und die Jungfrau sind natuerlich identisch”; [36] the “Fier Baiser” transforms the dragon; the mermaid loses her ophidian tail; the girl is no more when the woman has been “made”; from the nymph the winged soul emerges. [37] And so “through Thee an Iblis may become again one of the Cherubim.” [38]

And what follows when the lower and the higher forms of the soul have been united? This has nowhere been better described than in the Aitareya Aranyaka (II.3.7): “This Self gives itself to that self, and that self to this Self; they become one another; with the one form he (in whom this marriage has been consummated) is unified with yonder world, and with the other united to this world”; the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad (IV.3.23): “Embraced by the Prescient Self, he knows neither a within nor a without. Verily, that is his form in which his desire is obtained, in which the Self is his desire, and in which no more desiresor grieves.” “Amor ipse no quiescit, nisi in amato, quod fit, cum obtinet ipsum possessione plenaria”; [39] “Jam perfectam animam … gloriosam sibi sponsam Pater conglutinat.” [40] Indeed:

Dafern der Teufel koennt aus seiner Seinheit gehn,
So saehest du ihn stracks in Gottes Throne stehn. [41]

So, then, the Agathos and Kakos Daimons, Fair and Foul selves, Christ and Antichrist, both inhabit us, and their opposition is within us. Heaven and Hell are the divided images of Love and Wrath in divinis, where the Light and the Darkness are undivided, and the Lamb and the Lion lie down together. In the beginning, as all traditions testify, heaven and earth were one and together; essence and nature are one in God, and it remains for every man to put them together again within himself.

All these are our answers. Satan is not a real and single Person, but a severally postulated personality, a “Legion.” Each of these personalities is capable of redemption (apokatastasis), and can, if it will, become again what it was before it “fell” — Lucifer, Phosphorus, Helel, Scintilla, the Morning Star, a Ray of the Supernal Sun; because the Spark, however it may seem to be smothered, is an Asbestos that cannot be extinguished, even in hell. But, in the sense that a redemption of all beings cannot be thought of as taking place at any one time, and inasmuch as there will be devilish souls in need of redemption throughout all time, Satan must be though of as being damned for ever, meaning by “damned,” self-excluded from the vision of God and the knowledge of Truth.

The problem with which we started has largely been solved, but it still remains to accomplish the harder tasks of an actual “self-naughting” and consequent “Self-realization” to which the answers point, and for which theology is only a partial preparation. Satan and the Ego are not really entities, but concepts postulated and valid only for the present, provisional, and practical purposes; both are composite photographs, as it were of X1, X2, X3. It has often been said that the Devil’s most ingenious device is to persuade us that his existence is a mere “superstition.” In fact, however, nothing could be more dangerous than to deny his existence, which is as real, although no more so, as our own; we dare not deny Satan until we have denied ourselves, as everyone must who would follow Him who said and did nothing “of himself.” “What is Love? the sea of non-existence”; [42] and “whoever enters there, saying ‘It is I,’ I [God], smite him in the face”; [43] “What is Love? thou shalt know when thou becomest Me.” [44] [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]

Lyssa wrote:

Ananda Coomaraswamy and the gnostic Perennialism behind the Xt. 'If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." [Luke 14]

And in another passage on the same esoterism of "annihilation" and "self-hatred";

Coomaraswamy wrote:

"Let us enunciate the Christian doctrine first in order the better to understand the Indian. The words of Christ are these: that "I am the door; by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall pass in and out." It is not enough to have reached the' door; we must be admitted. But there is a price of admission. "He that would save his soul, let him lose it." Of man's two selves, the two Atmans of our Indian texts, the self that was known by name as So-and-so must have put itself to death if the other is to be freed of all encumbrances-is to be "free as the Godhead in its nonexistence."

