Excellent piece! Shaykh Faraz Khan noted in his essay 'The Incoherence of Secular Messiahs' a lot of points that you (& other Traditional Catholics, Orthodox, etc) will find great concord with:
>> The void can only be filled by what is objectively true, good, and beautiful—by Truth. And only Truth can ground morality, science, politics, art, and human existence and effort. The fundamental “big” questions cannot be answered by a worldview that affirms only matter, or by a worldview of “nothing matters,” let alone by a worldview of value creation by “human gods,” each vying with the other by asserting his Nietzschean “will to power.” The nostalgia will only deepen without the Absolute. Meaning is beyond matter, so its source must be luminous and beyond matter. That is the gift of all prophets, and every age is their moment. <<
Anything that is measured must have something of the like with which to be measured by. Length must be measured by something of pre-determined length. Weight by pre-determined length. Volume by volume.
Same with the immaterial. Morals must be measured by pre-determined morals. Spiritual by pre-determined spiritual measurements. The supernatural builds upon the natural; God builds upon what is natural, because that is the hierarchy of being - matter being lower than the immaterial, as well as we learn about God's nature from the world in which He created.
I think there are some errors in the piece, however.
First, regarding the distinction between master and slave morality. This is not necessarily the propensity for violence: an angry mob is quite capable of violence; by the same extension, the lord of the manor is not necessarily inclined to it, or reliant upon it. The distinction is rather found in the ends of the morality, its area of concern, its definition of the good and the bad. Master morality holds up everything that is strong, bold, ferocious, and beautiful as the good, and their opposites as the bad; it holds up the exceptional man as the ideal, as opposed to the herd.
Slave morality, by contrast, is concerned with the good of the lowest. The good is charity, mercy, the redistribution of wealth. The good is the kind and pleasant man; the bad, by contrast, is the oppressor, who tends to be the strong and powerful man. Nietzsche's point was that the pre-Christian ideal of the good man, essentially the fierce warrior, is very similar to the Christian conception of the evil man, which characterizes this ideal as a brute and a tyrant; by the same token, everything pre-Christian Europe found contemptible and small, is by contrast celebrated. I do not say that this is necessarily so, or that it is in practice such a clean -cut distinction; only that this was Nietzsche's characterization.
Next, on the gods. I don't think Nietzsche believed in Apollo and Dionysus as literal, embodied entities, as the ancients did; he used them rather as metaphors for different ways of being, which are of particular relevance to the creative imagination of the artist. Iain McGilchrist has several times drawn parallels between Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian, and his own conception of the different roles played by left and right hemispheres, respectively. I alluded to this in my own essay, though did not make it explicit.
Finally, on science. Here I think you have gotten me utterly and completely wrong, to the degree that you are yourself tilting at a strawman of your own imagination. I do not say that Cbristianity wants to utterly reject all of modern science and technology. The point is far more specific than that: it is that after centuries of archeological digs, textual analysis, and historiographic investigation, no evidence whatsoever exists that verifies the Biblical version of history. Abraham, Moses, Solomon, and David appear nowhere in the records of other, supposedly adjacent cultures, a remarkable fact given that the Kingdom of Israel is portrayed as the axis around which the political and religious world turns. They are not present even as footnotes. The Egyptians have no record of Exodus ... though they DO record a very similar incident with the Hyksos, albeit one that differs in quite noticeable respects, which are not flattering to the Hyksos by the way. Jesus of Nazareth himself does not seem to be referenced in any reliable fashion in contemporaneous extra-Biblical texts; what references do exist, in Josephus for example, are all quite clearly pious frauds (which is not to say that Josephus himself was not a notorious liar) ... and the known tendency of monks and priests to commit pious frauds with regularity must surely be a fact that gives us pause when regarding the entirety of the Abrahamic corpus, which has been assembled almost entirely by such men.
At the same time, textual analysis has demonstrated innumerable parallels between Biblical texts and Hellenistic philosophy, particularly that of Plato, leading to the hypothesis that Israel itself may be largely the invention of Platonic philosophers in the 3rd century. Is this true? I do not know, but I am persuaded that it is quite plausible.
When I say that a mass return to Medieval Christianity would require a civilizational lobotomy, it is this body of work I am referring to, not some notion that the strictly miraculous aspects of Christianity require an abandonment of science.
You may of course see all of that as an attack on faith. Personally, I believe that if faith is to be worth anything at all, then it should be able to survive such interrogations ... not by closing its eyes and shoving its fingers in its ears, but by engaging with it openly and honestly, in order that the transcendental aspects might emerge purified and all the stronger, after sloughing off the detritus of thousands of years of accumulated errors and deceptions.
Your response is well thought out and reasoned, but I think that it isn't taking the historical details into consideration.
