Robert Tulip

Lese Majesty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lese-majesty has an amusing picture. Banning farting in the face of the king (or equivalently seditious blasphemy) opens the politics of majesty, defined by Lenin as кто кого (who whom). Constantine’s use of Jesus as an instrument of power was somewhat like the way Genghis Khan used captured women and children as shields before his advancing army, but Constantine’s method speaks to the majesty of the proclaimed Jesus, not the historical Jesus. If the historical Jesus was invented, one cannot speak of his majesty except proleptically, projecting a vision of a preferred eschaton when the son will get even with everyone who insulted Him. Historically and politically, the actual majesty of Christ is constructed by believers in the imagined fictional Christ, and does not derive from a miraculous intervention of God in the world.
The majestic Isaac Newton is of course celebrated for his famous statement that he could see further because he was standing on the shoulders of giants, by whom he meant such scientific luminaries as Kepler, Galileo and Copernicus.

By contrast, in a field such as Egyptology, the predecessors tend to be a rather suspect and disreputable bunch such as Marcelo Ficino, Giordano Bruno, John Dee and other Hermetic types who fell foul of the inquisition and the Enlightenment. Even Newton’s celebrated hero Kepler had hermetic attitudes, as did the great Sir Isaac himself, seen in his scribblings about Daniel, Thoth, etc. Why, no less than the incomparable Leonardo Da Vinci wrote in his extant Notebooks “Hermes the Philosopher”, a cryptic remark that can hardly have been intended to flatter Mr Torquemada.

I say all this to illustrate that the more diverse and bold writers of the Victorian era did actually have hermetic shoulders to climb upon, if not to cry upon, but these predecessors tend to be discounted today by those of more empirical temper. So we can think of Mercury as a Hells Angels motorcycle enthusiast, maybe with one eye, a pair of ravens and a tablet, offering lifts to those skilled in the art of interpretation, like Champollion, and carrying them further than they could have travelled alone.

While I am clearing my throat, I should mention spin’s earlier amusing image of myself hawking a putrid albatross in the theatre, with the rotten bird disguised as an anointed Egyptian/Christian God. This is more Monty Python than Coleridge’s grey beard loon, evoking Mr Cleese’s offer of gannet on a stick. Bit of lippy and myrrh on a dead seabird and eftsoons it is the spitting image of Thoth. A bigger stumbling block than a crucified king. At least Coleridge’s albatross drank from the sacred alph and powered the loon’s lonely glittering return to England. But I digress. Sorry.
This mildly arcane scholastic point about Ages v Nations at Rev 15:2 is actually quite important for the question of this thread as to the source of the majesty of the historical Jesus. Real majesty is associated with political power, so the power of Christ rests in the attitudes of the faithful rather than what he may or may not have actually done in history. There is not much real majesty in reigning from a tree. So, when we see the contested text of Rev 15:2, with a bunfight over whether Jesus is king of ages, nations or saints, there are some intriguing problems as to the source of majesty.

At Rev 15:2 the tension is whether Jesus gets his legitimacy as king from an eternal source – the cyclic pattern of cosmic ages – or from a temporal mundane source – his inspiration for the church. The Gnostics (pneumatic spirituals) seem to me to favour the allegorical idea of an eternal king of ages, whereas the church (hylic materialists) favour either saints or nations, placing the majesty of Christ in the political connection of apostolic succession going back to Peter’s alleged confession of Jesus as Christ.

The majesty of a divine king is intrinsically linked to moral legitimacy from the mandate of heaven as the source of divine right, enabling rule through consent rather than from the barrel of a gun. Majesty does not seek permission, but it does seek to intimidate. Hence the proper translation of the power mottos of the British Crown - Dieu et mon droit and Honi soit que mal y pense - is ‘fuck you’. Pardon my French.You know, even though I got an MA Honours Degree in ontology, this is the first time I can recall in recent memory that anyone has specifically asked me about ontology. It seems such a non-topic, as Heidegger put it, a muffled bell. More often people confuse ontology with oncology, just as Christology gets confused with crystallography, by people who expect study to be of real topics rather than such speculative nonsense. As Brian might have said, blessed are you Simon bar-Jonah.

What is the meaning of being? As Heidegger asked, what means the ‘is’ in Goethe’s graffito uber alle gipfel ist ruhe (over all summits is peace)? I am more infected than I have realized by the epigraph of Being and Time, from Plato’s Sophist, ‘we who thought we knew the meaning of being are perplexed.’

