Part 26. The Black Myth of the West – 1

This is the second volume of Amin Ramin’s “Man in Islam”. The first volume can be purchased on Amazon at this link.

If we look at the modern world and compare it with the traditional one in which people lived before the Industrial Revolution, we will notice a great difference. The fact is that traditional man existed in a world of natural things. He just took what was at hand and made some objects out of it, not caring about creating an artificial environment, all these gadgets, programs, chemical compounds, space satellites, etc. Things were inherited – the son received clothes or household items from his ancestors… The sword passed from generation to generation, from father to son, just as, for example, the spinning wheel passed from mother to daughter. Man lived in a certain harmony and symbiosis with the environment; there was not this race of constant multiplication of artificial things. They made a new thing when the old one fell into disrepair.

On the contrary, modern man exists in a kind of artificial world that he creates around himself. Today we see that things are not being replaced because they are falling into disrepair. New, better models simply supersede them. A mobile phone from five years ago may function perfectly well, but a more prestigious and modern model replaces it. Artificial intelligence is invented not because there is a need for it, but simply for the “desire for progress.” Man has surrounded himself with a world of artificial, constantly improving things without even thinking about whether they are useful or harmful.

But the question is this. Why did man suddenly decide to create an artificial world around himself? Where did such a decision, such a project, come from? Usually, they offer us some trivial and illogical explanation that supposedly people have gradually improved and evolved until they came to satellites and mobile phones… It is clear that this school explanation does not work because there is a gap between the traditional and modern world, not a gradual transition. Man lived under one way of life and suddenly decided to live under a completely different one.

Where did this decision come from? What prepared it? Could it be that man became somehow uncomfortable and fearful in the natural world created by God Himself? After all, it is clear that modern society is created by people who are clearly not in harmony with this world and reality in general…

We said that Christianity consists of three elements – Monotheism, Monism, and Dualism. Monotheism in Christianity is associated with the so-called “Old Testament” and the person of the real Jesus the Prophet. The monistic or manifestationistic line is primarily the mythology of the deification of Jesus. But the dualistic component is what concerns the negation of the world, the division of reality into dual pairs. This is what we call the “Black Myth.”

It is these “black” elements of Christianity that we will deal with in this part of our series. We will look at it through this very prism, which will enable us to answer our question.

We know that Christianity is a dualistic religion: it starts from a theology of “original sin” and divides existence into polar pairs: “the earthly – the heavenly,” “material – spiritual,” “church – world,” “Old Testament – New Testament,” “man – woman,” etc. And this is so because it integrated the black logos through the mystery story of the suffering and resurrecting god.

Here again, I draw attention to what might be called the “dialectic of Christianity.” Since it consists of three great discourses that merge and flow into one another, it is always possible to switch to a parallel discourse while externally excluding the others. Christianity is a system of three semantic cores with complex interaction threads between them. Hence the difficulty in analyzing it: as soon as we attribute to it a fixed position, it immediately turns into its opposite.

We said above that all three discourses in Christianity are balanced, and none of them comes to the fore to the detriment of the others. This is true. The significance of the Abrahamic heritage in Christianity is enormous. Ultimately, everything here goes back to the monotheistic arena where this religion originated. Christianity became a kind of truck, carrying the paradigm of Abrahamic Monotheism around the world. Manifestationism gave it a form of expression and a conceptual system. However, we must go further and say that despite the significance of these two discourses, they are not the fundamental ones here. The very subject of Christianity, its spirit, its heart, constitutes the Black Mysterial Myth. Marcion’s Christianity, with its exclusion of the Old Testament, was still Christianity. Tertullian’s Christianity, with its attacks on pagan wisdom, was also Christianity. But without the story of a suffering and regenerating god descending into the world’s darkness to save people, Christianity would not have existed.

Therefore, if we want to give this religion some definition, then it will sound like this: Christianity is a dualistic mystery cult that grew out of the Abrahamic arena and was augmented with manifestationalistic motifs.

We know that there has been a split in this religion since late antiquity, with Eastern and Western branches going in different directions. In Eastern Christianity, the emphasis was more on the manifestationistic moment and magical ceremonialism. Whereas in the West, the black line developed to the maximum. This is largely due to the influence of such a figure as the Blessed Augustine.

