Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

Correlations exist between what are called Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah.

What are Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah and what is their significance linguistically, theologically, ideologically and as phenomena of history?

Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah are concepts that can be taken as symbols. A concept is a dialectically produced image of reality that unites more or less inclusive information and evaluation by and for a centered self, such as an animal or a personal self.

Because they are dialectically produced — that is, involving reception and response, destiny and freedom — concepts are existentially committed and involved, they participate in the dynamics of history. This means they are ambiguous, as life and history are. Concepts mix the constructive and the destructive, the vertical and the horizontal components.

It is not possible to live without concepts. Life proceeds by images (the Platonic eidos, idea). Life is continuously generating and transcending images (eidoi) and concepts with images and concepts, some driving forward and upward, some driving backward and downward, and all in mixtures of both.

The necessity of concepts and their underlying images makes iconoclasm a forlorn and baleful activity.  Iconoclasm underlies the genesis of Islam and appears not infrequently in the history of Christianity and Judaism, e.g., Karl Popper, Jacques Derrida, Puritanism and the contemporary global neurosis regarding “profiling.”

Semites in particular and throughout their recorded history demonstrate a penchant for iconoclasm driven by powerful, persistent unwillingness to examine or to accept the nature, utility and limits of cognition (Popper is a vivid example).

Hinduism and Buddhism exhibit some iconoclastic elements, as do Zoroastrianism and Baha’i.  However these are not depth or fundamental attitudes of Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Baha’i, as they are in Judaism and Islam.

Significantly, however, Judaism and Islam belie their loyalty to iconoclasm and emerge in hypocrisy by elevating law and legal scholars, philanthropy and architecture, Koran and Talmud to the status of worshipful images.

Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah are concepts that unite the contents of images of the self, the self’s world, the self’s group and the self’s relation to God. As concepts, Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah participate in the ambiguities of life and history. They can be more or less accurate or inaccurate and constructive or destructive. They can unite and they can divide. They can uplift and they can throw down. And they can do all of that all at once.

The ambiguously actualize-able power of concepts intensifies when they are taken as symbols pointing to something beyond themselves.

A symbol is an image or a concept that, through persistent use and acceptance by a group, points beyond itself to a reality which it represents and in which, importantly, it also participates. Symbols usually comprise multiple concepts which are united by the symbol into an expression of sublime or even ultimate concern that transcends the symbol and its constituent concepts and in which the symbol also participates.

The difference between a sign and a symbol is that a sign does not participate in the reality of that to which it points whereas a symbol does.  Penultimate concerns have objects but ultimate concern has no object.  Ultimate concern is beyond the subject-object split, or should be.  Ultimate concern can be lodged in something less than ultimate.  When it is, the subject-object split is not overcome by ultimate concern, it is intensified and with destructive consequences called idolatry.

The reality to which a symbol points and in which it participates can be an objective reality, over against the one using the symbol, or it can be a subjective reality, an extension or projection of the cognition or volition of the one using the symbol. This distinction is central to the following exposition.

As symbols, Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah point to a subjective reality, not an objective one. And not only so, they point to a delusional subjective reality. They point to a phenomenon that arises in every religion, namely, the wish that this religion, which one and ones’ group find so sublime and satisfying or so useful for expressing the will to power, be espoused by every creature, either for their own benefit or as evidence of their subjection to one’s will and the power of one’s group.

There is no objective reality that intimates or supports concepts or symbols of religious, cultural or moral hegemony. Concepts and symbols of religious, cultural or moral hegemony are subjective in nature, supported by delusions, projected from individuals and groups, not corresponding to any reality outside or over against the cognition and volition of individuals and groups espousing and projecting them.

Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah are fabricated realities foisted on the world. They have no basis in Being Itself (Latin esse ipsum), only in non-being, or, what is the same thing from another perspective, in will that is demonic. Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah correspond to no category or element of the structure of being. They rest on subjectively generated concepts of religious, cultural and moral hegemony. The intent of their use is to establish and promote those hegemonies. This is all delusional and unsupported by God.

Notwithstanding, the symbols Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah are of long use and uniformly baleful presence – such is the power of delusion or the demonic; that is demonic which takes for ultimate that which is not ultimate. Each has had its own political and economic concretization. The concretization of the symbol Corpus Christianum was the Holy Roman Empire. The concretization of the symbol Moslem Ummah were the Caliphates. Though the names differ, the nature, intent and histories of these symbols and of their concretizations strongly correlate.

Curiously, the demonic power of the symbols Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah and their concretizations, Holy Roman Empire and Caliphates, were destroyed almost simultaneously by the First World War and its cultural, religious and moral outcomes. However, the subtle cause of this felicitous exit of demonic harassment was the Presence of Baha’u’llah and Shirdi Sai Baba, both from the Moslem orbit.

The destruction of Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah is permanent and irreversible. They are gone forever as concepts with symbol-and reality-producing vitality. They are gone forever as delusional yet proximately effective historical forces. Nothing can bring either of them or anything like them back to life. Nor can anything like them be created in their stead. Concept, symbol and concretization are utterly wiped out.

And well it is so, though still unhappily for some. Current efforts to reestablish a Moslem Ummah with concrete Caliphate prove the point: they are negatively creative and hated by those on whom they are imposed. They lack the power of self-integration and rely entirely on internal delusion and external extortion and intimidation to exist at all. But delusion, extortion and intimidation are not bases of stable reality. They support no thing and are unsupported by God, who is All-in-All.

Delusional aims are called utopias. The word utopia (Greek ou + topos) means something that has no place to be, to take root and grow outward.

Summary

The destruction of the symbol Corpus Christianum was famously remarked and accepted by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who spoke for the Church in this particular.

The destruction of the Moslem Ummah was famously remarked, but not accepted, by Sayyid Qutb and more recently Osama Bin Laden (and here) and his ideological superior, Ayman al Zawahiri, who are followed in this particular by most calling themselves Moslem.

This fact argues that most modern Moslem are not Moslem, they are idolaters.  The best word for them is Mohammedans, which indicates their idolatry of Mohammed and the Koran.  The religion practiced by Mohammedans is not Islam, it is Mohammedanism.  This is the traditional nomenclature, as used by Voltaire for example, and is the proper one.

I am unaware of any Moslem in the world or any practice of Islam, although there must be some somewhere.

Mohammedans have accepted lies and distortions regarding their religion and are prevented by their scholars and rulers from examining their fundamental texts and the preaching done therefrom.

Mohammedan scholars, clergy and rulers fearfully and archly disallows subjecting the Koran and its amplifying literature to historical criticism, as would be fitting and beneficial and conduce to the peace of the world.

Historical criticism of the Koran would remove the possibility of literalistic interpretation of those writings on account of their mixing myth, legend, tribal, Roman, Jewish and Christian law and custom, poetry, preaching, exegesis and kerygma.  Exposing that, of course, would subvert the tyranny Mohammedan scholars, clergy and rulers enjoy over their followers.

Whom academics call “Moderate Moslems,” such as the Moslem Brotherhood (and here, and here), aim to glorify the Moslem Ummah and restore its concretization, the Caliphate(s), by manipulating legal, political and economic mechanisms in countries where they reside essentially as Fifth Columns. Whom academics call “Radical Moslems,” such, again, as the Moslem Brotherhood (and here, and here), aim to glorify the Moslem Ummah and restore the Caliphate(s) by manipulating public opinion with inducements for state-controlled media (aka the entertainment industry) to hypostatize their operations in countries they intend to supplant.