Can an ontology be objective, systematic, compelling and fundamental? This is how I read Heidegger’s question of the meaning of being, as the question that established him as the majestic hidden king of philosophy. My ‘personal ontology’, to use spin’s term, seeks to answer Heidegger’s question scientifically, noting that a theory of being must provide a story connecting humanity to the universe.

Kant speaks of a reverse Copernican revolution, placing humanity again at the centre of the cosmos. But rather than Kant’s conforming of objects to cognition, my approach is to say cosmology must explain the universe from a human perspective, or else it is all ‘cosmo’ and no ‘logy’. So the question is, What is the biggest cosmic structure that actively shapes human evolution? The answer is the physical structure of the solar system. So my ‘personal ontology’ looks to explain human narrative identity against observable patterns of nature seen in the astronomy of the solar system, in the orbital mechanics of the earth. As Copernicus observed, the earth has three motions, daily, annual and precessional. This last movement, precession of the equinoxes, structuring the long term observable position of the stars, is in my view, as in Hamlet’s Mill, at the ground of ontology and myth.
My mention of Humpty Dumpty illustrated Lewis Carroll’s absurdist sarcasm about the status of theology, his sense that in the days of Dover Beach and the Death of God that theologians were in hopeless need of repair by all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.

“Glory” is a meaningless term, objectively considered, which is why Carroll said Humpty could define it any which way he so pleased. That is why theology has slipped from its medieval status as queen of the sciences to its current position as a term of abuse, with ‘theological’ a byword for subjective irrational fantasy. But the ivory tower does not determine popular use, especially with a key political term such as majesty. Farting in the face of the king is well and good, academically speaking, but can still get you locked up in the real world. The power of the crown rests on the loyalty of subjects to the mystery of majesty.

For the power of Jesus, majesty is equally central, and equally mysterious, compared to its use as the framework of political consent. The core of the creed is κυριος ιησους χριστος (Jesus Christ is Lord). The question of the majesty of Christ asks in what this Lordship consists, how it relates to history, to politics and to cultural identity.

At Vridar Neil Godfrey recently pointed out that Claude Lévi-Strauss reminds us that “any retelling of a myth (including a rationalization of it) is itself a variant of the myth and nothing but a new version of the myth.” So the mythicist effort to remove the majesty of Jesus by proving he does not exist becomes a bit like Lady Macbeth removing the spot from her hand. Sin, grace, glory, majesty, none may flower as ideas if not watered. But then even tulips can grow if their five points are watered. These ideas don’t go away just because we ignore them. I have to blame Heidegger for this ontological use of meaning. His axiom that 'care is the meaning of being' has a rather wrenching impact on conventional thought patterns if properly considered. In this sense, the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ equates meaning with purpose and value. Heidegger interpreted meaning existentially, and in his later writings adopted a somewhat mystical enframing pantheist fourfold of earth and sky, man and gods. The central place he gave to care and concern as creating our concept of world was at the foundation of his ontology, as a paradigm grounded in human being in the world. Against this existential method, meaning is not just a property of objective scientific facts, but also of subjective personal values. The existential philosophy of Being and Time looks to how such values can be understood as universally true, for example in the moods of angst, resolve, openness and authenticity.

My use of meaning was in the context of the existential psychology of Rollo May, who said that myths are the stories that give meaning to our lives. This is to say, we require a narrative that makes sense of the world for us, and such a narrative, an ontology if you like, always has the psychological structure of religious myth.Since I’ve revealed my debt to Heidegger, it is no surprise that I sympathise with his messianic tilting at the windmills of etymology. Even Don Quixote, the knight of the sorrowful face, had his messianic qualities, which are often lost on the more cautious of his scholarly readers who don’t see the esoteric stream flowing from Cervantes through Alice to Cleese.

Just because an etymology is speculative does not make it bullshit. Indeed, having too sensitive a bullshit-detector in this field can close off some interesting conversation, for example on the meaning of majesty. Linguists don’t have a monopoly on the meaning of words, which is why Heidegger asked what poets are for. Seeing Bilbo on his way to bridle Smaug in the cinema, this is of course a meme that goes back to Jason and legendary Colchis in Georgia.

