And God Gave Ayn Dominion
Nature, Randianism, And The Future Of Man
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Ayn Rand1 first manifested herself to me by way of a bluestocking high school English teacher — the kind of stern but compelling figure who managed to walk that teacher’s tightrope of commanding both love and fear from her students. Of course, she looked rather a lot like Ayn herself; they could have passed for cousins, if not sisters. I was talking to Ms. N in the hallway (mark the Ms. — like any good English teacher, she was wed to the word, not to a man) before class, and, somewhat out of the blue, she looked at me intently and said, “You should read Atlas Shrugged; it’s by Ayn Rand.” “How do you spell that?” I asked, leaning in closer to hear her over the din. “It’s Ayn,” she said. “A-y-n.” Armed with information, I headed for the fiction section in the bookstore that weekend and picked up a chunky paperback copy of the text printed in a font size apparently targeted at literate ants.
I’ve yet to meet another woman who read Atlas Shrugged at 14, let alone loved it then, so I am left with only my own experience for examination. I’d been a voracious reader practically since I could talk; by fifth grade, I’d devoured the whole of children’s literature and by sixth grade, I’d finished up much of YA and moved on to a diet much heavier on adult fiction, starting with SF&F and historical fiction, and in the rest of middle school I gravitated to doorstoppers like Gone with the Wind, Les Miserables, as well as the whole of the traditional British classics like Jane Austen, Dickens, the Bronte sisters, and Thackery. The relative remoteness of these adult novels, though, in terms of their place in time, were very different, I now realize, than what I experienced when I read Atlas Shrugged. Despite its somewhat alternative history setting, Atlas Shrugged felt contemporary, fresh, immediate, and — especially as I approached it in my early teens — excitingly political. Reading Atlas Shrugged at 14 was like going to a proper, adult dinner party for the first time, snow-white linen tablecloths and fine rooms, wearing makeup and dangling diamond earrings and a dress made not for a girl but for a woman, with Ayn seated next to me, turning to me and asking, in all seriousness, on some present issue of the day — “Well, what do you think?” With Atlas Shrugged, I felt like I had arrived into the adult world, where I was not only allowed but expected to have political awareness, political opinions.
With such an introduction at so delicate a time in my life, I suppose in some sense there was no way, then, not to become totally smitten with Ayn, with her world, with her heroic protagonists. I devoured the whole of her fiction writing within months; by the time I turned to the last page of We the Living, I had developed a hatred for communism as intense as if I myself had endured winters in the U.S.S.R. I committed the singular statement from John Galt’s radio speech as an axiom for my life which I often muttered to myself as I squared my shoulders to walk through the long hallways of my high school in between classes: “I solemnly swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” Now, I was at this time also a practicing Christian, and one would think that it would have ever occurred to me that this axiom would be at loggerheads with say, the entire ethos of Christianity, but, in fairness to me, I was only a fifteen-year-old girl who’d been raised with the sloppy theology of Anglicanism, which in the present-day form is compatible with pretty much any philosophy you want it to be compatible with.
But as I matured, went to college, found other intellectual pursuits to occupy me, and came more fully to my own in adulthood, Ayn and her world gradually receded into the background. But that never stopped her from coming around to visit me, occasionally — or perhaps it only compelled her, in all her contrarian, oppositional way of being, all the more.
There’s a room in my mind where I think about things, and where I compose pieces of writing in my thoughts; to the extent that I could describe it in physical terms, it’s got dark-paneled walls, lacquered hardwood floors and a high ceiling, and I have a desk in front of the window, which is wide open, where thin white curtains on the side flutter in the breeze. I sit at the desk, writing in my journal, looking out at the bright sky and thinking, and once in a blue, blue, blue moon, Ayn would open the door and slink in. She was always so soft in her approach that I hardly heard her but became suddenly and keenly aware of her presence. I’d turn around to catch her dark-eyed gaze and we’d never say anything to each other, but she always had a kind of maternal love to give me in a way only a Russian Jewish woman could give: she takes an interest and that’s plenty enough.
I never did anything about her occasional appearances, though, besides having the vague thought that I needed to revisit her, somehow, one day, and try to understand whatever to do with her now that I had come well into my adulthood, and then I always set her to the side. But then, she started making herself more forcefully known to me when she came to the surface again, this time in a Peter Thiel interview. Not long after I listened to that interview, I had my first and only (to date) dream about her. I was standing behind a podium in a debate in a conference room in front of an audience — I was arguing that feminism was incompatible with liberalism2 (??) — and as I finished my piece, I went to take my seat in the front row. She was sitting right behind my spot, wearing a smart, bright mustard-yellow pencil skirt and matching blazer which suited her perfectly. I took my seat and then turned around to her to gauge her reaction, and her lips, tinged with a dark burgundy-toned lipstick, broke out into the thinnest but most sincere smile. She gave me a brief, approving nod and I could see a shining light of happiness in her eyes. This minute cluster of reactions from her felt to me in the dream as strong and as validating and as all-encompassing as a standing ovation from a full house at Madison Square Garden. So there was no escaping Ayn, it seemed, and, the next morning as I woke up, the kernel of this post began to take root. She would compel me to reckon with her, after all these years.
On one hand, I obviously feel a great affinity with Ayn: she and I are in some sort of very small category of perhaps autistic, bookish women who are positively disposed toward capitalism and free markets, and appreciate masculine virtues. When I came back to her — or rather, when I accepted her invitation to come back to her — it was like returning to a high school reunion after many decades, seeking out the face of that one person, wondering what one’s own reaction might be — only to discover that all the old feelings come rushing back a thousand times over, strengthened all the more for the long distance in time. And so it was, watching her interviews again, delving back into her world for the first time in eons. I had expected to feel a little bit of cringe for my former affection, that revisiting my adolescent love for her would feel a little suffocating in adulthood, like putting on a once-beloved jacket in a bright, garish color that I’d long since outgrown, both in size and in taste. But it was quite the opposite. I was only re-enchanted by her, coming to realize that my love for her was destined to be everlasting — even knowing all our differences, all her flaws.
For all these strong, positive, almost instinctual feelings of regard for her — there is, on the other hand, a feeling about our relationship, like a scribble of lyrics out of a song by The Cure — from me and you / there’s worlds to part / with aching looks and breaking hearts / and all the prayers your hands can make… She was not, shall we say, a Proverbs 31 woman, much less ever aspired to be one. Ayn was a Nietzschean — as much as Ayn has meant to me, Nietzsche meant a thousand times more to her. So she rather readily adopted, for various reasons I can imagine, his own criticisms against Christianity, and openly rejected the way of life I hold most dear.
That being said, I hold what seems to be — judging by the number of eyebrow raises I get when I bring this up — an extremely fringe, even maybe scandalous, view, which is almost if not entirely anathema to both sets of adherents involved. This view is that Nietzscheanism and Christianity are not as wholly irreconcilable as they might first seem, in a kind of objects-in-mirror-are-closer-than-they-might-appear sort of way.3 I will try to explain my arguments in more depth at another time, but for now, this post is my effort to sketch this out in some small way, not out of some gratuitous intellectual exercise — but out of a personal conviction, a need even, to lay down something of a bridge between me and her, and thereby to try and cross those waters that lie between us in these “worlds to part”.
This is for you, Ayn. Come back by anytime. The door’s open.
Can Nature Be A Standard?
We will begin, then, with the creation of the world and with God its Maker, for the first fact that you must grasp is this: the renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning. There is thus no inconsistency between creation and salvation; for the One Father has employed the same Agent for both works, effecting the salvation of the world through the same Word Who made it at first.
— St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation
It was not long after listening to this this discussion that Alex Epstein had with Peter Thiel last summer that Ayn came back to me in the dream. Mr. Epstein and Mr. Thiel’s discussion was framed around Mr. Thiel challenging various points in Mr. Epstein’s book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas–Not Less. While I am largely unfamiliar with Mr. Epstein, as far as I can tell he seems to be a dyed-in-the-wool Randian, having worked at the Ayn Rand Institute before he founded the Center for Industrial Progress (a Randian name if ever I heard one!). At one point in the discussion, noted below, Mr. Thiel says to Mr. Epstein that he understands him as an “unreconstructed Randian”, a point which Mr. Epstein largely does not dispute.
Now, on the other hand, I have never heard Mr. Thiel deeply discuss his thoughts on Randianism or the philosophy Mrs. Rand developed, Objectivism, although it seems he has surely read at least one of her seminal novels, The Fountainhead. In 2021, he accepted a lifetime achievement award from the Atlas Society, an explicitly Randian organization. Certainly, Mr. Thiel and the Randians seem to run in similar circles of thought, especially with respect to the monetary system (as I have touched on very briefly here in the introduction to this piece). What is so particularly interesting about this discussion, however, is that beneath the first layer of conversation about environmentalism and energy policy — the bread and butter of Mr. Epstein’s work — is an extremely fascinating, even if much less overt, conversation between a Randian and a Christian about the meaning of nature and the human being.
At one point in the conversation, this break between Mr. Thiel’s perspective and Mr. Epstein’s becomes most clear, and while Mr. Thiel never references Christianity or Christian principles directly in this discussion, he seems to be fashioning an argument that implicitly assumes them (transcript lightly edited for clarity):
MR. THIEL: One philosophical question. You're sort of a unreconstructed Ayn Randian-type person — or almost unreconstructed?
MR. EPSTEIN: Yes.
MR. THIEL: And so human nature is actually not that strong; it's not that well defined, the way I understand the Randian view. It's sort of like it's a very abstract thing, you're a human being; maybe a self-creating being, or something like that, but it's not like some Thomistic set of things that precisely define human nature. So, what do you, as a Randian, mean by human nature?
MR. EPSTEIN: Well, I'll tell you what I mean, but I'm not sure what the contrast is. You're saying it's determined versus not?
MR. THIEL: Well, I'm always a little bit nervous with nature as the standard that we measure things by. What does it actually tell us and especially vis-a-vis human beings? Maybe there's some natural standard of how the laws of nature work: you don't have to fly, because it violates the law of gravity if you don't have wings. There’s all sorts of ways one can use it — but I don't know how one uses nature as a standard with respect to human beings.
MR. EPSTEIN: Well, it’s not a standard.
MR. THIEL: It's supposed to have some normative force in the way in which you're using it, or is it?
MR. EPSTEIN: Well, it has normative force in that it tells you specifically about the causal relationships that you need to understand to achieve some outcome, right? If you understand the nature of life is such that you have to transform nature to meet your needs — which is really the heart of productivity — that tells you that productivity is innate, is a virtue, if your goal is for human beings to flourish.
MR. THIEL: But then, why shouldn’t we just make productivity the standard — or GDP the standard?