“Moderate Moslems” and “Radical Moslems” are the same people using different rhetoric, rhetoric keyed to specific agendas in specific contexts.  The differences are tactical merely, not strategic.  Academics typically reject this fact because its being is excluded from the presumptions and expectations of their dogmatik, their ideology.  The truth is, academics fear Mohammedans even more than they fear creative persons.

Those operations are commonly termed “terrorist” but in the minds of their accomplishers they are deemed purification of the earth and world and have excellent intimidation value against people they plan to dominate or exterminate. Said accomplishers reject the observation that they labor in the thrall of delusion. They have towering and tragic certainty in their work and their righteousness. They are, as they call themselves, “the good ones.”

On the motivating power of law and morality, see this excerpt from Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology Volume III, p. 48-50.  Jewish “good ones” call themselves Hassidim.

Most Moslems, in accord with the Moslem Brotherhood (and here, and here), practice agility and adaptability to achieve their shared goal of reifying the Moslem Ummah and restoring the Caliphate(s) to the exclusion of all non-Moslem religious and civil authority. Almost none accepts the permanent destruction of either Moslem Ummah or Caliphate(s). This fact drives the “Moslem” vexation of the world today. They reject the failure of their impertinent delusion … ruling the world, yet!

Their failure derives from their commitment to idolatry rather than religion, Mohammed and Koran rather than Allah and Love.

In fact, the Moslem Ummah and Caliphate(s) most “Moslem” seek to restore, girdling the globe in a single religion, culture and morality, a single “way of life,” existed ever as cloud castles and nightmares only. Neither was an objective reality, neither existed to its logical conclusion, which is to say to their proponents’ pretensions of world domination – indeed, four of the first five Caliphs were assassinated; hardly an auspicious beginning for hegemonistic aspirations.

The same may be remarked, of course, of Corpus Christianum and its concretization, the Holy Roman Empire. Neither of these ever existed to their logical conclusions and their proponents’ aspirations.

The symbols Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah, their enabling images and concepts and their concretizations in political/economic history are evidence of estrangement not religion, separation from life and God not reunion with them. They demonstrate the presence of limitless libido, the desire to draw the entire content of the world into one’s self. Those who espouse these symbols and their concretizations are estranged, fanatical psycho-sociopaths.

Libido is love for an inferior.  Philia is love for an equal.  Eros is love for a superior.  Agape is love without thought of self.

Most Moslems today espouse the symbol Moslem Ummah and its concretization, the Caliphate, whereas today few Christians espouse the symbol Corpus Christianum and its concretization, the Holy Roman Empire.  A version of these symbols and their concretizations is embedded in Jewish identity doctrine.  Likewise for Baha’i.  Hinduism and during recent centuries Zoroastrianism do not foster espousal of anything comparable to these symbols or their concretizations.  On limited scales Buddhism did espouse such symbols and concretizations until the recent past, when Buddhists generally and Tibetans in particular accepted that political/economic realities chastened those delusions.

Exposition

Why and how do these symbols and their concretizations arise? And what is the meaning of their abolishment?

Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah are symbols rooted in concepts that aim to describe, proscribe and control a creating, sustaining and fulfilling reality to which a group of persons has made a similar response. The root of these concepts, in turn, is a revelatory constellation comprising a revelation or self-revealing by God and a response by individuals, and gradually a group, to that revelation, that self-manifestation by the Ground and Abyss of Being.

A revelatory constellation is dialectical, comprising a revealing and a response to the revealing. Neither side of the dialectic can be described on its own apart from the other – for this reason Abraham Joshua Heschel named one of his works God In Search Of Man and another Man Is Not Alone.  A dialectic is dialectical (two-made or two-spoken) or it does not exist. Existence is dialectical. Essence is not.

Revelatory experiences are saving experiences to which response is made. A self-manifestation of God is not a force in history until responded to. Such is always responded to one way and another and it is in the response that mistakes and improprieties can occur and usually do.

Direct experience of divine self-manifestation is the most powerful and fulfilling condition of life any being, plant, animal or person, can enter. No other experience of any description compares with direct experience of the Divine Life. None other confers the depth of certainty, rest, quiet and bliss that direct experience of divine self-manifestation confers.

Revelation and response are a depth phenomenon of life that propagates continuously in all dimensions of nature and history.

A person cannot enter a revelatory constellation of his or her own power or volition. No human or superhuman effort can bring about direct experience of God. To enter the Divine Life, a person must be grasped, shaken and brought into a revelatory constellation by God, by the source and content of revelation and sometimes along with such mundane artifacts as God wishes to accompany the revelatory constellation.

God “holds all the cards” in the God-man dialectic or relationship. Man holds none of them. This fact is the basis for the experience of mystery which, along with the experience of ecstasy, is present in every revelatory constellation.

The core difference between Protestant and Roman Catholic theology and ethics is that whereas Protestantism, in accord with Augustine, accepts that “God holds all the cards” in the sense that after the Fall man is powerless and without freedom to reunite with God, to regain the Presence of God as he had it before the Fall, Roman Catholicism, in accord with Aquinas, asserts that man retains a portion of his pre-Fall nature after the Fall and therefore some power and freedom — and therefore responsibility! — on his own to achieve a degree of entrance to the Divine Presence even after the Fall.

Protestantism takes the biblical symbols of Creation and Fall as aspects of the one mystery of Divine Life. Roman Catholicism takes the biblical symbols of Creation and Fall as signs pointing to sequential historical events of decreasing power in which the superior power of Creation continues, albeit in an attenuated condition, through the Fall to preserve human nature from complete deformation during the Fall and the consequence such a complete deformation would have, namely, complete alienation or estrangement from God after the Fall.

Protestantism recognizes the complete estrangement of man’s existential condition from God, from himself and from his world after the Fall.

These differences between Protestant and Roman Catholic soteriological theology should not be minimized. They have profound consequences in the behavior of individuals and groups and thus the processes and outcomes of history. They root in an existential question.

Direct experience of God is direct experience of the mystery of Being-Itself, of that which classical theology describes as simultaneously mysterium fascinosum and mysterium tremendum. God absolutely attracts and absolutely terrifies and repels in the same experience, at the same moment and while remaining forever mysterious.

That only is mysterious which remains unknown and unknowable after it has revealed itself.  Ecstasy means “standing beside one’s self” in bliss in the revelatory constellation.  It does not refer to “altered states of consciousness” induced by chemicals, exercise, hyperventilation, etc.  Bliss is unavailable to any kind of inducement.

For all of these reasons, direct experience of a divine self-revelation is fraught with potential to be taken amiss and responded to improperly. The revelatory constellation is life’s finest fulfillment and deepest danger, all at once.

The most common mistake arising from a revelatory constellation is preening oneself on one’s good fortune. A responder imagines himself or herself special to God and superior to others because they have been brought into a revelatory constellation. (This is the fundamental error of so-called Liberation Theology, which presumes special status for “the poor” before God, man and history because, it claims, in error, that Jesus the Christ favored “the poor” with Grace because of their condition in life.) This thought quickly escalates to the notion that one was and should have been brought into a revelatory constellation on account of one’ excellences and achievements or general condition of life.

The most common impropriety arising from a revelatory constellation is hubris, considering one’s self deserving of God, which is putting oneself in the position of God. A responder next imagines that he or she is a surrogate of God or God’s equal because God has brought them into a revelatory constellation with Himself. Delusion concatenates then cascades delusion.

Placing oneself in the position of God is the real meaning of the Greek word hubris. Hubris does not mean arrogance. Arrogance is a moral fault, correctable and far less serious in its destructive effects than hubris, which is the tragic spiritual lapse explored by the classical Greek dramatists. Hubris is taking oneself as having aseity (Latin, standing on oneself), which only that without a second has, namely, God. Regrettably, English has no correlate of the Greek word hubris and in consequence hubris is often used improperly as a synonym for arrogance.

