Nothing but a Revolution can save Us, Part III - The Theology of the 99 Percent

Our previous chippings on the Occupiers concluded that the confluence of impulses which comprise the movement would fail to engage into the prevailing historical cycle if they sought to reform a system which, in our opinion, is beyond transformation.

No one who has applied a cream to an itch can complain of emollients. But palliatives do not deal with underlying causes which, in the case of dying empires, are pervasive and systemic. When the system itself is the disease, applying plaster to rot will not stop the decay.

But history also teaches that new life springs from rot. After all, why not? Why should we think -- other than adhering to some carte blanche notion of free will -- that human events are exempt from processes that apply to all other forms of life?

The “fall” of the Roman Empire and the concomitant “rise” of new racio-cultural, political economies in what became Europe provide an illustrative paradigm of sorts for our own looming future. Two of Gibbon’s three volumes attest to the complexity of the subject; so that apart from sketching some general contours this woodchip will focus on the existential and moral transformation that took place as orthodox Christianity replaced the weltanaschaung of paganism.

A preliminary word. The historical fact of regeneration which took place upon the so-called fall of the Roman Empire has been distorted by the myths of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment which were simply the self justifications of a class. In order to see how rot gives rise to regeneration in the human social context, it is first necessary to disentangle from the anti-feudal capitalist propaganda that passes for orthodox history.

The propaganda of a “Dark Age” was first foisted on history by the Italian litterateur, Petrarch, who applied it in 1350 to literature written after the dated fall of Rome in 476. The epithet then got applied to anything ante-dating Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) which is considered to be the herald of the “new” scientific era. Lastly, the term got used as Voltaire’s hachet du jour in his ongoing diatribe against the Church.

Not surprisingly, the agitation for something “new” began by maligning that which was “old” but the agitation rests on a cornucopia of petards. The Middle Ages, it is said, was a time of intolerance and witch burnings. Actually, the (Spanish) Inquisition (1492) was the opening salvo of the modern nation state and the Reformation Wars (1540) exceeded the Crusades in brutality and devastation. The Dark Ages, it is said, was a time of ignorance and superstition. Actually, the 700 years after 476 saw more technological, mathematical, artistic and scientific achievements than the 700 years before. By the time of Augustus (27 A.D.), the towering greats of Ancient intellectual life had been dead 300 years. What ensued for the most part was 400 years of imitation, compilation, tinkering and slow decay. As for superstition, the notion that the ancients didn’t jump for a shadow is laughable.

It is worth mentioning that Reverend Cotton Mather’s treatise on witches and the spectral evidence of ghostly apparitions, (The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693)), relied on the Bacon’s new scientific mode of analysis of which Mather was a serious student and proponent. Unless we disabuse ourselves of the anti-medieval canards we will be unable to learn from one of the great transformational events in history.

In this respect, Gibbon’s history was defective; for, as a Son of the Enlightenment, he espoused the prejudices of his Age. Relying on the formality that the Empire legally perdured until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, Gibbon dutiful covered all the viscitudes of the fragmented administration of “empire” in the West during the Middle Ages. As a military-political chronology, Gibbon’s account is impeccable; however, it fails in its grasp of the human “impulses” that form the calculus of history.

Gibbon’s central thesis was that the Roman Empire fell because Christianity had sapped what was left of its vital force. Instead of being manly and martial, men became monkish and theological -- prattling nonsense instead of working on practicalities. Gibbon’s sardonic account of the theological controversies that racked the Empire as the very Barbarians stood at the very Gates, is one of the malicious delights of all history.

“The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.” (Decline, vol. I, ch. 15.)

Gibbon all but feasted in his melancholy and his account will convince the reader that no stupider beast stalks the earth than man, among whom Christian theologians must be ranked as the most deranged.

But Gibbon’s thesis forgot its own best evidence: the “manly” Romans were prattling inanely well before Christianity stalked the globe. They had long ceased to have any useful aim other than maintaining a stasis which evidently wasn’t serving the needs of most people stuck on earth.

The Roman Empire in the West, ended because it had failed to deliver. People turned their backs on an Idea which maintained relevance only for the “inner belt way” crowds at Rome, Constantinople and Antioch. Sometimes people literally packed up to go live with the Barbarians; other times they came to a modus vivendi with the new occupiers.

