Foreword
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Foreword
On the shore where two thousand years of the Christian era have washed up, the rising tide of the commodity has not left standing a single traditional value of the past. By ruining the mass ideologies that had prematurely celebrated the collapse of the religious edifice, this tide — at a time when the State plays God in the conduct of [terrestrial] affairs — can it not ineluctably push towards the annihilation of the remains of a Church whose mysteries were socialized by The Council of the Vatican II?
The indifference that one today feels towards the beliefs governed by rituals performed by the Party or the ecclesiastical bureaucracy awakens, from the inside out, an interest that no longer supports an obsolete worry, no matter if it is apologetic or denigrating, but quite simply is curiosity preoccupied with its own pleasure and taking pride in the game of discovering what the official truths were so zealous to bury under the ultima ratio[1] of their dogmatic canon.
Can one imagine that Christianity, cleansed of the sacred apparatus by the great waters of affairism,[2] might escape from the crusher that has, in less than a half-century, dashed nationalism, liberalism, socialism, fascism and communism on the sacrificial rocks, while the generations watch with a mix of fascination and terror?
Now that it no longer subsists on the shipwrecks of yore and the sea that been spread out and weakly agitated by the smirk of derision, Christianity is a kind of archaeology that suits the objects bristling with a gangue of holiness; inspiring respect or profanation, they now hardly solicit — I wouldn’t say impartiality — but the naive indiscretion of a discoverer who has been denuded of both prejudices and cunning.
In the same way that it is now permitted to examine the birth, development and decline of Bolshevism without exposing oneself to accusations of materialism, spiritualism, Marxism, revisionism, Stalinism or Trotskyism — which today feigns to smile and be satisfied with the price of blood — one can focus on the Christian religion, which has been washed of the reputation and praises of theology and philosophy, on this archaic affrontery staged as a trompe-l’oeil in which the God of some and the non-God of the others meet in the heavens, their ideas at the same point in flight, at the same [level of] abstraction of corporeal and earthy reality.
With the feeling for the preeminence of the living mingles an astonishment that, for the candide[3], feels like the desire to know why and by which channels the world of ideas has so often required its book of flesh to be slashed in the heart for chimerical horizons.
* * *
The crisis of mutation, which today forces the economy to destroy itself along with the world or reconstruct itself along with the world, has at the very least the merit of disillusioning us about the origin of inhumanity and the means of remedying it. The politics of sterilization that has gangrenated the planet, [whole] societies, mindsets and bodies has demonstrated, by the pertinence of their extreme situation, how mankind — subjecting nature and his fellow men to market exploitation — produces, at the expense of the living, an economy that subjugates the living to a power that, at first, is mythical and then ideological.
Delayed by a system of exchanges that they created and that, while tearing themselves from themselves, determined them without ever completely mechanizing the body, consciousness and the unconscious, individuals have been, over the course of the millennia, powerless with respect to the formidable power that vampirizes them. How could their miserable destiny not induce them to put a halo on an absolute authority as perfect as the celestial vault, on the transcendence of a Father whose decrees manage fortune with misfortune, proclaiming the eternal and capricious instance?
Investing in an extra-terrestrial sovereignty, the mythical meaning of which only the priests had the power to decrypt, the economy, nevertheless, was inclined to unveil its fundamental materiality throughout the interests that, in a melee, insist that one can no longer profane the temporal masters and big players.[4]
Religion — that is to say, “that which binds”[5] — has placed in the hands of a fantastic deity the central link in a chain that, closed on both ends (tyranny and slavery), still anchors this celestial power to the Earth, on which scorn for oneself has been consecrated as sovereign, changeless, intangible.
* * *
Thus God drew from the cyclical, archaic world, which was enclosed within the ramparts and moats of the agrarian economy, a ceaseless perenniality that was refuted by the great tumults concerning the “end of time” by the innovative politics of commerce and free-exchange, which untied the loop of mythic time, corroded the sacred with acerbic spittle, [and] introduced the Trojan Horse of progress into the citadels of conservatism.
Nevertheless, despite the state of conflict that, in endemic fashion, opposed the conquest of markets to landed property, their antagonistic emanations — kings and priests, temporal and spiritual philosophy and theology — did not cease to constitute the agrarian structure and its still-dominant mindset, but also the two halves of God.
By decapitating Louis XVI, the last monarch of the Divine Right, the French Revolution killed both the bicephalic hydra of temporal and spiritual power, whose most recent crime in a long line of heinous crimes led the young Knight of La Barre[6] to be brought to the scaffold for the crime of impiety.