Hubris is taking the whole world into oneself and thinking one makes and controls it and is entitled to have it for servant. Hubris always ends in tragic fall, the principal subject of classical Greek drama. Along their course, a person who has succumbed to hubris, as is said, “pisses down everyone else’s back and tells them it is raining.”

Power without valid legal form destroys itself. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume III, University of Chicago Press, 1963, page 84.

When a group of persons, each having similar experience in a revelatory constellation, expresses their experience through common verbal formulae, such as are given in and created from their time and clime, preening and hubris are all but inevitable to some degree or another. If the group lacks internal checks on mistakes and improprieties or diminishes the effectiveness of internal checks it does have, it will take itself as more important than any other group and the very embodiment, the plenary actuality, of indomitable right and might on earth for all times and climes.

Chief among internal checks are ratiocination and contrition. Ratiocination undercuts recrudescences of ego by opposing them with intellect. Contrition undercuts blandishments of ego by opposing them with humility. Ratiocination presupposes robust and accurate epistemological sophistication. Contrition presupposes robust and accurate awareness not only of sins but of Sin as an ontological given.

Mohammedanism rejects interest in epistemology and awareness of Sin. Mohammedanism is bereft of internal checks on preening and hubris, a fact tragically and painfully overbearing now the whole world including Mohammedans.

In other words, the personalities comprising the group will think themselves as a group having the standing of God in all matters of existence.

“In heaven and on earth,” compare the Vatican doctrine that the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, is the Vicar of Christ who speaks Urbi et Orbi, to the City (Rome) and the world.

That is the origin and the content of the symbols Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah. Both symbols are consequences of preening and hubris-tic response to direct experience of the Divine Life in a revelatory constellation. A moment when the clock ticked but time stood still, a moment beyond good and evil, beyond right and wrong, a moment of fragmentary experience of truth, consciousness and bliss has received, at least in part, an improper and tragic response.

Classical Christian theology mentions that without the potential for improper response to divine self-manifestation, man would not have freedom and the dialectic of divine-human encounter could not be characterized as soteriological in nature. Thus, it is asserted that man’s potential for improper response demonstrates at once his fallen nature, his uniqueness relative to all other known forms of life, and the divine wish that even in his fallen condition man have that freedom which includes the potential for mishap.

Man is like God in all respects except that, being estranged from his essential nature — from God — he can deploy his freedom to further disunion with himself, with God and with his world. Man can act against himself. This is the true measure of man’s freedom and the source of the tragedy of his existence.

Holy Roman Empire and Caliphate were concretizations of the improper symbols Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah. They were political/economic implementations of those symbols, differing in content but not in source or intent.

The Formal Answer

The formal answer to the question, Why do symbols such as Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah and their concretizations arise?, describes the occasion of their rising. The occasion of their rising is the mutual immanence or interpenetration of the functions of spirit (small s). The functions of spirit are culture, religion and morality.

The functions of spirit may be distinguished but not separated. This fact is important to grasp. It is decisive for historical development because it is a reality inside all aspects of life.

Spirit with a small s (Hebrew nephesh, German geist, Latin spiritus) is that dimension of life in which the unity of power and meaning is actualized by man’s cultural, religious and moral creativity. Spirit is the dimension of life that, though potential in the dimensions of the inorganic, the organic and the psychic, is actualized in and by man alone.

Man alone creates worlds of meaning and power. That is because he lives in the dimension of spirit. The dimension of spirit is as natural as the dimensions of the inorganic, the organic and the psychic. Spirit is the most advanced of the ecologies of life. Man’s natural environment is the dimension of spirit. Man alone lives in this dimension, is natural in it and to it. He makes it.

Evolution drives towards self-transcendence, from the inorganic to the organic to the psychic to the spiritual and finally to the historical dimension. Each dimension comprises the entirety of the one(s) which precede and support it. Man’s natural life, his life in nature is lived in the dimensions of spirit and history. Spirit and history are the natural consequence of evolution, they define the ecology of life and comprise it.

To assert that man hurts or offends nature or that what man does is unnatural is to deny evolution. Man defines natural. Everything man does is the evolution of nature. The dimensions of spirit and history define the study of ecology. They are the standard of life because they are the goal of life.

Spirit and history are what nature aims for and goes to. This shrill argument we hear that man is unnatural and what he does hurts nature is poppycock, balderdash. Man defines nature. Man creates nature. That was the central insight of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and it is the truth.

Nature finds its fulfillment and forward movement in man and as man. Man is nature going forward through evolution to Eternal Life in God.

The dimension of spirit is the uniquely human dimension. Only man creates cultures, religions and moralities because only man faces the moral command, transcends the conditions of his existence and inquires after the ground of his being. Man seeks knowledge because his nature is Truth. He seeks awareness because his nature is Consciousness. Man seeks happiness because his nature is Bliss.

Everything man does roots in his ontological ground. The quests for Truth Consciousness Bliss are the three functions of spirit, religion, culture and morality, that uniquely characterize the phenomenon of man.

Man unites power with meaning in his cultural, religious and moral creativity. His creativity in these areas is omni-directional and without limit. Man’s activities actualize his potentials. The extent of his self-actualization, which is the actualization of his potentials, is the measure of man’s completion, which is his perfection.

Perfection is not a moral category and is unrelated to moralism.  Perfection (Latin, per + facere, completely done) is the measure of the fulfillment or actualization of a creature’s potentials.  A mollusk whose potentials are actualized is more perfect than a human whose potentials are not.  Sages are sages and saints saints because considerably more of their potentials are actualized than is ordinarily the case in human creatures.

Perfection is actualization of potentials. It is not moral uprightness or integrity. That man is perfectly good or perfectly evil who has actualized all of his potentials for good or for evil, whichever potential dominates his personality. And one will dominate. The potentials for good and evil are never equal components of a personality. There is no ontological dualism.

When dealing with the functions of spirit — culture, religion and morality — we are dealing with dynamic phenomena expressed through the polarity of freedom and destiny. We are dealing, among other things, with legal, political and economic ideas such as produce the symbols Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah and their concretizations of Holy Roman Empire and Caliphate.

When seeking a symbol to describe the relationship between man’s cultural, religious and moral creativities as they operate through the polarity of freedom and destiny, one recalls Charles Dodgson’s image of Alice playing croquet in Wonderland with a flamingo for a mallet and a hedgehog for a ball.

Gregory Bateson takes this image to describe meta-random systems. His intention is literal and technical. He takes the image as a sign pointing to an object, a meta-random system, but not as a symbol participating in the power and meaning of its object. However, the image has potential beyond use as a sign. It has use as a symbol.

A symbol differs from a sign by not merely indicating but also expressing and participating in the reality of the object to which it points. A sign statically points to its referent. A symbol dynamically points to its referent and simultaneously expresses its meaning. A sign is detached from its referent. A symbol belongs to its referent and its referent belongs to it. A mileage marker is a sign. A national flag is a symbol. A mileage marker indicates something without being connected to it or participating in it. A national flag expresses and participates in the power and meaning of the nation to which it points.  A sign points to a thing, a symbol points beyond things to aspects or the whole of the structure of being. Symbols point to and themselves participate in meaning.

Decisions of United States Courts which take the American Flag as a sign devoid of meaning miss the fact that our Flag is a symbol comprising our meaning, which is the United States.  The United States is one of our Seven Mothers.  The Court’s error and others typologically akin to it form the basis of popular disquiet regarding the learning and wisdom of Justices and Judges of United States Courts in recent decades.

