The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (15 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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“Lay not thine hand upon the lad,” cries an angel, as Abraham prepares to cut Isaac’s throat on the altar, “for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me” (Gen. 22:12). Instead, as Abraham himself unwittingly prophesied, God has provided the sheep for the sacrifice, a ram caught by his horns in a nearby thicket. It is a test of Abraham’s faith that he would slay his only son, but it is also a surprising revelation of the nature of God. There will be no human sacrifice in exchange for food and full wombs. Indeed, there will be no sacrifice of any natural good for the sake of good harvests. God is not mired in the natural world; He is above that world. The distinction is crucial. The Hebrews took long enough to get the idea, but eventually they understood, and when they turned to the Creator, they turned to the One who ordered the world “in measure and number and weight” (Wis. 11:20). That meant that they could look upon nature with a free eye. They need not cower before it. It might be terrible, as the behemoth, who “moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together” (Job 40:17); but no matter how muscular his testicles were, the Jews would not fall in adoration before any such, as the Hindus would fall before the elephant god Ganesh. Nature might be as lovely and mysterious, “the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained” (Ps. 8:3), but when religion-hungry Manasseh “built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord” (2 Chr. 33:5), he did evil, and his grandson Josiah smashed and burnt those altars, melted their idols, dismantled the bathhouses for ritual sodomy, and poured the refuse into a fiery pit, once a grove for the fertility cults, henceforth the garbage dump called Tophet (2 K. 23:5–15).
 
That rejection of nature worship is, in part, the meaning of Moses’ conflict with the Pharaoh of Egypt, Ramses II (c. 1279–1213). Some time in the 1600s BC, the descendants of Abraham found themselves in the valley of the Nile, welcomed by an interregnum of Semitic rulers. But the native Egyptians resumed their empire around 1550 BC, and eventually cast the Hebrews into slavery, compelling them to make bricks for the building-works of the Pharaoh. This slavery was both economic and religious. The Pharaoh, literally “Great House,” was the earthly manifestation of the just god Osiris. Now Osiris had been dismembered by his enemy Seti, but his twin sister and wife, Isis (with whom, says Plutarch, giving us a ghastly glimpse into the penetralia of the Egyptian cult, Osiris copulated
in utero
)
2
, gathered his members up and re-formed him, to be the god passing judgment upon men in the underworld. One member, though, she never did find.
That
had gotten gobbled up by a pike in the Nile, and hence the fertility of Osiris was the source of the fertility of the river. Meanwhile, Horus, Osiris’ son, slew Seti and assumed Osiris’ place as ruler upon the earth. A Pharaoh, then, is the continuation of this imperial dynasty. He is Horus when he lives, and Osiris after he dies. He guarantees good floods and rich harvests, prosperity and justice.
 
So when Pharaoh stiffens his neck and will not let the Hebrews free to worship their God in the desert—in a place, note well, where nothing grows—Moses takes the battle to Pharaoh’s turf. The Pharaoh is a fertility god, remember. All the people, not only the Hebrews, are enslaved to him, because all need to eat. But the Pharaoh can do nothing against the God
above nature.
He is powerless against the flies, the gnats, the grasshoppers, the frogs, the fiery hail, the pestilence, and the darkness. His holy river turns red with blood. The flesh of his people erupts in boils—a painful and humiliating insult for the Egyptians with all their cosmetics and their embalming of the dead. Finally the firstborn of all Egypt die, while the Hebrews are spared by the blood of the Passover lamb (more about that, too, soon). The theological rout is total, long before anyone shows up at the shore of the Red Sea.
 
 
 
Christ: The Civil Rights Activist
 
Jesus Christ is a God whom we approach without pride, and before whom we humble ourselves without despair.
Blaise Pascal
,
Pensées
(527)
 
 
He is therefore, whether an atheist will believe it or not, the great equalizer of men, who would make masters of them all by making servants of them all: the one whom it is a source of just pride to obey.
 
 
Not a political god, but the King of kings
 
Pharaoh’s Egypt also shows us a lesson for our times that the Soviet Union understood, but many well-meaning secular liberals in Europe and the U.S. today ignore: there is no such thing as a vacuum of faith. Let Christians and other believers in human freedom take note. If man is by nature a creature who gives praise, and if he does not know the true God, he will give his heart, and perhaps his sweat and blood, to something
big
within his vision. The two biggest candidates for false gods are Nature and the State. He will drown his imagination in the swamp of natural processes, birth and growth and sex and death, or he will enslave himself to power, most clearly manifest in an emperor-god, a deified city, or an all-competent State. Often, as in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and in today’s American Left, he’ll do both at once.
 