MR. EPSTEIN: Well, this goes to the holistic thing of it. I said it's a crucial virtue but there's a question of what if the end is a happy life or flourishing life? The idea is there are multiple necessary causal inputs in that and the other way in which you study nature is, you sort of understand the nature of the being you are including how happiness works, how emotions work, etc. In terms of the Randian Objectivist view, I think she's good at not claiming to understand every aspect of human nature. Her philosophy is focused on certain essentials that then other fields will work with. So, for example, reason is man's basic tool of survival. That's a key aspect of nature: reason is volitional, which — that's a more controversial issue — human beings actually have choice. Then there's an account of what is the nature of choice versus what's not. Even something like political, like freedom, is the social precondition for exercising reason, but it's trying to identify these universal, timeless fundamentals that we can then use to discover other things. […]
MR. THIEL: There's a part of me that is very sympathetic to that, and then part of me that gets very nervous about it, because my look-ahead function is immediately to what does this mean for public policy, politics, etc. On an individual level, I would agree that if human beings are more rational at the margins, they're likely to be happier and have more flourishing lives, and they have some control over that, some freedom to choose, to live more rational lives, and that all sounds good to me. As soon as we say, “Well, maybe the state should help people be a little bit more rational,” we're on the road to North Korea, and so the framing —
MR. EPSTEIN: Right, but then — I don't want to just focus on her, but people can read “What Is Capitalism?” in the book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, that's her most fundamental thing on capitalism. [...]
MR. THIEL: Let me go back to the question: How does human flourishing do? If it's just something that obviously makes sense on an individual level, that's good. If it's a standard for policy makers, that feels fuzzy, and therefore dangerous to me. If you're appealing to people's rational self-interest, and you want to have a flourishing life, and it's your power to do that you know a la Jordan Peterson and this is your approach to self-help, that's all good; it's better than Jordan Peterson. If you're in the EPA and, “Did you know you’re in charge of human flourishing”, right? — this is a formula for mischief.
MR. EPSTEIN: Really glad you brought this up, because this is a really important thing. So, when I'm talking about human flourishing as a basis for policy, I think it's overwhelmingly in the realm of what we can call environmental policy. Take the example if we're thinking about something like air pollution, because I believe in rights-based framework for all this stuff, but in defining like what level of pollution violates a right or not, ultimately the way to determine that is to think about life in a holistic way, in terms of, “What's going to lead to human flourishing?” You're defining the rights to say, “This is a level of this pollution; this is what constitutes trespassing on your neighbor versus not.” You're sort of deriving the rights from an understanding of human flourishing, but you recognize that the key to individual flourishing is is freedom of action within defined spheres, so the last thing you want is some dictator who arbitrarily gets to say on a case-by-case level, “Oh, this is what you need to flourish; this is what you need to flourish.” I think the the concept of human flourishing is used in the determination of rights in these kinds of environmental issues. The other way in which I think it's important, is insofar as we're broadly debating across different political philosophies what to do about energy, I think for every political philosophy is a question of, are you looking at it from a pro-human way or an anti-human way? And whatever your political philosophy is, even if you're collectivist, you should be looking at it in a pro-human way.
[…]
MR. THIEL: Let me ask about one ambiguity there. Is human flourishing about human beings, individually, or human beings, collectively?
MR. EPSTEIN: I don't think — I don't make a separation.
MR. THIEL: I think in theory, there's no separation, but in practice I would argue there is, because if you look at them individually you would probably focus on the human beings currently in existence, whereas if you think about them collectively, there's some version where you get into thinking about all the human beings from now till the year 3000 and beyond, and in theory, that's a more holistic perspective. I hate EA, and in practice, it's a formula for endless mischief…
MR. EPSTEIN: I'm happy to talk about it, but I'm also not utilitarian. […] Let's put it through the anti-impact movement — taken literally and seriously, it is the ultimate form of human sacrifice because, it's basically saying, “Sacrifice for the sake of an unimpacted planet,” whereas you have all these other seemingly pro-human things that end up being anti-human. […] Like, that's not my version at all. But then Peter Singer — effective altruist — his alleged genius contribution was to bring in all of these other animals that we actually can't peacefully coexist with, and say, "Well we should factor in their ‘happiness’ versus human beings we can beneficially coexist with, so respecting their rights is good for us.” So he's done that, and now he's part of this movement to consider the imagined interest of humans indefinitely into the future and what this all leads to is just an unlimited license to sacrifice individuals, and to consider their lives unimportant and their rights non-existent. You look at like a MacAskill4 type, I mean, their thinking is such crap, if you know about any of the issues on some level.
MR. THIEL: You’re being way too kind to these people. I find it hard to even think that they're acting in good faith. It’s like some attempt to go towards some weird ad hominem sociological commentary where if we have some capitalist-communist fusion product that's very desirable in our society, where someone like Sam Bankman-Fried says he's going to be the world's first trillionaire and it's okay because he's an effective altruist; he's going to give everybody on the planet a hundred dollars. Then there is a theoretical discussion about whether this is a good way to build the future and morally correct, and I can't even get to that, because I just don't believe any of it. I just think it was all a fraud — but you're the better person.
MR. EPSTEIN: But by the way if people are interested in this — if you search “Ayn Rand Institute effective altruism” — I used to work there and some of my colleagues have talked about this; I think they have some good stuff. What I do need to distinguish myself from is all the forms of human sacrifice, of individual sacrifice, that masquerade as a kind of collective, including future collective, human flourishing. That is a battle that needs to be fought; it's not my primary battle because my primary battle is against people who want to sacrifice human flourishing to unimpacted nature.
[…]
MR. EPSTEIN: Can you talk briefly about the need for a positive vision — and let's focus in particular on my issue on energy and Industry — because I want to hear you talk about that and see if we differ at all and see if I can learn anything?
MR. THIEL: If we're going to have a 21st century that is successful, I think it will somehow look different in a physical material way from the 20th century. The energy version would be that it would physically look different. My intuition is that we have, I don't know, maybe lots of forests and a few nuclear power plants that power the whole the whole country, versus we've chopped down all the trees and covered them with solar panels that barely work, or something like this, or, you know, we have windmills polluting the entire coast and ugilfying the landscape. But there's sort of like a picture of what our society, what the future looks like, and we're hesitant to push too specific a picture, because we're not in favor of centralized government. We don't want to dictate this or something like that um and uh and at the same time I think this is one of the weaknesses on our side: we don't have a of a a concrete picture of how this different world will look like and then the other side surely does. […]
If Los Angeles looks exactly like the present in 2100, I think we will have somehow failed in a various way. Then, the green people would tell us if it looks exactly like this, that's the best we can hope for: that if all just grew over. […] I keep coming back to: it shouldn't be abstracted. It's not just the rhetoric. It's not just the abstract, right, and if we could actually have a picture, this is good. One of the things that's been a little bit weak about the information age revolution in Silicon Valley is that it’s a little bit too abstracted from the physical layer. Yes, AI and the large language models: it's a very big technological breakthrough; it will make a very big difference. Then, I don't think that's the only dimension in which the future should look different from the present. It can't just be the level of bits. It has to also be on the level of atoms.
Nestled within this conversation are several interesting questions about how Randianism intersects with Christian values — even while explicitly rejecting them — especially on the question of human beings and our relationship to nature. But ultimately, all of these questions and comments have very modern assumptions underneath them that cannot go unexamined. To understand the modern relationship with nature, however, we must first revisit the past.
“Mystics Of Spirit Or Mystics Of Muscle — Reason? Whoever Heard Of It?”
As I went back into the Randian world for this post, I came across an interesting piece from 2013 in First Things: “Ayn Rand Really, Really Hated C.S. Lewis”, which highlights Ayn’s marginalia on her copy of C.S. Lewis’ 1943 compilation of lectures stitched together in one of his more known works, The Abolition of Man. I found Ayn’s marginalia to be: (1) really very funny; and (2) really rather unsurprising. Ayn held a modernist’s view of the world and Mr. Lewis a medieval one5. Modernists and medievalists have been at each other’s throats since scholasticism.
A passage in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber (below, tr. Talcott Parsons) crisply explains the differences between the medievalist and the modernist (here, little different than the Calvinist — appropriate, as Ayn shares quite a bit with Calvinism6):
Although the Reformation is unthinkable without Luther’s own personal religious development, and was spiritually long influenced by his personality, without Calvinism his work could not have had permanent concrete success. Nevertheless, the reason for this common repugnance of Catholics and Lutherans lies, at least partly, in the ethical peculiarities of Calvinism. A purely superficial glance shows that there is here quite a different relationship between the religious life and earthly activity than in either Catholicism or Lutheranism. Even in literature motivated purely by religious factors that is evident. Take for instance, the end of the end of the Divine Comedy, where the poet in Paradise stands speechless in his passive contemplation of the secrets of God, and compare it with the poem which has come to be called the Divine Comedy of Puritanism. Milton closes the last song of Paradise Lost after describing the expulsion from paradise as follows: —
“They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon:
The world was all before them, there to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.”And only a little before Michael had said to Adam:
. . . “Only add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith;
Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love,
By name to come called Charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loth
To leave this Paradise, but shall possess
A paradise within thee, happier far.”One feels at once that this powerful expression of the Puritan’s serious attention to this world, his acceptance of his life in the world as a task, could not possibly have come from the pen of a medieval writer.”
Ayn revolted against passages like these in The Abolition of Man:
“The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and science the new thing that acme in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Age: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavor are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. but if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disguising and impious — such as digging up and mutilating the dead. […]
It might be going to far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth: but I think it would be true to say it was born in an unhealthy neighbourhood and at an inauspicious hour.”
Contra Mr. Lewis, Ayn wrote in The New Left, lauding, against the “mystics of spirit or mystics of muscle”, the birth of reason:
The Middle Ages were an era of mysticism, ruled by blind faith and blind obedience to the dogma that faith is superior to reason. The Renaissance was specifically the rebirth of reason, the liberation of man’s mind, the triumph of rationality over mysticism— a faltering, incomplete, but impassioned triumph that led to the birth of science, of individualism, of freedom.
Mr. Lewis’ perspective in The Abolition of Man is quite an interesting foil to Ayn, and it is little wonder that The Abolition of Man stirred up such passion in her, because, strangely enough, the arguments that Mr. Lewis — one of the most famous Christians in the 20th century Anglosphere — presents in The Abolition of Man are not only not particularly Christian: they are even — perhaps — somewhat antithetical to it. And Ayn, being extremely modern, might have found herself making, without knowing it, quite Christian objections. Where The Abolition of Man really falls apart as any sort of reasonable Christian apologia that Christians could offer to a modern like Ayn, however, is with respect to the subject of the discussion between Messrs. Thiel and Epstein: on man’s relationship to nature.
In The Abolition of Man:
Now I take it that when we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our convenience we reduce it to the level of “Nature” in the sense that we suspend our judgments of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity. This repression of elements in what would otherwise by our total reaction to it is sometimes very noticeable and even painful: something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room. These objects resist the movement of the mind whereby we thrust them into the world of mere nature. But in other instances too, a similar price is exacted for our analytical knowledge and manipulative power, even if we have ceased to count it. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so many have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. […]
We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may “conquer” them. We are always conquering Nature, because “Nature” is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. Every conquest over Nature increase her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psycho-analyse her. The wrestling (wresting) of powers from nature is is also the surrendering of things to Nature.
