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Saint Paul

P

PaperclipGod

Banned
...for saddling it with the nastiest traditions of the Old Testament: intolerance, brutality, provincialism. How indiscreetly he meddles in matters which are none of his business and of which he has no understanding at all. His remarks on virginity, abstinence, and marriage are nothing short of disgusting. Accountable for our religious and ethical prejudices, he has determined the norms of our stupidity and multiplied those restrictions which still paralyze our instincts.

With none of the prophets' lyricism, none of their cosmic and elegaic accents, Paul echoes only their sectarianism, their lapses into bad taste, verbiage, and marketplace rant. It is mores that interest him. Once he gets on the subject, his voice cracks with malice. As much obsessed by the City he would destroy as by the one he would build, he pays less attention to relations between man and God than to those between man and man. Read the famous Epistles carefully: not one moment of detachment or delicacy or distinction; everything is breathless frenzy, plebian hysteria, hatred of learning and of the solitude which is its condition. Intermediaries everywhere, connections, contacts, clannishness: the Father, the Mother, the Son, angels, saints - not a trace of intellectuality, no coherence of concept, no attempt to understand. Sins, retributions, the bookkeeping of vice and virtue. A religion without inquiry: an anthropomorphic debauch. I blush for the God it offers; disqualifying Him constitutes a duty.

Neither Lao-Tse nor Buddha allude to an identifiable Being; scorning the artifices of faith, they invite us to meditation; to engage our minds, they establish its limit: the Tao, Nirvana. They had a different notion of man.

How meditate if everything must be referred to a supreme... individual? What can we seek with psalms and prayers? What can we find? It is out of sloth that we personify our divinity and then appeal to Him. The Greeks awakened to philosophy the moment their gods were no longer adequate; ideas begin where Olympus leaves off. To think is to stop venerating, to rebel against the enigma and proclaim its bankruptcy.
 
By adopting a doctrine originally alien to him, the convert imagines he has taken a step toward himself, when he has merely sidestepped his problems. To escape insecurity - his ruling passion - he pledges himself to the first cause chance affords. Once in possession of the "Truth" he will revenge himself on others for his old uncertainties, his old fears. This was the case of Saint Paul, the arch-convert. His grandiloquence betrays an anxiety he will make every effort to dispel, without success.

Like all neophytes, he thought his new faith would transform his nature and triumph over those hesitations he was so careful to keep from his correspondents and his listeners. His tricks no longer take us in, but in the past many minds permitted themselves to be duped. Granted, that was when we sought the "truth," when we were not yet interested in cases. If our apostile was badly received in Athens, if he found there a society contemptuous of his lucubrations, it is because in Athens men were still arguing, because skepticism, far from abandoning, still defended its positions. In Athens, the Christian gibberish could get nowhere; on the other hand, it was to seduce Corinth, a vulgar city inimical to dialectic.

The mob asks to be overwhelmed by invective, by threats and revelations, by shattering pronouncements: the mob loves a shouter. Paul was one, the most inspired, the most talented, the most artful of antiquity. We still can hear the echoes of the noise he made. He knew how to hoist himself onto the stage and, once there, how to hold it. He was the first barker of the Greco-Roman world. The sages of his time recommended silence, resignation, withdrawal - impractical things; shrewder, Paul came along with his alluring recipes: the ones that redeem the riffraff and demoralize the refined. His revenge upon Athens was complete. Had he been more successful there, his spleen might have been less. And if we are mutilated pagans, pilloried, crucified, susceptible to profound vulgarity, we have this failure to thank for it.
 
A gentile Jew, a perverted Jew, a traitor. Which accounts for the odor of insincerity that clings to his appeals, his exhortations, his violence. He is suspect: he sounds too convinced. One never knows where to get hold of him, how to define him; standing at an intersection of history, he is subject to many influences. After hesitating among several roads, he finally chooses one - the way. Men of his stamp play for high stakes: obsessed by posterity, by the echoes their actions will raise, if they sacrifice themselves to a cause, it is as effective victims.

Whenever i am at a loss for a scapegoat i open the Epistles and am quickly reassured. I have my man, and he rouses me to a fury. To hate him up close, as contemporary, i cancel out twenty centuries and follow him on his rounds; his successes discourage me, his tortures fill me with delight. The frenzy he communicates i turn against him: unfortunately, the Empire proceeded otherwise.

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect, permits a Paul to circulate... By the same token, it admits defeat, worm-eaten, done for. The smell of carrion fascinates and inflames those greedy and garrulous gravediggers we call the Apostles.

A world of magnificence and light fell before these "Enemies of the Muses," these fierce invaders who even today affect us with a certain dread - tempered by a certain distaste. Paganism regarded them with irony, a harmless weapon too noble to reduce a horde a horde indifferent to nuance. The man of discernment who reasons cannot measure himself against the Boeotian who prays. Frozen in the high altitudes of sarcasm and satire, he will succumb to the first assault, for energy, privilege of the dregs, always comes from below.

Antiquity's horros were infinitely preferable to those of Christianity. These frenzied minds, these souls riven by irrelevant remorse, these wreckers roused against the amenities cherished by a senile society, were to abuse understanding by turning it into "heart." The ablest among them fell to his task with a perversity which at first scandalized but ultimately scarred, scored and secured allegiance to an unmentionable cause.

Yet the Greco-Roman twilight deserved another enemy, another promise, another religion. What grounds for granting even a grain of human progress when we think how easily the Christian fables snuffed out stoicism! If the latter had managed to propagate, take possession of the world, men might have come to something, or almost. Resignation, had it become compulsory, would have taught us to endure our misfortunes with dignity, to contemplate our nullity in silence. Would poetry have evaporated from our world? So much the worse for poetry! In exchange, we should have captured the faculty of suffering our destinies without a murmur: accusing no one, condescending to neither melancholy nor mirth nor regret, reducing our relations with the universe to a harmonious system of defeats, living as condemned men may live - not imploring divinity but offering it a warning... It could never be. Overrun on every side, stoicism, faithful to its principles, had the elegance to die without a struggle. A religion erects itself on the ruins of wisdom: the latter's strategy is hardly suitable to the former. When they must despair, men will always prefer kneeling to standing. It is their cowardice, their fatigue that aspires to salvation, their incapacity to embrace comfortlessness and in it find the justification of pride. Shame on the man who dies escorted to his grave by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive. Let the mob and its mouthpieces crawl into the "ideal" and be swallowed up. Solitude is a mission, not a donnee'; to rise to its level and assume it means renouncing the vulgarity that insures success, religious or otherwise. Recapitulate the history of ideas, acts, attitudes and you find that the future was always on the side of the rabble. One does not preach in the name of Marcus Aurelius: since he spoke only to himself, he had neither disciples nor votaries; on the other hand, temples are still being built where certain Epistles are cited to satiety. As long as this goes on, i shall persecute this saint so adept at interesting us in his torments.
 
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