Although I think I grasped this months back, I mean essentially, this last bout of exchanges has helped me to revisualize the type of conflict that Immanuel Can has with *the way things are* (ie the way they went in history), and as well at least some large part of the conflicts he has with others, and also that I have with him.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jun 20, 2023 7:34 pm You're mixing issues, I think. You've got "history" confused with "theology." The former is about what simply happened, the latter defines what it meant in light of the belief system.
Nobody denies that Catholicism was formed as a point of historical fact, and that Constantine started it. What's in dispute is whether that move is "Christian" or not.
And how do we decide? Theologically. For there is no other way possible.
Put it this way: what if I said to you, "I am an Alexisite (a follower of Alexis Jacobi), but I do not do anything Alexis Jacobi says." Would you not instantly ask me, "Why do you call yourself an Alexisite, then?" For it would be perfectly obvious that I was simply confused or lying about that.
Likewise, if somebody says, "I am a Christian," that means "a follower of Jesus Christ." And it's perfectly reasonable for you to then ask, "Do you follow the teachings of Christ, then?"
If they don't, as Constantine did not, and in fact, flatly disobey and even countermand the things Christ said, and invent new things He never said, and treat them as if they were His instructions, why can we not legitimately doubt the credentials of the person who then claims to be a "Christian"?
I think we can. And in any other parallel situation in life, I'm sure you would, too.
What he objects to when he refers to *Constantine* is not really this one man but -- in essence -- the resistance that arose when hyper-zealous Judeo-Christianity was imposed on the Indo-European cultural groups when *civilization* was imposed on them by Roman/Mediterranean culture.
At a core level the Christian religion can be described as *world-negating*, as eschatological and in this sense *sick* insofar as it undermines the sense of well-being or complacency with life in the world, in a body, and accepting that life is what it is (I might say *tragic*) and must be accepted as it is.
The world in which Christianity arose was disturbed, fractured, distressed by its exhausted cosmopolitanism, and certainly the Roman civilization was at the time in different stages of crisis. Therefore, on one hand Christianity presented itself as a 'cure' for debauched culture and for the individual who was in a distressed, corrupted state due to the social collapse occurring around him. Christianity certainly did offer the fractured individual suffering anomie with a 'renovation plan' and, naturally, it is necessary to see it in its positive aspect. The very idea of *getting right with God* and establishing oneself on *solid metaphysical grounding*.
However, the Roman conquest of the primitive Germanic tribes was a brutal conquest on one hand, as well as an *imposition of cultural and civilizational forms*. But Germanic cultures were *life-affirming* and that means not *life-denying*. They were also cohesive societies with naturally strong social links. They were primitive and unruly but not *diseased* or *sick* in the way that Roman and Mediterranean culture was. And here is the essential fact: When Christianity was brought to these northern, primitive and Indo-European peoples they received it both by and through force and by and through persuasion, to which they assented, but against which they resisted as well. That is to say that they received what they could, what made sense to them, but adapted a great deal to their own life-purposes.
I refer to this as syncretism. Or I say that it was through adaptation and modification that European Christianity came into being. It was interpretive therefore. It was as if the indivudual said: "OK, I recognize the superiority of these forms in many ways, but not all. I will convert, but I will do it according to my terms and my lights. You can ask a lot but you cannot demand I surrender everything."
The Germanization of eastern-modeled ascetic Christianity is the process that, in many ways, Immanuel Can is dissatisfied with. By Germanization I mean the influence of Germanic ethics in a reverse-influence. Christianity was modified substantially. Immanuel is a Christian Zealot and in this specific sense is more of a Jew than he realizes. That there were adaptations, and that the power-structures (religious authorities) did make all sorts of allowances for *local traditions* and *folkways* is intolerable to Immanuel in his capacity as ideological zealot.
The symptoms, as it were, of the Germanization of Christianity were in its modification of a world-renouncing religious modality to a life-affirming one. And one significant aspect of life-affirmation is in governance. I.e. civic and state structures through which men are governed and educated. You cannot simultaneously deny life and the need to develop and flourish in life while also constructing institutions designed to endure. So, somewhere there has to be a relaxation of ideological strictness.
The idea that a religious modality, and that Christianity, should have existence outside of the political domain has got to be one of the stupidest admonitions that can be made! If you define a religious modality it is one that must operate, in one degree or other, at all levels of society. And this is exactly what occurred in the Middle Ages of Europe! You might hate it (and your own sick self) but you cannot deny that it was an effort to build something really substantial on the earth-plane. And all its creations -- all of them -- are the creations and structures that we now live in and through. Universities, hospitals, education systems, defined values and indeed as I have often said *the very creation of our own selves*.
When Immanuel Can speaks of 'Catholicism" and its horrors, he is in fact talking about European civilization. I mean this seriously. Immanuel Can is therefore a *sick man* if this self-negation is understood to be a sickness that must be overcome.
Immanuel Can also takes possession of Jesus Christ and makes Jesus Christ his own mouthpiece. No, that is not quite it. Rather that Immanuel Can takes that aspect of the Christian teaching about life and life's bounty (the possibilities of renewed life, the possibility of living fully in life) and says: I know what Jesus Christ is, you do not. I am right and you are wrong. And then he quotes Scripture and says "See? It is not me saying this, I simply convey the Master's truth to you!"
He therefore, and on this basis, and though this endeavor, he invalidates Europe!
