The Christian Deviation
Elaine Pagels, in The Origin of Satan, nobly and lucidly clarifies the Christian deviation which, through demonization of the Jews over two millennia, not only contributed mightily to a murderous persecution culminating in the Holocaust (as Vatican II contritely agreed) but, more broadly, furthered the whole tendency of modern mankind to deviate away from the depth of centripetal, holistic, integral, "metaphoric," abiding spirit, faith and faith-based culture, the Person, toward shallow, linear, fragmenting, "metonymic" rational, manipulative, extravert centrifugality (launched by the Big Bang), and vulgar, commercialized personality.
Both are needed—Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, as it were—just as all great vision (including artistic) is primarily romantic (daemonic, inspired, intuitive, deep, uniting opposites paradoxically) but also, secondarily and transversely, classical, rationally ordered, tempered. Whence Gide's formula: "classicism [i.e. high-class, rounded art: "classics"] is tamed romanticism." The "higher balance" (Camus) of psychic dimensions—clearly visible in Aquinas and Dante, Romanic architecture, Matisse—has a crucial total tilt to the vertical of spirituality, as in the cross-pattern of the Buddhist mandala. But the secondary axis, through usurping "cancer" brain, has progressively, over the millennia, run away with the show to the point of sclerosis and total cultural crisis in our time and the serious question—Spengler, Toynbee, Kenneth Clark—whether the West has "had it." The loss of faith in sacred, natural spontaneity, flow from the Source, as in childbirth and authentic inspired creativity, in favor of robotic schemes, mass-appeal, commercialized artificiality, gadgets, digitation, and numbers is illustrated by the radical drop in birth rate—that alone blocks any meaningful "Edenic" future—and the death of high culture on and off of campus, as Cynthia Ozick showed and anyone with any vestigial taste can see.
This has come about over the ages going back to the Hebraic Fall and Babel, et seq. and the Greek equivalent, the Homeric deviation (Mallarmé), the rampant rise of logos deplored by Aristophanes, the polytheistic failure to develop a transcendent morality, leading to the vast corruption of the city-states described by Burckhardt, the worse-than-animal savagery of the Peloponnesian War, as seen by Thucydides.
The achievement of individual inspired Greeks like Plato, Aristotle, the tragic playwrights, is uncontestable and strongly admired by Burckhardt and the rest of us. But the whole order could not withstand the challenge of Hebraic monotheism through its heir, Christianity. Josephus, in Against Apion, had presented the earlier Hebraic challenge to their dignity: the Maccabees had evicted Greek usurpers from the temple in Jerusalem, in the second century B. C. under Antiochus IV (this gave us the feast of Hanukah).
All this brings us to the specific, grave deviation of Jew-demonizing Christianity as presented by valiant Elaine Pagels: she faces, as we all must, the corking problem of chosen-ness, a major spin-off of the central problem of evil: how can one claim to have found spiritual salvation and deny it to those who were born before you, or are, for various reasons of formation—perhaps in dark Africa, as Pierre Bayle surmised, i.e. bad-luck blindness—unable to see that Way? The Christian formula is that they are free to come and join, the "gate" is open. Then why did Jesus explain to his disciples that he spoke in parables in order to keep some "blind" folks out?
The Hebrews had expressed a similar selfish exclusiveness by creating various barriers to membership in their "monopoly." Still today, becoming officially Jewish is a very elaborate affair. It is fair to say that Christianity did far better in "reaching out" and reaped the rewards of that in vast spread. But the "hidden" God's monotheistic and prior zero-point all-commanding singularity was watered down by the Trinity, which embodies a whiff of polytheism. Jesus was closer to the limited humans and their desire to be saved as they were, like the southerners of the Elvis Presley cult, or John Lennonites elsewhere, but at the cost of some loss of purity.
The Jews had that advantage and had trouble giving it up for a worship of another impressive but recognizable Jew—just one of them, it seemed—touted by a new sect among many (Sadducees, Essenes...). Here were new "chosen," an elite club, attacking the old and naturally (as aging life goes) somewhat crusty or sclerotic official club, the Sanhedrin, and eventually becoming, of course, a spirally-revenant later-come Sanhedrin, the Christian establishment(s).
Jesus himself, open-souled and bereft on his Cross, was more ever-fresh than that: his deep lovingness could make one forget the watering-down and exclusiveness problems. But, as Dostoevsky put it, if he came back he would have been blackballed by his own followers. Gide, and many others, felt the same.
This threat to the established order, dogma, and belief-system was joined by the haunting power of the old God, off and on, as in 17th century Jansenism; modern freethinkers like George Eliot. Robert Frost and William Faulkner were "Old Testament believers." After the Holocaust, good Christians regretted the lethally violent break with the pure faith of those pioneering ancestors, and Vatican II leaned toward inculpating the Romans in the old-chestnut (and historically-dubious) orthogonal—cross-patterned—dilemma of "who crucified Christ?"
This is where Pagels is particularly illuminating:
At the crossroads of a deep organic succession, as of tree to branch, parent to child, the relation of continuous "sap" (blood, spirit) flow to interruption at the node is crucially important and tricky; the "flow" is often clogged or botched, as we can see every day in families. This is a universal test in a long series of such in normal existence, like Lacan's "mirror stage" when the child either adapts to the paradox of self-other or doesn't and fails to mature properly.
This is the gist of the extended common drama of the prodigal son—or the exile's return, as when the good Christians atoned at long last for leaving those hurt Judaic ancestors ruinously behind, "came home" in some real sense.
Pagels clarifies the crossroads "wrong turn" at the beginning of the Christian tradition: the older Judaism and its branch should not have broken so violently, as in the stormy adolescent revolt. They should have patched it up somehow, perhaps in seeing the ordeals and deaths of, say, Abraham and Jesus as a joint grief—the death of a child often unites split family, including generations.
What happened instead, fatefully, was that the militarily strong Romans were a powerful incentive to deviate from the healing: even Josephus, proud of his people, gave in to them when they destroyed the Temple in 70 A.D. That approximately is when the Gospels were written, and Pagels feels they too gave too much to the pagan (Greco-) Romans, as subsequent Western civilization would do with fatal consequences evident now.
Pagels saw Daniel and the Maccabees—Mattathias—as Jew-uniting national figures who defied the pagans—the king of Babylon and the Jew-oppressing Syrian rulers whose dynasty had been installed by Alexander the Great—and that the "wrong turn" deviation, looking to the Romans, undermined that Jewish unity/continuity: from then on the all-too-human tendency was to justify the error by demonizing Judaism (cf. Judas) as a revolted adolescent tends to abandon and inculpate his parents (as even Jesus did at one point) when he joins some fanatically passionate new cause such as fascism.
Bad Christianity eventually helped the entire West to do the same, wholesale, as when Luther and Kant turned Greco-Roman rational statism against the reviled Jews, the Church supported Franco in Spain; the Protestants of Germany largely supported (neo-pagan, aesthetically neo-classical) Hitler.
Modern Jews, alas, often gave in to revanchism and Mammon.
But Eisenhower's Judeo-Christian perspective, Pope John Paul II, helped to heal the wound. Jews and Christians are joining hands and refusing to divide once again under intimidating pressure from a ruthless neo-fascist horde (with Islamic allies) bent on destroying us and our beautiful spiritual/cultural tradition.