act, the felix culpa, or happy fault that freed Man to fulfill his destiny as something other than God’s humble, obedient servant. As St. Augustine wrote in the Enchiridion, “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.”
Paradise may have been lost, but what was gained may have been something far more valuable, something, when you stop to think about it, that more closely comports with God’s stated plan for humanity: creatures endowed with free will and thus potentially superior to the angels. Eve’s first bite of the apple is not, then, simply Original Sin—it is the inciting incident of mankind’s own drama. Something was lost, to be sure, but something was gained as well, implanted in our breasts from the beginning: a sense of where we are going. Evil, sin, change, flux, drama, and death itself are the means to get there.
As poets and authors have known since the time of the ancient Greeks, a world without conflict cannot exist. And, by our lights, accustomed to this world, if it did, it would be a very dull place indeed. For here, outside the Garden, without God available for direct consultation, it is only in the clash of conflicting ideas that truth—furtively, hesitantly—emerges, however unwelcome that truth might ultimately be. Oedipus’s search for his father’s killer first drives him into the arms of his mother and later, when the truth is revealed, to his own self-blinding and exile.
So the modern American tendency to regard peace as man’s natural state and war as its aberration has it exactly backward. We intuit this about man’s nature, and history validates this insight recurrently and bloodily. To be human is to be Fallen. But to be satanic—that is to say, to accept uncritically the legitimacy of Critical Theory’s anti-human argument—is to have no chance at redemption at all. For how can nihilism be redemptive?
A world at peace, absent the arrival of the Second Coming, would surely be a very dull and unproductive place, perhaps possible only through a universal tyranny. While no one wishes war, sometimes war must come; war is an inevitability, and peace is the outcome of its successful, if temporary, sorting-out. Hobbes was right, although he failed to allow for man’s nature, divine as well as human. Though red in tooth and claw, nature occasionally calls for, and sometimes obtains, a temporary state of balance, out of which the world promptly spins and begins the cycle again. This is not pessimism, this is realism. Free, we differ, argue, fight, and sometimes kill. Enforced peace ends in slavery and the grave—as one of the world’s major religions promises and, in its Dar al-Islam (house of Islam), tries to practice. Trying, testing, questioning, pushing: These are man’s true natural attributes, and trouble, his natural state.
A world without conflict, or post-conflict, however, is exactly what various all-encompassing political systems have promised. But the path to this utopia has been paved with much misery and death. In our time, the main retailer of such a myth has been socialism, in two forms: German National Socialism and Soviet Marxism—especially the latter.
The two prime movers of the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács, sought to overturn the existing order—first the moral order and then the political order—like the the nineteenth-century radicals that they were. (Except for their outsized influence, there is nothing “modern” about either thinker.) More akin to anarchists such as Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Luigi Lucheni (who assassinated the Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898), Gramsci and Lukács had no interest in any compromise that could be the result of the Hegelian formula of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. For them, there were only winners and losers—and in this, we must grudgingly admit they were right. To compromise is to negate the validity of one’s own position and succumb to the temptation to see reason at work, when the true radical knows that reason is only a tool, put to base uses. In the ur-Kampf, both sides seek a lost Paradise, and it is clear from both cultural and religious tradition whose side each is on. The forces of good seek a kind of Edenic restoration, with man this time taking his place alongside and above the angels at the throne of God, while the vengeful revolutionaries dream of a new, better Paradise that they themselves control, one from which God is entirely absent.
Which raises this important question: Just whose Paradise has been lost? The conventional interpretation of our Genesis-based foundational myth is that it is our paradise, the Garden of Eden, that has been lost. But man’s heroic post-lapsarian quest is not to return to Eden, but to get to Heaven—something that is explicitly denied forever to Satan and his minions. They made their choice when they allied themselves with the seductive and beautiful angel Lucifer, and now they (save only Abdiel, the angel who was tempted by the satanic but in the end returned to God) must suffer eternally in the realm of the hideous, deformed Satan into whom the angel Lucifer has been transformed.
The Paradise that has been irrevocably lost is not ours but Satan’s. No wonder those who advocate the satanic position fight for it so fiercely; it is not Eden they seek to restore but Heaven itself, albeit under new management. Bent on revenge, it is Satan who, in the form of the Serpent, tempts Eve to taste of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. (Satan, it should be noted, is extremely sexually attracted to the gorgeous Eve.) In Milton’s poem, it is Satan whose journey we follow. For some divine reason, he has been given a sporting chance for revenge, and, by God, or somebody, he is going to take it.
The roots of the intractable political conflict that currently plagues Western societies lie almost entirely in our rejection of myth, legend, and religion as “unscientific” and in our embrace of barren “process” to deliver solutions to the world’s ills. Whether it goes by the name of “global warming” or “climate change” or “social science,” this worldview claims to be all-encompassing, eternal, and grounded in “settled science,” which boasts remarkable successes in empirical, experimental endeavors. With these technological achievements as cover and camouflage, this ideology brooks no rivals to its monopoly of knowledge; it dogmatically excommunicates all competing truth claims. Nulla salus extra scientiam, it thunders. Outside science, there is no salvation.
Let us call this Lenin’s Wax Dummy Effect. During the Cold War, critics in the West remarked that the Soviet Union and its doctrine of Marxism-Leninism resembled nothing so much as a new religion, complete with scripture (the writings of Marx and Engels), charismatic prophets (Lenin and Stalin) with the aura of demigods, a Church Militant (the Party), a mother church (the Kremlin), and a clerical caste (the Politburo and Soviet apologists in the West). The religion also had, tellingly, a funerary temple to the mummified corpse of the Founder lying in eternal state just outside the Kremlin’s walls, where tourists and Soviet citizens alike would wait in the cold of a Russian winter to shuffle past the bier and gaze upon the embalmed body of the Leader, Teacher, Beacon, Helmsman, the Immortal Guide, V.I. Lenin (whose relics were gathered at the Lenin Institute and Lenin Museum immediately upon his death).
Having officially outlawed religion in the name of state atheism—or, rather, mandated the replacement of the Deity with the State—the Soviets nevertheless needed to create a faux Christianity, a grotesque and parodic wax dummy, in order to make a successful transition from the Church (the opiate of the masses) to dialectical materialism. In the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the thesis was the Church, the antithesis was Lenin’s wax dummy, and the synthesis was to be the triumphant materialism of Marx. But if they truly believed in the principles of Marxism-Leninism (a modification of German Communism with Russian overtones), why did they need the wax dummy, the faux religion?
Deception. Full fraught with mischievous revenge, the ghost of Karl Marx, via his vicar on earth, Lenin, demanded that his deeply anti-human prescriptions for human happiness be obscured with the trappings of old Mother Russia’s traditional culture. But this had things exactly backward: an attempt to create Marxism’s foundational myth both ex nihilo and as a false-flag operation. That Soviet Communism collapsed in a smoldering heap less than seventy years after its founding should have come as no surprise to anyone—it had not a leg to stand on—but the fact that its demise surprised so many in the West tells us a lot about the weakened state of Western culture as well.
True,