The image of Alice’s croquet game symbolizes man’s religious, cultural and moral activity expressed through the polarity of freedom and destiny that characterizes all dimensions of life. Additionally, this polarity is effective in the relations between man’s cultural, religious and moral creativities. The image of Alice’s croquet game is an adequate symbol, therefore, for those relations and implies numerous aspects of their reality that are useful to understand and shape.

The Existential Answer

The existential answer to the question, Why do concepts such as Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah and their concretizations arise?, describes the cause of their rising. It is that the allure of claiming ultimacy (Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah) for that which is not ultimate (Christianity and Islam, or worse, Christians and Moslems) overwhelms man’s faculties, especially in his social life with its requirements for order and therefore regulation.

The power of delusion, which is rooted in the Unconditioned, in Being-Itself, and personalized in the symbol of the Almighty God, is a condition of man’s existence that easily overwhelms his faculties and causes improper response to reality, including in revelatory constellations. Man has limited freedom to resist the power of delusion but he is destined to struggle continuously against that power and may succumb to it because his freedom to resist it is not plenary. (This is the inner meaning of the so-called Doctrine of Original Sin.)  Man experiences himself as a creator, a benefactor and a victim of his own existence. His experience is both made by him and given to him. He has inalienable freedom and inalienable destiny.

Man is prone to believing, thinking and acting in a condition of delusion. Delusion begets idolatry, which is the taking as ultimate of that which is not ultimate – such as an idea, a rock, a book, a personality, a picture, an goal, a nation, a device, a tribe, a leader, a philosophy, a religion, a family, etc.   Idolatry is a demonic condition, one in which the finite is taken as the infinite. The terms demonic condition and idolatry denote aspects of the same phenomenon of having been taken in or played by the power of delusion.

The occasions for idolatry, driven by delusion, are omni-present and unending. The number of objects available for man to regard amiss and the opportunities he has to create and enter idolatrous relationships are beyond counting. They fly at him in hordes every instant, waking, dreaming and sleeping. Every object he encounters, including his own self and his idea of God, man can take delusively, creating for himself a demonic condition, a relationship of idolatry which destroys his lucidity.

Man’s liability to delusion and idolatry illustrates the presence of tragedy as an ineluctable component of his life. Tragedy, indeed, is an ineluctable component of life itself. St. Paul laments the tragic character of man’s existential condition in these words, “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:24).

The “body of this death” to which St. Paul refers is the tragic nature of existence in which all creatures, including himself, participate, not his ailing body and not, as some foolishly speculate, a corpse to which he has been tied as punishment.  He uses the phrase “body of death” symbolically,, meaning this life itself, not literally.

The focus of the Christian constellation of revelation is a tragic event. A “scandal” (Greek scandalon) St. Paul calls it. The power and poignancy of this paradox (Greek para + doxa, surprising, outside ordinary thought and expectation) should not escape attention or be underestimated. To underestimate it indeed is to fail to grasp the essential character of life.

Idolatry arises from an impulse of man that cannot be eradicated because it is an aspect of his creaturely existence, his finitude. However, the impulse can and must be resisted and its puissance diminished by ceaseless vigilance, contrition, meditation, study, singing of sacred songs and ratiocination both alone and in company. Idolatry is a phenomenon inside of a man not outside of him. The idolater it is one’s cultural, religious and moral duty to resist through the enlightenment of Divine Grace and self-education.  (This is the reality of Jihad “Jihadis” reject and so their “Jihad” is merely despicable imperialism.)

Education is the refining of impulses, the burning away of dross (improper impulses) to reveal the effulgent residue of true or essential nature. A refined man is enlightened (effulgent) and thereby disinclined to idolatry, on the one hand, and enabled with self-correction, on the other. Education leads forth from a man his essential nature, imbuing him and his world with Love, which is his essential nature.

The end of education is Love. Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba.

Idolatry is not only all but inevitable and extremely foolish, it is also destructive. Any taking of reality amiss generates dis-harmony that generates dis-ease that generates de-construction.

In man’s seemingly inexorable propensity to claim ultimacy for non-ultimates, such as the religions of Christianity and Islam, or worse, Christians and Moslems, we see evidence of the power of delusion to overwhelm man’s faculties. This evidence is especially vivid in man’s life in society, with its requirements for order and regulation that are just. (Justice is recognition and respect instead of manipulation and destruction of the centered self that is another creature.)

Only God is ultimate and only the Divine Presence should be an ultimate concern of man because only the Divine Presence is analogous to man’s essential nature. Only God can content man. Man cannot content himself because he is a creature and therefore cannot escape from or nullify his existential condition, although with the gift of Divine Grace he can transcend it in the direction of God.

To reach God, man is better off playing the kitten, who is moved about lovingly by mother, than the monkey, who has to hang on for dear life as mother jumps about from tree to tree.

Struggle against his own demonic propensities to enter idolatrous relationships is an element of man’s destiny, assisted by God’s directing creativity, called Grace, through to the triumph of contentment in realization, the occasion of which is the revelatory constellation and the divine-human dialectic the revelatory constellation inspires.

The symbol Corpus Christianum is idolatrous in both of its terms. No thing, no existent, no object, no political/economic structure can be identified as Christ. Furthermore, the phrase “Body of Christ,” which underlies the symbol Corpus Christianum (literally, Body of Christianity in the sense of Christianity as a political/economic entity), is a symbol for the Spiritual Community that is the reality of the Church and that cannot be identified unambiguously with any entity, including any church or government.

The Body of Christ is a symbol that points to and participates in the Divine Life reuniting, sublimating and transcending all polarities and paradoxes, all powers and meanings and all tragedies and triumphs. The Body of Christ is the salutary, comprehensive, consummating real presence of the Divine Spirit (capital S) in all dimensions of life, most recognizably in the dimensions of spirit and history. This symbol does not reference any entity, any thing that can be seen, heard, touched, tasted or felt. The Body of Christ is beyond the subject-object split.

Likewise, the symbol Moslem Ummah is idolatrous in both of its terms. First, only God can declare a person a Moslem, certainly not the person themselves, for how would they know? Second, no thing, no existent, no object, no political/economic structure can be identified as Moslem. Finally, the word Ummah refers to the Spiritual Community that is the reality of God and that cannot be identified unambiguously with any entity, including any mosque, masjid, madrassa, social order, law code, book, regardless of pretentious claims made for it, aspirations or government.

Tracks Through History

Though still violently resisted, we live in a time of consolidating and expanding humanity’s triumph, through World War I, over the symbols Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah and their concretizations, Holy Roman Empire and Caliphate. Let us examine moments along the way to this auspicious development.

Christians took longer to create the idolatrous symbol Corpus Christianum than Moslems took to create the idolatrous symbol Moslem Ummah.

Moslem Ummah

Moslems created the idolatrous symbol Moslem Ummah almost immediately upon the death of the Prophet, probably in principle even before that event. They did this by reposing both spiritual and civil authority in the person of a Caliph, a supreme head and decision maker, whose administrative structure, soon to be a government by dynastic succession, was meant as the institutional repository, patron, protector and multiplier of converts to the religion.

The concept of dynastic succession has strength in the Middle East, especially in matters of religion and politics. It appears in Hebrew and then Jewish practice from the time of Moses, where it is given the sanction of revealed law, an origin claimed also for Sharia so-called “law.” It appears in disputes between James and followers of his brother Jesus over preeminence in the succession of David. It appears in the first three generations of the offspring of Baha’u’llah. It appeared recently in Benazir Bhutto’s appointment of her son, a near minor, as political heir and her son’s acceptance of that role.

