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Last night I wrote a follow up post to my Inferential Distance post from a month ago However in the hopes that it will get a bit more engagement I've decided to put on lay-away till the new thread is posted on Monday. That said, today is also Easter Sunday, and I feel that is worth commenting on in itself.
While admittedly there is some disagreement between calendars as well as much quibbling over precise historical dates, for the vast majority of people in the english-speaking world today marks the two-thousandth and twenty-third anniversary of the founding of Christianity. Regardless of whether you consider yourself a Christian or even consider yourself religious, the simple fact is that Christianity is one of the foundational pillars of Western Civilization. It is perhapse even the central one without which there would be no concept of "Western Civilization", as it is arguably the spread of Christianity from it's birthplace in modern day Isreal to Greece, Rome and beyond, coupled with the debates between Europe and Asia that rocked the early church that ultimately set "The West" apart as "Western".
Unless one has spent a lot of time immersed in a foreign culture or really dug into pre-Christian texts, I think it's hard for modern thinkers to truly appreciate just how radical Christianity was at the time of it's introduction and just how thoroughly it's concepts and parables underpin what we now think we know.
A classic example of this is the concept of there being a delineation between worldly questions of wealth and power and the more divine questions of morality and truth. (Rendering unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar's) The exchange described in Mark 12:13-17 is a brilliant bit of verbal and philosophical Jujitsu that is difficult to appreciate if you're coming from a mind-space where some sort of separation between the "church" and "the state" or "clergyman" and "politician" is assumed to be the default. Something that was emphatically not the case in the ancient world.
Likewise, the idea that a man might be wealthy or powerful for reasons other than being favored by Fortune/God (or gods as required) was borderline seditious back in the day. Wealth and Power were supposed to be a manifestation of one's inherent superiority and right to rule. The idea that it might be attained through intelligence, diligence, guile, or luck, was seen by many as a genuine threat to social order.
These ideas and others carried with them whole rafts of social and cultural implications with them.
For all the talk of Christianity's waning influence, something people seem to forget or otherwise ignore is the effects of path dependance. Even if you identify as an Antinatilist Marxist Post-Human Gay Trans Furry Neo-Pagan Atheist, the fact remains that if English is your mother-tongue the social and cultural implications of Christianity are the water you've been swimming in your whole life.
You're welcome.
As He has risen so may we.
Happy Easter all.
Edit to add: For those interested the follow up to my inferential distance postes referenced above has since been posted. See...
https://www.themotte.org/post/440/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/85475
Regarding that Mark quote, there absolutely was a separation, the separation between Jews and Romans. To read the separation of church and state into that is anachronistic. Jesus didn't want the Jewish temple separate from the Jewish state. If you look at that quote practically, it is obvious in the context of the bible that taxation was a big deal at the time, and Jesus is weighing in on paying the Romans, which he almost certainly wasn't the only one to do so. If you look at it in the context of apocalypse, of which both Jesus and Paul believed was coming very soon, it adds another dimension that it doesn't really matter because God is coming to bring revelation soon anyway. And finally, if you look at the division between the Earthly world and the heavenly world in this statement, that is entirely an innovation by Paul (not Jesus who thought he would be king on Earth), and Paul was clearly influenced by Plato. So your classic example completely falls apart to support your argument that Christianity stands as an entirely new way of thinking apart from those before it.
I would love to hear from a Christian a compelling argument for why western civilization owes it such a great debt, but this is just not convincing.
I'm not necessarily defending the post you are replying to, but the influence of Christianity on Western civilisation is so obviously self-evident that it's hard for me to take such a proposition seriously. If anything, the burden on proof should be on the argument that Christianity isn't influential on Western civilisation or doesn't 'owe it such a great debt'. Whatever your opinion of Christianity is as a religion, the reality is that for many centuries (let's say, from 400 to 1800) Christianity was the belief system of virtually all 'Westerners' (Europeans). Even post-1800 which I'm demarcating as the point where political ideologies took centre stage and God took a backseat, Christianity still remained extremely influential. I'm not sure how you could have the primary belief system of your civilisation for centuries not be influential. The only caveat is that I would say that Western civilisation is not merely Christianity, but also the Greco-Roman tradition of 'reason'. Indeed, much of the history of philosophy of the West can be seen as attempts to reconcile the two (the most obvious example being Thomas Aquinas).