Bridling the dragon is a story with a heavy potential for precessional mythologising, looking at the movement of the north celestial pole over historical time from the dragon to the bear. The North Celestial Pole is a source of ‘power, seat and authority’ as the glittering loon of Patmos put it at Rev 13:2. And bridling the dragon is central to the majestic story of salvation when Michael cast out Satan at Rev 12:7-10. Our modern temper finds such stories strictly meaningless. But I would claim that a precessional ontology can recover some scientific value in this apocalyptic marsh. I suspect mythicism goes back to Docetism, and then maintained an esoteric secret thread through to Leonardo.

I read the Wikipedia page on David Strauss as a refresher. Strauss’s use of Hegel is one thing that I would like to mention in terms of this discussion of majesty. Hegel has a cultural mythical status that is somewhat majestic. Stalin was Hegel’s great bastard acolyte, in Keynes’ sense of men of action misreading past thinkers. There is an atheist power line from Hegel through Bruno Bauer to Lenin. It seems that Strauss mixed up ideas from Hegel and Schleiermacher, but nonetheless, the intensely political debates about Strauss’s work help illustrate how the idea of the majesty of Christ persisted in Prussia. That is logically sound, and in principle I agree. Where I would quibble is in your ontological commitment to the scholar over the amateur. An amateur can range widely but lightly over numerous fields of study, incorporating all into an ontology, without being blinkered by scholarly boundaries, and having respect for specialists in dialogue. So I think the most pressing prerequisite is the ability to define ontological commitments, exploring the coherence and power of our assumptions. My ontological commitments, as points of axiological ethics, include belief in the existence of the universe as described by science, the reliability of evidence and logic, and the need for new popular stories that enable human flourishing.

spin

Well, yeah. You don't see far standing on the shoulders of midgets.

(Not that I have no respect for Bruno et al., but they were best known as recyclers of older ideas.)


It's funny that you jumped poem here. Coleridge has been lurking in the back of my mind regarding certain facets of personal ontology. Building that pleasure dome in air. What one does in one's head involves at a minimal level sense data one receives and uses them to construct more complex structures. Such sunny pleasure domes need have no relation to the real world beyond the sense data. This is where I get uppity with enunciated ontological fragments that have no epistemology behind them....

I get to here and understand that I came out by the same door where in I went. I went in a door concerning the need for clarification of personal ontologies that come into contact with others. It's like I've just been told that ontological clarification is next door. And I have no notion of a personal ontology being objective: how could it then be both personal and objective? I was interested in the interplay between the what is of one person and that of another, the compromise necessary for communication. (No compromise indicates no communication.)

I admit that beside the fact that he was a boozy beggar, I know nada about Heidegger and had hoped not to strain the limits of my brain with details in that direction unless necessary.

:wide:

:constern02:

Notions of the "meaning of life" conjure up gormless people coming to your door trying to fulfill their religious commitments by muttering confusedly about purpose or significance of my existence. They naturally have trouble when I ask on what grounds they are so teleologically minded.

If these values are purely ontological, how can one say they are universal?

As I know nothing about Rollo May or his psychology, do you think your use of "meaning" in what I commented on would have communicated anything to me?

Is "give meaning to our lives" somewhat analogous to "make sense of the world"? Does science supply us with tools to make sense of the world? If so, does science equate to religious myth?

I have no problem with etymology. But one can't just pick "etymologies" out of one's anal cavity, as all those sorry things you've previously proffered under the name of etymology seem to have been picked from. Etymology works on systemic knowledge of languages and diachronic linguistics. Without the use of these skill sets, it's clear what etymological efforts are.

And using words, phrases and presuppositions whose usage is not in the ken of one's interlocutor in a conversation can also close off some interesting conversation.

The answer today is none. (But that's because contemporary society has been denied of access to even the simplest of non-literal use of language.)

This comment about linguists not having "a monopoly on the meaning of words" is certainly true. Words mean what speakers can get them to mean in the act of communicating, which is true of anyone including poets. Linguists merely systematically analyse aspects of language usage.

I think the church was relatively efficient when dealing with heresy.

Hey, I know that majesty is ostensibly what this thread is about and you're doing a sterling job, weaving it through your response, but I still haven't changed by view on its lack of interest to me.