In the Vedantic texts it is likewise the Sun of men and Light of lights that is called the doorway of the worlds and the keeper of the gate. Whoever has come thus far is put to the test. He is told in the first place that he may enter according to the balance of good or evil he may have done. If he understands he will answer, "Thou canst not ask me that; thou knowest that whatever I may have done was not of 'my' doing, but of thine." This is the Truth; and it is beyond the power of the Guardian of the Gate, who is himself the Truth, to deny himself. Or he may be asked the question, "Who art thou?" If he answers by his own or by a family name he is literally dragged away by the factors of time; but if he answers, "I am the Light, thyself, and come to thee as such," the Keeper responds with the words of welcome, "Who thou-art, that am I; and who I am, thou art; come in." It should be clear, indeed, that there can be no return to God of anyone who still is anyone, for as our texts express it, "He has not come from anywhere or become anyone."

In the same way, Eckhart, basing his words on the logos, "If any man hate not father and mother.... yea and his own soul also, he cannot be my disciple," says that "so long as thou knowest who thy father and thy mother have been in time, thou art not dead with the real death"; and in the same way, Rumi, Eckhart's peer in Islam, attributes to the Keeper of the Gate the words, "Whoever enters saying 'I am so and so,' I smite in the face." We cannot, in fact, offer any better definition of the Vedic scriptures than St. Paul's "The word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, extending even unto the sundering of soul from spirit": "Quid est ergo, quod debet homo inquirere in hac vita? Hoc est ut sciat ipsum.” “Si ignoras te, egredere!"

The last and most difficult problem arises when we ask: what is the state of the being that has thus been freed from itself and has returned to its source? It is more than obvious that a psychological explanation is out of the question. It is, in fact, just at this point that we can best confess with our texts, "He who is most sure that he understands, most assuredly misunderstands." What can be said of the Brahman-that "He is, by that alone can He be apprehended"-can as well be said, of whoever has become the Brahman. It cannot be said what this is, because it is not any "what." A being who is "freed in this life" (Rumi's "dead man walking") is "in the world, but not of it."

We can, nevertheless, approach the problem through a consideration of the terms in which the Perfected are spoken of. They are called either Rays of the Sun, or Blasts of the Spirit, or Movers-at-Will. It is also said that they are fitted for embodiment in the manifested worlds: that is to say, fitted to participate in the life of the Spirit, whether it moves or remains at rest. It is a Spirit which bloweth as it will. All of these expressions correspond to Christ's "shall pass in and out, and shall find pasture." Or we can compare it with the pawn in a game of chess. When the pawn has crossed over from the hither to the farther side it is transformed. It becomes a minister and is called a mover-at-will, even in the vernacular. Dead to its former self, it Is no longer confined to particular motions or positions, but can go in and out, at will, from the place where its transformation was effected. And this freedom to move at will is another aspect of the state of the Perfected, but a I thing beyond the conception of those who are still mere pawns. It may be observed, too, that the ertswhile pawn, ever in danger of an inevitable death on its journey across the board, is at liberty after its transformation either to sacrifice itself or to escape from danger. In strictly Indian terms, its former motion was a crossing, its regenerate motion a descent.

The question of "annihilation," so solemnly discussed by Western scholars, does not arise. The word has no meaning in metaphysics, which knows only of the nonduality of permutation and sameness, multiplicity and unity. Whatever has been in eternal reason or idea or name of an individual manifestation can never cease to be Such; the content of eternity cannot be changed. Therefore, as the Bhagavad Gita expresses it, "Never have I not been, and never hast thou not been."
The relation, in identity, of the "That". and the "thou" in the logos "That art thou" is stated in the Vedanta either by such designations as "Ray of the Sun" (implying filiation), or in the formula bheddbheda (of which the literal meaning is "distinction without difference"). The relation is expressed by the simile of lovers, so closely embraced that there is no longer any consciousness of "a within or a without," and by the corresponding Vaisnava equation, "each is both." It can be seen also in Plato's conception of the unification of the inner and the outer man; in the Christian doctrine of membership in the mystical body of Christ; in St. Paul's "whoever is joined unto the Lord is one spirit"; and in Eckhart's admirable formula "fused but not confused." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]

"Our whole metaphysical tradition, Christian and other, maintains that “there are two in us,” [5] this man and the Man in this man; and that this is so is still a part and parcel of our spoken language in which, for example, the expression “self-control” implies that there is one that controls and another subject to control, for we know that “nothing acts upon itself, "

Nothing acts upon itself - Sounds like a very deterministic view of the universe but at the same time there is something inside us with free will which is the important part - the soul...

