The god, History

(I am re-posting this to include the Postscript)

April 3, 2017

The god of the godless is History. 

According to this "idolology" (as opposed to theology!), it is History that will judge you, History that will either vindicate and laud you or despise and consign you to its proverbial ash heap. It is before History and its verdicts (confidently spouted by History's self-anointed prophets today, while few take note of the irony) that we are summoned to cower and grovel, lest (the horror!) we be found on its Wrong Side. 

Like every idol, History exists, finally, for itself. Man is merely the raw material of its Self-Actualization. 

So it was with Moloch. 

So it was with The Communist Man—the promised pinnacle of human evolution, for whose eventual advent it was worth reducing millions of human beings to faceless fuel and fodder. Communism is gone, but those millions of devastated lives, whole burnt offerings on History's altar, cannot be brought back. 

God made Man in His holy image, in Love. Out of no insufficiency, desperation or dependence, but out of Love's sheer unquenchable abounding. 

In grotesque parody, Man's idols are the manifestation of Man's distorted cravings, of Man's self-doubting scramble after a god in his own image. A god, yet...a lackey! A toadie that exists purely to embody, gratify, and (supreme blessing of our age!) "validate" Man's every impulse. 

This god takes on many forms—among them, "History." 

The exquisite trap is this: the closer an idol-maker gets to satisfying this longing, the nearer the day his idol usurps his place and obliterates him. The projection, fully realized, no longer tolerates the projector. No idol can embody and gratify Man's worst impulses without, finally, consuming Man Himself. No self-projection Man comes to depend on for self-validation will, ultimately, go on suffering Man's nuisancesome presence. 

Nothing slapped together and contrived out of human desperation and emptiness can live, sovereignly, or love, supremely. Not Moloch, not the Communist Man, not History. The idol is a vampire; the image is a "Portrait of Dorian Gray"; the interdependence is diseased, the outcome an abyss of lifelessness. 

Only the living God dwells in the unapproachable, uncreated Light that He Himself is. Only He is "a consuming fire" that, by Love's condescension, nevertheless pervades without consuming—as in the burning bush, and the tongues of fire that descended upon the Church at Pentecost. God—the Father, Son and Holy Spirit—is the one Locus and Maker of whole and holy Personhood. He will never be the creation's lackey. Nor, wondrously, did He appoint His creation, Man, to any such fate; the freedom of Love forbids it, forever.  

____________________________________

April 27, 2017

Postscript—a couple of weeks after posting the above....

I'm just now re-reading G.K. Chesterton's "The Everlasting Man." My first reading was many years ago, and for quite a long time the back of my mind has been nagging me to pick it up again. I finally gave in, and am glad I did. The back of one's mind is usually right.

The opening paragraph in the seventh chapter, just read this morning, converges wonderfully with what I wrote above. Here is the paragraph.

(From chapter VII, "The War of the Gods and Demons")

"The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings. Man cannot live without the two props of food and drink, which support him like two legs; but to suggest that they have been the motives of all his movements in history is like saying that the goal of all his military marches or religious pilgrimages must have been the Golden Leg of Miss Kilmansegg or the ideal and perfect leg of Sir Willoughby Patterne. But it is such movements that make up the story of mankind and without them there would practically be no story at all. Cows may be purely economic, in the sense that we cannot see that they do much beyond grazing and seeking better grazing grounds; and that is why a history of cows in twelve volumes would not be very lively reading. Sheep and goats may be pure economists in their external actions at least; but that is why the sheep has hardly been a hero of epic wars and empires thought worthy of detailed narration; and even the more active quadruped has not inspired a book for boys called Golden Deeds of Gallant Goats or any similar title. But so far from the movements that make up the story of man being economic, we may say that the story only begins where the motive of the cows and sheep leaves off. It will be hard to maintain that the Crusaders went from their homes into a howling wilderness because cows go from a wilderness to a more comfortable grazing-ground. It will be hard to maintain that the Arctic explorers went north with the same material motive that made the swallows go south. And if you leave things like all the religious wars and all the merely adventurous explorations out of the human story, it will not only cease to be human at all but cease to be a story at all. The outline of history is made of these decisive curves and angles determined by the will of man. Economic history would not even be history."

I wouldn't dream of trying to imitate Chesterton's humor. I had to read this paragraph in a series of starts and stops, to allow for laughter. So, without Chesterton's comic glint, but, I hope, in accord with his "vision," I want to relate this excerpt to what I wrote above (but it's quite obvious already, isn't it!).