The Western medieval project was to slowly integrate the pagan world into the Christian one, and it is such a pre-modern worldview that Mr. Lewis presents here, where artifacts of paganism remain in the presence of “bleeding trees” or otherwise the stars have “divinity”. It is no surprise that Mr. Lewis holds such a perspective, as it is the exact same perspective that very much informs his seminal work of fiction, his children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia. In Narnia, four human children from wartime London enter into a magical world populated not only by ordinary (albeit talking) animals like beavers and horses, but also mythical creatures such as fauns, centaurs, satyrs, unicorns, dwarves, giants, and of course, Mr. Lewis’ favorite dryads.
Jonathan Pageau noted this in some comments on the Narnia series:
C.S. Lewis, unlike Tolkien, does not take into account the quality of the beings he places into his Narnia. For example, a satyr has a certain characteristic. It’s a human with animal legs. Centaurs are usually related to aggressive, out-of-control sexual desire. To have them be characters in the book, like, ‘Here’s the centaur, here’s the faun, here’s all these creatures,’ and they don’t have the qualities of what they are?
One important purpose of myth is to provide information, a kind of map, about the wider world. Almost all mythical creatures represent an exaggerated version of marginalia that a person would encounter as they leave the domain of their known world. In some cases, such as with dwarves or giants, these mythical apprehensions are simply intended to demonstrate exaggerated differences in height relative to a native population — if the hero leaves his home and wanders out far enough into populations that have not genetically mixed in with his own, he will find people who look very different from him. Similarly, mythical tropes are rife with siren-like temptresses of one sort or another, women who are beautiful and unusually available, always with some sort of catch that is not immediately clear, and these tropes are simply intended to explain how foreign women encountered in the margins of one’s world will be especially appealing because of their novelty, but nonetheless are dangerous because they are from cultures with which the hero may have little familiarity, and to fall into any sort of relationship with such women may bind the hero to the foreign world in ways he does not anticipate.
The monsters, however, that Mr. Lewis includes in Narnia, are a distinct expression of myth, beyond simple information about marginalia. These are either animal hybrids or, more strikingly, half-human, half-animal hybrids: fauns, satyrs, centaurs. Monsters are notable, and their treatment in stories very important, because they are what is ultimately generated at the end of mimetic frenzy. For a Shakespearean example, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play-within-a-play actor Nick Bottom mutates into a human with an ass’ head — concurrent with the mimetic crisis undergone by the wilds of the forest by the four entangled lovers who frame the story. René Girard explains in A Theater of Envy:
If the lopsided view that the lovers take of their own relations keep reversing itself at a constantly accelerated pace, the moment must come when all differences oscillate so rapidly that a separate and distinct apprehension of the polarities they define becomes impossible; all extremes contaminate each other. Beyond a certain threshold of instability, dizziness prevails and normal vision is impaired; hallucinations occur, but not of an an entirely capricious and imaginary type.
When the dog and the god, the beast and the angel, and all such contraries oscillate fast enough, they become one, but not in the sense of some harmonious “synthesis” à la Hegel. Entities are beginning to merge that will never truly belong together; the result is a jumble of bits and pieces borrowed from the component beings. If an illusion of unity emerges, it will include fragments of the former opposites arranged in a disorderly mosaic. Instead of a god and a dog facing each other as two irreducible specificities, we will have changing combinations and mixtures, a god with beastlike features, or a beast that resembles a god. This process is properly cinematic. When many images are seen in quick succession, they produce the illusion of a single moving image, the appearance of a living being that seems more or less one, but in this case it will have the form, or rather the formlessness, of “some monstrous shape.”
A mythical monster is a conjunction of elements normally specific to different creatures; it will automatically result from the process suggested by Shakespeare, if the substitutions are numerous and rapid enough to become imperceptible as such. IN a centaur, elements specific to a horse and a human being are joined, just as elements specific to an ass and a human being are joined in the monstrous metamorphosis of Bottom. Since there is no limit to the differences that can be jumbled together, the diversity of monsters will seem infinite and will seem to “marry” one another. The “seething brain” of a Bottom is about to transform this metaphoric marriage into a real one, his own, with the queen of the fairies herself, the beautiful Titania.
The playwright does not merely invite us to witness the gracious but insignificant evolution of purely decorative fairies; he offers us a coherent view of mythical genesis. The fairies are “monsters,” and Bottom becomes one as well when he turns into an ass. Monsters are a conjunction of man, god, and beast, and are born as a result of the process triggered by the use and abuse of animal and transcendental images. [….] [F]or Shakespeare himself, the monstrous metamorphosis of Bottom is rooted in mimetic interaction via the animal images. The “supernatural” incidents of the play are not the gratuitous fabrication of an author different to the intellectual unity of his work. The myth of the fairies is a production of the people overcome by mimetic frenzy. […] The monster is the last phase before a confusion so total that everything becomes alike.”
That monsters are so associated with mimetic frenzy (and, ultimately, a murder to resolve the tension) gives rise to their prevalence in paganism, as pagan religions are simply capturing (and thus attempting to control) the symbols that they see emerge in mimetic crises, where the monster becomes a god because he unifies the community. The ancient Egyptians perhaps documented this best:
And, more famously:
In the Narnia universe, almost all the monsters serve the lion Aslan, the allegorical stand-in for Christ and putative theocratic ruler of Narnia, which is an interesting choice indeed as Mr. Pageau suggests, because the monsters are fundamentally representing very pagan concepts that are inherently linked with human sacrifice. This is perhaps the clearest example of the flawed reasoning that underlies Mr. Lewis’ arguments in The Abolition of Man.
Stranger still, The Abolition of Man, composed a good decade after Mr. Lewis’ conversion to Christianity, scarcely references Jesus Christ at all, and, even worse, for reasons I can only hazard a guess at, serves up the same exact warmed-over perennialism for which Christians have verbally flogged Aldous Huxley — who was never a professing Christian — for eighty years.
Instead of leaning his arguments on Jesus Christ, Mr. Lewis rests the bulk of The Abolition of Man upon what he calls the “Tao”:
The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. […] This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as: the Tao.
Later:
And is it, in any event, possible to talk of obeying what I call the Tao? If we lump together, as I have done, the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew, shall we not find many contradictions and some absurdities? I admit all this. Some criticism, some removal of contradictions, even some real development, is required. […]
[T]he Tao admits development from within. There is a difference between a real moral advance and a mere innovation. From the Confucian “Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you” to the Christian “Do as you would be done by” is a real advance. The morality of Nietzsche is a mere innovation. The first is an advance because no one who did not admit the validity of the old maxim could see reason for accepting the new one, and anyone who accepted the old would at once recognize the new as an extension of the same principle. If he rejected it, he would have to reject it as a superfluity, something that went too far, not as something simply heterogenous from his own ideas of value. The Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgements at all.
The concept of the Tao is integral to the arguments in The Abolition of Man. What Lewis is trying to conceptualize as “the Tao” is some sort of natural law, a roughly similar code of ethics that continually emerges across many different cultures and at many different periods in history.7 This is further reinforced by the absolutely appalling appendix to The Abolition of Man, titled “Illustrations of the Tao”, which he introduces with the following commentary:
The following illustrations of the Natural Law are collected from such sources as come readily to the hand of one who is not a professional historian. The list makes no pretence of completeness. It will be noticed that writers such as Locke and Hooker, who wrote within the Christian tradition, are quoted side by side with the New Testament. This would, of course, be absurd if I were trying to collect independent testimonies to the Tao. But (1) I am not trying to prove its validity by the argument from common consent. Its validity cannot be deduced. For those who do not perceive its rationality, even universal consent could not prove it. (2) The idea of collecting independent testimonies presupposes that ‘civilizations’ have arisen in the world independently of one another. […[ It is by no means certain that there has ever (in the sense required) been more than one civilization in all history. It is at least arguable that every civilization we find has been derived from another civilization, and in the last resort, from a single center— “carried” like an infectious disease or like the Apostolic succession.
Mr. Lewis then goes on to list, in a kind of tossed-together kleptomaniac salad to make the British Museum blush, his “illustrations” in axioms from the Laws of Manu, Babylonian hymns, Exodus, Cicero, old Norse, Homer, 1 Timothy, ancient Egyptian confessions, Native American accounts, observations of the Australian Aborgines, Beowulf, Seneca, the Bhagavad gita, Plato, and the Gospel of John.
Mr. Lewis correctly notes in his illustration that “those who do not perceive its rationality, even universal consent could not prove it” because there is no rationality to be perceived here. To sprinkle together the words of the Lord from the Gospel of John with Old Norse and Seneca is an undertaking that even the leftist libertine Thomas Jefferson did not dare do.
Ultimately, Mr. Lewis uses the concept of the Tao to develop the idea of a universal “law of nature”, here expressed in his most famous work of nonfiction, Mere Christianity:
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. […] But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong "the Law of Nature," they really meant the Law of Human Nature. […]
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. […]
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man [….]”
To Mr. Lewis, theistic pagans have a moral teaching "like […] to our own” (that is, Mr. Lewis’ own Christianity). Because Mr. Lewis has the typical literate hangover common to all moderns, he myopically focuses on stripping down whole cultures to what has been written down — totally ignoring ritual and all that lies before literacy, much less before language — and considers this much more of a whole summation of a Weltanschaaung than it actually is. It is especially absurd that Mr. Lewis, as a Christian, would include the Babylonians in this list as having a “moral teaching” similar to “our own”, given that he should have been well familiar with the story of Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego in the Book of Daniel:
King Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold, sixty cubits high and six cubits wide, and set it up on the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon. He then summoned the satraps, prefects, governors, advisers, treasurers, judges, magistrates and all the other provincial officials to come to the dedication of the image he had set up. So the satraps, prefects, governors, advisers, treasurers, judges, magistrates and all the other provincial officials assembled for the dedication of the image that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up, and they stood before it.
Then the herald loudly proclaimed, “Nations and peoples of every language, this is what you are commanded to do: As soon as you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music, you must fall down and worship the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up. Whoever does not fall down and worship will immediately be thrown into a blazing furnace.”
Therefore, as soon as they heard the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp and all kinds of music, all the nations and peoples of every language fell down and worshiped the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up.
At this time some astrologers came forward and denounced the Jews. They said to King Nebuchadnezzar, “May the king live forever! Your Majesty has issued a decree that everyone who hears the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music must fall down and worship the image of gold, and that whoever does not fall down and worship will be thrown into a blazing furnace. But there are some Jews whom you have set over the affairs of the province of Babylon—Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego—who pay no attention to you, Your Majesty. They neither serve your gods nor worship the image of gold you have set up.”
Furious with rage, Nebuchadnezzar summoned Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. So these men were brought before the king, and Nebuchadnezzar said to them, “Is it true, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, that you do not serve my gods or worship the image of gold I have set up? Now when you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music, if you are ready to fall down and worship the image I made, very good. But if you do not worship it, you will be thrown immediately into a blazing furnace. Then what god will be able to rescue you from my hand?”
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to him, “King Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us[c] from Your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”
Then Nebuchadnezzar was furious with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and his attitude toward them changed. He ordered the furnace heated seven times hotter than usual and commanded some of the strongest soldiers in his army to tie up Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and throw them into the blazing furnace. So these men, wearing their robes, trousers, turbans and other clothes, were bound and thrown into the blazing furnace. The king’s command was so urgent and the furnace so hot that the flames of the fire killed the soldiers who took up Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and these three men, firmly tied, fell into the blazing furnace.