The people's response to the traditors WAS upholding the good and the beautiful. What is more, is that they are also doing so in a way that shows that they are not slaves by the Aristotelian definition in which they would weakly accept what they are dished out. These are every day people that are righteously offended about sacred texts being defiled and burned. Before the age of the printing press, these books were not merely holy, but could be worth a mansion in and of themselves. If those texts were further detailed with beautiful handwriting, unique commentary (as they often were in the margins), or held other pious, unique letters between bishops/saints; they were considered part of that region's inheritance.
So, I think you simply don't understand the context. Christianity was something that empowered people to see and understand the beautiful, the good, and the true on a much more profound level. It gave every level of society the ability to fight for it; it thus isn't a 'slave' or 'master' religion - as stated at the end of the post; it really is a religion that dignifies all of the human experience.
You also are skipping the soldiers, the judges that converted, and various other local officials that weren't slaves.
Take the Apostle Paul. He was the Top Tier of his society. Well off, and well to do. He always goes to the chosen people. Priests are always, in every society, primarily from those that have the means to educate their children. This held true in the Early Church through modern times - the majority of Bishops have always been from nobility or the well off - St Augustine, St Ambrose, down to the Popes of more modern times. But too, there are saints raised from humble backgrounds to Peter's Chair; like St Pius X born to a mailman.
My apologies for taking the science line the way you did - you have written it the way you have in multiple of your works and comments, without any of the explanation that you now have put forth. If you have it in another piece, I have never seen it, and the way it is written seems the natural way to interpret it, as there is no mention of history but only of science and progress in your pieces to give it context.
I do not see it as an attack on Faith. I will give it some time to ponder, as I have never had someone honestly question the Biblical narrative.
I will put forward that the scriptural references to the Roman census would have made it readily available for people of the time to check the historical accuracy of his birth, or at the least Mary and Joseph's travels, through the Census demanded by Rome. That, obviously, has been lost to history with the fall of Rome. But while you have a lack of sources available to us now, John, I also will note that I have never had presented to me any contemporary that doubted the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth for the first 300 years - unless they were making the kind of heretical claims that He didn't die because God's don't die, and other non-sense, gnostic type stuff that I've read.
As far as Nietzsche simply using the pagan stuff as a metaphor - I can understand that. And get it. I simply don't take things 'just as metaphors.' If you're seriously about a re-enchantment of the world, you have to start looking at these things seriously. You don't start throwing around pagan gods names willy-nilly, making it a part of a worldview/philosophy, and expect it to have no effect on outcomes.
I have to read through Carter's essay, but the excerpts you posted speak to someone who thinks that the Renaissance and resulting Materialism made the all descendants of the men who built cathedrals into the worshipers of toolboxes. I hope to be at least somewhat mollified by the remainder of his post. As a PhD-wielding physicist, my faith is not diminished by knowing the means to explore and measure aspects of the Universe via the tools of Science and Technology exist. The fact that we can do that only enhances my Christian faith.
Perhaps Mr Carter is another who believes Christianity's power is measured in the material and numerical, and is not familiar with the historical precedents that we do best when we are down on the scoreboard in the late innings of the game.
As to Nietzsche, his belief that faith was dying was his despair leaking to the surface. Unfortunately, it's gone forward to infect too many others. Despair is a poison and should not be celebrated in any form, nor should his philosophy--real or misapplied--be a guide for any normal man.
John has good insights on things at times - his posts are sometimes hard to track as he is verbose and I feel like his tendency to wander leaves one thought disconjointed from the other in terms of his world view.
As far as Christianity goes, I'm never sure which version of Christianity he's responding to. Is it the Catholic one, that has built up the West since it inherited Rome, and saw it morph into the blossom of the Medieval period? Is it the pagan Renascence, where beauty and form were put forth, but pagan gods came into vogue again, and the cracks start to show in the feudal system as kings don't address the needs of their peoples while the Hapsburgs centralize power? Or is it the Enlightenment/Protestant? Or the modern Christian?
Which Christianity is it he responds to? If Catholicism, there is an argument that there are problems in the different periods, but those are temporary, addressed in different ways. If addressing a facade of Christianity, it's a another issue. If addressing a different sect of Christianity, we're literally discussing something that is NOT the backbone of Western civilization - sorry Protestants, you can argue that you made America, or even our modern world as it is, and I'll give you that, but that's a different argument than Western Civ; or you can argue you're an outgrowth of Catholicism; but again, a different argument.
As to Nietzsche, yes, the despair is a huge deal. I don't know how you can get around it.
He needs to define his terms then, especially if unaware of the Church's actual nature. His understanding of Christianity has the vibe of monochromatic media derivatives more than actual research or contact with the practitioners of the Faith. Happy to be proven wrong.