This quibble is not worth the effort. I was rather clear that the discourse concerning amateurs and scholars regarded how someone without knowledge in a field should start of getting information, ie by going with the scholarly status quo, at least until you know better. Once you have started learning the requisite skill sets the distinction becomes less relevant, for ultimately all that matters is the evidence and conclusions drawn from it.

(And hopefully circumvent those you can individuate as impeding. The individuation of commitments is not a necessary condition for the task I outlined, but for all scholarly pursuits.)

I can provisionally* go along with the universe/science/evidence and logic, but can't one flourish without popular stories?
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*Provisionality allows me to change my mind at the drop of a hat, though it is highly unlikely that I will change my mind in this case.

mountainman

At Antioch in his oration Constantine made explicit references to the chronology of the Christians. His people had done their research into the chronology of the Sibyl's prediction of the birth of the historical Jesus ...


This is made profoundly clear in the new testament:




The majesty of Big J. appears to be historically derived from the miraculous intervention of the Emperor Constantine in the world.

Into the world at the same time in the 4th century entered the ruthless and despotic imperial measures taken against anyone who even appeared to violate the majesty of the Emperor's New and Strange dead Jewish god. It was considered one of the worst crimes in the 4th century not to confess in the universal majesty of the Jesus character. Punishment for these crimes against the majesty of the ruthless Christian state involved torture and execution, and the Christian emperor(s) established state tribunals to conduct these barbaric inquisitions.

When the fictional Big J said he was to bring the sword and not peace, the author who had given him birth in a story was not kidding.

The fictional NT appears to be seriously humourless Roman propaganda.

Robert Tulip

All this meandering among kings and cabbages is immensely fascinating to me. To have a serious conversation about ontology and Christology is a rare pleasure, as these are the subjects that have preoccupied me most for the last thirty years. I do apologise to any readers who find my comments unclear or irritatingly cryptic, and would be happy to explain myself to any direct questions. I am an open book.

Having just read Mountainman’s latest post, I have opened my copy of Robin Lane Fox’s Pagans and Christians, which I bought in 1987 but have never, sadly, read, an error I plan to rectify. In the preface I read his astounding gibbonish statement “although my book is long, I sympathise with the reader who felt that it should have been longer.” Go Robin!

Regarding the politics of majesty, I am particularly interested in the similarity between Constantine and Stalin, who respectively venerated Christ and Lenin as their majestic sources of messianic legitimacy. Both are horrible liars, along the lines of Orwell’s Big Brother, of which more another day. But now I want to respond to spin.Giordano Bruno was the heretic who was burnt by the pope in Rome in 1600 for disputed reasons, which may include support for heliocentrism, hermeticism, atheism and alchemy. He also had a Socratic unwillingness to save his hide by escape, making him a martyr for science. Bruno is often viewed as a prophet of reason and the enlightenment. More than a ‘recycler of old ideas’, Bruno typified the Renaissance ideal of bringing classical knowledge to bear for modern life, establishing the platform upon which the rocket of science was launched. One of the myths of science is that such mercurial earlier writers can be dismissed as just magicians.

Tying this all back to the topic, the majesty of Christ, we find that the goal of the hermetic writers of early modernity was to understand through use of reason how human life connects to the totality of observable natural reality. This theme of connection is formalised in the discipline of hermeneutics, which gets its name from the role of the God Hermes (Mercury) as the messenger of the Gods. Just as the planet Mercury is seen to attend closely to the Sun, so too Hermes attends to Apollo, serving as the connecting bridge between the sun and the earth.

The allegory of the sun as king helps to explain the majesty of Christ – the sun of righteousness is the new born king, bringing light and life to all. So, more than just recycling antiquity, Bruno et al connect us to antiquity, like a bifrost rainbow bridge from here to eternity. If we ignore the hermetic path of connection, we will not get a proper understanding. Considering the sun as king, as symbol of infinite and eternal power, we find that Constantine replaced the invincible sun with Christ as his unifying imperial myth, perhaps because the pitiless blank gaze of the sun lacked the human qualities needed to win consent. Jesus looks far friendlier than the sun.
Smack Sammy C undoubtedly had a ‘personal ontology’, and Xanadu might have been even more lurid if STC had dropped acid. Alph is sometimes used as code for a secret western esoteric tradition.

