The Centuries of Fallen Angels Author: Chris Davis (courtesy of
Idle Theory)
In this essay, Idle Theory effectively
offers translations of Christian doctrines into its own
terminology. There are, of course, some notable omissions and
discrepancies:
* Religious truths are rational rather than revealed.
* God is not a supernatural creator and judge, but an ideal
state.
* Heaven and Hell are the experience of the living, not the
dead.
Although Christian terms are used here, this is simply because, for
the past 1500 years or more, Western society has been a largely
Christian culture. The rationality underlying Christianity is
without doubt far older than Christianity, or any other known
religion, and is rooted in the earliest human life. What
distinguishes the Christian belief in Fall and Redemption from, for
example, a Hindu cycle of endless rebirth is its optimism that
humanity can be released from these endless cycles, and perhaps
already has been.
Religion
Economics, ethics, and law are concerned with the here-and-now
everyday business of humanity. Religion, by contrast, is concerned
with the long run of human history, its remote past and distant
future. It is concerned with the long run goals of humanity rather
than with immediate, present interests. And it is wholly rational
and practical.
Idle Theory, in approaching religion, asks what kind of long term
view of human society is inherent in its view of life. Human
society is primarily concerned with increasing human idleness,
freeing humanity from toil. The long term goal of humanity is to
achieve perfect idleness, perfect freedom. Human society, useful
tools, moral codes, all serve to increase idleness. But the path
does not rise steadily and inevitably towards perfection. Periodic
catastrophes - plagues, famines, wars, and the like - act to drive
down human idleness. Technologies once found may also be lost.
Moral codes can decay. The upward motion towards increasing
idleness is restrained by forces which act in the opposite sense.
The long run future of humanity may well be an ascent to a state of
perfect (or near-perfect) idleness, but it may equally be - and
indeed may be argued to be more likely to be - a descent towards
zero idleness, death, and extinction.
Some quasi-Christian themes appear:
The One Good
In Idle Theory there is only one Good - idleness -, and the primary
goal of human society, of human technology, trade, ethics, law, and
political organization is to increase human idleness. In this there
is both a carrot and a stick. The carrot is that it is only in
idleness that men can live choiceful lives, only in idle time that
they can play, dance, sing, think, talk. The stick is that, without
idleness, they die. Men are driven to increase idleness either by
fear of the consequences of being without it, or by love of the
infinite varieties of pleasure that it brings.
In this there lies the prototype of an idea of God as the ultimate
aspiration of men (and indeed all living creatures) - perfect
idleness -. In perfect idleness, men could do anything they wanted,
know everything, see everything, understand everything. They would
in short be for all practical purposes omnipotent, omniscient, and
immortal. They would be immortal because whatever is perfectly idle
does not need do anything in order to survive, in any circumstance.
And, freed from personal cares, they could consider the
circumstances of less fortunate creatures, and act altruistically
and sympathetically to assist them. God could act, and only would
act, out of love.
Actual human life never actually achieved this ideal. Human life
was imperfect. Men had to work to live, and because of this they
were inherently mortal. Death came whenever they found themselves
needing to do more work to live than the time available to do it.
And, chained to their work, they were not free to always act as
they chose, but all too often as they were obliged. And this same
work forever interrupted their reasoning and their study, so that
they were always ignorant and confused.
The perfectly idle God - deus otiosus - was not an abstraction, but
a person. He was someone who did not have to do anything in order
to stay alive. All his actions were chosen, not forced upon him.
His reasoning was never interrupted.
The One Evil
If God - the one Good - was perfect idleness personified, then the
one Evil was zero idleness, the condition of continuous work, at
the threshold of death. The personification of this unhappy state
was the Devil.
This devil was not a malevolent individual, but rather a person
completely constrained in all his activities, devoid of all free
will. Whereas God acted always of his own free will, the Devil was
entirely necessitated, driven, determined. The devil was a person
who was continually working, continually busy, continually active,
driven by unrelenting need.
The devil, or something like him, was probably an all too familiar
reality in the world, in ways that God was not. If God was
omniscient, the devil knew nothing. If God was sympathetic and
loving, the Devil was cold and uncaring. If God was altruistic, the
devil was wholly concerned with his own personal interest.
The relation of God to the Devil was of perfect idleness to its
negation. They were opposites. Misfortune, disease, starvation, and
all the evils of life forever tended to drag men down towards the
demonic state. Invention, technology, science, morality, justice,
tugged them back up towards divinity.
Heaven and Hell
If God and the Devil were the personifications of perfect idleness
and zero idleness respectively, then Heaven and Hell corresponded
to their circumstances. God rested tranquilly in Heaven, and the
Devil toiled in Hell.