Makes me think that it was those who pretend to be humble in front of the ONE who were actually the arrogant ones - Who left their humble, connected, dependent self behind to exchange it for a self-delusion.

Coomaraswamy is not wrong in saying "there are two in us" - Man is of twin/dual nature.

If you read on the myth of the Titans and the Dionysian dismemberment, it is said Man thus came to have a dual nature - the immortality of the gods [dionysos re-generated by Zeus, etc.] and the mortal nature of their self [dionysos torn to pieces].
In the Birth of Tragedy, 9, Nietzsche explained this 'esoterism' as,

Nietzsche wrote:

"I find expressed in the terrible triad of Oedipean fates: the same man who solved the riddle of nature (the ambiguous Sphinx) must also, as murderer of his father and husband of his mother, break the consecrated tables of the natural order. It is as though the myth whispered to us that wisdom, and especially Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural crime, and that whoever, in pride of knowledge, hurls nature into the abyss of destruction, must himself experience nature's disintegration. "The edge of wisdom is turned against the wise man; wisdom is a crime committed on nature": such are the terrible words addressed to us by myth. Yet the Greek poet, like a sunbeam, touches the terrible and austere Memnon's Column of myth, which proceeds to give forth Sophoclean melodies."

Man is both the Apollonian self [defended with borders, skins, barriers, principles, ego] And being interconnected with Nature - entropy, Man is also the Dionysian self [breaching those borders, corrosive, expanding].

From the Apollo-affirmative-Dionysian view, Man is an Agon between fighting entropy out in the world and maintaining an Apollonian self, and he is also the Entropy, nature fighting from within cor-Rupting out...

And as N. says above, any corruption of nature is simultaneously also a cor-Ruption of and on his own self.
This is also the meaning of the vedic nexus "I" "am" "Brahman" (become) - while popular hinduism and vedanta literally equated the individual ego [atma] with the super-id [Brahman], dissolving the individual soul likened to a droplet of water into the "absolute ocean", the real nexus as I've excerpted in the Heesterman thread shows man as the same agon: the Apollonian "I" against-With the Dionysian nexus and excess of possibilities.

The pro-Nazi Benn, expresses this in his writings,

Gottfriend Benn wrote:

"We saw in [the (human) organism] the amphibian, the reptilian, the marsupial, the mammalian, the simian: all these stigma of its subjection to a vast principle of tellurian history; all these stigma of its former declines and of its renewed joy in the surges of one great organic motif that always runs through all animal forms of the same geological period, producing a tension that drives contemporaneously living zoological beings away from their characterising specificities towards new corporeal situations and functions."

Gottfried Benn wrote:

"Mass in instincts. Brain bubbles into the drain, germ layers into the flower bed, yolk sacks in the thrust of distance. Heritage of exaltation and intoxications, astral conflagrations, transoceanic decay. Crises, mixtures, third century. . . . Primeval urges of ageless masses in the sound of the seas and the plunge of light. Life wants to maintain itself but also to perish. . . . From catastrophes that were latent, catastrophes that preceded the word, come dreadful memories of the race, hybrid, beast-shaped, sphinx-pouched features of the primal face."

Life at large is the incessant re-invention of itself, always creating and perishing and re-creating into a plethora of forms, constantly bursting into newer and newer becomings, recurring in novel forms - Man being one of them.

Where Coomaraswamy and his eternal perennialism go wrong in this common confluence of all 'T'raditional systems and 'T'raditional 'T'ruths, Xt., Hinduism, Sufism, etc. is not in the dionysian theory of constant self-overcoming - the lower self dying to regenerate into the higher self, etc. but  in already presuming Godhead as an absolute ground, an abstraction,,, making the "self-annihilation" a singular, one-time process,,,, the union is supposed to be eternal.

I am brahman-Becoming (self-expansion, birth of self-exceeding possibilities) - becomes - I am brahman Become.

Stasis.

