“As regards organization, it is clear that the local Christian community was one in faith and government, bound to the other similar Christian churches by a bond of common submission to St. Paul and the other apostles, among whom it is clear from the New Testament as a whole that St. Peter ranked as chief.”

Rev. Cuthbert Lattey, S.J., The Epistles to the Thessalonians (1913).

I am reading Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians and so dipping, albeit not very deeply, into some relevant commentaries. My brow creased with dubiety when my eyes first passed over the line above, and it has been sticking like a painful thorn in my conscience ever since.  That the local and general Christian community was so organized in A.D. 50 is, I believe, very far from clear, whether on the strength of this particular letter or that of “the New Testament as a whole.”

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“The political doctrine brought forth and advocated by Zionism has nothing in common with the Jewish Messianic hope . . . .  Nowhere is there anything in Jewish Holy Scriptures which justifies agitation to reëstablish a Jewish nation and state by human endeavor, and I, therefore, do not hesitate to insist that Zionism in its political aspirations has no warrant from the religious point of view. The endeavor to force the hand of Providence has never been profitable, and many cases can be cited from Scripture where the attempt to accomplish the Divine purpose, without the Divine command and support, has resulted disastrously.”

Letter of Jacob Schiff to Solomon Schechter (Sep. 22, 1907)*

The great flaw of extreme passivism is inconsistency.  Advocating passivism fails, for instance, to leave advocacy of passivity the hands of the Lord.   When Jesus told his disciples to take no thought of what they would eat or wear, they did not, so far as we know, wait for God to feed and dress them like babies.  We should not fret about fictional famines in imaginary futures, but God will not stock our pantry when we fail to buy groceries.  We should trust God to deal with the big things, but life’s details are still “human endeavors.”

Instituting the Millennium looks to me like one of the big things, so on this point at least I agree with Jacob Schiff (1847-1920).  Schiff, as you may know, was a New York banker who helped finance the Russian Revolution.  Schiff did this because he was a Jew who wished to liberate Jews in the Pale of Settlement; but deposing the Czar and instituting the Millennium were in Schiff’s eyes two very different things.  Schiff believed that mortal men could only pray for the day when justice and mercy would reign in the New Jerusalem.  It was both impious and imprudent for men to try to “force the hand of Providence,” to by “human endeavor” seek to make a sacred prophesy come true.

This is why Schiff opposed the political Zionism that in his day aimed to create a Jewish state in Palestine “by human endeavor.”  It has been said that “only God can make a tree” and Jacob Schiff felt that the same is true of Zion.  If the Jews returned to Palestine to build a state for the third time, he might have said they could only hope to illustrate Karl Marx’s quip that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.**

For, as Aslan says to Lucy in Prince Caspian, “things never happen the same way twice.”***

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Paul once says “neither Greek nor Jew”, but usually the contrast in the Bible is between “Jew” and “Gentile”, the former a positive–the children of Abraham, the people of the Covenant–and the latter negative–everybody else: at best the passive recipients of Israel’s light and salvation, at worse, the recipients of divinely sanctioned genocide. This disparity continues among the theologians. Everyone acknowledges that Greek-Roman culture exerted a profound influence on the early and medieval Church. Greek is the language of the New Testament, and by identifying Jesus with the Logos, John the Evangelist explicitly connects the Faith to the pre-Socratic Greek speculative tradition, giving it a sort of divine sanction. Roman Law is the law of the Church; Christendom and Byzantium are the continuation of her Empire. However, all of this is admitted with embarrassment. To say that some Christian teaching betrays the influence of Greek philosophy or Roman cultural forms is to delegitimize it. On the other hand, to show that it is a development of Judaism, even of post-Biblical Second Temple Judaism, is to legitimize it. Both liberal and orthodox theologians argue from these same assumptions. Yes, we concede that Christianity must be “inculturated”, but this is just an inessential local exterior coloring to the Jewish core.

I find this all very unsatisfying. It is a fact that historical Christianity is profoundly Hellenistic, and I don’t think it is helpful to demand that we feel alienated from this part of ourselves. Paul himself indicates that Christianity has accomplished the miracle of reconciling Jews and Greeks and making them one people, which I think is more than just enabling featureless “Gentiles” to assimilate into Judaism. And we must embrace the whole synthesis. The Marcionites were rebuked for refusing the Judaize, but one could also interpret Paul’s rebuke of the Judaizers as condemning the refusal to Hellenize, since in practice to enter full communion with Gentile converts was to enter fully into the stream of Roman civilization.

Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella comments on an article by Ed Farrell, an virtual buddy, in which Farrell defends the maximalist understanding of “Christ’s admonishments on the sermon on the mount” (Farrell’s words).  Farrell specifically argues that (1) wrath is “the same” as murder, (2) lust is “the same” as adultery, (3) vows are “idolatrous” because an oath-maker says a power other than God (namely himself) will determine the future, and (4) resisting one’s enemy dishonors God whose “grace extends to friend and enemy alike.”

It is once again the day to deliver a birthday cake to the Orthosphere. This year the cake sparkles with candles to the number of fourteen.  In the numerology of the Bible, the Passover Lamb is to be slain on the fourteenth day, and fourteen generations separate Abraham from David, David from the Exile, and the Exile from Christ.  I hope the passage of fourteen years by the Orthosphere will be likewise, if much more modestly, auspicious.  

For, if truth be told, our vitality has of late been less than robust.  I do not track our stats slavishly, but I sometimes pull them up to be sure we are not preaching to the birds.  And the stats are now telling me what the publisher of the Washington Post not long ago told his now unemployed journalists.  They told me,

“People are not reading your stuff.”

With the Epstein revelations, replete with intimations not just of sexual predation upon youngsters, but of their torture, sacrifice, and ingestion, by men and women who stand at the apogee of wealth and power in our world (and who therefore stand in no need of any additional mundane advantage, so that their participation in such liturgies cannot be motivated by need, but rather only by greed (or lust, or … terror)), the ancient dragon who gnaws always at the root of human affairs has lurched again to the surface of current events.

He has been always at work, eating away at us since Babylon; since the earliest human settlement. The basic and perennial conflict of history, upon which all others supervene, is constant, albeit usually hidden: on the one hand, cults and cultures of one sort or another, that have in common their utter abhorrence and hatred of human sacrifice (and, so, of all who practice it), and on the other, cults that celebrate such immolations … and, as with all sacrifice, partake of the meat produced thereby.

It comes down at bottom to the worship of demons, or of the Most High; of death, or of life. Whether it’s Israel versus the Amalekites, or Rome versus Carthage, or Spain versus the Aztecs, it’s the same antagony in operation. Perhaps indeed, as we now, seeing the pattern again rear its hideous head, dare to think … the witch hunts and inquisitions, the crusades against secret societies, indeed perhaps even the ancient pattern of the scapegoat, manifest all some horror endemic and inimical to human social life, against which we all ever struggle, whether or not we know it.

It’s not just the conspiracy theories that are now revealed to be true. It goes much deeper. The very fairy tales – Hansel & Gretel, e.g., or Jack the Giant Killer – are now shown to be simply realistic; common sense. Stay away from witches! Let no vampire within your pale!

And, Carthago delenda est.

“At all events, I was never made for a merchant, and I even begin to doubt I was made for anything in particular but to loiter through life.” 

James Russell Lowell to G. B. Loring (May 20, 1839)*

To loiter is to dawdle, to execute a task with less of the brisk and business-like efficiency than the critic who employs the word thinks proper to that task.   It is to linger, which quite literally means to prolong (in Old English, lengan means lengthen).  From here the word loiter quite naturally ambled to the definition of public loafing, since street-corner loiterers were presumed to be neglecting, and thus prolonging, whatever their proper business might be (assuming they had any).

When James Russell Lowell asked if he had been made for nothing but to “loiter through life,” he meant for nothing but to pass his days aimlessly—to inefficiently do this, then lackadaisically do that, and then at last saunter to his grave with nothing to show.  The poet asked this shortly after turning twenty, an age when I daresay many a young man asks himself the same question.  He stands on the threshold of manhood and sees before him the prospect of an aimless life of frittering, perhaps a few freaks, and many, oh so many, imbecilities.

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“And at the Feast of Pentecost all manner of men assayed for to pull out the sword that would assay: but none might prevail. But Arthur pulled it out before all the Lords and Commons that were there: wherefore all the Commons cried at once, ‘We will have Arthur unto our King; we will put him no more in delay. For we all see that it is God’s will that he should be our King’”

Thomas Mallory, La Morte d’Arthur (15^th c.)*

“There is nothing directly to show at what moment the thought of displacing the shadow of a king who sat on the Frankish throne came, as an immediate practical question, into the mind of the man who could be called to fill it the moment it should be declared vacant.”

Edward A. Freeman, Western Europe in the Eighth Century and Onward (1904)

History abounds in stories of the failure of regal lines, of their degeneration to a pantomime of poltroons and popinjays who brandish scepter and sport crown, but who of kingliness are devoid.  And royal houses have of course been founded by means in which kingliness played no part, royal houses that were mere conspiracies of terror or fabrications of a hidden hand.  True kingliness, which is absent in such cases, is a charisma that a loyal subject perceives as proof that his monarch is anointed by God.   

Thus, where true kingliness prevails, might is sustained by right and not the other way round.
 
This is the meaning of the famous story of how Arthur became King.  Arthur did not rise to power by thrusting a thirsty sword into the weltering bodies of his rivals, or even by dint of his hidden pedigree; Arthur rose to power by the miracle of drawing a mystical sword from a mystical anvil and stone.