Ascending The Tower – Episode XV, Part 1 – “That Sort Of Christo-Pagan Thing”

3 Comments

1. 

   John Longg May 17, 2016 at 10:39 pm

   Former Christian here. All I’m keeping from Christianity is the word God: partly because if I said “the Tao” people would think I’m a weeaboo.

   I like the idea of a perennialist/traditionalist/naturalist/whatever-you-want-to-call-it understanding of Christianity, but the fact is Christianity is pretty strongly hard-coded against such an interpretation. A Vedantic-inspired Christo-pagan might say that he reaches the unindividuated all-creating God through his own ethnic gods, while also understanding Christ to be the manifestation of God for all ethnicities; but then an old-fashioned Christian would say “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me”. And that’s pretty hard to argue with.

   You could come up with some sort of semi-gnostic interpretation that Jesus came to show perennialism through the symbology of his ethnic-bound Judaic folk tradition, and so by this fact justifies himself in a “man->gods->Christ->GOD” chain of celestial Chinese whispers. Personally, I consider that a stretch; but no more so than the trinity tbh. In the end the proof’s in the pudding, and if 100 churches sprang up that practised that then I’d probably bloody join them. You’re right with the language analogy. Religion *is* a language, and speaking a dead or dying language is lonely indeed.

   Of course, if you like the whole syncretism thing, there’s nothing stopping you from going to church and also going to Pagan meetups and simply not telling the two groups. God in the town, gods in the country. That’s how the various Latin American heresies work. I think the idea that you can be naughty that way could actually catch on very quickly among our rebellious set.

   Not much hope in England, though. Here, Christianity isn’t much less dead than Paganism… minus the African immigrants. I don’t think I want to bother reviving it. Paganism was a religion for a tribal age, Christianity was a religion for an inter-tribal (imperial) age; and now we’re in an inter-dialectical globalised mess. In my mind, only the balls-tripping holographic cosmology of the eastern traditions – or a profoundly reimagined European faith, that’s not afraid to piss all over the more logically prescriptive tendencies of European thought – can really make it in an age where not even humanity, the one historical constant, is left unchanged. Plus a religion with a stronger element of fractality would be nice, considering our apparent difficulty with hierarchy, subsidiarity, and unity without uniformity.

   Anyway to each their own. I’m happy Christianity happened. Whether he sticks around or not, what Christ gave us was the idea that the ultimate unity of all things is not just a philosophical abstract, but a personality and intellect. That’s *never* going to leave us.

   PS: you’re half-wrong about the Tao.

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