All change as suffering. And stasis - the unchanging, as pure eternal bliss.

This is in brief is the esoterism of "mystical" perennialism of Xt., vedanta, etc.

Binary logic, dualism, is a primitive form of self-consciousness as it begins to relate to consciousness.
Art, and the recognition of the mind's own thoughts and words as a form of artistry (technique), is how the mind evolves to the next level.

'Being' came before Dualism.
Being -> Awareness -> Self-awareness.
To be self-aware makes it possible to reflect on being. And I think this is a point where the self-aware creature could start to believe that it is its self-awareness and not its body - which would be a delusion. Self-awareness is a creation of the body and it has limitations. And also, both are intertwined, because, there would be no self-awareness without the body and it wouldn't be said body if it wouldn't produce its own self-awareness.

Moments of self-awareness create the possibility for a 'choice', the choice to not choose the path of least resistance but some other path. In a sense, that choice is an illusion, the illusion of free-will.
Which is an illusion because self-awareness is tied to the body. But I think we are supposed to create this sense of free-will with our self-awareness. That's how there is meaning created for making a choice against the path of least resistance.
And both are true in their way.

So is the Dionysian path the path of the body and the Apollonian the path of the self-awareness?

Yes, this distancing from Becoming, perceiving it as Being, is the beginning of this disassociation from self.
A schizophrenic state, Jaynes already described.
Modernity is this regression or this retardation of maturity so this state is retained.

Many things can be traced back to this state, and not only monotheism.

Spirituality detached from the aesthetic, identity deferring to an abstract otherness, nihilism as a philosophical psychological world-view...etc.

Lyssa wrote:

Where Coomaraswamy and his eternal perennialism go wrong in this common confluence of all 'T'raditional systems and 'T'raditional 'T'ruths, Xt., Hinduism, Sufism, etc. is not in the dionysian theory of constant self-overcoming - the lower self dying to regenerate into the higher self, etc. but  in already presuming Godhead as an absolute ground, an abstraction,,, making the "self-annihilation" a singular, one-time process,,,, the union is supposed to be eternal.

I am brahman-Becoming (self-expansion, birth of self-exceeding possibilities) - becomes - I am brahman Become.

Stasis.

All change as suffering. And stasis - the unchanging, as pure eternal bliss.

This is in brief is the esoterism of "mystical" perennialism of Xt., vedanta, etc.

More popular vedanta: Brahman = God, etc.

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How Zizek smuggles in Xt. love valuing it against Buddhist "indifference":

You can't be a Communist without being a crypto-Christian.
A Socialist would be a Protestant.

This gave me new appreciation for medival society and what remnants persist. This boundless confidence brought upon lower divisions. Enable competitive social mobility, a sort of righteousness of knowing the one god is on your side. This resulted in consistent strife within own boundaries whilst maintaining expasion.




A sense of beauty in simple defiant humbleness and hope.

Lyssa wrote:

How Zizek smuggles in Xt. love valuing it against Buddhist "indifference":

Satyr wrote:

You can't be a Communist without being a crypto-Christian.

"The sacrificial victim as vanishing mediator

To the extent then that mimesis took over from instinct, to that same extent man's natural sociality (the herd mentality) was lost and mimesis had to make up for that loss by creating the unnatural sociality called culture. Thus mimesis works on the basis of what Žižek has termed the vanishing mediator between nature and culture..."

Ha!

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Judaism unites Egypt's disenfranchised, forcing them to flee into a life of "wandering", forever on the outside.
The psychology of the Jew is born, as a Romani/Gypsy united under a shared code; a internal Law, applicable only to its members, and giving them a purpose for their condition.

The "choseness" to prepare the way for the coming reckoning - the retribution of the slave against his master.  


Jesus is offered up to the Romans, by the Pharisees.
They would rather eliminate this rabble-rouser than Barabbas the criminal.
 

The usurper of Jewish Priestly power, that would shake the foundations of Jewish identity, had to be crucified as a warning for generations to come.


[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], a Jew, himself, had the tools necessary to repackage an idea and turn it into a product the pagans would buy.
Rome was full of slaves poor, ill peasants, desperate for hope, and an idea that could help them deal with the plight.  
Jews being the best merchants, directed by their detached position, could offer the market a product.