Virtually all intellectual thought during this period was intertwined in Christianity. The distinction between natural philosophy and theology was paper thin at best, really only becoming distinct magisteria (sorry Gould) during the Enlightenment. The vast, vast majority of European philosophers and thinkers were unavoidably intertwined wtih Christian theology, and even those who explicitedly avoided or criticised Christianity (e.g. Machiavelli or Spinoza) were still necessarily working in and shaped by a Christian society. Saint Augustine, Aquinas, Luther were explicitly Christian, and those like Descartes and Kant were still heavily influenced by Chrisitian (Kant (catagorical imperative) is sometimes described as trying to construct a secular reason-based version of Christian ethics to complement but not conflict with Christianity). Even those not engaged in what today we would describe as religious and theological endeavours still explicited said their goal was to study God's creation or similar. Nietziche believes that the West's development of natural science was a evitable consequence of Christianity for this reason (though it would ultimately destroy Christianity, a snake eating its own tail). Some have even described Marxism as the last 'great' Christian heresy.
Of course, we can't neglect the political consequences of Christianity and debates over Christianity. The Investiture Controversy, the Thirty Years War, both the Great Schism and the Western Schism and soon. These political consequences in turn resulted in political outcomes which further in turn resulted in further developments in political and non-political philosophy. The Thirty Years War resulted in the Peace of Westphalia, often cited as the origin of modern notions of statehood and international relations.
Liberalism and the concept of natural, individual and human rights - inventions of Western civilisation - have their clear origins in Christianity theology - we are all made in the image of God, and everyone is a sinner. This is hardly a novel argument. When the US Declaration of Independence states - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" - it's not immediately obvious to an atheistic/materialist or non-Christian view how these truths are 'self-evident' but they are to a Christian worldview, it literally states men are endowed these rights by their (Christian) Creator. The speeches, personal letters etc of the US Founding Fathers basically confirm that this was their belief.
I agree it's obvious that Christianity was intertwined with intellectual pursuits, the enlightenment etc. But to be clear I am looking for evidence that Christian ideas substantially influenced things in moving things forward, instead of holding us back.
I think without Christianity you can still have Kant (maybe that's a controversial take) because you still have Plato, ideas of "heavens" and the divine, and of key importance, you still have Judaism. These ideas would be around, especially in intellectual circles. There were also other movements towards monotheistic thought in antiquity, we didn't need a Christ cult for philosophy to necessarily see that become more prominent.
That kind of thought experiment of a world without Christianity can get kind of bewildering because of how ingrained it was, but consider that without the fervor it may have secularized sooner. Without the sin of greed, we may have discovered capitalism sooner, and with it liberalism. How many ways did the institution of Christianity resist that (many) and how does it compare to the sliver of insights it gave in return?
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Imagine knowing a great guy, he's really very swell, a scholar and an athlete, helps everyone in need; a bit neurotic and guilt-ridden though, and drinks more than a bit. Adorably, he's mad in love and talks of his wife often. You get invited to the 20th anniversary of their marriage, and for the first time see her; she's less than what one might think he deserves. Pudgy and high-strung, adorned with weird new age artifacts, woke, visibly obsessive and controlling, and once he starts musing aloud about some high-minded fancy, she pinches him quite viciously. They withdraw; you happen to overhear her berating him in a shrill voice, and even hitting him with a frying pan, Acme-style. Then in the open, bloodied a little – «I just stumbled!» – he gives a speech where he tearfully attributes all peaks he has achieved and all the good he's ever done to her. She's fuming, but accepts it as a given, and snorts that he should focus more on charity and less on greatness: she still has work to do; if only he could neuter his pride and listen more, and perhaps donate all that they owe to her guru, publicly committing now.
How would you feel about his confession?
You may assume I'm talking about, say, Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner or my own family or whatever, but my point is that sunk cost fallacy is a thing, and that people can have false consciousness. People grow invested in their partners and ideologies, especially if they can't sever the relationship; and religions in particular are partners of civilizations that are so molded by selection pressure as to consume the logos of the people under their yoke; to teach those people to construe their virtues as following from religious practices and precepts, and their vices as failures to comply. In an attempt to avoid incoherence, Christian scholarship interprets non-Christian civilizations too as created by their religions, and holds that any major social form is downstream of some founding creed (with «good» creeds of successful forms tending to be Christian in their ultimate origin). This is generalized transubstantiation, and it should be suspect for any unbiased observer.