Augustine was a bishop of Hippo, a Western church father who composed his works in Latin, in contrast to the Eastern fathers who wrote in Greek. He was a Manichaean before Christianity and, in fact, remained so afterward, and therefore his teachings have pronounced dualistic features. Although, as we have said, Christianity as a whole is a dualistic cult, Augustine further emphasized this dualism by placing it at the head of the Catholic Church. Apparently, he was the first to coin the expression “original sin.” According to his teachings, this world and human beings are radically evil because they were created by the fall into sin. Every one of us inherits original sin, and therefore only the grace of God can save him – the man himself is utterly depraved and represents “the abyss of destruction.” In his famous work The City of God, Augustine divides reality into dualistic pairs – the city of God and the city of the earth, the earthly and the heavenly, etc.

These points will play a major role in the history of Western Christianity from then until almost today. Whether Catholic or Protestant, every European theologian has since proceeded from the concept of original sin, and thousands and thousands of preachers have made this issue paramount to the common masses. And so, we are not exaggerating when we say that Augustine is one of the most influential figures in the history of Western civilization. His influence was enormous in both Catholicism and Protestantism. He became an indisputable authority as early as the 5th century, immediately after his death. His influence has only grown ever since, until it peaked a thousand years later, in the 15th-17th centuries, at the dawn of New Age civilization.

In the Doctrine of the Fall, we see the same dualistic-gnostic plot reflected in the figure of the trickster who perverted creation, or the cosmic catastrophe that made creation fundamentally bad and evil. Augustine devoted many pages to criticizing Manichaeism, but in doing so, he de facto accused it of the same thing he himself believed.

So, in Western Christian theology, original sin, that is, Adam and Eve’s eating from the Forbidden Tree took on truly grand proportions. The famous Christian orator of his day, Seno, asserted that “man’s whole crime consists of his birth. He is guilty already in that he descends from Adam.” Let’s look at another quote, “The power of the poison that fills mortal sin is such that it when placed on the scales of divine justice, outweighs all the good works of all the saints, even if they were a thousand times more numerous and great than they actually are.”

To satiate His anger over this event, God condemns “the only son” to torment, but even this is not enough. Most people are cursed anyway; only a tiny minority will be saved. And so, each person is guilty by the very fact of their existence.

All this caused a pathological sense of guilt in each individual and a state of collective neurosis in society. People became unable to accept the world, themselves, their bodies, and their actions. A constantly inflated sense of sinfulness caused self-loathing and alienation from oneself.

Let’s just take a few historical illustrations to give a clear picture of what it looked like.

“The body is the prison of the spirit,” “life is a vale of tears,” “man is a son of rot and food for worms,” living among men already means “living in Babylon,” anyone who wants to be saved must “spew worldly vomit”… These are all quotations from medieval Christian authors. Streams of such literature poured out of the bosom of the church, monasteries and mendicant orders. Generations and generations have been raised on it, and it has become the norm for an entire civilization, not just for monks or clerics. Especially since there were no alternative sources of information. Being human and just living is already something disgusting, already a sin.

Today, it is difficult even to imagine the degree of spiritual terror the man of that time was subjected to. Ludolph of Saxony, the author of the popular book Vita Christi, writes, “The Savior said, Beware of men as the greatest of evils, wishing to show us that man is the greatest danger on earth… Every wild beast has its own cunning, but man includes all possible cunning. And more than that: he is worse than the devil.”

Over time, medieval European civilization developed a true death cult. After all, the Savior died. And he died not just any death, but a painful and shameful death on a cross, and this Death – with a capital letter – became the main religious myth. What does such a myth teach people? The answer is obvious: it teaches them to die with all its consequences. “The darkness of the North,” “the sunset lands of the West” (Abendland) is not just a metaphor. On the people living under the shadow of the Crucified One, the night of life has descended. They live under the sign of death. The symbol of religion becomes the cross, the instrument of torture and torment. Skeletons and decomposing corpses (“relics”) are displayed in churches; the bodies of saints are dismembered and carried to temples and homes in pieces (according to Christian canons, every church must necessarily be built on a piece of a relic, that is, on a piece of a corpse). Chronicles report that the crowd nearly ripped up the living saint in order to take possession of his future relics.