If Rome, deprived of the secular arms that maintained the truth of its dogma, slowly fell to the level of a spiritual scarecrow, this happened because the era of the lords and priests, and the dominant economy of the time, escaped recourse to it, avoided it, by abandoning the penal ferocity of the means of Rome’s arrogance.
The Ancien Regime, definitively exhausted under the inexorable mass of market freedom and democracy reduced to the lucrative, dismantled itself as well as its ramparts, chateaux, crowned [obsidionale] mindset, and old mythic way of thinking.
* * *
From that moment, God succumbed to the magical spell [coup de merlin] cast by a State that reigned without the security of God’s celestial acolyte. Christianity then entered the spectacular history of the commodity. At the dawn of the Twenty-First Century,[7] Christianity will be crushed, just like the other gregarious ideologies.
That Christianity continues to subsist at the heart of systems of ideas that supplant Christian mythology — including opinions that are the most furiously hostile to Christian allegiances — with a kind of religious spirit and in the sinister colors of fanaticism, the exaltation of militants and the hysteria of crowds, this demonstrates quite well the nature of the Great Masses solemnly held in esteem by the tribunes and haranguers of nationalism, liberalism, socialism, fascism and communism.
The hysterical tearing that throws Man beyond his body, so as to identify him with a collective and abstract body — a nation, a State, a Party, a Cause — is indistinguishable from spiritual membership, I might even say spiritual adherence to a God whose glance injects solicitude and scorn, and thus symbolically expresses the relations between the mechanical abstraction of profit and living matter that has been reduced to almost nothing.
Thus there have been more crises in the last three decades than in the previous ten millennia. By balancing ideologies on the scales of indifference, the self-services[8] of the consumable-at-any-price have, volens nolens,[9] stripped the individual of the characteriological turtle shell that dissimulates itself to itself, condemns him to constrained desires, without another way out than recalling the dead passion to destroy and to destroy oneself. Thus, little by little, one can see the awakening of a will to live that has never ceased to appeal to creation and pleasure, united in itself and with the world. Isn’t it henceforth a matter of each person attaining the amorous possession of the universe?
Just yesterday an object manipulated by a Spirit and nourished by its very substance, the individual — discovering on the earth and in his/her flesh the milieu of his/her living reality — today becomes subject to a destiny that will be constructed by a renewed alliance with nature. Wearied of artificial desires that gave it lucrative reason and that, over the centuries, led it to a place where, with an amused curiosity, the individual can contemplate the objects that have objectified it and litter the shores of its past with fragments of a death that, today, is refused.
Although weak enthusiasm for herd-like manifestations indicate a constant decrease of religious and ideological faith in the industrialized countries, the follicules — by fits and starts able to galvanize a desperately lethargic, everyday spectacle — haven’t failed, after several outbursts of archaism and barbarity, to cry for the return of the various religions and nationalisms. But, as Diderot asks, which ass will pass this shit? Which economic imperative, hastily rectified by despair and resentment, will be a buttress to the ramparts of another age and will prevent them from caving under the weight of the lack to be won?
* * *
No doubt the end of religious institutions doesn’t signify the end of religiosity. Hunted by the debacle of the great ideologies — imperfectly satisfied by the sects, more and more badly lodged at the Churches (Catholic or Protestant) — the Christian sentiment now searches for new beds to cum in.
Will it find itself sleeping with a landscape that economic mutations are readying to remodel? Some people fell it coming in the wake of an ecological capitalism that draws from depollution a saleableness that is hardly guaranteed by the desertification of the [earth’s] soils, sub-soils and hopes for survival. It makes little difference to me who is the conjurer, Gaia, Magna Mater, Sylphides, Dryades or other elements. Moreover, each belief is not repugnant to the human to the extent that it doesn’t require sacrifice.
On the other hand, I am delighted by the apprenticeship of the autonomy that, through the collapse of the supporters of and supports for the past, engenders the necessity of going it alone. The end of crowds, the [emergence of] individual consciousness of the fight for life, the cancellation of defeat and fear of self, from which all the other fears are derived, the emergence of a creativity that, substituting itself for work, directs the new generations toward a veritable humanity that, if its advent is not ineluctable, rests — for the first time in history — in the hands of men [sic] and, more particularly, children who are educated in the pleasure of life, rather than in its morbid refusal.
* * *
Such is the perspective according to which I wish to examine the resistance with which the inclination to natural liberty has, during nearly twenty centuries, opposed the Antiphysis[10] of Christian oppression.