The ideas themselves were not Jewish inventions. they were adaptations of already existent philosophies.
Jews are essentially Egyptians who sought a "promised land" to escape their social status.
They carried with them, into the deserts, Egyptian theology, and a obsession with immortality, and then came into contact with Zoroastrianism and its monotheism, already providing the symbols of God and Satan.

Into the loving embrace of Christianity the multitudes of heterogeneous peoples found their shared social identity - later to morph into Marxism's class identity.
An escape from suffering.
A hedonistic maximization through eternal bliss.

Old identifiers had to be diminished in importance, for the new shared one, bridging race, sex, nationality, culture, to take hold and stick.
In Modern times the concept of 'God' has to be abandoned as too divisive, and outdated.
Humanism, Marxism, Idealism, could now express the same anti-life, anti-world sentiments, uniting a more sophisticated herd beneath its leveling identifiers.          
 

To this day Plato is the common westerner's symbol for Hellenism.
Socrates - Plato's vehicle - becomes the Jesus-like figure, representing Hellenic decline - Democracy the end result of political necessity.
There are some who claim that Plato, through Socrates, had come into contact with the monotheism of Zoroastrianism through a mysterious Thracian sage who was named [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

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In the quest for an all-unifying, secular, idea(l), the lowest-common-denominator is sought.
Something undeniably human, without being divisive, nor controversial, yet, at the same time, something that offers relief.

Perhaps the very sensation of relief will do.

It is the lowest-common-denominator, and so no more explorations need be attempted.
Salvation from life's sufferings; an end with no beginning, no God necessary.

Not quite an emotion, as is love, but a sensation, to satisfy (pun intended) the most jaded mind with nothing left to hold into but its own detached aesthetics.

Quote :

Paul's commitment to a single church was shown by his ruthless anger with any who broke its rules-heretical thoughts or deeds which varied in any way from his own prescriptions must be punished by expulsion from the church and eternal damnation. In all his contradictions, his anger, humility, energy, faith, arrogance, certainty and dedication, Paul set out the stall of the Christian church and its faith. As an educated Jew living in a Graeco-Roman world, he invested Christianity with its unique combination of Greek rational universality and Hebrew moral fervor.

The influence of Judaism on Paul's beliefs, and thereby on the church, was considerable. Like the Jews, early Christians found themselves members of a community defined by shared beliefs rather than attachment to a particular place or material world. For most of their history, the Jewish people existed as a discrete entity, separated from their oppressors and from the natural world, with their homeland as a disembodied ideal. This separation was made plain in the creation story: "And God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have domination over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth'"(Genesis I:26). Humanity as a uniquely privileged creatures--made by God in his image and given power over all others--was a distinctively Judaic idea that fitted well with Greek post Socratic philosophers' promotion of a distinctly human rationality.

Christianity adopted these ways of thinking, and then took them a stage further by stating that God had sent his son in the form of a man. While most other religions--Egyptian, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Persian, Hindu--saw gods woven into the natural fabric of the world, appearing as bulls, swans, griffins, rams, elephants or horses, Christianity was utterly based on the unspoken belief that human beings were not only the centre of the natural world, but were the reason for its existence
.-Roger Osborne-New History of the Western World

We can also see as well the Reformation was the pinnacle that Christianity reached to be secularized into everyday living by turning it into a practical meme through the protestant movements of Lutheranism and Calvinism. The Judaic monotheistic anomaly became absorbed into the Capitalist system through the feudal empire, it took on its respective anti-natural metamorphosis through labor and monetary acquisition. The Church wasn't rejected, it was only reintegrated into a more efficient political pragmatism that gave it deeper roots into realistic life.