Excellent piece! Shaykh Faraz Khan noted in his essay 'The Incoherence of Secular Messiahs' a lot of points that you (& other Traditional Catholics, Orthodox, etc) will find great concord with:
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-incoherence-of-secular-messiahs
Excerpt:
>> The void can only be filled by what is objectively true, good, and beautiful—by Truth. And only Truth can ground morality, science, politics, art, and human existence and effort. The fundamental “big” questions cannot be answered by a worldview that affirms only matter, or by a worldview of “nothing matters,” let alone by a worldview of value creation by “human gods,” each vying with the other by asserting his Nietzschean “will to power.” The nostalgia will only deepen without the Absolute. Meaning is beyond matter, so its source must be luminous and beyond matter. That is the gift of all prophets, and every age is their moment. <<
Exactly.
Anything that is measured must have something of the like with which to be measured by. Length must be measured by something of pre-determined length. Weight by pre-determined length. Volume by volume.
Same with the immaterial. Morals must be measured by pre-determined morals. Spiritual by pre-determined spiritual measurements. The supernatural builds upon the natural; God builds upon what is natural, because that is the hierarchy of being - matter being lower than the immaterial, as well as we learn about God's nature from the world in which He created.
Thanks for the considerate reply!
I think there are some errors in the piece, however.
First, regarding the distinction between master and slave morality. This is not necessarily the propensity for violence: an angry mob is quite capable of violence; by the same extension, the lord of the manor is not necessarily inclined to it, or reliant upon it. The distinction is rather found in the ends of the morality, its area of concern, its definition of the good and the bad. Master morality holds up everything that is strong, bold, ferocious, and beautiful as the good, and their opposites as the bad; it holds up the exceptional man as the ideal, as opposed to the herd.
Slave morality, by contrast, is concerned with the good of the lowest. The good is charity, mercy, the redistribution of wealth. The good is the kind and pleasant man; the bad, by contrast, is the oppressor, who tends to be the strong and powerful man. Nietzsche's point was that the pre-Christian ideal of the good man, essentially the fierce warrior, is very similar to the Christian conception of the evil man, which characterizes this ideal as a brute and a tyrant; by the same token, everything pre-Christian Europe found contemptible and small, is by contrast celebrated. I do not say that this is necessarily so, or that it is in practice such a clean -cut distinction; only that this was Nietzsche's characterization.
Next, on the gods. I don't think Nietzsche believed in Apollo and Dionysus as literal, embodied entities, as the ancients did; he used them rather as metaphors for different ways of being, which are of particular relevance to the creative imagination of the artist. Iain McGilchrist has several times drawn parallels between Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian, and his own conception of the different roles played by left and right hemispheres, respectively. I alluded to this in my own essay, though did not make it explicit.
Finally, on science. Here I think you have gotten me utterly and completely wrong, to the degree that you are yourself tilting at a strawman of your own imagination. I do not say that Cbristianity wants to utterly reject all of modern science and technology. The point is far more specific than that: it is that after centuries of archeological digs, textual analysis, and historiographic investigation, no evidence whatsoever exists that verifies the Biblical version of history. Abraham, Moses, Solomon, and David appear nowhere in the records of other, supposedly adjacent cultures, a remarkable fact given that the Kingdom of Israel is portrayed as the axis around which the political and religious world turns. They are not present even as footnotes. The Egyptians have no record of Exodus ... though they DO record a very similar incident with the Hyksos, albeit one that differs in quite noticeable respects, which are not flattering to the Hyksos by the way. Jesus of Nazareth himself does not seem to be referenced in any reliable fashion in contemporaneous extra-Biblical texts; what references do exist, in Josephus for example, are all quite clearly pious frauds (which is not to say that Josephus himself was not a notorious liar) ... and the known tendency of monks and priests to commit pious frauds with regularity must surely be a fact that gives us pause when regarding the entirety of the Abrahamic corpus, which has been assembled almost entirely by such men.
At the same time, textual analysis has demonstrated innumerable parallels between Biblical texts and Hellenistic philosophy, particularly that of Plato, leading to the hypothesis that Israel itself may be largely the invention of Platonic philosophers in the 3rd century. Is this true? I do not know, but I am persuaded that it is quite plausible.
When I say that a mass return to Medieval Christianity would require a civilizational lobotomy, it is this body of work I am referring to, not some notion that the strictly miraculous aspects of Christianity require an abandonment of science.
You may of course see all of that as an attack on faith. Personally, I believe that if faith is to be worth anything at all, then it should be able to survive such interrogations ... not by closing its eyes and shoving its fingers in its ears, but by engaging with it openly and honestly, in order that the transcendental aspects might emerge purified and all the stronger, after sloughing off the detritus of thousands of years of accumulated errors and deceptions.
John,
Your response is well thought out and reasoned, but I think that it isn't taking the historical details into consideration.
