The Passion of the Western Mind

It is as absurd to say that "man is made in the image and likeness of God" as it is for a calculator to claim it was made in the image and likeness of man. In fact, the former is indeed infinitely more absurd than the latter. And it is only with a supreme hubris masquerading as religious humility that any "believer" denies this obvious truth. What's more, this absurdity is matched only by the irony of the fact that it was by believing in the fiction of the former that humanity has allowed itself to be so seduced by its technologies, and as a result, reduced itself to being little more than slaves of the latter.

 

In Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford detailed the long process by which this occurred, with the gradual regimentation of society being infected culturally and psychologically as much through the military as the monastery, with each transforming what it meant to be human from natural animality to the level of a mere calculating machine. The result, of course, is that human beings were increasingly conditioned to be automatons that marched obediently into the meat grinder of one battlefield after another for their glorious states and flags, and humans were reduced from their infinite capacity for creativity to a binary moral ethos that served religion as the only true God. Both war and religion, of course, were aided in their mutual endeavor to reduce human consciousness to the level of a programmable computer, by science. 

In The Passion of the Western Mind,  Richard Tarnas described how this process unfolded intellectually when pagan religions evolved into the new cult of Christianity, and grew to envelope the world with its chastity belt of binary beliefs about "good and evil," exactly as the serpent in the Garden of Eden had promised Adam and Eve.  

Seduced by the fruit of power by pretending to know the mind of God, the physical world itself was slowly reduced to the level of an elaborately complex machine. This new view of the world was eventually systematized by Isaac Newton into a binary determinism of cause and effect, one that exercised the spirit of God from the body of material reality. When Clement therefore "described the late pagan Greco-Roman world as being like the seer Tiresias - old, wise, but blind and dying - and exhorted him to shed his decaying life and ways, cast off the old revels and divinations of paganism, and be initiated into the new mystery of Christ," he was in effect inviting him to march joyfully into the matrix which Christian programmers like himself were working to build; a virtual world of fantasy and simplicity that today finds its digital fulfillment in the internet, and its financial fulfillment in the temple of economics, where the worship of "the love of money" demands the sacrifice of everything else.  

By placing God behind the curtain of material reality, reality itself was demoted to merely the plaything of an invisible divinity.  "Clement reasoned with the pagan intellectuals of Alexandria," as a result, that "the world was not a mythological phenomenon full of gods and daimones, but was rather a natural world providentially governed by the one supreme self-subsistent God." God, as such, became the blind watchmaker and the universe as a whole was demoted to the status of a common wrist watch.  Pagan statues of deities were eventually seen as "no more than stone idols, the myths merely primitive anthropomorphic fictions. Only the one invisible God and the one biblical revelation were authentic. The Presocratic philosophies, like those of Thales or Empedocles with their deification of the material elements, were no better than the primitive myths. Matter should not be worshiped, but rather the Maker of matter." 

 As Tarnas explains:

Unlike the mystery religions, Christianity was proclaimed and recognized as the exclusively authentic source of salvation, superseding all previous mysteries and religions, alone bestowing the true knowledge of the universe and a true basis for ethics. Such a claim was decisive in the triumph of Christianity in the late classical world. Only thus were the anxieties of the Hellenistic era with its conflicting religious and philosophical pluralism, and with its larger amorphous cities filled with the rootless and dispossessed, resolved in the new certitudes. Christianity offered mankind a universal one, and enduring community, and a clearly defined way of life, all of which possessed a scriptural and institutional guarantee of cosmic validity. 

The Christian assimilation of the mysteries extended to the various pagan deities... for as the Greco-Roman world gradually embraced Christianity, the classical gods were consciously or unconsciously absorbed into the Christian hierarchy (as later would occur with the Germanic deities and those of the other cultures penetrated by the Christian West).

 Their characters and properties were retained but were now understood and subsumed in the Christian context, as in the figures of Christ (Apollo and Prometheus, for example, as well as Gilgamesh, Perseus, Orpheus, Dionysus, Hercules, Atlas, Adonis, Eros, Sol, Mithra, Attis, Osiris, and even Apollonius of Tyana), God the Father (Zeus, Kronos Ouranos, Sarapis), the Virgin Mary (Magna Mater, Aphrodite, Artemis, Hera, Rhea, Persephone, Demeter, Gaia, Semele, Isis), the Holy Spirit (Apollo, Dionysus, Orpheus, as well as aspects of the procreative feminine deities), Satan (Pan, Hades, Prometheus, Dionysus), and a host of angels and saints (the conflation of Mars with Michael the archangel, Atlas with Saint Christopher). As the Christian religious understanding emerged out of the classical polytheistic imagination, the different aspects of a single complex pagan deity were applied to corresponding aspects of the Trinity, or, in the case of a pagan deity's shadow aspect, to Satan. 

Apollo as the divine Sun god, the luminous prince of the heavens, was now seen as a pagan precursor of Christ, while Apollo as the bringer of sudden illumination and the giver of prophecy and oracles was now recognized as the presence of the Holy Spirit. Prometheus as the suffering liberator of mankind was now subsumed by the figure of Christ, while Prometheus as the hubristic rebel against God was subsumed by the figure of Lucifer.   The spirit of ecstatic possession once ascribed to Dionysus was now ascribed to the Holy Spirit, Dionysus as the self-sacrificing redemptive deity of death and rebirth was now transfigured into Christ, and Dionysus as the unleashed erotic and aggressive instincts, the demonic deity of unregenerate elemental energy and mass frenzy, was now recognized as Satan. 

Thus the ancient mythic deities were transformed into the doctrinally established figures that constituted the Christian pantheon. A new conception of spiritual truth arouse as well. The narratives and descriptions of divine reality and divine beings, that which had been myth in the pagan era - malleable, undogmatic, open to imaginative novelty and creative transformation, subject to conflicting version and multiple interpretations - were now characteristically understood as absolute, historical, and literal truths, and every effort was made to clarify and systematize those truths into unchanging doctrinal formulae. In contrast to the pagan deities, whose characters tended to be intrinsically ambiguous - both good and evil, Janus-faced, variable according to context - the new Christian figures, in official doctrine at least, possessed no such ambiguity and maintained solid characters definitely aligned with good and evil. For the core drama of Christianity, like that of Judaism (and its seminal Persian relative, the prototypically dualistic religion of Zoroastrianism), centered on the historical confrontation between the primeval opposing principles of good and evil. And ultimately Christianity's dualism of good and evil, God and Satan, was a derivation of its final monism, since Satan's existence was finally contingent upon God, supreme Creator and Lord of all. 

Compared with the pagan outlook, the Christian world view was still structured by a transcendent principle, but it was not a decisively monolithic structure, absolutely governed by one God. Among the Greeks, Plato had been one of the most monotheistic, yet even for him "God" and "the gods" were often interchangeable. For Christians, there was no such ambiguity. The transcendent was still primary, as with Plato, but no longer pluralistic. The Ideas were derivative and the gods anathema.