Max Weber wrote:

In the first place it follows dogmatically. The world exists to serve the glorification of God and for that purpose alone. The elected Christian is in the world only to increase this glory of God by fulfilling His commandments to the best of his ability. But God requires social achievement of the Christian because He wills that social life shall be organized according to His commandments, in accordance with that purpose. The social activity of the Christian in the world is solely activity in majorem gloriam Dei. This character is hence shared by labor in a calling which serves the mundane life of the community. Even in Luther we found specialized labor in callings justified in terms of brotherly love. But what for him remained an uncertain, purely intellectual suggestion became for the Calvinists a characteristic element in their ethical system. Brotherly love, since it may only be practiced for the glory of God and not in the service of the flesh, is expressed in the first place in the fulfillment of the daily tasks given by the lex naturae; and in the Process this fulfillment assumes a peculiarly objective and impersonal character, that of service in the interest of the rational organization of our social environment. For the wonderfully purposeful organization and arrangement of this cosmos is, according both to the revelation of the Bible and to natural intuition, evidently designed by God to serve the utility of the human race. This makes labor in the service of impersonal social usefulness appear to promote the glory of God and hence to be willed by Him. The complete elimination of the theodicy problem and of all those questions about the meaning of the world and of life, which have tortured others, was as self-evident to the Puritan as, for quite different reasons, to the Jew, and even in a certain sense to all the non mystical types of Christian religion.

Max Weber wrote:

Only a life guided by constant thought could achieve conquest over the state of nature. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum was taken over by the contemporary Puritans with this ethical reinterpretation. It was this rationalization which gave the Reformed faith its peculiar ascetic tendency, and is the basis both of its relationship to and its conflict with Catholicism. For naturally similar things were not unknown to Catholicism.

Mitchell Heisman wrote:

Without accounting for Jesus’s hatred of the family one, very simply, cannot understand Christianity. Jesus did not preach a superficial doctrine of “universal love” but, rather, a hatred of selfishness so total that it attacked the selfish love of father and mother, and sister and brother. The “universalism” of Christianity is built upon a refutation of the “universalism” of the values of the common, patriarchal family. Pure, literal individual egoism is, in its implications, the negation of subordination to kinship logic, and “altruism” against the egoism of the family was the supreme individual egoism of Jesus as the negation of subordination to familial altruism. Christianity is a distinctive source of the implicit Western modern valuation that kin selective altruism is ultimately evil. Hatred of kin selective altruism is the foundation of the distinctly Christian form of altruism that systematically negates those kinship roots. Jesus’s love of the stranger is founded upon “Christian” hatred of the family. It is from this attack on family values that a distinctively Christian life follows. The traditional negation of Christianity’s roots in Jewish sociobiology is only an extension of this interior logic. The demolition of the family is the deepest, most profound human foundation of Jesus’s moral innovation. Without this thorough attack on the family, the purity of Jesus’s vision of the end slips back into Judaism’s honoring of father and mother on the path to the end. But with this overcoming of the family, Jesus’s vision was consummated and Christianity was born."


The great Roman hierarchy was built on a central contradiction: the glorified selfish altruism of duty to Rome. Christianity worked by exposing this contradiction to Jesus’s radicalization of the ideal of altruism: consistent self-sacrifice unto the self-destruction of the ego. This was the seditious genius of Jesus. Christianity deconstructed the Roman hierarchy by pulling the thread of altruism loose from its conventional association with familial love and thus unraveled the whole structure as if a yarn from a knitted sweater"


Love killed honor. The values of honor and shame are appropriate for group moralities where the group is valued over “the individual”. Crucially, such a morality is inconceivable without a sense of group identity. Jesus’s morality became liberated from a specifically Jewish group identity. Once it dominated gentile morality, it also eroded kin and ethnic identity. The Christian war against honor moralities became so successful and traditional its premodern origins were nearly forgotten along with the native pagan moralities it conquered"


Liberalism continues the Christian paradigm by interpreting Homo sapiens as individuals, rather than members of groups such as racial groups. If it is wrong to assume Jesus can be understood on the basis of group membership, and his half-Jewish/half-Roman descent is a key to understanding this, then the evolutionary connection between Christianity and modern liberalism becomes clearer. Jesus was a paradigmatic individual exception to group rules, and his example, universalized, profoundly influenced modern liberal emphasis on individual worth in contradistinction to assumptions of group membership."