In no domain — historical, scientific, philosophical, social, economic [or] artistic — can I conceive of an analysis that would want to exert itself outside of the individual histories in which the everyday gestures of those who have resolved to undertake it are inscribed. Although circumstances have saved me from contact with the religious thing, I have always felt a singular repulsion for a mortified empire, armored with a cross that’s been driven into the hearts of all those who are born into life. Thus, I understand the indignation of Karlheinz Deschner as he thrashes — in Kriminalgeschicte des Christentmus[11] — the deaths, impostures and falsifications of the Catholic Church, but I do not know at what point his polemic — by penetrating into the terrain of the adversary — wins him recognition and interest, in which he takes pride. And why revive the embers of the millennium pyre with puffs of anger, when the wind of a new time has condemned them to be extinguished completely?
Besides, is there not something that protects people from the virtues of your sad threats of sanction in the obvious fact that atheists, freethinkers, anti-clericals and other militants of the “Good God in Shit” — far from giving up Judeo-Christian comportment — have often gone over to its most odious practices: sacrifice, cults of the martyr, guilt, guiltification, hatred of amorous desire, scorn for the body, fascination with the Spirit, quests for salvational suffering, fanaticism, obedience to a master, a cause, a Party? What better homage to orthodoxy than heresy, [or] non-conformism that infatuates itself with contesting the axis around which it gravitates?
* * *
Hardly interested in arbitrating the dubious combat between victims and torturers, I prefer to set free from the past — in which the forgotten, scorned, poorly understood, prejudged and calumnied are buried and often stratified by the famous objectivity of the historians — the scars that the human tissue, irrigated by the freedoms of nature, untiringly maintains so as to reconstitute and strengthen itself, weaving the social network from the ordinary, despite the deleterious effects of fear, dereliction, suffering, faith in the beyond and the consolations of death.
Thus I would seize the living from beneath the death that takes hold through a subtle mix of violence and persuasion that has been revived to deal with beings and things no longer indexed according to the traditional perspective, in which God, the State [and] the Economy collect the tears of the terrestrial valleys for a different happiness, and yet shudder from the beating of the wings of the living, who are more perceptible today because they no longer suffer [under] the weight of the old oppressions.
Therefore, the reasons to be amazed by a life that is so obstinate that it breaks through and re-flowers the asphalt of an inhuman history raise, in counterpoint, several doubts about the honesty and quality of the scholars and specialists who are accustomed to covering this history as if it were conquered terrain.
I admit that a theologian — whose craft of repolining[12] his God so as to once again point out the lightning-flash to the blind who do not perceive the ordinary evidence — prescribes the facts according to his manner of belief, by which he gives his jargon the outward appearance of a sensible language, calling desire a temptation, pleasure a sin, the embrace of lovers a fornication; which he venerates from the position of the Saint of the Rivals of the Heroes of the People honored by Lenin; which he erases from the Gospels according to the truth that Stalin accorded to the Soviet Encyclopedia. This is what follows, not from the lie, but from proselytism. But to encounter the same attitude when it is held by a historian who doesn’t also inspire vast designs is enough, one will agree, to leave one perplexed.
What is one to think of the university scholars, who are instructed in the science of removing doubts concerning the authenticity of manuscripts that have been dangled from copyist to copyist and stuffed with interpolations, who make comments as if these were original texts and who date the Epistles by a certain Saul (a Roman citizen who lived around 60, whereas Tarse was only Romanized in 150) at the beginning of the Christian era, when they were rewritten, if not written, by Marcion, then revised by Tatien, and submitted to corrections in the Fourth Century?
No one is unaware that, at the earliest, the manuscripts of the canonical Gospels and the Acts of the Gospels appeared in the Fourth Century and constituted — under the egis of Constantine — the library of propaganda that Eusebius de Cesaree and his scribes revised and distributed to all the Churches and that were thus universalized on the same dogmatic base. Apparently, the argument isn’t of the type to trouble the good consciences of the researchers who, with a beautiful unanimity, take them for reports on the living, nearly contemporaneous with the witnesses or apostles of an Adonai, Kyrios or Lord. At the end of the First Century, the name Joshua/Jesus — with its symbolic meaning “God saved, saves, will save” — hardly imposes itself. The only dissonances in the ecstatic concert are the atheists Dupuy, Alfaric, Couchoud, Kryvelev, [and] Dubourg; the Catholics Loisy and Guillemini; [and] the Protestant Bultmann.
To designate polytheism and the cults of the “strangers to faith,” the scholars do not hesitate to use the terms pagans and paganism, by which the Church signifies its scorn for the beliefs of the pagani, peasants, hicks, and bumpkins impermeable to the civilization of the towns. Is it a question of mentioning the angels of the Jewish pantheon, the semi-legendary Paul and Peter, the anti-gnostic Irenaeus, the philosopher Augustin of Hippone, the anti-semite Jerome, the spiritual master of the Inquisition, Dominique de Gizman, the massacrer of the Fraticelles, Jean de Capistrano? Many are given the title “saint,” with which the Church compensated its real and mythic servants. The same thing goes on in the biographies of Stalin in which, without derision, he is called “Little Father of the People.”
