Many Reformations

By the time of the turning from the medieval era to the renaissance, the Christian church in Europe had fully dejudaized itself from an authoritarian to a despotic regime. The institution of the Roman Catholic church had made itself into a trans-national cult, a unifying temple economy which granted legitimacy to all monarchs around it, in the same way as the temple once granted legitimacy to ancient near eastern despots. At the apex of this, the Globus Cruciger was born and held aloft, the prime sign of the face of God, to be interpreted by the clergy in an every spiraling circle of total christianity. The economic consequences of this followed as they did in the ancient near east. The face of god is interpreted and transmitted downwards upon the people, who then return-action with it through various means. In this case, the discourse of sin makes for an important case study, where the mechanisms of confessional, indulgence, penance, etc, make for the most complex and wide-spectrum mode of communication between the priesthood and the laity.

This dynamic re-asserts itself in the WASPs of today’s America. With complete domination over the vertical structures of media, they recreate the dynamic of the church at this pivotal moment, their institutional media being the chapels and churches by which the laity interacts with them. In turn, they’ve developed a temple-economy about themselves, of transmission between lower and higher. The news performs the function of scripture here. The biblical text, the real face of the worshipped, is interpreted and distributed downwards through the papistry, mediated from the high latin of credibility into the vulgar language via the journalistic presenter and writer. The transmission between laity and priesthood appears in the vertical forms of engagement with the audience. Invitations to participate in mass rituals (Rally to Restore Sanity), economic actions by which to sanctify oneself (merchandising, “viewers like you”), etc, all fulfill in this chapel-economy the same function as confessional and indulgence fulfills in the cathedral-economy and as sacrifice and blessing fulfilled in the temple-economy.

The protestant reformation came about as a judaic turn on the despotic regime, making christianity authoritarian again. In doing so, the individual believer acquired more prominence, with the function of the interpreter being cast unto them. The biblical text and its interpretation became collapsed into the laity and all actions of hierarchical transmissions were collapsed in the same, all functions of the ecclesiastical institution being now present in a single person. In recreating the same collapsing as the jews had when they turned their canaanite cult into judaism during the 2nd babylonian exile, the covenant was discovered. In this, the authoritarian way of religion was rediscovered, with it being no surprise that protestants took such obsession with imagining themselves as jews, seen in the Lutheran redaction of the biblical canon and the Anglo desire to imagine themselves as Israelites.

With a fully atomized relationship to the god, the judaic covenant’s schism marks a turn towards individuality and personal struggle. In the ancient Near East, it birthed the wandering jew, in renaissance Europe, it birthed the bourgeois-capitalist, and in contemporary liberalism it birthed the anarchist. Taking sola scriptura’s invective to heart, the fascination with journalism can be seen in a way not before, where the anarchist becomes obsessed to a pathological extent with documenting the truth, with writing within the covenant given to them through their holy texts of corpses and atrocities, the zealotry and glee that can be seen in the face of every professor as they recite the divine commandments of Howard Zinn on how many millions have died at the hands of the CIA. Their economics as well take the same turn. Now collapsed into themselves, they serve god as the bourgeois did, their individual careerism and donation-seeking replacing the vertical economies of merchandising and organized fandom. This can be seen as well in difference in their ideas of sin. While the liberal seeks their penance through confessions, through praying diligently at the church, the anarchist seeks theirs through individual perfection, deeper and more intensive interpretations of the covenant.