It was precisely because shame in his hereditary origins was so radical, and his pride in his non-biological identity as the “son of God” was so radical, that Jesus helped initiate a radical break with the shame/honor ethics of the ancient pagan world. Jesus’s values implicated the end of the hereditary world by living the logical consequences of denying the importance of his hereditary origins. This is a central premise underlying the entire modern rupture with the ancient world: breaking the import of hereditary origins in favor of individual valuations of humans. In escaping the consequences of a birth that, in his world, was the most ignoble possible, Jesus initiated the gentile West’s rupture with the ancient world. Jesus’s repression of shame in his own biological birth was a sociobiological foundation of Christianity’s evolutionary impact on modern values. The rupture between the ancient and the modern".


The average secular liberal rejects Biblical stories as mythology without rejecting the compassion-oriented moral inheritance of the Bible as mythology. That people, still, after Nietzsche, still tout these old, juvenile enlightenment critiques of Christianity would seem to be another refutation of the belief that a free and liberal society will inevitably lead to a progress in knowledge. The primitive enlightenment critique of Christianity as a superstition used as a form of social control usually fails to account that its “social control” originated as a weapon that helped to bring down the Goliath of Rome.

The very spirit of Jesus, his blind almost frantic hypnotic state of revolutionary drive, shows how he forcefully absorbed his half breed inheritance of the dedication to the Roman kinship nepotism, in the form of applying it to "humanity", and his memetic loyalty to his Jewish ancestry of a singular God, the Singularity.

We can see how with the advent of industrialization and technology, religion became secularized into modern rationalism. The socialist paradigm is one that is bred of taking religion to its extreme, through the new age attitude of enlightenment and of course "free thinking". This is the reason why the Jews survive and thrive so prosperously in Capitalism. it is a system that is intrinsically anti-world, and anti-natural, and collectively individualistic, atomistic, singular.

Satyr wrote:

To this day Plato is the common westerner's symbol for Hellenism.
Socrates - Plato's vehicle - becomes the Jesus-like figure, representing Hellenic decline - Democracy the end result of political necessity.
There are some who claim that Plato, through Socrates, had come into contact with the monotheism of Zoroastrianism through a mysterious Thracian sage who was named [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

This is very interesting....

Quote :

Thus Getae, worshiped Zalmoxis, apparently a God, whose high priest king seems to have been considered a substitute on earth. Zalmoxis endowed his priests with the power of healing, and they were known as physicians. The myth of Zalmoxis descend into an underground chamber or cave, and his priests habitation in such a cave appear to represent an initiatory ritual, including a temporary death. In later time, the eternal happiness after death, promised by Zalmoxis, made the Greeks compare him with their Lord Elysium, Kronos.

The ritual is based on a most fascinating phenomenon; the search of revelation of ultimate truth and wisdom by means of altered states of consciousness. Altered states of consciousness, deliberately sought by various mystics and visionaries worldwide, but first and foremost by shamans, may be induced by a variety of means, one of the easiest being sensory deprivation, during which a reduction of external stimuli leads to the release of internal imagery. As a means of attaining these visions in the geographical setting of the Balkans, caverns, grottos, and underground chambers, provide an easy way to isolate the mind from the outside input and allow its concentration on a spiritual quest. Zalmoxis' behavior finds more than a few parallels in the life legends of Greek sages and prophets.

Vegetarian commandments of Zalmoxis, his catabasis, and above all the doctrine of immortality, induced the Pontic Greeks to link him with Pythagoras already by the fifth century. Disregarding the Greek prejudice of superiority of the Hellenes over the Barbarians, which is reflected in the tale making Zalmoxis Pythagoras slave, this interpretatio Graeca of Thracian ideas on immortality demonstrates that the cult of Zalmoxis involved a belief in the blissful postexistence, certain initiatory rites, magical healing, and decent into a cave, as a means to attain ultimate wisdom.--Greek Knowledge of Thracian and Scythian Healing Practices

LaughingMan wrote:

Yes - it does kind of seem like the Jesus myth was used as a way of making people more servile, thus more easy to control.

Paul even stated in his epistles that the believers ought to submit to Roman authority.