Charles McBryde > Recent Status Updates

We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. We sleep to time’s Hurdy Gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of light uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it’s time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it’s time to break our necks for home.

It was always the excesses that we wished to oppose, rather than the whole program. The whole spirit that produced the first steps A,B,C, and D out of which the excesses were bound to come. It is so much easier to oppose the excesses about which one can, of course, do nothing, than it is to oppose the whole spirit about which one can do something every day.

“The propaganda didn’t make me think of him as I knew him, but of him as a Jew. And it was as a Jew, praying alone, that he frightened us. So I suppose that, in the end, that was a part of it. Of my Antisemitism. I can still make myself frightened. Put myself back there. I hear my mother saying not to be frightened.”

The non-political pastor, satisfied Nazi require requirements by being non-political. But the non-political schoolmaster was, by the very virtue of being non-political, a dangerous man from the first. he himself would not rebel, nor would he, if he could help it, teach rebellion. But he could not help begin dangerous. Not if he went on teaching what was true.

Thus Nazism, as it proceeded from practice to theory, had to deny expertness in thinking and then, this second process was never completed, in order to to fill the vacuum, had to establish expert thinking of its own. That is, to find men of inferior or irresponsible caliber whose views conformed dishonestly or (worse yet) dishonestly to the party line.

For Nazism, unlike modern communism, began with practice. Because the mass movement of Nazism was non-intellectual in the beginning, it had to be anti-intellectual in before it could be theoretical.

My friends wanted Germany purified of all the politicians. The wanted a representative leader in place of unrepresentative representatives. And Hitler, the pure man, the anti-politician, was the pure man, the ma untainted by politics, which was only a cloak for corruption.

National Socialism was a revulsion against parliamentary politics, parliamentary government, parliamentary debate, against all of the higgling and haggling of the parties, the splinter parties, the coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man’s repudiation of the rascals. Its motif was “throw them all out.”

Did they know what’s communism—Bolshevism—was? They did not. They knew Bolshevism as a specter which, as it took on body in their imaginings, embraced not only the communists, but also the social Democrats, the trade unions, and of course, the Jews, the gypsies and the neighbor next-door, whose dog had bit them and that Neighbor’s dog.

Most pastors in Germany had always preached christ crucified without seeing (who does?) that He was being crucified all around them every day.

In the Weimar Republic, the German tradition of the non-political, non-party, civil servant, always safely conservative, was broken down. The Nazis finished the politicalization of government workers that the Social Democrats began. It would not be reckless to assert that half the civil servants had to join their party, or lose their jobs. The other half were well advised to do likewise, and nearly all of them did.

We die solitary deaths, but dream communal dreams.

Yet psychoanalysis was, and is a shamanism; its affiliations with occultism or parapsychology are far more authentic than its supposed links to biology, as a discipline… Freud attempted a remarkably successful (though impermanent) usurpation of the dreamworld, particularly in the West.

A grand charismatic, with extra extraordinary, well-nigh hypnotic powers of suggestion, Freud must have recognized, sometimes “unconsciously,“ that he had a marked telepathic or clairvoyant effect upon his patients. Though the greatest of demystifiers, surpassing Nietzsche and Marx, Freud almost allows himself to hint that he is a secular Messiah.

Freud‘s ambition was prophetic; though intensely secular, he belonged to be the profit of a new revelation, possibly even a new Jewishness, though hardly a new Judaism. In a marvelous irony, he intended to establish his status as a prophet by denying to dreams any prophetic function whatsoever.

In Homer, the dream is a person or a god, frequently seeking toward off impending disaster from a hero… As messengers, as guardians, as thresholds to transcendence, some of our dreams appear in distinguishable from angels, and may as well be seen as such. The Zoroastrian Avesta, the Bible, the Quran, the Sufis, and Kabbalists all concur with Indian and Chinese sacred texts in treating dreams as divine epiphanies.

The Talmud says that a dream is only 1/60 part of prophecy, so presumably, even the holiest of answering angels who govern the dream realm can mistake the future.

Smith evidently studied Kabbalah, and came to the understand that as the resurrected Enoch, his ultimate transformation would be into the Angel Metatron… who is also the angel Michael and the resurrected Adam. Though orthodox Islam refuses such an identification for Muhammad, the Sufis insisted upon it, and Joseph Smith thus brings together the three great esoteric traditions of Gnosticism, Sufism, and Kabbalah.

The likelier interpretation is that ancient, medieval, and modern Gnosis all seek to answer an authentic and lasting spiritual need, which is to reconcile time and death with our intimations of immortality.

We have always been a religiously fecund nation, particularly from about 1800 on. Since our religion tends to be experiential and pragmatic, it increasingly has departed from European Christianity, where institutional, historical, and theological aspects of the faith have remained relatively strong. Since we tend to be heterodox, even when we assert otherwise, angels return to us from the spiritual repression…

It is an ancient pattern among monotheists that the gods of other faiths and nations are demoted to the status of angels (or of demons). As guardian angels of rival states, these former gods easily could be associated with evil and with pestilence.

In Avicenna’s angelology, the monotheistic cosmos of the Koran tends to be dispersed into a kind of pragmatic polytheism, much resented by literalist orthodoxy in Islam, both now and then. The tension in all angelology, then and now, is between monotheism and the elevation of other heavenly beings to a status that seems to rival God’s. And yet the major monotheisms—X, J, Z, I—are all pervaded by angels.

Paul’s influence upon the church fathers was to eventuate the image of Satan as Christ’s envious younger brother, who seeks to serve the kingdom of God from Christ. Augustine culminates this tradition by carrying the division between Christ and Satan all the way back to the first day of creation, when God divided the light from the darkness, and part of the angels chose the darkness, in an initial sin of pride.

Paul understood implicitly, long before Augustine, that the difference between Judaism and Christianity was between a belief that God‘s image survives in one, even if partly hidden by sin, and a faith that the image was blotted out by sin except for the work of the atonement. To the extent that Christianity is essentially Pauline, it had no need and little use for virtuous angel.