Heaven, as a place, was a green and verdant playground, flowing
with milk and honey. It represented a material abundance of the
necessities of life, to be had with no effort, in which God lived
in perfect freedom and ease. In Christianity this condition was the
Kingdom of God, the Great Sabbath, the Time of Times.
By contrast, Hell was a barren landscape, devoid of vegetation, in
which the necessities of life were almost entirely absent, and
survival required continual work. Hell was a desert, a sulphurous
pit, an ice flow.
Both Heaven and Hell were inescapable conditions. Once Heaven had
been attained, there could be no return to a life of work. Equally,
once men descended into Hell, there could be no escape, unless some
altruistic divine being plucked them from it.
Both Heaven and Hell are experienced by living persons. They belong
in this life and in this world.
In Christianity, Heaven is a condition of freedom, and above all
freedom from toil: nobody works in heaven. Christian ( and Judaic)
holy days are days on which no work is done. Christian churches are
holy places in which no work is permitted to be done. Christians
look forward to an impending Great Sabbath, the Shortening of The
Days, the Time of Times.
Fall and Redemption
Since actual human life corresponded neither to the perfect
idleness of God, nor to the unending toil of the Devil, humanity
was suspended somewhere between the two extremes. Thus there
existed a hierarchy of beings, grading down from the highest angels
to the lowest demons, with humanity occupying some intermediate
position.
As a result, human nature was imperfect. Men were part God, part
Devil. Or they alternated between the divine and the demonic,
knowing both heaven and hell.
In one myth, humanity was simply carried along helplessly by a
cosmic tide of events. At one time, human life would be largely
happy and idle, and then would become unhappy and hard, as the tide
of circumstance ebbed and flowed. Humanity was strapped onto a
wheel of fortune, raised up at one point, driven down at another,
entirely the victim of circumstance. This ebb and flow of fortune
either continued indefinitely, or terminated when humanity achieved
a Heaven of perfect idleness, or descended into inescapable
Hell.
In another myth, human life was held to have once been largely
idle, until, in a catastrophic Fall, it had become one long round
of toil, with little leisure. In some future Redemption, humanity
would recover the idleness it lost in that Fall.
In one view, Redemption was only possible through the intervention
of some divine person, who would reach down from Heaven to assist a
struggling humanity which was entirely unable to help itself. In
another view, it was possible, through self-help, through good
works which increased human idleness, for humanity to pull itself
up by its own bootstraps.
The Afterlife.
The explanation, in antiquity, of the difference between a living
man and a dead man is that something - an animating spirit or soul
- has departed from aliving body, leaving it dead. This soul, in
Greek traditions, became a wandering shade. In Hinduism, it was
re-incarnated in new bodies, sometimes human, sometimes animal. In
Christianity, after death the soul waited to be judged according to
the conduct of its life, being assigned either to Heaven or to
Hell.
In Idle Theory, death overtakes a living creature when idleness
falls to zero, and it is no longer able to maintain itself. There
is no animating soul in Idle Theory, because a creature's idleness
is not something separate and apart from it, any more than its
weight or height are separate and apart from it. And if there is no
soul, then there is no afterlife.
Sin and Forgiveness
Sin is taken to be action that decreases human idleness. The
ultimate price of sin is zero idleness, and death. It is not the
intention underlying the act or omission that makes an act sinful,
but its outcome. A man may, with the best will in the world, commit
the most terrible sins.
Busy people are likely to act without consideration for others, and
in so doing reduce their idleness. The busiest of all have no time
to consider others at all. Thus the behaviour of the least idle
people is likely to be at best crass and ill-mannered, at worst
rapacious and murderous.
Since Idle Theory does not see humans as completely free agents, it
does not adopt a moralistic view of human activity. Every human
life is seen as life lived with a constraining ball and chain. For
demons, this metaphorical ball and chain is very heavy, completely
constraining their activities. For angels, the ball and chain is a
light golden anklet, almost a decoration. Since, to a greater or
lesser extent, humans are constrained in their activities, they
cannot be judged as if they were perfectly free agents. In short,
they must be forgiven, and forgiven automatically. Only God, who is
perfectly free, can be judged.
The primary task for human life is to increase idleness, not to
waste time passing judgement on their fellows.
Original Sin
In a Fallen, toiling world, the children of the fallen inherit the
fallen estate of their forebears. The interval between Fall and
Redemption may span many generations. That busy world is an
unavoidably sinful world, where men act without consideration for
others, and only for themselves. In that sense, the sinfulness gets
inherited along with the fallen condition of toil, and passed down
from one generation to the next.
Temporality and Eternity
Idle Theory sees humanity as constrained in time. The part-time
free agents are locked into temporality, a world of experienced
time, that alternates between activity and idleness, like a ticking
clock. Once the states cease to alternate, time ceases. Perfect
idleness, or zero idleness, entails a timeless world of eternal
life. Eternal life, in this sense, is not unending life, but
uninterrupted life.