Some historians refer to this phenomenon as “feudal” rather than “dynastic” succession. But the word feudal refers to an economic and social order, not a method of leadership maintenance.

The concept and concretization of the Caliphate harassed Islam from the death of the Prophet. The Caliphate quickly became multiple dynastic successions from within and from without the family of the Prophet. Thus it is proper to speak of Caliphates rather than Caliphate, a mundane reason the word Ummah as singular in the idolatrous symbol Moslem Ummah is a demonic pretense indicating idolatry. (For the same mundane reason, the word Corpus as singular in the symbol Corpus Christianum also is idolatrously pretentious.)

The assassination of four of the first five Caliphs is hardly an auspicious “out of box experience” for an ambitious institution intended to repose and promote a religion defined as a government having absolute, universal legal, political, artistic, economic and religious authority. Yet, telling it is of the actual legitimacy of that government. None whatsoever.

Right away, idolatry and ambition infected the religion of Islam. And there were and remain no internal checks on its propagation of provocations to ever more violent self-aggrandizement. The Caliphate is an idolatrous concretization of an idolatrous concept and symbol, Moslem Ummah. It was brought down by its own stupidity. The Caliphate self-destructed in its own insanity, drowned in its own filth.

Moslem scholars will say that all men by nature want to be Moslems and would accept Islam eagerly were obstructions to their doing so removed, chiefly competing governments and religions. These are seen as seducing men away from the truth of God, away from Islam, meaning away from the aegis — actually the tyranny — of those scholars and their secular patrons.

I have heard it said that there are about twenty million “jihadis” and “jihadi”-supporters among the earth’s creatures calling themselves Moslem.  That is a large number of terrorists.

This of course is a demonic assertion of fact that was and by many still is a confidently and, with steadily increasing frequency, fanatically held belief.

The reality is that none can come to any religion unless God calls them to it and the evidence is clear that God calls men to one of several religions, not only implying but actually demonstrating the equal validity of those several religions.

Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Islam and Christianity are the major religions measured by number of adherents and there are at least eleven minor religions, using the same form of measurement, all inspired by divine self-manifestation and responded to by persons in unique conditions towards significantly different characteristics, pieties and liturgical forms.

Notwithstanding evidence of the perfect freedom of the divine call, from its inception the Caliphate was conceived as both the repository and the tool for promoting a religion, Islam, as the sole religion and government of mankind. In actuality, Islam was reposed and promoted as the idiosyncrasies, needs and agendas of secular governments, competing Caliphates, in support of which scriptures, Koran and Hadith, were created and read to compel believers to an idolatrous relationship with their government and its scholars.

Though born in iconoclasm, in radical resistance to idolatry among desert tribes and monastics, Moslems succumb to idolatry immediately the Prophet dies and perhaps even before, after he moved to Medina. Upon his death, the first lesson of the Prophet, the ultimacy of God, the very principle of Islam, Moslems violate and in democratic council foregathered consent to violating, yet!

There is credible suggestion that the Prophet himself originated this deformation of the revelation he had been vouchsafed and that in circumstances hidden from view by the book attributed by Mohammedan scholars to his recording while being in fact mostly their creation years after the Prophet’s career.

Succumbing to idolatry is not remarkable, but the speed with which these early Moslems did is. Their mindless rush to ruin is simply breathtaking. They were indeed, and so remain, uneducated blighters, desert rubes.

The early Moslems were ignorant, lazy and incompetent people. They entered the world from the desert wastes, which begged for cleansing from ignorance, tribalism, savagery, idolatry, indolence, and a host of related tribulations. Their chief incompetency appears to have been internal check on self-delusion.

It is worth noting that Semites and Arabs in particular are responsible for the florid angelology and angelolatry brought into the early churches and from there metastasized to them all as well as to the great heresies, such as Arians (modernly, Mormons), Gnostics (modernly, New Agers) and Manichaeans (modernly, Collectivists, both Fascist and Communist).

Arabs, and so many others, have paid dearly for this incompetence of their leadership.

Graciously granted a revelatory experience of God’s saving beneficence, Moslems’ ignorance, indolence and epistemological incontinence promptly overwhelmed the truth given and received, depriving them of strength to hold the consciousness bound to truth (the meaning of the Sanskrit dharma and the English righteousness) and clarity of intellect sufficient for stable expansion in the dimension of spirit. Instead, they expanded in the dimension of psyche and became a tribulation in the dimensions of spirit and history, another damned engine of tyranny by laws, lawyers and judges quibbling over words.

They did not understand spirit and so they did not probe to understand the Divine Spirit, on the one hand, and the delusional workings of their own cognitive processes on the other. They did not discover and so could only ignore the dialectical and analogical nature of man and life generally. This insufficiency of Islam from its earliest years has dominated it ever since.

Islam as presented by Moslems today is not more than a pathetic, pedantic, pedophiliac pretense of a vicious, misogynistic, tyrannical legal system. It is not Islam. What passes for Islam today and those who pass it off as Islam are an affront to God and a blight on life and history.

This is an irony and a tragedy, improved somewhat in later years, even semi-conquered by some, but debilitating overall and radically enforced by tribal habits and juridical conceits. Mohammedan insistence on subjection to their civil authority as religious authority attenuated their actualization of the cultural, religious and moral potentials of Islam. Just in the civil realm, for example, there were competing Caliphates, competing pretenders as Caliph of Islam who addressed one another disparagingly as Sultan rather than as Caliph.

A Sultanate is an administrative entity, including judicatory, subordinate to a Caliphate. For example, the soi-dissant Caliph of Islam sitting in Persia addressed the soi-dissant Caliph of Islam sitting in the Ottoman Empire as “The Sultan of Rhum” (the ancient name for modern Turkey), who in turn addressed the soi-dissant Caliph of Islam sitting in Persia as “The Sultan of the Persians.”

Those, of course were terms of abuse belittling the other party as a vassal, in this case a Sultan of the Caliph of Islam. The abuse was justified, however, when one considers that neither Caliphate nor Sultanate is implied in the divine self-revelation of God the response to which is Islam. Revelatory constellations are not meant to inspire idolatries. Idolatries are a work of man in his own freedom, which is a work of God.

In recent years, King Abdullah of Jordan convened an ulema of Mohammedan scholars to condemn as illegitimate the pretense of al-Qa’aeda as the Caliphate now and in the future at Jerusalem.

A subsequent convention of the same ulema formally, albeit dissemblingly, demonstrated to Christians the reasons they should accept Islam as the truth of Christianity. In Mohammedan logic that demonstration, whether straightforward or deceitful in the making, is the legal prerequisite for waging war on and slaughtering or enslaving those who decline the demand implied in the demonstration. The fraudulent occupant of the White House through her spouse accepted that demand on behalf of all Americans in June of 2009 during an obsequy in Egypt. Of course, the acceptance is fraudulent because its source is. And she has no intention of wearing a burkha, thank you very much.

Under the Caliphates, the religion was constrained by its subjection to civil authority. Islam could not expand beyond the political, intellectual, artistic, literary, economic and other conditions of the Caliphate and its supporting juridical scholars. A religion was tied to a government and a government to jurists, an action that constricts and debilitates both religion and government. The result is tyranny by “courts” dispensing Sharia “law.”

Now that the last Caliphate is abolished, jurists as well as clerics, a recent phenomenon in Islam, dating from the 18th Century, seek to constrain Islam to their agendas and appoint themselves, effectively, Sultans warming to Caliphs. The clerics, through their bumptious spokes groups-cum-enforcement gangs assert that Moslems’ conditions are not constrained enough!

