Dear
Readers,
My apologies. In Chapter 8, which addressed the Council’s deification of man, the following paragraphs towards the end were meant to be prior to the one on the Emperor Claudius’ arrival at heaven’s gate, but were inadvertently left out. Too precious this excellent, short read. Not to be missed.
F.R.
Painting of 'Homer Among the Greeks' by Gustav Jäger. 1808
‘Even the pagan religions
offer a deeper and more serious vision of life and death than the Council.’ Don Pietro Leone.
The Council’s Anthropology in its Ideological Context
The inadequacy of the
Council’s anthropology and indeed of its entire world-view may be seen by
comparing them with that of (traditional) Catholicism and even with that of
Paganism. The former views man as fallen and not glorious in any way in
himself, but only in the imitation of Christ. In this it contrasts the things
of man with those of God, in which sense St. Paul states [1]:
‘For I give you to understand, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by
me, is not according to man.’ Man’s task, then, is to lead a life in imitation
of Christ, Who died for him on the Cross to give him the graces of the
sacraments he needs in his constant battle against the World, the Flesh, and
the Devil in order to avoid Hell and to attain Heaven.
Plato and Aristotle saw 'life as orientated to the Good and the True'.
Detail from “The School of Athens” by Raphael
Paganism, in its greatest and
most influential philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, sees life as orientated to
the Good and the True; in its greatest poets, Homer and the Greek tragedians [2],
it portrays life, death, and the human condition with stark realism, and
regards suffering as the occasion for wisdom and for the ennoblement and
transfiguration of man. Even the pagan religions offer a deeper and more
serious vision of life and death than the Council. After all, the deification
of man advocated by the Council, as we have already stated, is only egoism, or
egoist hedonism, which has always been recognized as immoral by man. Even the
hedonist philosophers, such as Epicurus, maintain an anthropology opposed to
egoism.
No, it is rather to the other
Gnostic systems that we must turn, in order to trace the ancestry of Council
thinking: in modern times to the adherents of sects such as the Freemasonry and
the ‘New Age’, and in the middle Ages particularly to the ‘Free Spirits.’
In the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries a movement spread across France, Germany, Switzerland and
Austria: ‘Its members called themselves the Brothers and Sisters of the Free
Spirit or simply the ‘Free Spirits.’ The key doctrine of this sect was belief in
the possibility of ‘transfiguration into God.’ Since the soul of each man
consists of divine substance, any man in principle can achieve a state of
“Godliness.” …the Free Spirit was liberated from all moral constraints. He was
higher than Christ... The Free Spirit was the complete equal of God, “without
distinctions.” Hence his will is the will of God, and to him the notion of sin
becomes meaningless… Nothing performed by the flesh of such a man can either
decrease or increase his divinity. Therefore, he may give it complete freedom…
Intimacy with any woman, even with a sister or his mother, cannot stain him and
will only increase her holiness…’ [3]
As for the Council’s literary
predecessors, it is not to the tragedians that we should turn in our genealogical
research, but to the comedians. For what more apt literary precedent can we
find for the Fathers’ socialism, eroticism, emasculation, lack of sagacity and
a paternal spirit (both in relation to the faithful and to their children [4])
and general superficiality, than Aristophanes’ beard-sporting women
Councillors, the Ecclesiazousae? And
as for the myth of man’s self-deification, we can think of no more fitting
commentary, and of no more fitting conclusion to this second part of the book,
than the following passage from the Apocolocyntosis
Divi Claudii [5],
referring to the arrival of the Emperor Claudius at Heaven’s gate:
‘He wants to become a god…
Once it was a great thing to be made a god, but now you have made the
distinction a farce… I move that from this day forward, no-one should be made a
god…. Whoever, contrary to the decree of the senate, shall be made, called, or
depicted as a god, is to be given to the hobgoblins, and get a good thrashing
among the newly-hired gladiators of the next show… I propose that stout
punishment be meted out to him, that he be granted no rest… and that he be got
out of the way as soon as possible, departing from Heaven within 30 days and
from Olympus within 3.’ This verdict was carried… he was carried off from
Heaven towards the nether regions, whence, they say, no man returns.’
[1] Gal.1.11
[2] we are here thinking above all of Sophocles but also
of Euripides, particularly in the Hippolytus. This view of man and the world
was to be inherited and kept alive by the Stoics.
[3] Igor Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon,
Part One Chiliastic Socialism, s.2.The Socialism of the Heresies. We also find elements in the sect of
the Cathars which prefigure the Council: it opposes the Catholic Church (in Her
true nature) and the Cross; it denies Her holiness and refers to Her as the
'Church of Sinners'; it adopts an ambivalent attitude towards sin, considering
its highest ranking members as ‘the pure’ (katharos
in Greek) and demanding celibacy of them, while at the same time deeming them
incapable of sin; it adopts a socialist rejection of property; it opposes
marriage and procreation, considering the propagation of the human species as a
work of Satan and favoring as an ideal for humanity what may rather be described
as 'universal suicide'
[4] we are here thinking of the failure explicitly to
condemn contraception and of the promotion of ‘sex education.’
[5] the satire on the apotheosis of the Emperor Claudius, in
the author’s view, probably the work of Petronius