The essence of life becomes death. For God Himself has become a corpse, having taken the form of man. Every living person is essentially dead. Heidegger will call this “being-towards-death,” as we shall see later. Sources continually mention that all life is nothing but preparation for death. Pietro da Lucca states, “We are sent into this life only to learn the art of dying well.” Mistress Death symbolizes the dominance of nothingness over being. The Crucified and the nations, consecrated by his mournful image, merge in a universal roundel of Holy Death.

As long as man has an ounce of life, he will be suspected because of his potential “sinfulness.” For what is sinful is life itself, which is the result of the “fall into sin,” from the consequences of which Christ redeemed us. Redeemed by nothing less than death…

And so, it is no coincidence that with the advent of Christianity, the cemetery became located in the center of the city. And by virtue of its location, it became the center of city life. They built a church near the cemetery, read decrees in the cemetery, held meetings and trials, made sales and purchases, took walks.

In the literature and sermons of that time, naturalistic descriptions of the processes of rotting and being devoured by worms occupy a large place – as an admonition to those who were too fond of this world. The visual arts genre known as the macabre (“dance of death”), depicting dancing corpses and skeletons alongside kings, priests, knights, and peasants, became extremely popular. 

Another common genre of fine art is paintings depicting the suffering and death of various kinds of saints and martyrs, including the crucifix itself. Sometimes these paintings are very naturalistic – green corpses, bent hands, faces frozen in horror… On the other hand, executions accompanied by elaborate torture were constantly practiced in the streets of cities. The bodies of the executed were left in this position for a long time.

The great plague epidemic began at the peak of the Church’s experiments in the war on life. The “Black Death” came in 1348 and exterminated a third of the European population in three years. Society perceived it as the materialization of terrible threats, the apotheosis of the macabre. Mistress-Death became the undisputed queen of the European continent not in dreams but in reality. The Black Death shocked European humanity, from which it may not yet have recovered. The nightmare of the plague consisted not only and not so much in the great mortality but the unspeakably horrible things associated with it. The disease spread like wildfire and plunged people into utter despair and powerlessness. The sick person died in a few days or hours; there were few recovery cases. Sick people abandoned alone by their relatives; bishops and priests fleeing the cities; streets littered with corpses; extinct cities; general alienation and fear; plague barracks filled with corpses mixed with the dying; plague doctors in sinister beak masks; crowds of self-abusive flagellants; mass suicides; dancing people who had lost their minds at the sight of unbelievable horrors; visions of the devil riding himself in a carriage drawn by raven-horned horses – all these surreal pictures seemed to embody the secret of the Black Myth – that all life is but a bubble on the surface of the all-encompassing Death.

An important place in the practice of the Church at that time was occupied by exercises in the mortification of the flesh. Heinrich Suso wore an iron chain, which he removed only when his wounds began to ooze blood. He also wore a shirt with 150 spikes that plunged into his body and caused unbearable pain. Eventually, his flesh began to decompose alive, giving off a disgusting smell and becoming a haven for vermin; so many insects crawled on him at night that he often felt as if “he were lying in an anthill.” Madame de Guyon burned her body with candles, poured molten wax on it, demanded that her healthy teeth be pulled out, and ate her filth.

All medieval manuals require mortification of the body, seeing it as a means of combating temptation. According to Montargon, “The body should be mortified in order to strengthen the spirit, for it never feels so good as when the flesh is weak. So the apostle teaches.” Listen again to what Tertullian says: nothing pleases the Lord so much as the thinness of the body; the more it withers in diligent mortification, the less decay it undergoes in the tomb and therefore, the more glorious it will rise again.

Sexual life was especially attacked. What Imam Sadiq (A) says is the highest pleasure of Paradise has been branded as the lowest perversion and vice. Medieval authors literally cannot find the words to express the contempt they felt this area of human life deserved. According to St. Augustine, in intercourse, man is likened to cattle. Even sexual desire itself is defiled. Marriage is inherently always filthy and can only be tolerated out of necessity. Intercourse with one’s wife, not for procreation but for pleasure, was regarded as one of the deadly sins, no less! But even sexual intercourse for the sake of procreation is sinful if even a little bodily pleasure is mixed in with it.