It's a chicken and egg question: did the Church build the West, or did the West create Christianity that can be taken seriously? Hlynka's motivated reasoning is as good an example as any, he deeply wants to tie what he likes about the West (actually just Red-Tribe USA) to Christianity, and it doesn't matter for him how accurately he gets the details (just as it doesn't matter for him whether everything he loathes, from progressivism to HBD bros, is truly part of the same bundle); what is clearly Christian of all these proceedings is, perhaps, only Hlynka's obsessive thinking in absolutes and morally laden dualities.
Do they?
One of the most misunderstood parts of Genesis, I believe, is Jacob's wrestling with God. ISV 32:28 «“Your name won’t be Jacob anymore,” the man replied, “but Israel, because you exerted yourself against both God and men, and you’ve emerged victorious.”». I happen to like the inaccurate Russian Synodal translation more. «И сказал: отныне имя тебе будет не Иаков, а Израиль, ибо ты боролся с Богом, и человеков одолевать будешь». «And said: henceforth your name will be not Jacob but Israel, for you have wrestled with God, and will be overcoming humans too».
It's undeniable that Christianity has influenced the West. And people can grow tough through wrestling with their faith. But the interesting aspect of such supposedly academic inquiry by theists is that they never ever assume the root of their success lies in some compensation for the trauma, or in ugly aspects of said faith: it's only ever the most noble interpretation of its words, applied directly.
I fear this is unprincipled charity.
Galkovsky on Rome and Christianity:
There are three features of Christianity that catch the eye of any open-minded observer.
The first is the gloomy, depressive nature and fixation on the subject of death and the deceased. The basic religious ritual of Christians is a funeral; funerals are the crowning glory of the Christian saint, and his life itself is the PREPARATION OF THE CORPSE. [...]
Of course the motives of death and barbaric veneration of corpses are subdued in churches before the congregation. For example, relics are often kept «under wraps» - in closed boxes. But Christianity as a whole imparts on the culture an incredible longing and sadness. This finds expression in everything – in architecture, painting, music. Sometimes it turns out solemn and even bittersweet – because tears can bring relief and can be an expression not of physical pain, but of nostalgia, of love, of high sorrow. […]
Secondly, Christianity is a very short and narrow religion. The entire content of the Christian legend amounts to one medium-sized ancient myth. They try to conceal this by turning the Bible into a telephone book or by supplementing it with stories about the saints. But these additions are artificial, uninteresting, and even as such they already create great problems for the basic legend. In general, no one knows them. The Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary in the «Ineffabilis Deus of 1854» is the bureaucratic apotheosis of such «improvements». It is not artistic creativity, but rectification of paperwork by an office of cadaver accounting in a morgue or city cemetery. Take just one minor myth of ancient religion: the myth of the radiant Eos.
Eos is a beautiful girl with pink fingers. Every morning she ascends to heaven in a chariot drawn by Lampos and Phaeton and illuminates the Earth. Eos is a very naughty girl, so her cheeks always blush after the night. When Eos's kingdom comes in the morning, men get erections. Eos is kind, but forgetful. She fell in love with the beautiful young man Tithonus and married him, asking Zeus to make him immortal. But she forgot to ask to keep him young, and Tithonus eventually turned into an old man. In order not to see him, Eos locked Tithonus up in a separate room, from where he complained in a squeaky voice about his unhappy fate. Then, out of pity, Eos turned Dmitri Evgenievich into a cricket.
It's just ONE little story, and this story alone creates a massive opportunity for successful human contacts. It's AMUSING. You can joke about it, you can innuendo, you can relate – to teenagers, to young people, to mature people, to old people. You can laugh, and if you want you can cry too. In moderation, without cruelty.
Now, what can a Christian tell? Well... An attendant came home from the morgue, decided to entertain his wife with a cool story.
A normal person is shocked. And the Christian goes on:
This is… HARD. Very.
The only plausible upside to all this is that Christian culture is quickly causing the secularization of society. People avoid talking about religious topics in everyday life, they stop using religious analogies, and they avoid contact with cult servants. It is no coincidence that it is bad luck to meet a priest in the street. A lot of icons in the house is bad luck. A vacuum quickly forms around a person who is preoccupied with religion. People scatter. The religious community and the state strive to substitute the sacred functions of priests with institutions for moral preaching, statistical accounting, medical and social assistance, art and philosophy – anything but Christianity itself. «Anything but the toenail».
This is why atheism originated and gained the significance of a coherent doctrine only in the Christian world. Other cultures just don't get it, can's see the problem. Imagine an uncle who runs around school plays and combats the belief in Santa Claus. He shouts from the audience: «Don't believe it, kids, it's all a lie!» or he writes a complaint to the Local Education Authority. Or even pounces on poor Santa Claus with his fists and tears up the gift bag. In general, he acts like a complete fool and a retard. But if Santa Claus is furtively showing the children a dried cat from his bag, then we can empathize with the strange man.