The point about the majesty of Christ in terms of ontology is that historically it was used as the basis of an ontology that is interpersonal, expressing an accessible shared vision of reality. The Christological heuristic seeks to construct a shared vision by hermeneutically connecting above and below, Christ and Jesus, eternity and time, logic and history, the sun and the earth, into a hypostatic myth that resonates at the popular level. The challenge in defining the ontology of the eternal logos, considered against the romantic transcendental imagination, is to objectify the sunny pleasure dome, building it upon a scientific epistemology.

Now that may be seen as rather like slaying dragons, but nonetheless this vision, previously understood against the eschatology of the holy city, sets out the challenge of understanding the majesty of Christ. The early church climbed the ladder of cosmic allegory of Christ as the sun and then kicked the ladder away to hide their tracks, instead presenting the myth of Christ as literal history. The literal myth served as a basis for asserting that Jesus Christ is Lord in pre-scientific times, but it no longer cuts it.My approach to ontology is grounded in objective knowledge about astronomy. Linking astronomy and ontology opens many doors of perception, as quite a big topic. There is limited mileage in an ontology that is not contestable, which ought to be the goal in describing what is universal in human experience. Some may prefer living in their own private Idaho, but since Socrates refuted Protagoras such relativism has been seen as incompatible with logic. The poetic idea of a personal ontology is incompatible with philosophical ontology.

The majesty of Christ, against Constantine’s magisterial criteria of utility, is about producing a modus vivendi, a discourse that all can live with. Constantine banged the religious heads together at Nicaea to form a creed that functioned as a social ontology, a theory of the meaning of being. This theory, and its Chalcedonian elaboration, provided a hermeneutic union of above and below in the union of divine and human natures in the person of Christ. The accuracy of the creed was secondary to its enforceability as the story of orthodoxy, but Christology still serves as a framework for a universal philosophy.

The concept of ‘personal ontology’ is a bit of an oxymoron. An ontology is a theory of what exists. The modern ontology is science, with its theory of what is the case in terms of known facts. You can have your own personal opinions but not your own personal facts. Science is celebrated because it is not personal, but objective. However, this objectivity has been achieved at the cost of the elimination of subjective meaning – hence Carl Sagan’s myth of the pale blue dot as the sign of human insignificance. Given that humans define significance, this scientific attitude of objectivity without subjectivity is not really viable. That is why I am interested in a return to hermeneutic methods in ontology, to relate the subject and object in a way that can be communicated and shared. As I mentioned, I have my own views about how this might be possible, grounding myth in astronomy as the union of above and below, but that is a complex topic.
No worries. Heidegger specialised in ontology, so if you are really interested in the meaning of being, then Being and Time is an excellent place to start. Heidegger was the atheist who systematised existentialism, as the founder of postmodernism. This led to a massive influence on theology, especially through Bultmann’s concept of demythologising Christ. The role of time in demarcating knowledge is another big central issue in Heidegger’s phenomenology of being, and one that is a good heuristic on this problem of the majesty of Christ, in view of the centrality of the relation between eternity and time in understanding who Jesus really was anyway.Of course teleology is infra dig since Darwin, but acknowledging that purpose is not intrinsic to matter does not dispose of a telos. Recognising that meaning and purpose are human constructs opens the question of how we should best construct a sense of purpose, and how big old stories such as Jesus might contribute to a useful sense of purpose in a social ontology.

Just looking at teleology from the hypothetical position of purely rational philosophy, if you believe there is no purpose in life then you have little reason to go on living. If you think you have sane reasons not to suicide, then in principle you ought to be able to articulate these reasons into a universal philosophy. Purpose and reason are intimately linked. That is far from saying that a conscious and intentional supernatural God is pulling the puppet strings to create our real purpose. It is more about recognising that we have interests that can be explained through an ontology, that an ontology can and should have moral goals.

