thread: 2007-02-26 : Exorcism followthrough
On 2007-02-28, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
In defense of "war and wealth":
The Desert Fathers (and Mothers) were not always people you'd want to be around, what with the painful penances and the mortification of all fleshly desires to include not only sex but decent food.
The core Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition holds that this world and its pleasures are good, gifts of God, and that we should enjoy them gratefully. The material only becomes a problem for the spiritual when we forget where the material comes from. But to consider self-denial an end in itself is ultimately as sinful as to consider self-gratification an end in itself: Either way you're obsessing about the physical, either as a positive or as a negative, and forgetting the fundamental issues of hope, faith, and love.
As for Emperor Constantine, I'm well aware that his grasp on Christianity was loose and his faith at least partially a matter of tactics, and that the Church became significantly corrupted by its association with political power and wealth.
But it's all too easy for the Church to go the other way and become corrupted by purity. You can be so obsessed with not compromising your principles that you become narrow-minded and exclusive: Look at all the little sects of Puritans excommunicating each other in colonial New England. You can become so obsessed with not seeking wealth and power that you actively deny yourself the means to make a difference in this world.
Unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity started as a persecuted religion, and it retains a deep discomfort with using the tools of the State—in blunt terms, with using force. But there's a problem with that, a profound practical and moral problem: There are people in the world who use force and who will not be dissuaded, and if you reject the use of force yourself, your only alternative is to give them what they want or let them kill you—and others. As long as Christianity was not the religion of either the majority or of the political leadership, it could dodge this question by renouncing violence itself but enjoying the police and military protection of non-believers. As soon as Christianity becomes responsible for guiding an entire society, that society has to figure out a way to make Christianity compatible with the use of force or accept banditry, conquest, and ultimate extinction.
You can argue that it's more moral to be killed than to be killed. You're probably right. I admire those who are willing to die for their beliefs, when they could easily have saved themselves at the cost of their principles. But I believe it is profoundly immoral to let someone else be killed for your beliefs when you could have easily saved them: Your principles are less important than someone else's life.
To paraphrase C.S. Lewis (as I'm prone to do), when someone is beating a child, and no amount of disuasion or moral example or guilt will stop them, the Christian pacifist has to pick up a baseball bat. When someone is pillaging your neighborhood, and "nonviolent noncooperation" does not slow them down, the Christian pacificist has to pick up a rifle. To refuse to help people who are suffering because of a point of principle is not moral, but profoundly selfish. There is a moral obligation to act, not merely an obligation not to act immorally.
The other day, in William Buck's translation/retelling of the Mahabharata, I read a story about an ancient Indian holy man who swore never to tell a lie—so when bandits asked him where the man they sought to murder had run to, the holy man told them. For not lying, the Mahabharata informs us, he burned in Hell.