Third, there is a ridiculous confusion in the basic doctrine of Christianity that discourages neophytes. […] Christian theologians are literally lost between three pines with their doctrine of Trinity. How this is possible is completely incomprehensible. This creates enormous difficulties for initial propaganda. No other world religion is so difficult for neophytes to grasp. With great effort, the European empires in the 19th century converted a pristine Africa to Christianity at a power ratio of 1000:1. And what? Now Islam is successfully supplanting Christianity there. […] While the Muslim doctrine is very clear. One god is Allah. His prophet is Mohammed. And there are two witnesses for conversion into Islam. PERIOD. A person can be converted in one day and that conversion is honest and strong. […]
In fact, it is unclear how a religion with such a defective doctrine could have spread quantitatively. Chain reaction is difficult in Christianity. This religion conducts effective propaganda only when it already has political and military dominance and is funded by the state.
Also a related discussion in the old place.
Hajnal Christianity is the egregore for Hajnalism. I assume it is similar with Orc Christianity and Orcishness. Perhaps that's all there is to it.
That's funny when you just got finished talking about Islam. How did Christianity bootstrap to its first state support, vs how Islam?
Naturally I believe that all there is to your argument (assuming you speak from a Hajnali perspective) is perfectly explained by what I've written. «I am an Elf because Yelena Bonner has civilized me». False consciousness.
Egregore is supposed to have some independent motive power, it's not an epiphenomenon. Are South Americans, those consummate Catholics, Orcs or Elves in your book? They are almost indistinguishable from Russians in all their characteristic failings, sans baseline depression level perhaps; their pious mafia dons are the spitting image of our vors. Are Orthodox Western converts somehow defective? Are there any interesting correspondences between denominations and lifestyles in Africa?
Funny? You don't know the half of it. The sudden punchline of Galkovsky's shitpost is alt-historical, namely that Christians have falsified the record and they're basically a gravedigger cult that has «bootstrapped to state support» via an accidental military coup.
I don't think this is true. But I also think Hajnali egregore is not meaningfully religious. Christianity has altered their original metaphysics but has not enriched it.
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That argument at book length is Tom Holland's Dominion. I am about 2/3 of the way through, and the book is excellent. Unfortunately part of why it is excellent is that it can't be condensed to a tl;dr, but the most important single idea is the way that the idea of Christ crucified (which has no equivalent in other religions) changes the nature of the religion, particularly viz-a-viz the paganism of the early Principiate, where the idea of the Emperor as a God was still being taken seriously. This leads into a number of things, including Christian asceticism (and thus indirectly the Christian intellectual tradition and the University), the Christian idea of martyrdom, and the (limited by modern American standards) degree of separation between civil and religious authority that we see in Christian society.
Also important is the idea of the Peace of God - the idea that multiple legitimate Christian rulers can co-exist and they should ideally not fight each other. Islam and Temple Judaism believe that the faithful should form a single political entity under a single ruler. In so far as it is tied into Chinese political thought, Chinese spirituality does the same thing. Most paganisms including Roman paganism, Judaism, and most traditions within Hinduism are non-universal - they teach that most people are outside the protection of our gods because of who they are, and that therefore whether we fight them or not is a matter of pure prudential calculation. All "other things being equal, war is bad" thought in today's world is downstream of Christianity. (And, obviously, not ancient Rome).
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I don't think it's anachronistic at all.
Like I said...
...but to the average Roman or Judean in the first century there was no clear delineation between the Roman Nation State and the Roman Gods/Religion. The Consul and the High Preist were by definition the same guy. That it might be possible to both pay your Roman taxes while remaining loyal to the God of Abraham was indeed a radical concept at the time, which is why the crowd was astonished/taken aback. Similar to my response to @Supah_Schmendrick below, i kind of feel like your objection is really only illustrating my point.
...and as for Paul being influence by Plato, Jesus himself makes references to Homer and Aeschylus, we all stand on others' shoulders do we not?
The point I'm making is the idea of a Jewish person paying taxes to gentiles ruling over them was not at all new and is well trodden in the old testament. To turn that into separation of church and state is anachronistic, and I feel like I'm repeating myself to explain why.
Yes people stand on the shoulders of giants, but they add something too. My point is that nothing in that quote was new or interesting at the time.
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