The telos of life is seen in its opposition to entropy, the tendency of life to grow ever more complex under conditions of peace, evolving into all available niches. So we can postulate the majesty of Christ against the question of how human life can be expected to grow more complex, eschatologically speaking, fulfilling our telos.That is a basic, although rather hard, question in the Kantian Platonism of the categorical imperative, the duty to see any universalisable action as moral. I am not sure what you mean by describing a value as ontological. My view is that to say a value is ontological is to say it reveals the meaning of being. So Heidegger argues that anxiety reveals being as a whole, and is therefore ontological. Angst is also universal in the sense that to be human involves a measure of anxiety. How I look at it is that we can draw a distinction between transcendental and phenomenological values, but that is a topic for another day.Science does not equate to myth, although there is something to be said for the construction of popular stories grounded in scientific knowledge. ‘Meaning’, in the sense of ‘the meaning of life’, is a question of values and goals. Science, strictly considered, is the collection and synthesis of facts, and is value-free. Insofar as values intrude, we are engaged in meta-science, not science. The statement that science is good is not a scientific statement. ‘Making sense of our world’ means explaining how our world works in factual terms. This elides into the question of how we should live, but this ethical question is not really a scientific question. To suggest we should live majestically or gloriously, or by any other moral value, involves a metaphysical teleology, an ideal vision of human purpose.No it is not clear. There is more to the meaning of words than what can be proved by evidence. There is also the philosophical analysis of comparative meaning. This conversation started because of my acceptance of the old assertion from Champollion and Massey that the Egyptian word karast means anoint which means Christ. Diachronic evidence can be used to prove or disprove this claim, for example by finding examples of context where karast clearly does not mean anoint.

If I can give an example from Heidegger, he defined Logos as “the original connecting connectedness of being.” This is likely to look incurably obscure to a linguist, but in philosophical terms it has a certain majesty. That is why I raised the example of Lewis Carroll’s mockery of the concept of glory. Glory is a seemingly simple word with wide conventional usage, but its real meaning is quite obscure, and Humpty’s definition of glory as ‘a nice knock-down argument’ is interesting. So too, the majesty of Christ is a seemingly simple phrase that conceals all sorts of assumptions. I have used a few words here in relation to ontology that might well cause some readers’ eyes to glaze, but hope springs eternal that some might ask questions about statements that are unclear.meaning?You can’t hope to open up a sensible understanding of why Christianity has been such a dominant religion for such a long time, unless you have an interest in the meaning of the central majestic concept of the Christian creed, that Christ is Lord. My interest here was piqued by mountainman’s assertion that the majesty of Christ was invented by Constantine. That appears a rather superficial analysis, in my view.
But we do not have agreement on what the ‘field’ is for analysis of the majesty of Christ, the topic of this thread. It would seem to be a question in Christology, but that is a field that lacks clear method, and needs to be assessed against ontology. You can’t base ontology on linguistics. It has to draw on a wide range of disciplines.Could you explain what that means?Christ the King is basically a story of popular piety. So if you have an attitude of disdain for how such ideas resonate emotionally in worship, it is rather hard to get inside any more sophisticated phenomenology. Popular stories encode myths that resonate widely and simply across the zeitgeist. So the question of why some ideas are hits is a great memetic mystery, a bit like the challenge of writing a number one song.

Flourishing, more broadly, is primarily a social rather than a personal thing. So the question can be posed of how the idea of Christ as Lord engages with good and evil in the world, with good understood as 'conducive to human flourishing' and evil understood as 'conducive to human destruction'.

sotto voce

What are your thoughts about the following?

Regarding his acceptability as a ruler, Jesus said,

'"The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law."' Mk 8:31 NIV

'When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen:

"Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" "Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!"

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher, rebuke your disciples!"

"I tell you," he replied, "if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out."'

Lk 19:37-40 NIV

And was he right? Apparently so:

'"Shall I crucify your king?" Pilate asked. "We have no king but Caesar," the chief priests answered.' Jn 19:15 NIV

'The chief priests of the Jews protested to Pilate, "Do not write 'The King of the Jews', but that this man claimed to be king of the Jews."' Jn 19:21 NIV

John noted, 'He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.' So we can see that respectable, upright Jews, whose love of Romans was not quite the stuff of romantic legend, preferred even that appalling mega-cur Caesar to their own, long predicted monarch. They found Jesus a disappointment, a bit of an anti-climax, shall we say. So no wonder that those infamous organisers of orgies in the recognised capital of decadence found the rule of Jesus just a trifle incommodious. But of course, canny Tertullian was proved right, and the Mighty Empire eventually had to grovel. Jesus just had too much street cred. Jesus ruled.

Or rather, the empire had to appear to grovel. Because, as we know, the old brainwashing of the plebeians carried on, as it had from the foundation of Rome, and as it had from the foundation of every 'civilisation' known to archaeologists. It was plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, already. Sacrifices were made in temples by cipher priests, just as they always had been, and as they are today in a papist temple near you.