As in Mesopotamia, geography pretty much determined the political structure of Egypt. You had to control the whole river valley or nothing, since outside of the river valley there was desert, speckled with only a few oases. If a Pharaoh held the lower Nile, and an anti-Pharaoh held the upper Nile, the one would be a constant threat to the other, a constant source of agricultural and commercial interference. The great Menes united upper and lower Egypt back around 3100 BC, and, with some periods of dynasty-change and upheaval, Egypt remained that same slender snake of fertile land, independent until Alexander conquered it in 332 BC.
 
So when the Egyptians adored their Great House, they were also bowing before the power of their State, embodied in the monarch and in his priestly ministers and tax collectors and slave drivers. That State brought peace and prosperity. It was the same in the more vulnerable kingdoms of Mesopotamia. That flatland was not banked with deserts, as was Egypt, so its cities had to be walled to protect the grain. That required a warrior class to defend the walls. Since no one city could stand against the might of a large army, all the cities of Mesopotamia had to be brought under a single imperial rule.
 
Under such circumstances the separation of temporal and spiritual power is inconceivable. Men submit to the State with the same readiness and fear as to a god. The State is divine.
 
The revelation to the Hebrews changes all that.
 
This de-coupling of God from identification with king or State or city is to be found throughout the Old Testament, from the beginning. Cain, the farmer, is the first murderer, killing his brother Abel. When he is driven from his family, he becomes the first builder of a city. Evidently that conferred no moral or religious distinction upon him; and Saint Augustine would trenchantly compare Cain with Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome who slew his twin brother Remus while they were building the city walls, and who at his death was revered as a god.
3
The solitary Enoch “walked with God,” and one day was seen no more (Gen. 5:24); but the ambitious men of Babel, city builders all, wanted to construct a tower that would reach to heaven, to make a name for themselves and cause all their neighbors to cower before them (Gen. 11). God derides that statecraft, and confuses their hitherto single language, so that they can no longer understand one another. All cities, all states, all towers “whose top may reach unto heaven,” are incomplete, a mockery, riven with strife.
 
Marduk has Babylon, Osiris has Memphis, Athena has Athens, and in all these places, to worship the god is to worship the city. It is tempting then to answer, “God has Jerusalem.” Not so, as the prophets are at pains to show us. God does not bind his covenant to any city or its citizens. The commandments are given in the one place no one could mistake for a city or a fertile valley: Mount Sinai, in the desert. Indeed, when the people below miss Moses for too long and grow anxious, wishing to turn God into their good luck charm, they fashion the Golden Calf, a young bull, symbol of life and fertility. God punishes them for it. Later, when they have settled in Canaan and wish to live as other people do, in one state united under a king, the prophet Samuel tells them that God
is displeased.
Note how strange this is. Everywhere else, the union of a people in a powerful state is what a god is for—that’s why you worship the
 
 
 
“A Little Lower than the Angels”
 
Curiously, the new conception [following the scientific revolution] both exalted and debased man: he was raised up against God, exalted at His expense; he was reduced through a deep desire to an object of nature no different fundamentally from an animal or a plant.
Romano Guardini
,
The End of the Modern World
 
 
How noble and liberating was, by contrast, the obedient praise of the Psalmist:
 
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
 
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
 
For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
 
Psalm 8:3–5
 
immortals! But God sends the prophets to teach the people the reverse: He Himself is to be their “city,” their bulwark, their king. 
God does allow Samuel to anoint a king for the people, after the prophet advises them about the misery that such concentration of power will cause, for the king “will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots,” and “will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers,” and “will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants” (1 Sam. 8:11, 13, 15). If only our potentates in America would take but one tenth! But the real harm of bowing at the political altar is spiritual. One comes to believe that salvation lies in statecraft. Then every tin dictator with armies in bright uniform will look good. Ezekiel is unforgettable in his attack on this stupidity:
 
And [Jerusalem] played the harlot when she was mine; and she doted on her lovers, on the Assyrians her neighbors,
 
Which were clothed with blue, captains and rulers, all of them desirable young men, horsemen riding upon horses.
 
Thus she committed her whoredoms with them, with all them that were the chosen men of Assyria, and with all on whom she doted: with all their idols she defiled herself.
 
Neither left she her whoredoms brought from Egypt: for in her youth they lay with her, and they bruised the breasts of her virginity, and poured their whoredom upon her. (23:5–8)
 

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