A short taxonomy of those gangs: on the one hand, Moslem Brotherhood (and here, and here), Taliban, Hamas, al-Qa’aeda, CAIR and, in the Northern Hemisphere as well as Africa, African tribal arrays with their catamites; and on the other hand, Iranian Ayatollahs with their catamites.

A state of war exists, therefore, between governments of nations predominately Moslem, such as Turkey, Egypt, Morocco and Jordan, and clerics aiming to abolish those governments and nations along with all others to reestablish the Caliphate as the only government and nation in the world, based at Jerusalem (Sunnis) or Qom (Shi’ites) and headed or controlled by themselves.

States of war, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, also exist between Sunni and Shi’ite and Shi’ite and Shi’ite Caliphate-pretending jurists and clerics.

First by the Caliphs and jurists and now by jurists and clerics aiming to reestablish the Caliphate (as themselves), the customary condition of Moslems is tragically narrowed. The word anxiety means narrowing.

Anxiety shows as the demand by Moslems to be understood, even appeased! This is undignified, bathetic, reflecting their desperation in consequence, unseen by them, of fostering the idolatrous symbol Moslem Ummah and accepting as overlords cruel men posing as scholars, jurists and clergy.

The symbol Moslem Ummah and its political/economic concretizations have narrowed Moslems’ lives past toleration, so they strike out in desperation at whomever their clerics and scholars point to as having “done harm” to them. Of course, it was their clerics and scholars and their own infernal deceit, mendacity and laziness that “did [whatever it is] to them.” (The same phenomenon and the same cause of it – their clergy – governs the lives of most “African-Americans” residing in the United Sates.)

Overall, spanning a lengthy period of history, the fundamental idolatry of Moslems’ relationship with the functions of culture, religion and morality has kept them ignorant, undeveloped, remote, untrustworthy, indolent, quarrelsome, immured in self-pity, inured to tyranny and prone to explosive violence. From the death of the Prophet, Islam, a great religion, is hagridden by the pretense of Moslems in uniting spiritual and civil authority as an aggressive secular/sacred government backed by jurists and clerics, but principally clerics (according to the clerics).

Islam, which begins in radical iconoclastic fervor – especially against idolatries and superstitions rife at the time of Mohammed among Arab tribes and monastics living in the Syrian, Palestinian and Arabian deserts – becomes idolatrous in order to remove obstacles – “infidel” religions and governments – to its universal acceptance. Moslem Ummah is an idolatrous conceptual tool of offensive intent regarding the entire world.

Christianity, on the other hand, while struggling with idolatry, as all must, developed Corpus Christianum as a tool of defensive intent against aggressive Caliphates. The desperate condition of most Moslem women is the measure of the failure of Islam in the hands of Caliphs, jurists and clerics. When women clutch their lives in their hands and live in fear of brutality, the “culture” in which they live is no culture at all but a species of violence.

A Brief Preachment

The challenge to Islam today is to rediscover itself as a religion and expunge from its thinking the idolatrous symbol that Islam is the government of a nation, a so-called Moslem Ummah. Moslems must find religious authority that does not require the support of civil authority yet supports such civil authorities as exist wherever they are. The doctrine of the omnipresence of God must replace the idolatrous symbol Moslem Ummah and intent for its concretization as a universal Caliphate, a forlorn hope if ever one was.

… Christian mystics and philosophers have emphasized that ‘corporality is the end of the ways of God’” (Oetinger). This is a necessary consequence of the Christian doctrine of Creation, with its rejection of the Greek philosophical doctrine of material as an anti-spiritual principle.

God’s omnipresence overcomes the anxiety of not having a space for one’s self. It provides the courage to accept the insecurities and anxieties of spatial existence. In the certainty of the omnipresent God we are always at home and not at home, rooted and uprooted, resting and wandering, being placed and displaced, known by one place and not known by any place.

The Latin word presentia as well as the German word Gegenwart contain a spatial image: ‘A thing which stands before one.’

And in the certainty of the omnipresent God we are always in the sanctuary. We are in a holy place when we are in the most secular place, and the most holy place remains secular in comparison with our place in the ground of the divine life. Whenever omnipresence is experienced, it breaks down the difference between the sacred and the profane. The sacramental presence of God is a consequence of his omnipresence. It is an actual manifestation of his omnipresence, dependent of course on the history of revelation and the concrete symbols which have been created by it. His sacramental presence is not the appearance of somebody who is ordinarily absent and occasionally comes. If one always experienced the divine presence, there would be no difference between sacred and secular places. The difference does not exist in the divine life.

Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology Volume I, University of Chicago Press, 1951, Page 278.

Corpus Christianum

Christians created the idolatrous symbol Corpus Christianum eight hundred years following the advent of the Messiah and with significant differences compared to Moslems’ creation of the Moslem Ummah and Caliphates immediately upon the Prophet’s death and probably before that event. Indeed, the aggression of the Caliphates was a central driver for Christians to create the Corpus Christianum and the Holy Roman Empire.

Not only so, but in creating this symbol Christians bypassed plain, prominent, unambiguous foundational guidance for their relationship with civil and spiritual authorities. The Messiah, Jesus the Christ, and God’s chief architect and exponent of the message regarding the Messiah, St. Paul the Apostle, delivered that guidance.

In Christian doctrine, inspired by the guidance of Jesus the Christ and St. Paul the Apostle, civil and religious authorities are not coextensive. They must be distinguished and cannot be separated but they are not the same authority. Civil authority is a product of man’s cultural creativity. Spiritual authority is a product of man’s religious creativity.

Man’s cultural and religious creativities interpenetrate one another, they are mutually immanent and interdependent, but they are not the same creativity. Therefore, they produce non-identical structures.

Man’s cultural and religious creativities, along with his moral creativity, belong to the dimension of spirit as distinguishable and non-identical functions of that dimension. His participation in the dimension of spirit distinguishes man from all other creatures. Culture, religion and morality are functions of man’s spirit and belong uniquely to man.

The structure of man’s being, his logos, is analogous to the structure of being-itself, the Divine Logos. This means that man’s spirit is analogous to the Divine Spirit. The doctrine that man is the image of God means that the truth of man is analogous to the truth of God. Or more simply put, man’s essential nature is divine. (This truth is explored and described by the Christian doctrine of analogia entis.)

This analogical reality is the reason Divine Logos can appear as man without disrupting or destroying the humanity of man. Divine Logos appears as man in Jesus the Christ, Mohammed, Baha’u’llah, and preeminently as the Avatars, such as Rama, Krishna, Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba. Divine Logos in fact appears as each and every creature and as creation herself, parts and whole.

Christians created the symbol Corpus Christianum and its concretization, The Holy Roman Empire, largely as a defensive tool facing an offensive Caliphate and not as an offensive tool for extending Christian spiritual authority outside Europe. It was created, however, with a view to extending Christian spiritual authority inside Europe.

Furthermore, only Christians of the Western or Latin Church, characterized largely but not exclusively by the Bishop of Rome, styling himself Pope, created Corpus Christianum. Christians of the Eastern or Greek Church, characterized largely but not exclusively by the Patriarch of Constantinople, neither helped create nor participated in the idol Corpus Christianum created from Rome. 

This is remarkable in view of the nearer proximity of Asia Minor to the Levant than to Europe. The Byzantine Emperors held off the Caliphates for centuries but finally succumbed. Asia Minor was absorbed by the Caliphates and Byzantium became Istambul.

The most significant difference between Corpus Christianum and Holy Roman Empire in Europe and Moslem Ummah and Caliphates in the Levant, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula is this:

• when Moslems created their versions of these idols, they identified spiritual authority and civil authority, even reposing this united authority in one person and giving it and him a world-imperialist mission,

• when Christians created their versions of these idols, they differentiated spiritual authority and civil authority, assigning one to the Pope and one to the Holy Roman Emperor.