The people's response to the traditors WAS upholding the good and the beautiful. What is more, is that they are also doing so in a way that shows that they are not slaves by the Aristotelian definition in which they would weakly accept what they are dished out. These are every day people that are righteously offended about sacred texts being defiled and burned. Before the age of the printing press, these books were not merely holy, but could be worth a mansion in and of themselves. If those texts were further detailed with beautiful handwriting, unique commentary (as they often were in the margins), or held other pious, unique letters between bishops/saints; they were considered part of that region's inheritance.
So, I think you simply don't understand the context. Christianity was something that empowered people to see and understand the beautiful, the good, and the true on a much more profound level. It gave every level of society the ability to fight for it; it thus isn't a 'slave' or 'master' religion - as stated at the end of the post; it really is a religion that dignifies all of the human experience.
You also are skipping the soldiers, the judges that converted, and various other local officials that weren't slaves.
Take the Apostle Paul. He was the Top Tier of his society. Well off, and well to do. He always goes to the chosen people. Priests are always, in every society, primarily from those that have the means to educate their children. This held true in the Early Church through modern times - the majority of Bishops have always been from nobility or the well off - St Augustine, St Ambrose, down to the Popes of more modern times. But too, there are saints raised from humble backgrounds to Peter's Chair; like St Pius X born to a mailman.
My apologies for taking the science line the way you did - you have written it the way you have in multiple of your works and comments, without any of the explanation that you now have put forth. If you have it in another piece, I have never seen it, and the way it is written seems the natural way to interpret it, as there is no mention of history but only of science and progress in your pieces to give it context.
I do not see it as an attack on Faith. I will give it some time to ponder, as I have never had someone honestly question the Biblical narrative.
I will put forward that the scriptural references to the Roman census would have made it readily available for people of the time to check the historical accuracy of his birth, or at the least Mary and Joseph's travels, through the Census demanded by Rome. That, obviously, has been lost to history with the fall of Rome. But while you have a lack of sources available to us now, John, I also will note that I have never had presented to me any contemporary that doubted the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth for the first 300 years - unless they were making the kind of heretical claims that He didn't die because God's don't die, and other non-sense, gnostic type stuff that I've read.
As far as Nietzsche simply using the pagan stuff as a metaphor - I can understand that. And get it. I simply don't take things 'just as metaphors.' If you're seriously about a re-enchantment of the world, you have to start looking at these things seriously. You don't start throwing around pagan gods names willy-nilly, making it a part of a worldview/philosophy, and expect it to have no effect on outcomes.
I have to read through Carter's essay, but the excerpts you posted speak to someone who thinks that the Renaissance and resulting Materialism made the all descendants of the men who built cathedrals into the worshipers of toolboxes. I hope to be at least somewhat mollified by the remainder of his post. As a PhD-wielding physicist, my faith is not diminished by knowing the means to explore and measure aspects of the Universe via the tools of Science and Technology exist. The fact that we can do that only enhances my Christian faith.
Perhaps Mr Carter is another who believes Christianity's power is measured in the material and numerical, and is not familiar with the historical precedents that we do best when we are down on the scoreboard in the late innings of the game.
As to Nietzsche, his belief that faith was dying was his despair leaking to the surface. Unfortunately, it's gone forward to infect too many others. Despair is a poison and should not be celebrated in any form, nor should his philosophy--real or misapplied--be a guide for any normal man.
John has good insights on things at times - his posts are sometimes hard to track as he is verbose and I feel like his tendency to wander leaves one thought disconjointed from the other in terms of his world view.
As far as Christianity goes, I'm never sure which version of Christianity he's responding to. Is it the Catholic one, that has built up the West since it inherited Rome, and saw it morph into the blossom of the Medieval period? Is it the pagan Renascence, where beauty and form were put forth, but pagan gods came into vogue again, and the cracks start to show in the feudal system as kings don't address the needs of their peoples while the Hapsburgs centralize power? Or is it the Enlightenment/Protestant? Or the modern Christian?
Which Christianity is it he responds to? If Catholicism, there is an argument that there are problems in the different periods, but those are temporary, addressed in different ways. If addressing a facade of Christianity, it's a another issue. If addressing a different sect of Christianity, we're literally discussing something that is NOT the backbone of Western civilization - sorry Protestants, you can argue that you made America, or even our modern world as it is, and I'll give you that, but that's a different argument than Western Civ; or you can argue you're an outgrowth of Catholicism; but again, a different argument.
As to Nietzsche, yes, the despair is a huge deal. I don't know how you can get around it.
He needs to define his terms then, especially if unaware of the Church's actual nature. His understanding of Christianity has the vibe of monochromatic media derivatives more than actual research or contact with the practitioners of the Faith. Happy to be proven wrong.
Agreed
https://open.substack.com/pub/fatherofzoomers/p/mini-golf-on-friday-night?r=jejuu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true