The non-official reality is difficult to summarize because it occurred beneath the official version of events and was the product of multiple, sometimes parallel, confluences.

Perhaps the first thing to bear in mind was that people did not openly “renounce” the Empire or even paganism. In architecture, art, law and religion they kept familiar and useful bits and pieces of the ancient world. They thought more in terms of practical adaptation. Roman columns and masonry got reused in construction, just as pagan moral codes got reworked into the seven deadly sins and cardinal virtues, and just as ancient learning got redefined into the seven liberal arts.

Secondly, the “fall” of the Western Empire was as much matter of privatizing and contracting-out government than of so-called barbarian conquest. The Vandals, Burgundians and Goths who took over chunks of the West did so as agents or “friends” of the Emperor (then residing in Constantinople). Rome had become an Empire-in-Franchise; a brand name. The avowals continued; the underlying reality transmuted.

This de facto privatisation of empire was not oligarchical but democratic. As a whole, the Empire had come to present the interests of a 1% senatorial class who competed in finding more subtle gradations and high falutin’ titles to distinguish their pecking order. The res publica was their berry patch.

The parceling out of empire to lesser dukes (“leaders”) or counts (“friends”) dovetailed with new arrangements -- new social-contracts -- between those rulers and the occupants. At all levels, people began taking control over their lives working on local, sustainable realities in architecture, political structures, law and religion, as well as the all-necessary economy. The lack of any coordinated program allowed snits like Voltaire sniff to about a “Dark Age” but what the monarchical Enlightenment called “chaos” was actually a social democracy that produced a better and freer quality of life than had been had under the rapacious and heavy hand of Empire.

The point is illustrated by architecture which is the face of a society. For near a millennium the principles of architecture had been settled: row upon row of arches and columns in four orders: doric, ionic, corinthian and composite. The impression was intended: pomp, pride, power in your face -- what we today call a “corporate presence.”

As the empire crumbled, architecture became smaller, more intimate and decorated with popular, Celto-Germanic motifs and patterns. Friezes and columns got illustrated with real and fantasy animals including such in-your-face hilarities as a leering monkey with drooping phallus.

What Petrarch had objected to was that art had become vulgus -- pertaining to the common folk. But the becoming of the folk was far more genuine than the stasis of Augustus.

Were the Middle Ages stable? No. They were chaotic and at times miserable but, despite reduction and rustification, they were vital. Were they classical and polished ? No. But they were colourful and delightful. Did they have a program? No. What they had, however, was Christianity -- a set of moral principles and existential attitudes intended to infuse the structure of the system whatever the system ended up being.

To Gibbon, and for us, the theological quibbles of the day seem like so much stuff and nonesense. But this is only because we do not understand the buzz words and vernacular of the times. Through symbols and metaphors people were arguing about root political understandings at the base of all things.

For Gibbon, the most ludicrous of these existential disputes was the fight between Arius and Athanasius over the “nature” of Christ: Had Jesus been a very exceptional being who became a god or had he always been a part of God from the beginning of time?

In order to understand the social significance of this seemingly pointless debate we have to remember that in the pagan world heroes and emperors were always becoming gods. The “trans-op” was known as an apotheosis and became so routine that the emperor Trajan’s dying words were “puto! fio deo” -- best translated as “Bleh, I’m becoming a god....” .

But in death and in life, Rome remained the province of the one percent. Its rulers and heroes may have ascended to Olympus but the mass of “humble” people living close to the ground returned to mere mulch, as insignificant in death as they were expendable in life. If Christianity had nothing different to offer, it had nothing better.

Both the Arians and the Athanasians held to much the same liturgical practices and imperatives of moral conduct. They were not enemies; but a chasm separated them on their answer to the fundamental value of human existence.

For the Arians, Christianity was just another religion in the pagan pantheon. This meant that although some men became gods the rest of us nameless mortals could expect from life nothing more than what luck assigned us. Jesus was a very, ultra special person; but so too had been Heracles, Achilles and the great prince of peace, the Divine Augustus.