Here is a description of the female body in a medieval treatise: “A source of disgust, a vessel of filth, a stinking cloaca, a cesspool, decomposed carrion, a moldy trunk, a frayed bag, a leaky pocket.” Or look at the famous passage from the equally famous book The Hammer of Witches: “I have found that woman is harsher than death… for though Eve was led to sin by the devil, yet Eve seduced Adam. And since Eve’s sin would not have brought spiritual and bodily death upon us if it had not been followed by Adam’s fall, into which Eve, not the devil, led her husband, I say that she is more bitter than death. She is more bitter than death because death is natural and only destroys the body. But the sin begun by the woman puts to death the soul through the deprivation of the God’s grace, and also the body in recompense for sin.”

All beauty, male and female, must be despised. Beauty generates the tyranny of passion; it is “the bait of perdition.” In a sermon specifically dedicated to the “tomb of beauty,” Francis of Toulouse says: “We must despise beauty, for no matter how it glitters, no matter how blissful it promises and no matter how careful it is, it passes like a shadow and like smoke… It is useless… There is nothing real in it, nothing lasting.” Finally, “it is detrimental to those who see it because it generates dirty thoughts and bad desires.”

Conversely, ugliness is closer to the thoughts of the devout Christian because it turns him away from this world.

So it was a war on life, declared by the Church – a “crusade against life,” as one author put it. An attempt to destroy the most important manifestations and whole layers of human reality, for example, everything related to sex and gender – and this within the framework of an entire civilization! An experiment on a large scale – naturally, doomed to failure in advance. In the end, life took its toll and destroyed, in turn, Christianity.

So, we see that the Christian European world was literally the realm of Death for many centuries. A man would go to church and see pictures of the torture of saints or pieces of dismembered corpses and relics. He would leave the church and enter the cemetery, which was the center of city life. He would go to the square and see a sadistic spectacle of a criminal being massacred or his corpse on display. He would go to his home, and there was a picture of a crucified corpse, the symbol of this religion.

Protestantism not only did not weaken but even more strengthened these tendencies. The Reformers’ main accusation against the Catholic Church is precisely that it does not sufficiently follow its own declarations, that it is mired in worldly concerns and pleasures. Luther, as we know, reinforced the concept of original sin: here, it becomes truly comprehensive. The French historian Delumeau writes in “Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture”: “Thus it was in Protestant theology – and, accordingly, in the sixteenth century – that the diminution of man and the world reached its greatest extent in Western civilization. Never before have they been the object of such total condemnation, and never has this condemnation been intended for such a wide audience. Luther and his followers urged all Christians to ‘despair completely in themselves in order to gain the ability to accept the grace of Christ.’ A person who has become a bad tree can only want and do bad things. Salvation is rooted in a clear consciousness that all is bad in and around us. ‘The world’ and ‘the devil’ are synonymous.”

Another founding father of Protestantism, Calvin, scourges man and the world with no less ferocity. He calls man an “apostate,” a “monkey,” an “indomitable and cruel beast,” “dung,” and “garbage.” Even the knowledge of God, according to Calvin, is found in despair. Man must be completely disillusioned with the world and himself in order to behold God. In his major work, Instruction in the Christian Faith, he writes: “It is the sense of our ignorance, the futility of effort, poverty, weakness, wickedness, and depravity, that leads us to the realization that only in God can we find the light of true wisdom, unshakable virtue, the abundance of every good and incorruptible justice.”

The Reformers closed the monasteries not because they regarded the world and life in the world as something good, but rather because life, in their view, is all evil and filthy, including life in a monastery. They closed monasteries only to make all people monks. Everything in man is terrible, and only the unmerited grace of Christ poured out upon him can save him.

Thus, in its Protestant version, Christianity reaches the extremes of dualistic pessimism and ends nearly a thousand years of movement along this path. Then the transition to modern society occurs, and it is no coincidence that the Protestant countries were at the forefront of this transition.