Yes, the 'majesty' of Jesus was transferred to a ridiculous succession of ridiculous 'Vicars of Christ', imperial puppets, whose current status and residence was granted by Benito Mussolini, a dictator who proudly modelled his regime on that of 'Bullhead' Constantine. Rather appropriately, one might observe.

So ruling Pharisees, Roman patricians, aristocratic Greeks and no doubt many others, whose interests were carnal only, who found the gospel 'foolish', all had an interest in claiming the majesty of Jesus as their own, in order to fool the poor into doing what the real Jesus did not want them to do. So they created a figment, to fool. And some still people want to be fooled, do they not.

Chili

Bolding mine.

Pete has a problem distinguising Christ from Jesus. I have no probblem with Christ the King who is the light in man to transform the simple airwaves of the sun into our light by day, needed only so we as outsider to Him can sort through things and call them good or bad, and when push comes to shove we will close our eyes so we can see better even, i.e. thinking is trying to see connectedness.

So the light of common day is an illusion that is common to us as humans under Christ the King, wherein now the word hu-man means earthly (from humus), to say that our human condition is partial to us and not native as man himself that Heidegger called: the original connecting connectedness of being, nice phrase, thank you. Plato called this originative in our genus as the son of man to make known the light within so he may be the light himself and illuminate the other side of the sun so that darkness will be no more for him (by allegory in reverse).

And notice that Jesus is not part of this . . . ever, and if anything, Jesus is like sunglasses for us so we might look within, Billy Graham, would say, just close your eyes and pray so you might feel the light within, kind of like a pig does when he has sex so that he can increase intimacy that leads to extacy and not in shame of it, which so undoes the fig-leaf allegory attached to it.

In recognition of this, as fact, Catholics kneel to pray in admonition with their eyes wide open because Christ dwells among the living, for which they stand to sing in adoration, and only sit to listen to the sermon of the day.

Opposite this are so called Christians who close their eyes to pray in absence of the light and will pray to Jesus so that intimacy will be and not be ashamed of their deprivation as pig humpers themselves, the ancients would say in the very book they carry in their right hand as they go to and fro wherever they may go.

mountainman

The consultative assertion here was that the majesty of the Roman Emperor Constantine was transferred to the figure of Jesus H Christ. Whether Jesus was invented or not is irrelevant to the OP. Historically Jesus was elevated to the purple by a Pontifex Maximimus in the 4th century and received due state reverence and majesty at that time, but not at any time earlier.


Ancient history IMO the field for analysis of the majesty and historicity of Christ.

There is an obligation for researchers and investigators in this field to seek and assess evidence.




BTW I agree with one of your statements in an above post about Constantine and Stalin

Have you read any of Momigliano's stuff?

Robert Tulip

I like the mention of Sybil in the requiem Dies Irae Dies Illa solvet saeclum in favilla testae David et Sybilla
I see Constantine's Antioch speech is mentioned at your website http://www.mountainman.com.au/essene...%20Antioch.htm
It is ironic poetry to say Constantine was miraculous, and a diversion from understanding how the Jesus is Lord concept in the early creed provides the basis for the majesty of Christ. In discussing such matters against a scientific historiography all supernatural language has to be excluded. Majesty is not just raw power, but also involves concepts of nobility, divinity and legitimacy. And I have no wish to debate your novel claim that Christ was invented by Constantine in the fourth century.
Documents that seek to transform the world rarely have space for humour. Your characterisation of the New Testament as a Roman work requires systematic avoidance of most of it. It is clear that Paul counselled a tactical acceptance of political stability, but that is in no way support for the moral legitimacy of Rome.

Robert Tulip

Thank you sotto voce, that line from Mark 8 is certainly among my favourites in the Bible in terms of explaining the majesty of Christ, against the kenotic (self-emptying) messianism of the ideas that the last will be first and that the way that is seen is not the real way.

Mark 8 as a whole is an extraordinary text, with Jesus lambasting his disciples for their failure to understand the cosmic meaning of his messianic promise. The rejection of Christ as King alludes to Isaiah 53, where on top of being rejected, the man of sorrows is despised as well. I interpret all this in terms of the myth of the fall from grace into corruption, and the suggestion that the Christ is a mythical representative of the Golden Age in the midst of the Iron Age. That is all material that can be extensively expanded in terms of astronomy and comparative mythology. But in terms of the majesty theme, Jesus is saying that his messianic identity is above personal concerns, and that his commitment to truth will place him in conflict with the world.