For the Athanasians, God himself came down -- apoandrosis, as it were -- infinitely validating each and all of us by coming into contact with us down here, in the valley. Not only that but when He did come down his “triumph” was not that of some pretty-boy, gym-toned Apollo but as sorry assed, shameful and pathetic as could be imagined -- God the Defeated One. Nicene Christianity stood for a complete inversion of the pagan cosmological order.

Of course, the pagan gods did participate in human affairs, but they did so at a remove as manipulators, little different from the remove of master and slave. On a primary existential level pagan humanity stood estranged from its gods and alienated from itself.

The dispute between the Arians and the Athanasians was the ultimate one percent - ninety nine percent divide. Once the “theological lingo” is cast in context, we can understand why the orthodox Christians fought with such determination for the Nicene Creed.

They were not interested in formulating a military strategy for defense of the homeland or in coming up with a plan to revive the economy or for political reform. Those problems were so intractable that the best anyone could do was hope that calculus of history would figure it out somehow.

Instead the Athanasians insisted on a change of “root consciousness” from one that worshipped “exceptional cases” into one that insisted that “as you treat the least of these” so you treat the Eternal God himself.

The cynic will rightly remark that Christians have often betrayed their own Gospel. But that does not alter the radical nature of their revolutionary “good news.” The same cynic might justifiably remark that none of this god-stuff is actually true. But that too is not the point. What is important, from an historical and sociological perspective, is that people believed and acted on it and fought for it as if it were true.

In practical terms, the eternal divinity of Christ got translated into what the Church today calls the preferential option for the poor The option was stated in the Gospel of St. Luke:

My soul doth magnify the Lord : and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden. ...
He hath shewed strength with his arm:
He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat : and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things : and the rich he hath sent empty away.
(Luke: 1:46 55)

St. Luke’s Gospel was written “to the Romans” and once we recall what the Roman point of view was, we can see that the Gospel fell but a little short of a declaration of war against Augustus’ “vital stasis.” The Christian answer to the Ara Pacis was Mary in the Manger:

Nativity by Giotto

But Luke’s focus was less on political structures than on animating attitudes. Throughout medieval literature his Magnificat got restated in tales and lessons that focused on ordinary common mulch people: the lowly shepherd, the monk who falls asleep and awakes in Eden, the prince in unrecognized disguise, the lowly maiden. And it is Luke’s orientation that was carried on in A Christmas Carol, Les Miserables, Huck Finn, and -- it seems to us, the Occupiers.

Today, the motto of the One Percent is, “Wealth makes right.” Perhaps they are right. Obama certainly bespoke a very Roman attitude when he said that he did not begrudge Blankfein his billions.

But what is heard from the 99 Percenters is precisely the cry of the preferential option for the poor. The “option” is not a question of charity but of due and proper inheritance based on the conviction that all are called to the Table, not only those who can afford $35,000 a plate.

The questions that are being directed at the Occupiers are very much the types of questions that the Pharisees fired at Jesus: what is your program? how would you provide...? what do you say to those who ask how you would balance...? And the answers of the 99 Percenters are very much the kind of “irrelevant” non-sequiturs given by Jesus: lower tuition! provide home care to the disabled! get the money changers out of the temple!

But it is precisely the non-sequitur wherein the strength lies; for a sequitur would merely accept and continue the stasis. It seems to us that the worse thing the Occupiers could do would be to come up with a “solution” because, in fact, the political, economic and ecological problems confronting us are intractable.

There is among orthodox socialists the view that the present structures can be kept if only they are correctly inverted so as to benefit the working public instead of private capital. It is an intriguing proposition. After all what is the difference between G.U.M. (Soviet Russia’s All-Commodity Store) and Walmart other than ownership?

We, however, are not so sanguine. Systems are by definition integrated wholes and what is integrated at present is a system of despoliation and destruction that kills off the very insects that give us life. True revolution will come when the system or the climate collapses in such a way that allows and impels people to cobble together their own nearest and best solutions. What matters when they do so is their animating existential imperative.

We do well not to overlook the fact that the protesting “99 Percent” are actually less than 1% of the U.S. population and an infintessimally small sliver of the world population. They are nowhere close to attaining a political threshold that is going to cause any leader to loose sleep. They are but a cry in the wilderness; but from Oakland to Athens, the Occupiers speak the conscience of a new “Dark Age” and therein lies the hope.

©Woodchip Gazette, 2011

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