Now let’s look at the conclusions that follow from all of this.

First, it is clear that this was a doctrine completely opposed to fitra, that is, to the nature of man. By his very nature, man strives for perfection – beauty, dignity, strength, joy. On this, he was created, and this is what Christianity openly challenged, which amounted to a challenge to human nature itself. But sooner or later, that nature had to fight back. And so, it is only in the Christian world that such a thing as atheism is born. Of course, there have always been atheists in other religions and civilizations, but there have been no movements consciously and entirely trying to remove society from the influence of religion. Why this phenomenon arose in the West, after our remarks, becomes clear.

Second. Imagine the cemetery atmosphere reigning over society not just for one or two years but for centuries. Relics, dismembered corpses, graves, dead men dancing, cemeteries, mortification of the flesh, The Hammer of Witches, black death, naked crucified bodies, and all this for centuries and centuries… Such a situation must inevitably have led to a kind of mutation in the human psyche, causing the deepest fear – the fear of life – and, accordingly, the desire to overcome this fear through creating an artificial world. Modern society was born out of the experience of trauma. It could not have been created by people who are comfortable in the world, who live in harmony with reality. It is the product of those who are radically BAD in this world. Hence, the desire to enclose oneself with a paling of artificial things has become the Western unconscious’s deepest aspiration.

Thus, the project of continuous technological progress is derived from fear. It is a kind of psychoanalytical work that the unconscious of Western man does on itself: fear is embodied in technological progress. Modern technology is an embodied terror, an attempt to hex the world. It is the Western unconscious spilling out in the form of rocks of metal, concrete, and wires.

Contrary to God, who created a failed world, there is a desire to create an alternative world, to become the demiurge. And that is why no other civilization is able to set up the same mechanism of technical development – they have no “motor” that causes this movement. They outwardly copy modern technology, but they cannot create an internal mechanism for its reproduction – the mechanism of a dualistic civilization.

Third. As we know, the laws of this world are such that every action causes counteraction. The pendulum’s weight always returns to the other end of its amplitude. And so, from all the attempts of Christianity to artificially create a civilization built on a total denial of life, the opposite extreme is eventually born: a civilization built on an absolute cult of life.

At some point, people become so tired of the graveyard atmosphere that a vacuum forms around religion. It begins to be perceived as something disgusting. It becomes a natural thing to get rid of, just as one seeks to get rid of sickness, depression, and any other negative and unpleasant things. This is how atheism is born.

In turn, the response to the attempt to destroy all sensuality is a wild rampage of sensuality. Christianity declared gender and sex to be the wiles of Satan and tried to ban almost all their manifestations. But the pendulum swung back, and now gender and sex have become an intrusive cult, which resulted in extreme forms of vice and debauchery.

The situation is the same with death. From being the most discussed topic, it becomes the most censored one. If earlier death was everywhere reminded of itself, now, on the contrary, it is so ousted from reality, as if it doesn’t exist at all, and a person is going to live forever. It is as indecent to talk about death in modern society as it was to talk about sex in the Middle Ages. Even the funeral procedure is set up to cause as little discomfort to the living as possible. Mourning and lamentation are discouraged, and cremation is increasingly practiced instead of burial. Death is concealed from view, to become as inconspicuous an event as possible, even for the dying person himself (hence the spread of euthanasia as a method of comfortable and quick death).

So, we see that modern Western society is becoming the exact opposite of medieval Christian society. The weight of the pendulum has shifted to the opposite pole. Instead of a terrible and punishing God – atheism, instead of the apology of death – worship of life, instead of contempt for the body – its cult, instead of the prohibition of the sexual sphere – sexual licentiousness, instead of self-abuse – narcissism, instead of a one-sided emphasis on the afterlife – materialism, instead of panicked fear of the future world – its complete oblivion. One has to understand that these are inseparable things and that it could not be otherwise in a dualistic civilization. The response to one extreme was bound to be the other.