What is dearly missing from this story, one will observe, is any sort of “moral teaching” that compels King Nebuchadnezzar to stop the human sacrifice of three young men, strangers in their midst. Nor does he even have the slightest compunction about killing three young men on the basis that they will not engage in pagan worship. On the contrary: he is described as “furious” twice and is so angry after their interaction that he orders the furnace to be heated up “seven times hotter than usual”.
The historical critical approach dates at least the final assembly of the Book of Daniel into the form that we now have it to the mid-second century BC, about the time of the Maccabean Revolt — and less than 200 years before the birth of Christ — and places its context in a way that we might better understand the story to the final authors. Scholar Norman Cohn on the Book of Daniel:
It was written about 164 B.C., probably by several authors. And its background was what was known as the Antiochan persecution of the Jews. After Alexander the Great conquered that whole area of the Near East, he left behind him a number of successor kingdoms, one of which was based in Syria. It was known as the Seleucid dynasty, and one of the monarchs, a particularly nasty one, was called Antiochus Epiphanes IV. And he did exercise a very real tyranny over the Jews. On the whole, these ancient Near Eastern empires didn't persecute people for their religion. They could be nasty to conquered peoples as conquered peoples, but they left their religion largely undisturbed. But not so this man, who desecrated the Temple and forbade all Jewish religious practices. The answer to this was that those Jews who wouldn't compromise in any way started a war, known as the Maccabean Revolt, and in the end won. And they defeated Antiochus, and reconsecrated the Temple, and it was during this war that the Book of Daniel was composed. It wasn't, however, composed by the Maccabeans. Any idea that is was a kind of recruiting manifesto is now discredited. It wasn't that. It was simply a prophetic writing. Saying that we're going to defeat Antiochus and beyond that lies a world in which the Jews will be recognized as God's chosen people, and will really dominate in their turn.
To the extent that the final composition of the story exists for its immediate audience, then the story of King Nebuchadnezzar may be read, in one view, perhaps as a subtle reference to Antiochus. Among his many other endeavors, Antiochus was fervent about the promotion of Hellenistic culture, and so one way of reading the story of Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego is as a clarion call to the Jewish readers of the mid-second century to hold fast to their cultural identity against the onslaught of pagan culture. For the Jews who read the very same Book of Daniel that we have today understood themselves, and their relationship to pagan culture, very differently than the way that Mr. Lewis understands all vaguely theistic or moral worldviews as part of one universal “Law of Right and Wrong” as he describes it in Mere Christianity.
Quite the opposite: the Jews saw themselves as spearheading a very different project across the millennia, belief in a singular, omnipotent God above all others, a project that they understood would, one day, culminate in the birth of the Mashiach.
Salvation Is From The Jews
And now the Lord says—
he who formed me in the womb to be his servant
to bring Jacob back to him
and gather Israel to himself,
for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord
and my God has been my strength—
he says:
“It is too small a thing for you to be my servant
to restore the tribes of Jacob
and bring back those of Israel I have kept.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles,
that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”
The Jewish project is the most audacious, ambitious project in all of human history. That The Abolition of Man and Mere Christianity give almost no special mention to Judaism, while waxing poetic about pagan concepts, is yet another demonstration of the fatally flawed construction of Mr. Lewis’ theological thinking.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of the 9th to 6th centuries before the birth of Christ, the Israelites began coalesce on a relatively untried concept to date in human culture: monotheism.8 One would imagine that Mr. Lewis would have paid greater attention to the distinction between monotheism and polytheism, beyond simply commenting on their shared similarity of theism, given that a monotheistic outlook is not only in the opening line of the the Nicene Creed that Mr. Lewis, as an Anglican, would have stood up to recite every Sunday (“I believe in one God…”) but the practice of monolatry, at the very least, is enshrined in the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3)9.
For, in adopting monotheism thousands of years ago, the Israelites set humanity on a collision course with history. To begin to believe in a singular God, who could not be seen with human eyes nor take any form, and who was all-powerful, was to begin to move away from particular pagan practices — all of which were embedded in and informed by cyclical concepts of time re-initiated by the sacrifice of a human victim. As the Israelites de-paganized, they naturally began to shift away from the pagan understanding of sacrificial systems and they discovered our darkest secret: the revelation of the innocent victim. The story of Genesis 4, which not only openly and honestly tells the story of Abel’s murder by Cain — rather than mythologizing it — but has the omnipotent, transcendent God take the side of the victim and give voice to Abel is a staggering development in human understanding of the world. God’s statement to Cain in Genesis 4:10, “Your brother’s blood still cries out to Me from the ground” is perhaps the most scandalous line ever written.
Here, at long last, was a God who not only did not ritualistically demand Abel’s death, but one who was almost horrified and shocked by Cain’s violence, and took Abel’s side. However, in Mr. Lewis’ conception, there is no room for the Innocent Victim, and pagan religions are understood together with monotheism as being generally theistic and having shared moral teachings. In Mere Christianity:
If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. […]
The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in some kind of God or gods, and the minority who do not. On this point, Christianity lines up with the majority — lines up with ancient Greeks and Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, etc., against the modern Western European materialist.
In Mr. Lewis’ conception of the Tao and the aphorisms in the appendix of The Abolition of Man, the blood, bodies, and agonizing deaths of innocent, sacrificed victims to pagan gods are simply not present, because they did not live long enough to be the ones to write down the words that Mr. Lewis would record as demonstrative examples of the universal "Law of Right and Wrong”. We will never know, for example, what the last words of three children sacrificed by the Incas were, or what their opinion might have been on the “moral teachings” of the Inca culture. Instead, we have only their bodies and our scientific technology to guess at their last days:
The mummified remains were discovered in 1999, entombed in a shrine near the summit of the 6,739m-high Llullaillaco volcano in Argentina.
Three children were buried there: a 13-year-old girl, and a younger boy and girl, thought to be about four or five years old. […]
[The boy’s] clothes were covered in vomit and diarrhoea, indicating a state of terror. The vomit was stained red by the hallucinogenic drug achiote, traces of which were also found in his stomach and faeces.
However, his death is thought to have been caused by suffocation. The boy was wound in a textile wrapping drawn so tight that his ribs were crushed and his pelvis dislocated. [...]
The [teenage] girl, known as the "Llullaillaco maiden", was probably considered more highly valued than the younger children, because of her virginal status.
Tests on her long braids revealed that her coca [cocaine] consumption increased sharply a year before her death.
The scientists believe this corresponds to the time she was selected for sacrifice. Earlier research also reveals that her diet changed at this point too, from a potato-based peasant diet to one rich in meat and maize.
Dr Brown explained: "From what we know of the Spanish chronicles, particularly attractive or gifted women were chosen. The Incas actually had someone who went out to find these young women and they were taken from their families."
The results also revealed that the girl ingested large amounts of alcohol in the last few weeks of her life.
It suggests she was heavily sedated before she and the other children were taken to the volcano, placed in their tombs and left to die.10
Unlike the pagans, however, the Jews began to refuse to negotiate with all these various nature deities, and instead turned toward a mutual, self-giving covenant relationship with one God, almighty, a Creator and Lord of all who was Himself uncreated.
What resulted from this experiment was not some continuation of a universal “Law of Right and Wrong” or some iteration on a theistic project that has anything in common with, as Mr. Lewis asserts, “ancient Greeks and Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, etc.” (the etc. there speaks volumes….). Not at all. What the Jews did, in putting aside a typical pagan pantheon of nature-based deities and consolidating power into one immanent and transcendent God above all other gods, resulted in a complete upending of the entire cosmological order as it had ever existed.
Pagans did not understand humans as above nature, and this conception is entirely to be expected: nature is, in some sense, always man’s ultimate enemy, one that threatens to devour him via thirst or hunger or wild animals or disease or age even if he lives in perfect harmony with all other men. Humans did not exist without the cycle of the rain falling and the sun shining and the crops growing and the locusts staying away. These forces, to the ancient eye, were ultimately inscrutable entities upon which human life depended, and so it made complete sense for the pagan to attempt to barter with and control these entities and understand them in religious terms, and even to offer human sacrifice for such control. The rhythms of nature invite a cyclical — as opposed to progressive — understanding of time after which it is entirely unsurprising that human sacrifice would be used to initiate and vouchsafe each new cycle. In Thomas Molnar’s book The Pagan Temptation:
Indeed, all pagan religions are, with variations, pantheistic: The world-all is all that is, and since experience tell us how small a part we are of this totality, we drawn the conclusion that we are playthings of hidden forces. We are potential victims unless we learn the art of propitiating them, rending them favorable, and manuevering as so not to be crushed by them. This scramble for survival is life in the pagan cult. Pagan wisdom consists in the attempt to understand this life and to properly place human beings in the order of powers. […] The result is the tranquility of the inner life: the sage, equidistant from the tumultuous forces, internally neutral, and occupied only with the self, since the outside world is unmanageable, mostly hostile, and fundamentally meaningless.
Erich Fromm11 observes about the Jewish tradition in You Shall Be As Gods:
Man, the prisoner of nature, becomes free by becoming fully human. In the biblical and later Jewish view, freedom and independence are the goals of human development, and the aim of human action is the constant process of liberating oneself from the shackles that bind man to the past, to nature, to the clan, to idols. […] Adam and Eve at the beginning of their evolution are bound to blood and soil; they are still ‘blind.’ But ‘their eyes are opened’ after they acquire the knowledge of good and evil. With this knowledge the original harmony with nature is broken. Man begins the process of individuation and cuts his ties with nature.” (emphasis added)
The Jewish concept of an immanent transcendent God who wrestles with His own creation — as with Jacob — and allows Himself to be persuaded without any sacrifice and on arguments alone — as with Abraham — paves the way for a God who enters into a mutually binding covenant relationship with humans. As Mr. Fromm notes, at the burning bush, God introduces Himself to Moses as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob: for He is no god of nature, but a God of history, and a God of human history.
You Shall Be As Gods:
The most dramatic expression of the radical consequences of the covenant is found in Abraham’s argument with God when God wants to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because of their “wickedness”. […] [Abraham’s question to God] “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?’ This sentence marks the fundamental change in the concept of God as a result of the covenant. In courteous language, yet with the daring of a hero, Abraham challenges God to comply with the principles of justice. His is not the attitude of a meek supplicant but that of the proud man who has a right to demand that God uphold the principle of justice. […] With Abraham’s challenge a new element has entered the biblical and later Jewish tradition. Precisely because God is bound by the norms of justice and love, man is no longer his slave. Man can challenge God—as God can challenge man—because above both are principles and norms. […] Abraham is not a rebellious Prometheus; he is a free man who has the right to demand, and God has no right to refuse. […] God reveals himself as the God of history rather than the God of nature.
This is totally antithetical to the entire pagan cosmological order of things. In The Pagan Temptation, Mr. Molnar notes that the pagans “do not even have the concept of a good, just, forgiving, and yet powerful creator God, and they cannot even begin to fathom the God who came to human beings in Christ.”
