When the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity the persecution of Christians ended and the persecution of pagans began, writes Tom Sunic.
With Theodosius, the administration embarked upon a systematic effort to abolish the various surviving forms of paganism through the disestablishment, disendowment, and proscription of surviving cults.
And religious violence didn’t let up until the beginning of the 18th century. Just in time for the ideological violence of modern egalitarian cults from the French Revolution and Marx.
Of course, paganism didn’t really die out; it was continued in many festivals, saints, and ethnic folklore. And the rise of nationalism in the 19th century inspired nations to invent new founding myths.
And then there are the thinkers that we might call post-Christian:
Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger in philosophy, Carl Gustav Jung in psychology, Georges Dumézil and Mircea Eliade in anthropology, Vilfredo Pareto and Oswald Spengler in political science, let alone dozens of poets[.]
Sunic suggests that monotheism might trigger totalitarianism.
Has monotheism introduced into Europe an alien “anthropology” responsible for the spread of egalitarian mass society and the rise of totalitarianism…?… [Alain] de Benoist suggests that monotheism upholds the idea of only one absolute truth; it is a system where the notion of the enemy is associated with the evil, and where the enemy must be physically exterminated (cf. Deut. 13). In short, observes de Benoist, Judeo-Christian universalism, two thousand years ago, set the stage for the rise of modern egalitarian aberrations and their modern secular offshoots, including communism.
Thus, according to Carl Schmitt,
the majority of modern political principles are secularized theological principles. They bring down to earth a structure of exclusion; the police of the soul yield its place to the police of the state; the ideological wars follow up to the religious wars.
Now I have come to think that Christianity was the religion of people migrating to the city, that Christianity provided a social discipline to learn the ways of the city. But Sunic is not so sure.
[W]ith the consolidation of the Judeo-Christian belief, the world and the world phenomena came under the sway of the fixed concepts and categories governed by the logic of “either-or,” “true or false,” and “good or evil,” with seldom any shadings in between. The question, however, arises whether in the secular city — a city replete with intricate choices and complex social differences that stubbornly refuse all categorizations — this approach remains desirable. It is doubtful that Judeo-Christian monotheism can continue to offer a valid solution for the understanding of the increasingly complex social reality that modern man faces in the secular city.
Now, I am a Kantian, in that I believe that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances. So we cannot know the one true truth.
And I am a Nietzschean in that I believe we are in a process following the Death of God that consists of Groundhog Day decadence followed by nihilism and the eternal recurrence until the moment of the revaluation of all values. Nietzsche is also the guy that critiques Christianity for its “slave morality.”
And I am a Jungian in that I believe that we are overwhelmingly driven by our unconscious, particularly as it relates to the collective unconscious and the archetypes, the typical roles in which we strut and fret our hour upon the stage.
But I also believe that the egalitarian impulse is strong in us, and was particularly adapted to the pre-state society where humans had to reach agreement by consensus rather than the force of the police state.
So what does it all mean? Maybe I’ll get an idea after I read a couple of books by Alain de Benoist.