And it is interesting that the country in which both these extremes coexist at the same time is America. Europe is a post-Christian world where the movement of weights from one pole to the other is separated by time. But in America, because of its historical peculiarities, both poles exist side by side. On the one hand, America is the only white country in which Christianity is still alive, a country of fanatical moralistic preachers, Sunday schools, and Protestant communities, where the president recites the oath on the Bible… But on the other hand, this is the country of Hollywood and Las Vegas, mass culture and postmodernism, the consumer society, and the entertainment industry. There is a feeling that it is not one but two completely different countries. One can only understand this paradox from what we have said about Christianity. The two stages of Christianity that Europe has passed consecutively, America is passing simultaneously and synchronously.

Fourth. The foundation of Christianity is the doctrine of the incarnation of God. “God became man in order to give his life for our sins.” And when Nietzsche uttered his sacramental “God is dead,” few really paid attention to the fact that he was merely repeating what Christianity had been saying for nearly two thousand years before him: “God is crucified,” “Christ died on the cross.” The Nietzschean formula repeats the Christian formula, in which God was placed in a human body and died. There has been a collapse or expulsion of God into history. To say that “God became man” is like saying “God died.” The very entrance of God into human history with all its vanity, that is, the dissolution of God into human reality, was the first act of secularization. A God who has fallen to the human level, a visible and tangible God, is no longer God at all.

Another consequence is that the dissolution of God into the human means the deification of the human. This has never happened before. Traditional paganism deified man along with an endless number of other things. Man was simply one plane on the divine ontological axis. Above him still existed the gods, who, in principle, did not care much about human beings. The pagan picture of the world is now very difficult for us to grasp. The fact is that the pagan gods don’t care about people at all; they are indifferent to them. They can sometimes help them if they want to, but they can also hurt them, which they often do. We said that the pagan gods are really jinn. They are very different beings. And so there were no prayers to the gods in the pagan world. There were hymns, that is, praises to the gods, but there were no prayers like the ones we read. Because the gods were indifferent to man, they had their own affairs in their world, and people had to deal with themselves somehow.

And that’s why people very rarely made requests to the gods. We see that this is a completely different picture of the world than we are used to. Because we are accustomed to the fact that there is one God, Who governs everything, Who hears, to Whom you can make requests and entreaties. And the pagans (for example, in antiquity) had no such thing at all. There were gods-jinn, indifferent to man. And there was an impersonal cosmic origin from which everything came. Still, it was also not an object for requests but simply a blissful, self-absorbed center of the cosmos, from which all layers of reality, from top to bottom, emanate. It cares even less about man than the gods. Man was essentially left to himself.

And what happened here, in the case of Christianity? Here a certain divine nature (a divine dimension) was given to human existence, to its ordinary affairs. And only to the human, mind you. This is the difference from paganism, where everything was deified. If we think about it carefully, we see something unprecedented. These low, petty affairs of man, his terrible and bloody, messy history, were given the imprint of something divine. Along with this, Western civilization itself becomes “divine.” Hence its infinite confidence in the ability to impose its standards on the world. Hence its will to power. Hence cultural racism. And after that, technology becomes its embodied deity.

And from here, the following idea can already arise (and it has arisen): why do we need God somewhere out there in heaven? After all, “God became flesh,” became man. So we are all gods. Let’s build God on earth, God in the flesh, “God incarnate.” This idea is at the heart of the utopia of modern society.

And then there is such a striking, never-before-seen, and scandalous (one might say) occurrence, that man is deified and, on the contrary, the whole world is undeified. In paganism, as we said, man was deified, but everything else (all reality) was also deified. That is, man was a drop in this sea of the impersonal Absolute poured into all things, from minerals to the gods. In Abrahamic Monotheism, understandably, both man and the world are deprived of divinity. Only in Christianity did it happen that the whole world was deprived of divinity, while man, on the contrary, was endowed with it. And it turned out that man became a god, called to rule over this ungodly reality.

The world is black, bad, radically alienated from God. The world is a consequence of the fall into sin. But a divine origin descends into this blackness, becoming a man. Man as a kind of deity becomes infinitely exalted above this black, hopeless world. A monster, a mutant emerges, beginning a campaign to conquer the world… Technology becomes a Western form of alchemical opus, a Western god.

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