There were pretensions, long lasting ones, in Rome and, to a limited extent, in the several seats of the Holy Roman Empire, to the identification of spiritual and civil authorities and a world imperialist mission for their united presentment. However, the plenary identification of these authorities by Popes as themselves was continuously challenged by Holy Roman Emperors, some more so, some less. And Popes summarily challenged even a limited identification of religious and civil authority in themselves by Holy Roman Emperors.

Although the strength of these claims and counterclaims varied by the exigencies of extant conditions, the principle was established de facto among Christians that in no mundane condition are religious and civil authority the same authority. They are different authorities, independent even though mutually interdependent, and for that reason, additionally, they do not and cannot repose in one person much less one institution. The principle of the distinction and therefore separation of powers is early realized in the Latin Church and, in consequence, Latin or “Western” Civilization.

The dates of the leadership of the Holy Roman Empire are as follows:

Merovingian 447 – 751 (preliminarily)
Carolingian 751 – 987 (actually)
Salian/Frankish 1027 – 1125
Hohenstaufen 1138 – 1254
Hohenzollern 1067 – 1918
Hapsburg/Habsburg – 1218 – 1918

Customarily the end of the Holy Roman Empire is dated to 1806 and its renunciation by the Habsburgs. But in fact the idolatrous symbol Corpus Christianum and especially its concretization as the Holy Roman Empire had long been identified with “the German Empire,” comprising all German-speaking peoples, and in the minds of these peoples — and in reality — the German Empire did not end until the power of the German Army was arrested in 1918. The destruction of the idolatrous symbol Corpus Christianum dates, therefore, from the end of World War I.

The Moslem Ummah in principle and the Caliphate in Moslem law were abolished through the leadership of the Moslem and undefeated General in the Ottoman Army, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1924.  This was in consequence of the alliance of the Ottoman and German Empires and the defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire as an outcome of World War I.

“On March 1, 1924, at the Assembly, Mustafa Kemal said “the religion of Islam will be elevated if it will cease to be a political instrument, as had been the case in the past.”  On March 3, 1924, the Caliphate was officially abolished and its powers within Turkey were transferred to the Turkish Grand National Assembly.”  Wikipedia

Critical Analysis

Only God can say whether one is a Christian or a Moslem. Therefore, neither individuals nor a congeries of those calling themselves one or the other can be relied upon to be what they say they are. At best, they are a mixture of divine and demonic natures and impulses. And no inquisition can root out the latter. The elements of the mixture have to be accepted together and the presence of their sum cannot be identified as the Presence of God, the Spiritual Community or the House or Land of Peace or Belief.

There is an evolution in the development of governmental forms from electoral monarchy to hereditary monarchy to constitutional monarchy and hereditary legislature to elected executive and legislature and appointed judiciary. However, this evolution, which is based on wisdom derived from scrutinized experience, can be reversed and the entire progression can be destroyed. Neither history nor personality inevitably improves in morals or in perfection over time. Nor does education guarantee progress in any respect, social or personal, for better or for worse. Always there is the element of risk and the element of freedom and both can as easily be put to self-destruction as to self-realization.

George Santayana’s famous remark concerning the lessons of history (Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.) is commonly misquoted, used out of context and radically misconstrued. The context of the quote is this, from The Life of Reason: “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Santayana is right. He is explaining the content and true import of the jaded French pesudo-wisdom, plus ca change, plus c’est la mem chose. 

Civil and religious authorities in the Latin Church constantly drove against Papal insistence on subjection to religious authority as civil authority. Even the Papacy’s intended agent in the civil realm, the Holy Roman Empire, challenged the Papacy’s religious authority by asserting authority to appoint bishops. The Reformers, of course, denied the Papacy both civil and religious authority and would not identify the two or repose them in any person, office or institution.

By dint of struggle and blood across the centuries, this de facto agreement in the Latin Church and culture between the actualities of the Vatican’s position in the world and the theologies of the Protestant churches regarding the relative merits, excellences and positions of spiritual authority and civil authority inspired an accurate awareness of the roots of human nature and human rights as well as agreeable – because just – methods of regulating the same in the social realm.

Virtually everyone in the world now wants to live in a “Western” nation or a nation strongly influenced by developments of the Latin Church and culture, or, a nation that shares Vedic religious, cultural and moral roots with the Latin Church and culture. The reason is that Latin Church and culture, in common with some other Veda-based nations, have succeeded, so far and still able to be reversed, in understanding and regulating the relationship between spiritual authority and civil authority.

The chief difference between Corpus Christianum and Moslem Ummah is that whereas the former argued that religious authority is civil authority, the latter argued that civil authority is religious authority. The difference is profound and decisively consequential for the historical development of the two religions and the cultures and moralities inspired by them. The difference in approach to the relationship between civil authority and religious authority explains what is seen in the past and the present record.

The record shows that it has been easier for Christians than for Moslem to distinguish civil authority from religious authority and to regulate their relationship. Christians are more religious than Moslems because they start their analysis of life and society with religious eyes and assumptions rather than with legal eyes and assumptions, as do Moslems.

This means that Christians can maintain religious authority without having civil authority. This is a fundamental strength and felicity. It was the condition of their founding that lasted for over three hundred years. The same condition has returned in modern times.

Moslems cannot – or better, think they cannot – maintain religious authority unless they also have civil authority. This was the condition of their founding the Caliphate immediately upon the death of the Prophet and it lasted nearly thirteen hundred years. Most Moslems today are clawing more or less desperately to restore that condition. Despite clear evidence, they do not recognize how self-destructive is that which they desire.

Moslems today are in a panic because they have lost both religious and civil authority. Self-deluded that Sharia “law” could save them, they turn to fanaticism, which, on account of their seminal doctrine that civil authority (law) is required to establish religious authority, appears almost as a synonym for Islam.

Christians conceived civil authority as an extension of religious authority. Christians, therefore, could drop the pretense of civil authority and pull back to their base of religious authority without losing strength or identity. This was accomplished during the 20th Century.

In contrast, Moslems conceived civil authority as the patron of religious authority and religious authority as a ward of civil authority, whose primary duty it was to extend and expand religious authority (Islam) and perforce itself worldwide. Since for them, therefore, religious authority reposes in civil authority, if they lose civil authority, Moslems lose religious authority and with it their strength and identity. Or so most Moslems think. And so they turn to fanaticism and get really ugly at everyone, including Moslems, when they lose civil authority, as they did in 1924 when the Caliphate was abolished.

Moslems are a disappointed lot but their disappointment is their own doing, rooted in their premise that without civil authority they cannot have religious authority.

Understandably, the thought of losing civil authority stirs radical anxiety in most Moslems. Without civil authority, they imagine they have no fall back position and are adrift. They feel the threat of non-being, of being bereft of God.

When the Caliphate was defeated (Vienna, 1683), then its supposedly inviolate lands invaded and occupied (Napoleon, 1798, followed by the British, including Nelson) and especially when it was abolished (1924, by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk), Moslems felt desperately empty. They felt stripped of religious authority as well as the ability to maintain personal and group strength and identity. They felt as though standing on air, utterly desolated and extinct. The depth of their despair, their loss of identity and their feeling of helplessness cannot be overestimated.

Ultimately, the responsibility for the pathos of their condition reposes in Moslems’ leaders, civil and religious, and their own personal laziness. Long before the 17th Century, those leaders should have done what now they must do, rediscover Islam’s base of religious authority that is independent of any civil authority.