The "god History" is indeed this arid, barren, soulless and story-less "economic history" that is not, finally, even history. Nor is it human, nor does it care very much for humans. Humans annoyingly disrupt this god's calculations, contradict its diagrams and complicate its operations. The only humans this god "loves" are those who, in unmixed devotion, sacrifice other humans on its altar. They are "the good ones."

I remember a Trappist monk once pointing to the monastery graveyard and telling me with a grin, "Those are the good monks." That is, the departed brothers no longer contend with their own rebellious tendencies; they are in perfect harmony with their Maker. All the monks (along with everyone who is not a monk) on this side of the graveyard are "bad." "Bad" but human, and under grace, and loved, and growing into God's story. And on the way to divine goodness. If indeed we have capitulated to Christ. That is no recipe for self-loathing; it is the recipe for ultimate realization in Love.

But to the god History, "the good ones" are dead while they still breathe and offer up their brethren on the altar of Economic History (and, in the broader context of this post, the "Materialist Dialectic"), in unquestioning, unswerving obedience. They have no more story than does their god. Theirs is an anti-story.

Which rather makes sense of the preservation of Lenin's body. He is honored as a corpse just as he was while breathing.

What, after all, is the difference.

It might seem gratuitous, a hundred years after the fact, to kick a dead Lenin. Particularly going on thirty years after the fall of the USSR (yet Lenin still occupies his place of honor). You might say that the Marxist Materialist Dialectic is a proven disaster and no longer an issue to contend with (second part of that assertion: highly disputable). You might even say that, today, when politicians crow about being "on the right side of history" it is in a spirit entirely different from Marxism-Leninism's soulless subservience to the touted "irresistible" forces of History; it is, instead, in a humanistic and..."progressive" spirit. (As if anyone would dub their ideology "regressive.")

To which I might say these two things.

One, that the god History, decked out more appealingly to modern tastes, is still the god History, and this god is no one's living story. Moloch, whether plated in severe gray iron or adorned with ivy and evergreens, is still Moloch.

Two, that I can't help hearing the faint "thud" of the god's footsteps in the received political wisdom—axiomatically parroted in each election cycle, as if a brilliant new insight each time—that "the voters vote their pocketbooks".... That seems to be the only "story" that counts anymore.

The devil can appear as an angel of light, and Moloch has an abundant wardrobe of costumes.

Jeremiah 23:23-24

Jeremiah 23:23-24 "Am I only a God nearby," declares YHWH, "and not a God far away? Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him?" declares YHWH. "Do not I fill heaven and earth?" declares YHWH. 

The very first time I read that, many years ago, I did a double-take and went back, certain that that my eyes had failed me: "Surely God would say that He isn't far but very close?" The second reading confirmed that I was wrong; God was saying exactly what I thought He couldn't be saying.

We naturally expect (dare I say, insist) that God would make the opposite point, in the audience-affirming, warm-fuzzy way we've been conditioned to anticipate from pulpits and Christian bookstore best-seller racks: "I'm not far from you but very close." It seems that this is what our self-esteem-hungry age wants reinforced over and over again: God lives to be near us.

I don't mean to sound cynical. Absolutely, the Lord does promise, repeatedly, His intimate care and knowledge of our lives personally.

Yet here the superficially opposite and equally vital truth is declared through the prophet: "He isn't merely local; He is incalculably distant!"

Distant and all-pervading.

God is infinitely more than our hired life-coach, or a psychologist who doesn't know about the stuff we prefer to omit during our session on the couch.

He is not that close that He doesn't always see the big picture. Unlike the gods of Damascus or Babylon, blind statues housed in pathetic shrines, the living God, "I AM," ceaselessly entertains the entire prospect of His Creation (and beyond; the Creation itself isn't, after all, "the fullness").

We are, yes, a precious part of His endless prospect, but His impenetrable prospect and design (as impenetrable as the holy glory of the Trinity) surpass every time, place, point, motion, relation, appearance and consequence that He calls into being and sweeps up into His supernal will.

We are precious for being a part of that prospect; the prospect isn't precious for our being a part (though, in a way, it is that, too, but that must be carefully and soberly contemplated). There can be no value that isn't derived from God and isn't a gift. He is the only Soloist; the song is His. And in that there is freedom and joy, and the vibrant vitality of communion with the God we have not created.

Man creates only local gods. Yahweh—the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—urgently exhorts His people to remember Who created them.