For it is only in the Jewish project that the embers of Christianity can be kindled. As Jesus Himself says to the Samaritan woman at the well, “You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22). Only with an immanent, transcendent God who prioritizes His relationship with the nation of Israel above all — and promises they will be a light to the nations and spread His worship over the globe — is the way paved for the birth of God as incarnate within His own creation, incarnate within man himself.
In Nietzsche’s The Antichrist (tr. H.L. Mencken):
The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world, for when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be, they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at any price: this price involved a radical falsification of all nature, of all naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the outer. They put themselves against all those conditions under which, hitherto, a people had been able to live, or had even been permitted to live; out of themselves they evolved an idea which stood in direct opposition to natural conditions—one by one they distorted religion, civilization, morality, history and psychology until each became a contradiction of its natural significance. We meet with the same phenomenon later on, in an incalculably exaggerated form, but only as a copy: the Christian church, put beside the “people of God,” shows a complete lack of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the Jews are the most fateful people in the history of the world: their influence has so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter that today the Christian can cherish anti-Semitism without realizing that it is no more than the final consequence of Judaism.
Christianity is not some iteration or final perfection of broad pagan theistic projects with their nebulous “moral teachings” that are some expression of a continually emergent Tao across many different cultures and times. No, Nietzsche’s diagnosis is wholly accurate: Christianity is the final consequence of Judaism, and it was Christianity, as the Lord Jesus Himself predicted, that incinerated all the old order of the world, together with its gods, and from such ashes something entirely new came into being.
From Bleeding Trees To Chemical Agriculture: The Desacralization Of The Universe
As I quoted above from The Abolition of Man, Mr. Lewis seems to lament too this change in the cosmological order, although he, unlike, Nietzsche, does not correctly apprehend its root cause. Where Mr. Lewis comments that a “price” is “exacted for our analytical knowledge and manipulative power [over nature],” he is actually lamenting the desacralization of the universe:
We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so many have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture.
Where Mr. Lewis speaks of “bleeding trees” in Virgil, he is no doubt speaking of this passage in the Aeneid, when Aeneas happens upon a myrtle tree whose leaves he plucks in order to dress his altar of sacrifice (tr. Theodore Williams):
Unto Dione's daughter, and all gods
who blessed our young emprise, due gifts were paid;
and unto the supreme celestial King
I slew a fair white bull beside the sea.
But haply near my place of sacrifice
a mound was seen, and on the summit grew
a copse of corner and a myrtle tree,
with spear-like limbs outbranched on every side.
This I approached, and tried to rend away
from its deep roots that grove of gloomy green,
and dress my altars in its leafy boughs.
But, horrible to tell, a prodigy
smote my astonished eyes: for the first tree,
which from the earth with broken roots I drew,
dripped black with bloody drops, and gave the ground
dark stains of gore. Cold horror shook my frame,
and every vein within me froze for fear.
Once more I tried from yet another stock
the pliant stem to tear, and to explore
the mystery within,—but yet again
the foul bark oozed with clots of blackest gore!
From my deep-shaken soul I made a prayer
to all the woodland nymphs and to divine
Gradivus, patron of the Thracian plain,
to bless this sight, to lift its curse away.
But when at a third sheaf of myrtle spears
I fell upon my knees, and tugged amain
against the adverse ground (I dread to tell!),
a moaning and a wail from that deep grave
burst forth and murmured in my listening ear:
“Why wound me, great Aeneas, in my woe?
O, spare the dead, nor let thy holy hands
do sacrilege and sin! I, Trojan-born,
was kin of thine. This blood is not of trees.
Haste from this murderous shore, this land of greed.
O, I am Polydorus! Haste away!
Here was I pierced; a crop of iron spears
has grown up o'er my breast, and multiplied
to all these deadly javelins, keen and strong.”
The reference to Edmund Spenser is from his Faerie Queene, in which two lovers have become trees. As Polydorus notes to Aeneas, and as in the case in Spenser, the trees are not bleeding as trees. They are bleeding because, even within the logic of the story, they are actually trapped humans. The Girardian will understand that such stories are very light, thin cover-ups for human sacrifice that have taken place at special groves and trees12. In Willibald’s very credible biography of St. Boniface — he was ordained a priest by him — who evangelized to the Germanic tribes in the eighth century, he tells the infamous story of St. Boniface — who, legend says, heard that a little boy was set to be sacrificed by the pagans in the forest at Donar’s Oak (tr. George Robinson):
Moreover some were wont secretly, some openly to sacrifice to trees and springs; some in secret, others openly practised inspections of victims and divinations, legerdemain and incantations; some turned their attention to auguries and auspices and various sacrificial rites; while others, with sounder minds , abandoned all the profanations of heathenism, and committed none of these things. With the advice and ' counsel of these last, the saint [Boniface] attempted, in the place called Gaesmere, while the servants of God stood by his side, to fell a certain oak of extraordinary size, which is called, by an old name of the pagans, the Oak of Jupiter [to the Teutons, Thor]. And when in the strength of his steadfast heart he had cut the lower notch, there was present a great multitude of pagans, who in their souls were most earnestly cursing the enemy of their gods.
But when the fore side of the tree was notched only a little, suddenly the oak’s vast bulk, driven by a divine blast from above, crashed to the ground, shivering its crown of branches as it fell; and, as if by the gracious dispensation of the Most High , it was also burst into four parts, and four trunks of huge size, equal in length, were seen, unwrought by the brethren who stood by. At this sight the pagans who before had cursed now, on the contrary, believed, and blessed the Lord, and put away their former reviling. Then moreover the most holy bishop, after taking counsel with the brethren, built from the timber of the tree a wooden oratory, and dedicated it in honor of Saint Peter the Apostle.
Nor was St. Boniface alone in his encounters of sacrifice at trees in these lands. Even in the first century, Tactius noted in Germania:
“Mercury is the deity whom they chiefly worship, and on certain days they deem it right to sacrifice to him even with human victims. Hercules and Mars they appease with more lawful offerings. Some of the Suevi also sacrifice to Isis. Of the occasion and origin of this foreign rite I have discovered nothing, but that the image, which is fashioned like a light galley, indicates an imported worship. The Germans, however, do not consider it consistent with the grandeur of celestial beings to confine the gods within walls, or to liken them to the form of any human countenance. They consecrate woods and groves, and they apply the names of deities to the abstraction which they see only in spiritual worship. […]
At a stated period, all the tribes of the same race assemble by their representatives in a grove consecrated by the auguries of their forefathers, and by immemorial associations of terror. Here, having publicly slaughtered a human victim, they celebrate the horrible beginning of their barbarous rite. […]
None of these tribes have any noteworthy feature, except their common worship of Ertha, or mother-Earth, and their belief that she interposes in human affairs, and visits the nations in her car. In an island of the ocean there is a sacred grove, and within it a consecrated chariot, covered over with a garment. Only one priest is permitted to touch it. He can perceive the presence of the goddess in this sacred recess, and walks by her side with the utmost reverence as she is drawn along by heifers. It is a season of rejoicing, and festivity reigns wherever she deigns to go and be received. They do not go to battle or wear arms; every weapon is under lock; peace and quiet are known and welcomed only at these times, till the goddess, weary of human intercourse, is at length restored by the same priest to her temple. Afterwards the car, the vestments, and, if you like to believe it, the divinity herself, are purified in a secret lake. Slaves perform the rite, who are instantly swallowed up by its waters. Hence arises a mysterious terror and a pious ignorance concerning the nature of that which is seen only by men doomed to die.”
A Deutsche Welle article, intriguingly titled “Nazis and Fairytales in Germany’s Forests”, comments:
The Nazis built out the mythology that the German forest and people were one and the same. This idea served to exclude groups not deemed to be part of this unit.
This ideology propagated the view that Jews were the people of the steppes, or grasslands, and were not capable of understanding Germany's forest culture, explained Schmidt.
Indeed. It is the refusal to “understand” and participate in coughforestculturecough that the desacralization of the universe begins, and even the very organized and extremely determined Nazis could not summon back up the old ways of Germania. Once St. Boniface chops down Donar’s Oak and human sacrifice to pagans becomes prohibited, then time suddenly becomes progressive. No longer is nature to be bargained with, negotiated with, from a point of mere supplication, where, at a cyclically appointed time, a victim “without blemish” — usually a child or a young maiden — is “chosen” by the community and then “offered” to the gods in order to appease them and keep the community whole. In this new order, humans must find another way to continue living without offering human sacrifice. What is even more is that this world order is demanded by Christianity on the premise that all human life is valuable. Together, these interlinking concepts create a new cosmological order in which nature cannot be negotiated with because human life is valuable, and demands a world in which humans find new answers for the problems of existence.
This shift completely transmuted man’s relationship with nature, and with time, in ways we have not even begun to fully comprehend. As Mr. Molnar notes in The Pagan Temptation:
[Christianity] lifts [its worshipers] out of the pagan cosmic order rejected and demythified by Christianity from the start and situates them within creation, an order held together by providence and divinely ordered laws of nature rather than occult forces manipulated by secretive initiates.
It is from a more medieval-informed perspective that Mr. Lewis looks out at the disappearing dryads in The Abolition of Man, but he does not seem to fully grasp what was at work in medievalism. The entire purpose, ultimately, of the medieval project was to integrate paganism into Christianity, to retain and safely explore the symbols and tropes of paganism while holding the primacy of the Christian worldview.
Mr. Lewis’ medievalism is the reason that the pagan creatures that litter Narnia do not have “the qualities of what they are” as noted by Mr. Pageau above. What the pagan creatures “really are” is diametrically opposed to Mr. Lewis’ own Christian values. Like many people, especially in this time, Mr. Lewis seems to be drawn to the aesthetics and trappings of paganism (and the fact that imbues the world with some sense of meaning against post-modernity), but notably without all the downsides of rampant sexual immorality and human sacrifice. The reality is this, however: to defang paganism of its connection to human sacrifice by integrating it into the Christian worldview is to invite the introduction of chemical agriculture. For Mr. Lewis, even apprehending this world as “Nature” is a loss, a step down from a “primeval sense” of piety. But Mr. Lewis evinces himself as much as as perpetrator of the continually progressive modernity and unwinding of Christianity that he rails against in The Abolition of Man.
The reason that Mr. Lewis opposes the passing of the medieval world, together with its sanitized pagan tropes, is because he rejects some aspects of the modern project (although, he is more modern-influenced than he seems to realize), specifically, the loss of religious values derived from first principles, and is understandably wary of the consequent emerging post-modernity, and it is this primary concern, to be fair to the book, that frames The Abolition of Man. However, when Mr. Lewis theorizes in The Abolition of Man that Christians — as theists with some sort of “Law of Nature” — can be lined up with the “ancient Greeks and Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedean against the modern Western European materialist” he is fails to demonstrate an understanding of the Jewish project versus paganism, but also of the medieval project. The “modern Western European materialist” is a direct product of Christian medievalism. The medieval world naturally gives way to the modern one.