The reason for this difference in approach by Christianity and Islam to the relationship between religious and civil authority lies in the fact that Christianity developed hierarchically organized clergy from earliest years whereas, until the 18th Century, Islam did not develop clergy but rather fostered jurists and juridical schools, who have not the same role as clergy.

The role of jurists is essentially innovative and constructive although within strictly defined boundaries. It is to exegete the Koran and Hadith with a view to obtaining guidance for current questions and conditions.

The role of clergy is essentially conservative. It is to handle and protect writings, objects and rituals associated with revelatory experiences and to educate succeeding generations from the theological, liturgical and moral doctrines that developed in the churches through explorations and descriptions of those revelatory experiences.

However, starting in the 18th Century, both Sunni Islam and Shi’ism developed clergy. In Sunni Islam these are mostly loners, called imams, mullahs, etc. In Shi’ism, these are mostly members of hierarchical structures bearing names signifying rank, such as ayatollah. Since 1979, the ayatollahs in Iran have fabricated a Papal model, to include a Pope, a College of Cardinals, a Bench of Bishops and an Inquisition.

Prognosis

Two questions arise from the foregoing considerations. First, by developing clergy, will Islam be in possession of the same tool that enables Christianity to center in strength and self-confidence apart from civil authority? And second, is the overall answer to the quandary of Islam today that Islam should reestablish the Caliphate?

The answer to both question is, “No.”

First, even Christianity has surpassed the need for clergy and so have all other religions. I mention this fact without exploring its origins or expositing its implications. One self-evident consequence of it, however, is that Islam cannot be saved by its clerics or scholars. They put it in its present pickle, they are not going to extract Moslems from that pickle or it from them, as the case may be.

Second, Islam has to go to school in the solutions, found by Vedas and the Latin Church and culture, to the relationship between religious authority and civil authority. The Caliphate and its idolatrous presumption, Moslem Ummah, are the source of Moslems’ trouble, unhappiness and disquiet. Islam has not so far solved the problem of how to regulate life simultaneously in the religious and the civil orbits. This means Islam has not solved the problem of the independence and the interdependence of religion and culture. Islam must go to school with those who have solved this problem.

Doing just that is the inner reason Moslems are emigrating by the millions to a “Western” nation or a nation strongly influenced by developments of the Latin Church and culture or a nation that shares Vedic religious, cultural and moral roots with the Latin Church and culture. True to their doctrine and history, their first thought and act upon arrival is to take over and abolish the host who invited and accepted them. But that is not the real reason they came and it does not have to be what they accomplish, although it could be. They would be disappointed did they accomplish it, for then, life where they immigrate would be as desperate as it is from whence they emigrated.

Moslems are a failed people of a deformed religion, and they know that they are. Their hateful doings are the only way they know to express their self-revulsion. The redemptive posture to adopt towards Moslems is stern denial of their demands and equally stern insistence that they live by the laws and appreciate and support wholeheartedly the blessings of the nations which are the Latin Church. When their antics are treated as infantile manipulations, very dangerous ones, they will be happy and feel respected. And they will grow up, gradually.

Addendum I

Paul Tillich On The Motivating Power Of Law And Morality

The principle of agape expresses the unconditional validity of the moral imperative, and it gives the ultimate norm for all ethical content. But it has still a third function: it is the source of moral motivation. It necessarily commands, threatens, and promises, because fulfillment of the law is reunion with one’s essential being, or integration of the centered self. The law is “good,” as Paul says. But just at this point its deepest and most dangerous ambiguity appears, that which drove Paul, Augustine and Luther to their revolutionary experiences. The law as law expresses man’s estrangement from himself. In the state of mere potentiality or created innocence (which is not a historical stage), there is no law, because man is essentially united with that to which he belongs: the divine ground of his world and of himself. What ought to be and what is are identical in the state of potentiality. In existence, this identity is broken, and in every life process this identity and non-identity of what is and what out to be are mixed. Therefore, obedience and disobedience to the law are mixed; the law has the power to motivate partial fulfillment, but in so doing it also drives to resistance, because by its very character as law it confirms our separation from the state of fulfillment. It produces hostility against God, man, and one’s self. This leads to different attitudes toward the law. The fact that is has some motivating power leads to the self-deception that it can produce reunion with our essential being, i.e., a complete self-integration of life in the realm of the spirit. This self-deception is conspicuously represented by those who are called variously the righteous ones, the pharisees, the puritans, the pietists, the moralists, the people of good will. They are righteous, and they deserve to be admired. On a limited basis they are well-centered, strong, self-certain, dominating. They are persons who radiate judgement even when they do not express it in words. Yet just by their righteousness they are often responsible for the disintegration of those whom they encounter and who feel their judgement.

The other attitude toward the law, probably that of the majority of people, is resigned acceptance of the fact that its motivating power is limited and that it cannot bring about a full reunion with what we ought to be. They do not deny the validity of the law; they do not fall into antinomianism, and so they compromise with its commandments. This is the attitude of those who try to obey the law and oscillate between fulfillment and non-fulfillment, between a limited centeredness and a limited dispersion. They are good in the sense of conventional legality, and their fragmentary fulfillment of the law makes the life of society possible. But their goodness, like that of the righteous ones, is ambiguous — only with less self-deception and with less moral arrogance.

There is a third attitude toward the law, one which combines a radical acceptance of the validity of the law with a complete despair about its motivating power. This attitude is the result of passionate attempts to be a “righteous one” and to fulfill the law without compromise in its unconditional seriousness. If these strivings are followed by the experience of failure, the centered self is disrupted in the conflict between willing and doing. One is aware of the fact (which has been rediscovered and methodologically described by present-day analytic psychology) that the unconscious motives of personal decisions are not transformed by commandments. The motivating power of the law is defied by them, sometimes with direct resistance, sometimes by the process of rationalization and — in the social realm — by the production of ideologies. The motivating power of the divine law is wrecked by what Paul calls the opposing “law of our members.” And this is not changed by the reduction of the whole law to the law of agape, because if agape (toward God, man, and oneself) is imposed on us as law the impossibility of fulfilling it becomes more obvious than in the case of any particular law. The experience of this situation leads to the quest for a morality which fulfills the law by transcending it, that is, agape given to man as reuniting and integrating reality, as new being and not as law.

The Rev. Dr. Paulus Johannes Tillich
Systematic Theology Volume III
University of Chicago Press, 1963, pages 48-50

Update 1: Honoring COL Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and the others.

Update 2: An American Renaissance.

Update 3: Its inescapability gives tragedy its bearable or unbearable pain. There comes a moment and a place in life where one sees God determining whether one survives the pain of the tragic in life or succumbs to it. Warriors, more than any others, see the comradely dialectic of the heroic and the tragic in life and learn by precept and example to sublimate the silent dance.

Update 4: Moslem Brotherhood smoking gun.

Update 5: Clare M. Lopez: History Of The Moslem Brotherhood Penetration Of The U.S. Government

Update 6: The Moslem Brotherhood In America: A Course In 10 Parts

Update 7: Pamela Geller blogs in bikini, and related here

Update 8: Not news now, but: Huma Abedin and family are Moslem Brotherhood

Update 9: Mapping The Moslem Brotherhood In America

Update 10: Realism And Islam … Also Here

Update 11: John Hawkins: Why Liberals Support Moslems Who Hate Everything They Stand For

Update 12: A Roman Catholic leftie receives a ray of light: Next Pope Warns EU To BLOCK [colonizers] As Christians Are Being PUSHED OUT By Islamised Europe

Update 13: Joanne Patti Munisteri: Jihadi Generations: Strategies Used for Weaponizing Children  Part 2

Update 14: Myron Ebell and Steven J. Milloy: Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA