| HN Mirror

I would also add that the article confuses Christianity with superstitious Christians. They still exist. But this is an aberration, and always was. Human beings are prone to the vice of superstition. Our age is no less superstitious, I would say. We've merely given our superstitions other labels, or they've taken other forms. And it was in Protestant societies that witch hunts really took place, which makes it all the more mystifying why the author would have expected Protestant England to deal with superstition better than the Church, who was not in the business of witch hunts and who condemned superstition as irrational, as rooted in a lust for power over and domination of others, and as an attempt to coerce God into doing one's will, defects of will and intellect that predispose a person to still further evils. (He does admit that Protestant theology actually predisposed people to more superstitious compulsions, but the fictitious examples suggest otherwise. I would also point to the Puritans as perfecting Protestant rebellion in the Salem witch trials.)

Knowledge and power, in the abstract, are good as such, but like all appetites, they can get the better of us. Lust for knowledge, or curiosity as it was called, is self-destructive and irrational, as opposed to studiousness, the pursuit of knowledge according to right reason (our information glut today is rather shallow curiosity and desire to know what is none of our business to know; gossip). Lust for power is likewise, turning the desire to be and to do good into an irrational craving to dominate and exploit other people, even forgetting that one's very being is utterly dependent on the will of God sustaining you in existence at every moment; were it not for God willing you, you would not be.

Also, the failure to distinguish between "religious" (a wishy-washy and nebulous term, if there ever was one) from "magic" is annoying. Magic is about power. True faith is but trust in what the human mind can only partially, but sufficiently grasp to warrant trust. There is no Manicheanism in Christianity, as evil is privation of the good, not an ontological equal of the good, and Jesus could very well have expelled the Devil. He was not in danger of succumbing, though his human side, as it were, was subjected to the temptation. I don't see how the author could claim otherwise. What I see is lazy prooftexting, not serious scholarship.

The idea of "selling your soul" is figurative. One can live in accordance with the objective good, or violate it. One cannot sell a soul, and God is not in competition with created beings, but rather their fulfillment, as God is Being. The author's view suggests strongly a liberal view of freedom, not as the ability to be what you are by nature and to do what is good, but the ability to choose anything, even your own harm. But how is that freeing? It isn't. That's the fundamental mistake of philosophical liberalism.

No one claims pleasure in this world brings pain in the next. The Church has never taught that pleasure as such is bad. It only taught that the pursuit of illicit pleasures is harmful. We get this, so why do we pretend otherwise? We know that eating tasty treats in excess jeopardizes the higher good of health. We know that pursuing depraved desires, like pedophilia, is evil and jeopardizes both the good of the pedophile and the children he intends to exploit and abuse. There are wicked pleasures, and there is a hierarchy of objective goods.

Ultimately, the vice is pride, the refusal to submit to the truth, the refusal to live according to reality. As Satan, the poster child of pride, says in "Paradise Lost", "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." This is the essence of pride, to live in the "enchanted" fictions of one's mind rather than face reality as it is.

So yeah, we're all Faustians because we're all sinners. We all whore ourselves, bit by bit, some more and some less, betray higher goods for the sparkle of a lower good. This lower good may be an illusion, or it may even be good as such, but it is the decision to violate a higher good for its sake that offends and corrupts.