Thomas Molnar, in his 1987 book The Pagan Temptation, sees this clearly:
[As] a consequence of its conquest, Christianity has lost imagination and cultural vision that roughly parallels the gains it made in other respects — a loss not only because of the suppression of the sacred symbols with which people had lived, but also because of the form of that suppression: Christian doctrine demytholgoized human imagination and the soul’s harmony with the cosmos. Even though it replaced them with an impressive system of its own, combining religion, philosophy, and universal vision, it also prepared the way for an exclusively rationalist explanation of the mysteries of humanity and nature. This rational system built on Christian foundations resulted in the drying up of the souls of modern people — deprived of the support that myth and mystery once provided, they were left to their own narrowly rationalist devices, which made them extremely vulnerable in the face of psychological and cultural upheavals. […]
Christianity […] dedaemonized the cosmos: it denied the existence of the supernatural daemons between the gods and humans and left a vast rift between the realms of the human and the divine. Humanity thus lost its moorings in a cosmic hierarchy, and the cosmos ceased to be an orderly and compact totality. In dissolving the popular pagan worldview, Christianity disoriented the world’s inhabitants. Indeed, it did something more radical. By eliminating from the cosmos the elements that once both frightened and reassured people, by laying the foundations for the scientific worldview, Christianity prepared the way for a desacralized universe and, ultimately, a dehumanized one. The danger was evident: if the Christian religion should at any time show doctrinal or cultural weakness, or if rationalism should gain the speculative upper hand, humans would have lost their spiritual home. And in such a case they would have only one recourse — a return to their earlier mythical worldview.
Mr. Molnar’s comment that Christianity, “by laying the foundations for the scientific worldview”, prepared the way for a “desacralized universe and ultimately, a dehumanized one” exactly captures what is at the real crux of the issue in Mr. Lewis’ faultily-constructed argument in The Abolition of Man. In integrating the pagan world into Christianity, the medievals set the stage for the demythologizing of nature in the 17th and 18th centuries: something that did not have “dryads”, gods or goddesses, or imbued with any inherent mythopoetic meaning but could be studied, quantified, brought into mastery.
Ultimately, Mr. Lewis’ failure to see the extreme singularity of the Judeo-Christian project that leads to his seeming misapprehension of the appearance of the modern and post-modern worlds. This construction leaves Mr. Lewis in the extremely odd position of taking the advent of Christ far, far, less seriously — almost to the point of mere flippancy — than the man who he says has a philosophy of “mere innovation”. For Mr. Lewis’ almost hand-waving dismissal of Nietzsche in such terms, Nietzsche would have never have dared put the Lord Jesus in remotely the same category as the ancient Egyptians. Thus, Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist may be a far superior work of Christian evangelism than Mr. Lewis’ Abolition of Man:
What the Gospels make instinctive is precisely the reverse of all heroic struggle, of all taste for conflict: the very incapacity for resistance is here converted into something moral: (‘resist not evil!’—the most profound sentence in the Gospels, perhaps the true key to them), to wit, the blessedness of peace, of gentleness, the inability to be an enemy. What is the meaning of “glad tidings”?—The true life, the life eternal has been found—it is not merely promised, it is here, it is in you; it is the life that lies in love free from all retreats and exclusions, from all keeping of distances. Every one is the child of God—Jesus claims nothing for himself alone—as the child of God each man is the equal of every other man.... Imagine making Jesus a hero!
Unlike Mr. Lewis, who sees Christianity as a perfection of what has come before, a “one true myth” that has been present in some form across a multitude of theistic religions and moral codes (and thus on these grounds has the upper hand against post-modernity), Nietzsche recognizes that the coming of Christ is a complete break from the past. Nietzsche cannot wave away Christian values into some sort of Tao, but he will single out Jesus directly and deal with Him head-on. He does not call back to any “Law of Nature”, not suggest that Jesus’ death on the Cross any sort of continuation of it. On the contrary, he understands that the world will only be ripped apart if the Christian agenda continues apace. Throughout his entire body of work, Nietzsche correctly recognizes that Jesus is a problem, a stumbling block, to the project of human civilization. He would have readily agreed, and indeed would have even entered into evidence, the Lord’s words in the Gospel of Luke:
I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed! Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.
Where Mr. Lewis is correct, however, is in his central thrust of The Abolition of Man, in understanding that the post-modern project is a very real problem that the moderns of his own time — and even today, our moderns — were completely unprepared to apprehend. Mr. Molnar describes in The Pagan Temptation:
Having sponsored rational thinking about the universe and nature, a Christian civilization may turn excessively rationalistic and lose its sacral character. The suppressed need for myth may then reappear in order to prevent desiccation. But these suppressed myths would then encourage the development of a different civilization, a different belief system, perhaps even a new religion.
One can see clearly Mr. Molnar’s observations at work today in the music of Grimes, who sings in a sonically beautiful song called “New Gods”:
But the world is a sad place, baby
Only brand new gods can save me
Only brand new gods can save me
Oh, oh, oh
Only brand new godsHands reaching out for new gods
You can't give me what I want
Hands reaching out for new gods
You can't give me what I want
In an interview with Palladium magazine, “The Universe Wants Us To Take Her Clothes Off”, Grimes comments:
Do you know the statue Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science? It’s like, why would the universe make us so creative? Why would it? Why would she make herself so beautiful? I think she wants us to seduce her and decorate her.
I think humanity’s having performance issues, to be honest.
Humanity is having performance issues. The statue’s at McGill University, where I went to college—I think in the neuroscience building or something—but it’s just Nature stripping. I forgot to tell you this. It’s a really funny picture: Nature, literally stripping. It’s very erotic.
Grimes’ interviewer, Samo Burja, adopts this framing from her, later commenting, “Nature has already put power in the hands of unelected individuals,” giving some small voice to the notion that “Nature” is some sort of coherent entity that is capable of exercising unified and intentional agency. As Mr. Molnar noted, the desacralized world has a “suppressed need” for myth, which is now emerging in post-modernity and could very well turn into an attempt to revisit, even unconsciously, pagan nature deities. Such words sound innocuous to modern ears, but to publicly voice concepts of “Nature” having such agency in the world, risks conjuring an egregore. I would assert that all of this has been tried before in the world after Good Friday, most notably by the Nazis, and that all these efforts will ultimately fail, but their ultimate failure does not mean we, as Christians, should not withstand these attempts, which are inherently embedded with evil and therefore must be opposed.
Ayn’s dogmatic belief in sola ratio, however, will not hold against the temptation to revisit the allures of pagan belief, and is even now being eroded before our eyes to give way to neo-pagan expressions. Absent the Christian message working itself out, we do not find ourselves inching closer and closer to some sort of more and more liberalized, secularized future, but instead we find paganism returning. Ayn said once, “If I had to choose between faith and reason, I wouldn’t consider the choice even conceivable. As a human being, one chooses reason.” But Mr. Thiel might reply to her, as he commented to Eric Metaxas in 2020 (in one of my favorite interviews of Peter and I’ve heard them all), “I think faith and reason are compatible, and in fact, when you get rid of faith, you end up in a world with no reason either.” A turn to paganism is an attempt to turn against progress — Ayn’s beloved cities of the West will struggle against the pagan gods. Once “Nature” is understood as an alluring woman coquettishly inviting the male gaze of “Science”, how can Science stand against her without collapsing into mere worship of the chaotic feminine? She tied you to a kitchen chair, she broke your throne, and she cut your hair… Whole empires have fallen into such silky-smooth hands.
The framing that Mr. Lewis would offer as a Christian apologia, however, is fundamentally flawed. Christianity is responsible for modernity. The medieval world gave way to the Scientific Revolution. To overly glamorize “Nature”, and to uphold the pagans of the past as paragons of moral virtue simply because they are, at least, not liberal Western materialists — “say what you want about the tenets of the Aztec religion, at least it’s an ethos” — is to deny the work of Jesus Christ.
Mr. Lewis is not wrong, however, to understand that some sort of Christian responsa is needed to the collapse of modernity, even if he what he proffers is faultily constructed. Unfortunately, the most painful part of The Abolition of Man is, as mentioned above, the obliteration of the Person of Christ into an abstracted up, Star Wars-like “Force” as Mr. Lewis understands the Tao, because interestingly, Jesus, in His hypostatic union as true God and true Man, is the solution to the ultimate question with which Ayn and Mr. Lewis both wrestle, the question that Nietzsche was bold enough to give voice: how, exactly, does one save the world that Christianity sets on fire?
The Christian Vision Of The Future Is Dominion
“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.”
―Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
It’s a trick question, in some sense. Christians cannot save — nor should we wish to — the old order of the world, but neither can Christians abandon the material world and become hopelessly focused on escaping it through death alone. To pursue the first path is to become pagans again, or, maybe worse, pagan sympathizers; to pursue the second path is to become Gnostics. But there is a way in which Christians can navigate through the ending of the old world and toward the beginning of the next one, and that is to understand the Christian project in the very plain terms set out from the beginning of creation as recorded in the Book of Genesis. In the Garden of Eden, God gives Adam dominion over the whole earth, and the entire structure of God’s creation is to submit all of creation to man.13 Here, nature, and not even “human nature” itself is a standard, as discussed in the conversation between Messrs. Thiel and Epstein, but something else entirely.
For it is here there is a radical shift from the pagan understanding of the world: the God of the Bible creates a man who is above nature, and nature, in the Bible, has no special powers and cannot be brokered with. The Creator alone, who has a special relationship with man, is above all other principalities, one God, Creator of all. Once one understands that the entire journey of the last days of Christ is a journey back to the Garden from which Adam was expelled, and that Christ is assuming and thereby reversing all the effects of the Fall (as I have touched on here), one understands that Christ is completing the work begun in the Garden, not for the purpose of returning man to some Eden-like oasis of nature, but so that man can move forward and take what was always the true bride of Christ, the one that expelled Him even as He embraced her and spoke to her: the city, Jerusalem14. As St. John recorded in the vision of Revelation 21:
Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.
So it is important not understand dominionism not as a path back to Eden, but a path forward, in progressive terms, progressive toward man’s ultimate destiny in the City of God, which will be an incorporation of the elements of Eden, but not a return to it. In Paradise Restored: A Biblical Theology of Dominion, David Chilton writes:
In obedient imitation of his Heavenly Father, man was to reshape, understand, interpret, and rule the world for God's glory - in short, to build the City of God. […]
Simple restoration to Eden is never all that is involved in salvation, just as it was not God's plan for Adam and his posterity simply to remain in the Garden. They were to go into all the world, bring the created potentiality of earth to full fruition. The Garden of Eden was a headquarters, a place to start. But godly rule by King Adam was to encompass the entire world. Thus, the Second Adam's work is not only restorative (bringing back Eden) but consummative: He brings the world into the New Jerusalem. Throughout redemptive history, as God called His people to the restored Paradise, he brought them into His City. We can see this in the contrast between the rebellious, autonomous citybuilders of Genesis 11 and Abraham, who journeyed to the Promised Land "looking for the City which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God" (Heb. 11:10); and Scripture assures the New Covenant community that we "have come to Mount Zion and to the City of the the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem" (Heb. 12:22).
It is in the City of God we will finally realize the hope of the messianic age. In You Shall Be As Gods:
[The messianic time] is brought about by the force generated by man’s existential dichotomy: being part of nature and yet transcending nature; being animal and yet transcending animal nature. This dichotomy creates conflict and suffering, and man is driven to find ever new solutions to this conflict, until he has solved it by becoming fully human and achieving at-onement.
There is a dialectic relationship between Paradise and the messianic time. Paradise is the golden age of the past, as many legends in other cultures also see it. The messianic time is the golden age of the future. The two ages are the same, insamuch as they are a state of harmony. They are different, inasmuch as the first state of harmony existed only by virtue of man’s not yet having been born, while the new state of harmony exists as a result of man’s having been fully born. The messianic time is the return to innocence, and at the same time it is no return at all, because it is the goal toward which man strives after having lost his innocence.
Mr. Fromm highlights further the distinction in the Genesis narrative:
Man is seen as being created in God’s likeness, with a capacity for an evolution of which the limits are not set. “God,” a Hasidic master remarked, “does not say that ‘it was good’ after creating man; this indicates that while the cattle and everything else were finished after being created, man was not finished.” It is man himself, guided by God’s word as voiced by the Torah and the Prophets, who can develop his inherent nature in the process of history (emphasis added).
To extend Mr. Fromm’s argument further, one could read Jesus’ dying words on the Cross — “It is finished” (John 19:30) — as being the moment of the completion of the creation of Man that was begun in the Garden. For it is only when Jesus, the God Incarnate, has both assumed the throne of Calvary — which is seated in the Garden, with Jesus hung on the Tree of Life — and begun His walk into the valley of the shadow of death that man’s completion is made whole, because God has laid the path for man to come to Him and share in His divine nature. Mr. Fromm comments that man is “an open system and can develop to the point of sharing God’s power and capacity for creation” (emphasis added). This creative power of man — and thus, his redemption toward God— is expressed in time, progressively.
And this is the Will of the Father, and always was, since the beginning. St. Maximos the Confessor (via On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ):
He who, by the sheer inclination of his will, established the beginning of all creation, seen and unseen, before all ages and before that beginning of created beings, had an ineffably good plan for those creators. The plan was for him to mingle, without change on his part, with human nature by true hypostatic union, to unite human nature to himself while remaining immutable, so that he might become a man, as he alone knew how, and so that he might deify humanity in union with himself.
Dominionism is an antidote to both the contemporary Christian affection for Gnosticism (seen most clearly in the philosophy that the “world is a sinking ship” and that spreading the personal experience of salvation is the most critical function for Christians — not for the goal of outer transformation but inner transformation alone, in a dualist lens) and to the wider cultural predilection to integrate the natural world into man’s understanding by conjuring up and ultimately worshiping nature deities. Dominionism understands Christianity as a very embodied religion that is emphatically not Gnostic, and it properly understands man as divinely situated within the material world. Mr. Chilton correctly observes: “Man is not saved by being delivered out of his environment. Salvation does not rescue us from the material world, but from sin, and from the effects of the Curse” (emphasis added).
To expand on that point, the purpose of salvation — of believing in Christ as savior — is to offer to us a path back to God, where we reclaim the dominion given to Adam in Genesis and lost by sin, a dominion in which man participates in the divine nature of God as co-creators with Him. To gain mastery, dominion, over nature and bring it into man’s order is to give the material world of nature its proper fulfillment in relation to man, and then elevates it to become integrated in the spiritual life of man.
In Deification in Christ by Panayiotis Nellas:
The Fathers consider man a real governor and lord of the universe. And they understand this lordship to be one of the ways in which man expresses his royal character. Thus for the believer, who sees things under a theological aspect, no technological progress or achievement causes surprise. Man, in organizing the world and discovering its mysteries, does nothing but fulfill one of the marks of his destiny, provided, of course, that his organization of the world proceeds in the direction of its becoming fully human.
One can see how dominionism aligns with the mostly-unreconstructed-Randianism, as expressed by Mr. Epstein in his first book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels15:
There are some quotes from a story in the Los Angeles Times called ‘Fear of Fusion: What if It Works?” […]
Amory Lovins was already on record as saying, ‘Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.’
He is talking here about something that, if it had worked, would have been able to empower every single individual on the globe and that undoubtedly would have given him a longer life through the increased scientific and technological progress a fusion-powered society would make. He’s talking about something that could take someone who had never had access to a lightbulb for more than an hour, and give him all the light he needed for the rest of his life. Hes’s talking about something that would have given that hospital in The Gambia the power that it needed to save the two dead babies in the story, who could have been thriving eight-year-olds as I write this, instead of painful memories for would-be parents.That is what Amory Lovins regards as disastrous ‘because of what we might do with it’. Well, we’ve seen what we do with energy — we make our lives amazing. We go from physically helpless to physical supermen. We build skyscrapers and hospitals. We take vacations and go on honeymoons. We visit our families and tour the world. We relieve drought and vanquish disease. We transform the planet for the better.
Better — by a human standard of value.
But if your standard of value is unaltered nature, then Lovins is right to worry. With more energy, we have the ability to alter nature more, and we will do so — because transforming our environment, transforming nature, is our means of survival and flourishing.
What Ayn truly longs for, one can tell in her writings even if she would not openly confess it, is a teleology of man that is spiritual and supra-rational. Ayn prizes man above nature, because, in some sense, she is truly a Jew, and her love for the skyscrapers of New York is because they represent a spiritual end to man’s highest achievement, a kind of materialist apotheosis.16 What Ayn does not seem to realize is that this valuation of man is deeply spiritual and is wholly unique to the God as He reveals Himself to the Jews and becomes fully manifest not as a bull, not as a cosmic ether, but in the Person of Jesus Christ. To forsake Christ is to forsake the teleology of man that Ayn desires, because it cannot hold on its own against the disintegration into paganism — which will come with attempts to return to sacrificial systems — where nature becomes an object of worship rather than a field by which man not only improves his life, but, through his participation in God, sanctifies the fallen natural world and acts as a vessel for integrating it into a higher spiritual order.
This is man’s ultimate work. In Deification in Christ:
The category of biological existence does not exhaust man. Man is understood ontologically by the Fathers only as a theological being. His ontology is iconic. […][The functions of learning, work, science, the arts and politics] can and should be used as the new means by which man will exercise his dominion over the world, and living by the grace of God, will channel this grace into the world. In this way he will transform the conditions of life, and grafting himself, the conditions of life and the world onto Christ he will not only correct the disruptions which sin has created on all levels, but will bring about in practice within the historical process that union of the prelapsarian divisions which Christ realized within Himself for the sake of the whole world. This is the great task, beyond the simple ensuring of survival, which human knowledge, work, art, politics, and all other postlapsarian functions of life are called to serve.
All on earth Thy scepter claim,
All in Heaven above adore Thee;
Infinite Thy vast domain,
Everlasting is Thy reign.
Gratitude is owed to Jennifer Burns, whose excellent biography Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right was extremely helpful as a background for me in writing this post. Tyler Cowen’s interview of her here. Ayn is almost never written about well, because she is so polarizing, but I found Goddess of the Market to be a refreshing and much-needed work, a balanced perspective that was both thorough and engaging.
I did not know Ayn’s view of gender relations when I had this dream, but later found this excerpt from The New Left that indicates the directional truthfulness of her disposition as presented in my dream: “The sex views professed by Women’s Lib are so hideous that they cannot be discussed — at least, not by me. To regard man as an enemy — to regard woman as a combination matriarch and stevedore — to surpass the futile sordidness of a class war by instituting a sex war — to drag sex into politics and around the floor of smoke-filled back rooms, as a tool of the pressure-group jockeying for power— to proclaim spiritual sisterhood with lesbians, and to swear eternal hostility to men— is so repulsive a set of premises from so loathsome a sense of life that an accurate commentary would require the kind of language I do not like to see in print.”
See, for example, this pointed comment in “Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilist”: “Nihilism, here, isn’t about the absence of values but about the destruction of the existing order to create something new, and better, out of its ruination. It entails a liberationist view of progress: to be liberated from social and institutional systems was to be free. In that freedom, individuals would discover their agency and ascend to create new values, new loves, new happiness, and thereby become the man-god. Despite disparaging Christianity and Platonic mysticism, there is an ironic—though inverted—inheritance from the very intellectual currents they despised: the striving to heaven and the metamorphic nature of man are not new to the nineteenth century but ideas inherited from Platonic Christianity subsequently divorced from their overarching metaphysical ‘systems.’”
Additionally, I learned in the course of writing this post that while I may be in an extreme minority, I am not alone, as a Christian, in such sympathies to Nietzsche. In The Meaning of the Creative Act by Nikolai Berdyaev (h/t to Michael Martin who mentioned this book in this video): “Nietzsche is the forerunner of a new religious anthropology. Through Nietzsche the new humanity moves out of godless humanism to divine humanism, to a Christian anthropology. Nietzsche is an instinctive prophet, as yet not possessing the Logos, a prophet of the religious renaissance of the west. Zarathustra’s hatred for the lost man who has invented happiness is a holy hatred of the degrading lies of humanism. Zarathustra preached creativity, rather than happiness — he called man toward the mountain-top, rather than to bliss on the plain. Humanism is a level plain — it cannot stand the hills. As no one else ever has in the course of all history, Nietzsche sense the creative calling of man, a concept unknown alike to patrisitic and to humanistic consciousness. He cursed the good and the happy because they hate those who create. We should share Nietzsche’s torment; it is religious through and through. And we ought to take upon ourselves the responsibility for his fate. Through Nietzsche there begins a new anthropological revelation in the world, which in its final concept, in its Logos, must become the Christology of man. ‘What is great in man, is that he is a bridge, rather than an end.’”
Here Mr. Epstein refers to William MacAskill, author of What We Owe the Future.
While Ayn is a liberal, I do think it is important to emphasize that she is not a traditional liberal but a kind of Nietzschean-influenced liberal — strange as that may seem to say. She seems very (and correctly) aware of the potential for liberalism to eat itself, an instinct she may have picked up from Nietzsche, and the entire Aristotelian-informed Objectivist philosophy project that she upheld later into her adulthood seems to be an attempt to crowbar Nietzscheanism onto liberalism as a kind of life jacket by coming up with a cohesive (anti-Kantian) ethos to serve as some unifying social outlook after the death of God that is not communism, which, it almost goes without saying, she abhorred. In this frame, the John-Galt-as-Übermensch implicitly agrees not to consume the society with his sheer force of will as long as the society leaves him alone. In return for leaving him well alone, they are allowed to enjoy the fruits of his labor and strength in a free and fair trade, where liberal notions like individual rights are well-respected by all — even by the Übermensch.
