Tag Archives: Christian Theology – General

The Age of Reason

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Age of Reason [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Thomas Paine, ed Moncure Daniel Conway.

Paine Conway The Age of Reason

Thomas Paine was a leading public intellectual of the 18th-century American Revolution, with his pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis as chief texts of the “spirit of 1776.” He followed these publications with his Rights of Man to defend the French and American revolutionary efforts against reactionary political sentiment in England. His final major work The Age of Reason was written as an expatriate in France. The first and shorter part he composed under the shadow of imminent arrest and possible execution, without recourse to a copy of the Bible that it criticizes. The second part includes a more detailed evaluation of Christian scripture, on grounds of both its provenance and internal features.

“Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself than this thing called Christianity” (189-90). Raised by Quakers, Paine was an exemplary Deist of his period and staunchly anti-Christian. His distaste for Christianity is entirely consistent with and often justified by his Deist piety, refusing to attribute to the godhead sentiments and behaviors offensive to human conscience.

Paine’s dismantling of claims that the Bible should be regarded as the “Word of God” remain effective today, performed entirely around the evident sense of the texts themselves, without recourse to the “higher criticism” already being developed in Paine’s time, which was to prove so damning to the historical pretenses of Bible reception. He does verge on source criticism at a couple of points in discussing the evident “Gentile” origins of certain component texts of the Bible, but simply refers to the judgments of Jewish authorities (Abenezra and Spinoza) and the texts’ inconsistency with ancient Hebrew culture and religious sentiment (124-5), rather than any putative source texts. Paine’s attacks on the moral features of the supposed heroes of the Bible have not lost any of their force or relevance.

While Aleister Crowley was later to take up as a rallying cry Paine’s maxim that “Mystery is the antagonist of truth” (76), I would not say the Beast intended it in just the same unsubtle sense as the venerable Revolutionary, although mystery’s envelopment of truth in Paine’s argument foreshadows Crowley’s incantation. Paine classes mystery with miracle and prophecy as the three invidious organs of revealed or “fabulous religion” (75, 80-2), which he opposes to the “true religion” grounded in scientific admiration for nature and individual conformity to reasoned ethics.

Miracle is faulty for “degrading the Almighty into the character of a show-man, playing tricks to amuse and make the people stare and wonder” (79). The enlightened man of reason (dare I say “magician”) will stare and wonder at unadorned reality, of course. As regards prophecy, Paine makes an important distinction between the archaic sense that he finds for the word in the Hebrew Bible, where it evidently means musical performance and/or poetry (35-7), and the “modern” sense in which “prophet” takes the place of “seer” indicating a claimant to divinely-guided psychic foreknowledge (81-2, 111 citing 1 Samuel 9:9). “Prophet” thus ultimately descends to a mere synonym for “liar,” particularly in such cases as Isaiah, whose prognostication was contradicted by the subsequent course of events (133-4).

A full chapter of the first part of The Age of Reason is dedicated to “The Effects of Christianism on Education,” sadly relevant to the US of the 21st century. The Christian institutions of education substitute indoctrination for learning, in order to profit by the resulting ignorance and cognitive dissonance. Today, we can see the further turn of the wheel in which Christians accuse sincere secular efforts to foster learning with the psychologically projected charge of “indoctrination,” since that is the only function they can see in schooling. Current attacks on public libraries and new laws to put schoolteachers in ideological straight-jackets manifest such perspectives in policy, although the recurring phenomenon is as old as the US nation-state, a polity distinctive for its historical adoption of anti-literacy laws.

My Dover paperback copy of The Age of Reason reproduces the 1896 Putnam’s edition by Moncure Daniel Conway, which reconciled the first-published French text with the later unauthorized English edition, noting the variances in footnotes. Conway also appended some correspondence by Paine regarding the work: one letter to “a friend” clarifying the book’s thesis, and another in response to his Revolutionary comrade Sam Adams. The latter clearly shows the Deist anti-Christian Paine to have a greater magnanimity of spirit than his Puritan interlocutor Adams.

Cult and Controversy

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Cult and Controversy: The Worship of the Eucharist Outside Mass [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Nathan Mitchell, Studies in the Reformed Rites of the Catholic Church, Vol 4.

Mitchell Cult and Controversy

When I started reading this 1981 study in Roman Catholic liturgy and ritual praxis, I expected it to be chiefly concerned to contextualize and interpret the 1973 Vatican Decree on “Holy Communion and Worship of the Eucharist Outside Mass,” which supplied regular liturgical forms for administration of the Eucharist to the sick, viaticum, processions and benedictions with the Eucharist, “forty hours” devotions, and Eucharistic congresses, all in light of the Second Vatican Council. While that concern is certainly present here, the book happily has a much wider scope and ambition to review without prejudice popular customs and official sanctions attaching to the Eucharist outside the liturgy of the Mass.

The first half of the book is concerned with ancient and medieval contexts. Ultimately, the traditional practices are classed under four heads: 1) Administering the sacrament in ministerial visits to the sick or dying, 2) Processions displaying the host, 3) Stationary exhibition of the host, and 4) Use of the reserved host as an instrument of benediction (163 ff.). Early chapters discuss cultural and liturgical developments that fueled the worship of the consecrated species, which only became possible once the Eucharist had transformed from a “holy meal to sacred food.”

The second part (“Reforms”) is concerned with modern developments, including both the Tridentine era and the developments since Vatican II. There is particular attention given to the US American context, where the sort of practices discussed in this book “provided a ‘distinctive badge of identity’ for a Catholic minority in an overwhelmingly Protestant country” (335). “Theological roots” make for a surprisingly minor element of the overall treatment, and the summative synthesis and evaluation draws heavily on both secular psychology (notably that of Erik Erikson) and philosophy (Paul Ricoeur).

My peculiar perspective on this material caused me to take note of such items as the 17th-century Congregation of Rites making an injunction against “placing relics or statues on the altar of exposition” (205), which naturally put me in mind of the contradictory command from Liber Legis III:22. While I had little use for the bits of Christian theology in this book, its study of the long-term interactions of culture, institutions, and liturgy around Eucharistic practice was definitely worth my attention.