reasonvemotion wrote: ↑Wed Jan 26, 2022 3:38 am
Immanuel Can wrote:
It's Catholic -- and as I've said before, Catholic is its own thing, distinct from Christian.
Can you please elaborate in further detail?
Perhaps I can interject my understanding of IC's position while, as always, advancing some of my own ideas. I hope you and those who read will bear with me.
First, I think it is highly relevant to consider the sense and meaning of Dubious' discourse. We have to see, confront, deal with, and respond to his level of intense criticism of *Christian belief*. We must -- this is my view -- understand why he holds to his views; where they came from; and why they have been given energy and power. As I often say we must ask questions about *function*. What is the function of these powerful and in a real sense deadly critiques of Christian belief? I feel I can say, and with no doubts, that this alone is a demanding and difficult topic. Movements that overturn what they define as 'old orders' and 'established hierarchies' involve themselves in modes of attack. It is similar, for example, to the assault on a fortified city. You have to find the weak-point and you have to exploit it. And there are, always, ranges of motives that come to play their part. So, these things need to be carefully and judiciously gone through.
But this implies, of course, that the one who will do this has some sort of 'balanced perspective' and is not, shall we say, compromised and biased. So another problem arises: Who can we rely on? And do we consider that 'balanced perspective' to have validity?
The other side of this strange coin is IC himself. We have to be able to define, in as exact and true terms as are possible, what he is trying to present to us, and why he is trying to present it to us. (I say *us* and I simply mean that any discourse has as its goal that of convincing, and the *us* I refer to is the listener to his discourse, whoever and wherever they may be). I would have to say that IC's views are 'chemically-pure Protestant Christianity'. But IC does not state it like that. He says his views are simply *Christianity*. And he builds his platform, his assertion, by referring solely and exclusively to the texts of the NT itself -- the Gospels and the Epistles, the Acts of the Apostles and the Revelation.
And as I say, because I think it is important, his position is that of an ultra-modern man -- the outcome, if you will, of hundreds and hundreds, centuries, of civilization processes that *produced him*. They have in fact produced us all and I introduce this idea again because I think it true: We have a hard time seeing ourselves. How could we actually *see* what has informed us? We can only see it, I assert, if we
study it. So the example of the fish that cannot define water, or does not even think about it, applies to us. We are all *outcomes* of extraordinarily involved cultural processes that 'inform' us in ways that we cannot know unless we gain distance from ourselves. That is why Basil Willey (a minor historian of culture) said that we require a 'master metaphysician' in order to be able to see, and understand, the ideas (the sense of things) that we take as 'given and 'normal' and 'the way things really are'. We have a really hard time *seeing* our presuppositions.
Now, we have to describe
The Field. That is to say the place where we are; the time we are in; our *temporal modality*; our cultural and political situation; and here I can mention our *description* of what the World is. What is it? Where is it? How did it come to be? How did we come to be the aware beings we are in a world where consciousness is the supreme event that undergirds what he human beings are and, essentially, all that we do and can do?
The Field is also our immediate circumstances which, in our day, seem to be in turmoil. This is not a minor element. Revolutions in this-and-that follow other revolutions in this-and-that and everything seems to be accelerating. It seems to be true, given how much weight we give to the dystopian visions (1984, Brave New World) that we can rely on them to a degree as harbingers. Thus we have, in our midst, what perhaps I can fairly call *seers* and *visionaries* who have, as far as I can tell, not painted the prettiest picture of what we accelerate toward. But let us leave that aside though it must be mentioned, and we must consider the implications of the events of the 20th century where the outline of dystopia was drawn.
There is one more thing that I feel needs to be mentioned. It is known as Clown World in its popular meme-form. But what I want to mention is that there are vast numbers of people who I believe we can say are completely adrift in the sense that they have no way to define their world. And yet when they think about it, and when they reveal what they think, it is
looney-toon material. I could mention again Michael Barkun's
Culture of Conspiracy which goes into the confluence of strange religious idealism (distorted religious ideas and notions) that combine with other strange currents of ideas as:
What is far less known is the extent to which conspiracist worldviews have recently become linked in strange and unpredictable ways with other “fringe” notions such as a belief in UFOs, Nostradamus, and the Illuminati. This book, the most comprehensive and authoritative examination of contemporary American conspiracism to date, unravels the extraordinary genealogies and permutations of these increasingly widespread ideas, showing how this web of urban legends has spread among subcultures on the Internet and through mass media, how a new style of conspiracy thinking has recently arisen, and how this phenomenon relates to larger changes in American culture. The author discusses a range of material—involving inner-earth caves, government black helicopters, alien abductions, secret New World Order cabals, and much more—that few realize exists in our culture. Looking closely at the manifestations of these ideas in a wide range of literature and source material from religious and political literature, to New Age and UFO publications, to popular culture phenomena such as The X-Files, and to websites, radio programs, and more, he finds that America is in the throes of an unrivaled period of millenarian activity. His book underscores the importance of understanding why this phenomenon is now spreading into more mainstream segments of American culture.
I have taken the
loooooonnnggg route to offering my answer to your question, but it is not without some purpose.
IC defines Catholicism as a hybrid distortion of *true Christianity*. And in some senses, of course, he is right. But I suggest that when we consider what Catholicism is, and what Christianity became, that we cannot simply dismiss it all, as IC seems to do, and that it is impossible to
ex post facto redefine Christianity-Catholicism -- the religion that formed Europe -- through an act of Protestant modernist revisionism.
Catholicism is an enormous blending of many many different strains of ideas that necessarily flow together, that flowed together, into a general
European paideia. These are what Europe, and our civilization, are built on.
Oddly, I draw a parallel to what I label Dubious' 'destructiveness' (undermining, invalidating, and distorting with unique purposes in mind) to what I understand IC to do as he undermines and invalidates the attainments of Europe, that is to say of
Christendom. The Kierkegaardian critique of Christendom needs itself to be examined critically.
The attack on Christianity is far more meaningful than those who are soldiers in that attack seem to be aware. If Christianity is killed, and in that sense if God is killed, the living being known as Europe dies.
So the question is really not how to go about killing God, or undermining the profound meaning that is there, but much more about bringing back to life, resurrecting, strengthening, restoring health. This, I assert, involves truly creative work and not the tearing apart and tearing down that come far to easily.