See The Virtue of Selfishness: “It is only by accepting ‘man’s life’ as one’s primary and by pursuing the rational values it requires that one can achieve happiness—not by taking ‘happiness’ as some undefined, irreducible primary and then attempting to live by its guidance. If you achieve that which is the good by a rational standard of value, it will necessarily make you happy; but that which makes you happy, by some undefined emotional standard, is not necessarily the good. To take ‘whatever makes one happy’ as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one’s emotional whims. […] This is the fallacy inherent in hedonism—in any variant of ethical hedonism, personal or social, individual or collective. ‘Happiness’ can properly be the purpose of ethics, but not the standard. The task of ethics is to define man’s proper code of values and thus to give him the means of achieving happiness. To declare, as the ethical hedonists do, that ‘the proper value is whatever gives you pleasure’ is to declare that ‘the proper value is whatever you happen to value’—which is an act of intellectual and philosophical abdication, an act which merely proclaims the futility of ethics and invites all men to play it deuces wild.”
Mr. Lewis’ affection for this idea of a “universal law of right and wrong” or “law of nature” is echoed in The Chronicles of Narnia, particularly in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where the White Witch Jadis— a stand-in for Lucifer (Lucifer and Satan are different entities; I will discuss more another time) — claims a “right” to kill the human child Edmund because she is “owed” the life of a traitor under the law of the “Deep Magic”. Aslan himself seems bound to the rules of this “Deep Magic” and offers his own life in Edmund’s stead, which Jadis accepts. This is a trick on Jadis, and after Aslan resurrects and saves Narnia from her, he explains to the children that Jadis was ignorant of a “different incantation” of the “Deep Magic”: “when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.” One clearly sees the theology of the Atonement here, including the idea that even Aslan, through his father the Emperor-Over-the-Sea, is bound to some universal law of justice. Had Ayn read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, she would have recoiled from such a religious conception. The Girardian may read with interest her comments in a 1964 interview with Playboy magazine: “Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the nonideal, or virtue to vice.” In The Virtue of Selfishness: “The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone.” (I cannot let pass by an observation that all Mr. Lewis’ notions of laws and rights as expressed in his works are really ritualistic at their root: ritualistic because they are intended to prevent mimetic contagion by enshrining and upholding sacrifice. Of course, Mr. Lewis does not recognize this. I won’t even go into all the theological problems in the ending of The Last Battle where Aslan describes our world as “the Shadowlands” and the “true” reality as only starting after death.)
I recognize the construction of the Hebrew Bible, especially the Pentateuch, is a topic of scholarly debate which is far from settled consensus. As this discussion will show — noting that I am no scholar and this is not a subject I have done great research on for some time — I am generally sympathetic to arguments that the construction of the Hebrew Bible reflects the differentiation of the Israelites as originally splitting out from another pagan group, possibly even the Canaanites, and that there are threads in the Hebrew Bible that suggest the Israelites once believed in a pantheon of deities like all their neighbors. Of course, as time goes on, I believe it is clear the Israelites become more and more monotheistic, and these threads are gradually removed and revised as the texts come closer to their final assembly.
As a point of reference, from what I have been able to read on Google Books (as it is out of print), I suspect the book No Other Gods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel by Robert Gnuse would have interesting discussion on this subject.
Let us take a moment to thank the Spanish Empire for eviscerating from the Earth such barbaric and brutal ideologies.
For those who may not be familiar, Erich Fromm is from the Frankfurt School, and his Hegelian influence will be evident as I quote him in the rest of this post.
One may also recall the discussion of monsters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which takes place outside the walls of Athens in the forest. The use of wild forests for ritual (human sacrifice) allows for a physical separation of the violence from the normal dwelling of the community and thus acts as a guardrail against the violence spilling out into the community’s ordinary life.
Some understand dominionism as synonymous with “Christian nationalism”. I believe there is probably a distinction to be made, but I have given very little thought to “Christian nationalism” and, at first blush, do not quite understand what it is supposed to entail as it involves the American project. I do note that “Christian nationalism” seems to be inherently dependent on the frame of the state, and I always encourage everyone to think of their projects as beyond such a frame, as I am not sure that the state will last forever as we know it, while of course I do recognize that it has present importance as a means of coordinating social and political action.
Some may argue that the Church is the true bride of Christ, but at the end of time, the City and the Church are one.
I would assert that even a title that suggests that a “moral case” can be made for the continuation and “flourishing” of human existence has an unspoken Judeo-Christian point of view.
From my view, Ayn’s abandonment of higher-order principles for a seemingly singular conscious focus on economic materialism (as important as economic materialism is) makes her too much a double, mirror image of the atheistic materialist Marxism she abhorred. Mr. Thiel once made a comment (somewhere in this interview with N.T. Wright and Ross Douthat) about how atheists and fundamentalists both agreed on the primary question of God as being violent, but disagreed on more secondary questions like whether God existed. Similarly, Randianism and Marxism seem to agree that atheistic economic materialism is the highest good. (Here, of course, I am talking about actual Marxism, not cultural Marxism, which I believe is distinct.)
The Rigor of this piece is very refreshing and the ranging references are thrilling! Bravo- a justice done to the thrusting quality of both Rand & Nietzche.
I find beautiful your correlation between Israel, Nietzsche and Rand- I also concur that the divinity of man is the central perspective that unites them and I totally agree in your theological point; Lewis’s Law of Nature is not based on this and to his discredit. And I properly agree with your conclusion regarding the centrality of man in his quintessent nature and that his eternal destiny to bring forth sacred order and redeem what is fallen in himself , and nature.
I found the Thiel references slightly unclear.
A few disagreements, if you will…
I think the argument would be improved in precision and accuracy if idolatry was the point made regarding paganism and modernity rather than set it all under paganism generally. In regards to Christianity, Paganism has much of coherence- one of them which is in fact, the purifying ritual of sacrifice and the sacredness of nature. The question is one of distinction, ordering, priority rather than domination. If as in your beautiful reference to St. Athanasius “the renewal of creation is wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning” , wouldn’t every element of nature (which is symbolic of transcendental realities), point to Christ as Logos? Wouldn’t all stories, even those that seemingly deviate from this unitary truth, remain still part of an elongated return to that same truth? I’d suggest here is where we find the notion of sin as that which is apart from truth, but even remains part of that “self-same word”, as Paul says -“ For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.” (Romans 11:32). Thus, even in rebellion to truth and idolatry we declare truth in the same way that Pilate called Christ “King” and the solders nailed “King of the Jews” to this cross. It is the same with the idolatry of nature by the pagans, that idolatry worshipped the natural symbol rather than the originating (and invisible) LOGOS of God, the issue is they worship the symbol which points to the unitary truth. Does the tree seek to be worshipped? Christ himself pointed to the lillies of the fields as a sacred symbol of divine providence, then said to “seek first” the kingdom of God. I would suggest that paganism and judaism tell the same story of Christ himself, it is our depravity that falls to an idolatry of the story itself rather than the reality. I agree in the singularity of the Judaic project, and that salvation of course is from the Jews. However I would suggest there are more consistencies between Old Testament Judaism and the pagans than your argument lets on (besides idolatry). and among them, sacrifice (including human) is the most glaringly omitted in your argument.
“22 In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” -Hebrews 9:22
The Jewish tradition is clear in it’s ritualistic sacrifice, Ceremonial Sacrifice as purification is at the heart of the Old Testament Law. It was Abraham who was in the act of killing his Son that foreshadowed the fulfillment of the old covenant with the new. Moses lifted the snake in the desert, The Levites annually shed blood for purification, etc. Also, regarding your point of the Judaic project being a sort of redemptive humanistic tradition in contrast to this “threat” of paganism- I concede that the monotheistic element is key, but what of their idolatry? What sacred perspective of humanity was espoused by “an eye for an eye” , what about the the insolent history of escaped slaves who insisted on idolatry arguably more severe than the pagans? What’s the difference between pagan idolatry of a tree, a capitalistic idolatry of money and a Jewish idolatry of a golden calf?. While righteousness was present, the majority of the Old Testament is not “a mutual self giving relationship with one God” , this framing is slightly romantic. Sacrifice and “self-righteousness” was central to the old covenant by a law based on works , which inevitably erected religious supremacy that was “enforceable” (The Passion), punishment, slavery, and brutality was just as prevalent, it was Christ who brought the covenant of Grace.
While the Gentiles are grafted into the tree of Israel and not the other way around, The symbolical truth of Christ is just as present in hermetic texts, or the hanged man tarot card, or the inert nature of the world’s silent submission and obedience to Divine Providence as it is revealed in the Old Testament. I think using Paganism too broadly here risks a further aggravation of the modern desecration of nature in favor of some power worshipping ideal, which is more severely contrary with Christ.
I agree with the consummative metaphor in your postulation of “dominion” in the quotation of Genesis, but I think to postulate based on this term is coarse and ill-defined. I agree in the Nietzche /Rand term of the rational centrality of the thrust of the individual, this is essentially Christian- But in making this point, let’s not make it too coarsely and forget that Christ himself came as a sacrifice- a fulfillment of the sovereignty of Truth over the earthly kingdom of Force and Domination - which Pagans, Romans and Jews worshipped.
“The reason my father loves me, is I lay down my life”
So, while agreeing with your conclusion about the centrality of man as divine vessel ordained to set the world into divine order, I think using “Dominionism” without making the distinction between the kingdoms of men (man) and the kingdoms of God (love) severely risks losing the point. *By who’s power* are we to have dominion? Do we reign over nature through Randian fantasies of tall nyc skyscrapers? Christ is above all a testament to the truth that love itself is sovereign over force and [domin]ation, which is dangerously close to Dominion. I would suggest man was made to set things in order by God as co-heirs with Christ. To have “dominion” as Adam named the animals. But dominion by a Thiel/Rand/Pharisaical force over them is not that order- it was to set them in order by himself adopting the sacred order of divine providence, belonging in membership to the perfect obedience to this order that nature embodies. We preside , but do not dominate.
To me, the Nietzschean tone to this word dominionism (without further clarification) creates a linguistic space closer to the conquistadores than it is to Christ, its closer to crusader language of force, domination, and slavery which has yeasted our scientific cosmologies much more than CS Lewis ever did. Dominionism too easily falls into the linguistics of a Roman Emperor who worshipped Jupiter one day and Christ the next, according to the calendars of his enslaved subjects. Dominionism has more directly led to the Western desecration of nature (via nihilism + ego) than medieval paganism ever did. This interpretation has some tones of the worship of power without acknowledging that the whole point of Christ’s passion was a Kingdom that yields power unto the Father’s will and sacred order. One could argue this deification of power is what emptied christianity of it’s mystic essence (including stoic & agrarian elements) by the great beasts of materialism- The Romans.
I also disagree that the fulfillment of the universe is to first bring it into mans order; then somehow integrating it into the spiritual ascension of man. I do believe that the revelation of us as children of God liberates nature (Paul ref), but I believe that Nature is a state of perfect obedience to an impartial order of divine providence that we have departed from, not it- it remains obedient, it obeys by virtue the order of divine providence. I reject the dismissal of nature as less than , or under man, it is our home and our instruction. Nature is the estate, God is the master, we are the masters children. The more accurate point to make is against the idolatry of the symbolic quality of nature just as the idolatry of the “image” of progress the Randians have worshipped for decades. (giving us an era of autistic industrialism).
Overall, I really enjoyed your argument and your work!
One wonders if the translation merely glossed the original to add "dominion-ship and stewardship" instead of just "dominion-ship" if our world would be more verdant today. One is clearly impossible without the other.