* * *
It behooves atheism to polish the arms of critique with one of the most preemptory arguments by the Church, namely, the historical existence of this Joshua/Jesus, which accredits the legitimacy of its temporal power. Enraged enough to deny the divinity of Christ, a militantism of presumed freethought will fall into the trap of this Jesus, friend of the poor, a kind of Socrates preaching the truths of an evangelical Socialism and then dying on the cross due to the insolence of a pacifist tribune. Tertullien and the Christian movement of the New Prophecy could not have dreamed of a better future for their heroe — freshly purged of his Semitism and disguised as Zorro for the edification and salvation of the working class — than what existed in the second half of the Twentieth Century.
Once one admits the existence of an agitator and founder of the Church, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate — and this without the least contemporary [corroborating] testimony and while the name Jesus for a long time kept the meaning of the Biblical Joshua — , why be surprised that the spiritual scholars accept the false listing of popes and bishops that was drafted by Eusebius de Cesaree and that back-dates the canonical texts, interpolates writings from the Second Century and citations dating from the controversies of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries, and fixes as heretical — as if these ideas articulated themselves in the year 30 [C.E.] around an orthodoxy that had scarcely begun in 325 [C.E.] — the Dosithian, Nazarene, Sethian, Naassene, Ebionite, Melchisedequian, Elchasaite, Carpocratian, Basilidian, Marcionite, Antimarcionite, Montanist, Valentinian, Marcosian, Bardesanian and Novatian doctrines that had all kinds of origins and that the Constantinian Church — by crushing, remodeling [and] readjusting them — would use to fashion the unstable foundations of its dogma?
In the manner of Stalin recuperating Bolshevism and shooting Lenin’s companions, the Catholic “Fathers” a posteriori condemned as heterodoxy, not only non-Christian things (hairesis in Greek), but also the diverse Christianities on which the throne of Constantine was raised. From their nests, the historians fall into step by discerning in Peter, “the first Pope of Rome,” the meritorious efforts of a Catholic Church that was struggling with a heretical perversion that corrupted the integrity of its canonical teachings.
* * *
Although it does not appear to me denuded of utility to emphasize such an imposture at a time when one quite incorrectly thinks that the Pontifical authority and the clerical bureaucrats have survived the collapse of the last totalitarian citadels, I have found less charm in rectifying the opinion that nothing — other than some inertia of thought — continues to support the pretension to uncover these innervations of the living, which are often frail and yet generate a force that is incomparably more efficacious than the critical consciousness that intends to offend the tombstones of oppression.
Under the label of heresy, what is recovered of the labels by which the Church subjugated, by naming, diverse human and inhuman behaviors, the condemnation of which reinforced the superior power of orthodoxy? Episcopal rivalries [and] internecine struggles, as in Arianism, monophysism [and] English Lollardism. Or a dislocation — which the market in penitence and death exploited with remarkable skill — of the limping body of the constraint of license, the asceticism of debauchery, [and] the repression of relief. Or a still-more secret attitude, which is the object of perplexity to the religious police: the individual will to find a destination that — contrary to the social forms of antiphysis — is better reconciled to the promises of a nature that had previously been relegated by its exploitation to the far side of the human. One will easily divine the types of heresies or irreligious remanences[13] to which my curiosity is the most willingly attached.
For the sake of several readers who are familiar with the Treatise on Living, The Book of Pleasures and the Address to the Living,[14] I make it clear that my endorsement in The Movement of the Free Spirit is applicable here: “A book has no other genius than the genius that finds a way to the pleasure of living better. It is thus agreed, from the beginning, that the study of the Free Spirit does not relieve me of such a requirement.”[15]
On the other hand, a single merit must be granted to this work: I would love it if it misunderstood as little as possible the solicitations of the pleasures of knowing and the gay science. As a summary that, in the course of time, reveals itself to be the cleaning-out of the undergrowth of an uncertain history, this book — I have the feeling — at least will escape the risk of competing for the most errors, ignorant remarks and fabricated hypotheses with the majority of the volumes, monographs and scholarly works that have, in our era, been piled on the heads of Jesus, the apostles and their residual heirs.
If it is, finally, necessary to furnish an excuse for a style of writing in which one hardly finds the care that I give to the books that are not too far removed from the line of my life, I would like simply to say that each matter has been given the treatment that it suggests.
[Raoul Vaneigem]
January 1992
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