The rejection of Christ reflects the inability of everyday life to comprehend a cosmic ontology. My view is that what Mark is telling us here is that amid the tumult of the consolidation of the Roman Empire in the east, seers sought to understand what was happening against a religious framework, but their cosmic visions were suppressed by the broader community as too mysterious and dangerous. So the task now, in view of the apparent suppression of the origins of Christianity, is the forensic reconstruction of the cosmic vision that constructed the Christ Myth.Again, Luke 19 is among my favourite texts. I have set it to music in a song called Palm Sunday (apologies for scratchy performance).

The “crying stones” is an extraordinary telluric vision of messianic identity, expressing the claim of a cosmic harmony in the king tide where everything came together in the perfect storm of celebration of Jesus Christ as the imagined anointed saviour and Son of David. The animist quality in this assertion of a divine spirits in rocks is unsettling for conventional supernatural alienated monotheism. Again, it is an idea that I interpret in cosmic terms, seeing the construction of Christ against the observation of precession of the equinoxes, marking the unique attunement of the stars and the seasons when the equinox precessed from Aries into Pisces in 21 AD.Caiaphus explains it quite simply: to accept Jesus as King would be to declare war on Rome. Writing in hindsight after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, perhaps the single most traumatic upheaving deed of all ancient history, apart from the fall of Rome itself, Mark is seeking to present the Jewish experience as cosmic parable, as a mythical story that assimilates the trauma into a believable fable, inventing one perfect man who can stand for all.

Just as people today reject those who are perceived as religious fanatics, the ancient Jews must have seen the enthusiasm of the zealots and Nazarenes as politically dynamite. In a Quisling context, appeasement of empire can easily appear to be the wisest tactic. The situation for the Jews under Rome was comparable to the Native Americans of the western plains who visited New York and immediately saw that this behemoth of metal and paper would destroy them as night follows day, and that a strategy of military conflict would lead to grief. The Romans made many promises to the Jews but they kept but one, they promised to assimilate them into the empire and they did it. Mark invented Jesus of Nazareth as a ‘one for all’ parable for the Jewish experience under Rome. The “street cred” of Jesus rested on what the Chinese call the mandate of heaven, the sense of moral legitimacy. Mark perceived Rome as pure evil, stoppable only through spiritual warfare. So his strategic vision of a kingdom not of this world aimed to slowly undermine the social consent for empire. Mark imagined a perfect king who was cruelly ignored and destroyed, but whose message spoke of an eternal morality of pure love and truth, a message so powerful that not even the grave could hold it.I think we have to recognise that the original cosmic vision of the gospels is millennial, seeing a thousand years as a day to God, as Peter and the Psalmist say, testae David et Sybilla. Against such a vision, the fallen cooption of it by Rome is inevitably a distortion, since there was no way the Sermon on the Mount could become a basis for practical morality in Roman times. Rome therefore used the moral vision of Christ as a way of claiming it was sorry for its guilty conscience, although its apologetics were all show.

Setting the Jesus story against the Hindu vision of the Yuga cycle, and setting that cycle against orbital dynamics of terrestrial climate, it appears that the most recent low point of earth’s permanent 21600 year climate cycle occurred in 1246 AD when the solstice crossed the perihelion. The Gospels can be read as intuiting the path in to this cultural low point, a cycle from which we are now starting to emerge, with the perihelion having advanced to early January. The point of this cosmic enframing of the Christ Myth is that the incomprehension over the last millennia was predicted in the New Testament, as a necessary eschatological stage.I don’t agree that criticising the misuse of the majesty of Christ by the church really engages with the theological and cosmic framework that gives majesty its meaning. Constantine saw Christ as a mythical basis for political stability and social legitimacy of his rule. I am not sure why that is such a bad thing in the context of the efforts of the barbarian hordes to destroy Rome. I tend to blame Christianity for the Dark Ages, since the historicist dogma is so pathological. But on the other hand, the Gospels contain a deep wisdom, and it ought to be possible to separate the weeds from the wheat and the goats from the sheep.

mountainman

I asked you earlier if you'd read anything by the 20th century ancient historian Arnaldo Momigliano. You are quite correct in pointing out the irony here, but this did not stop one of the world's foremost historians from describing the victory of Christianity under Constantine as a miracle, twice in succession: