Christendom became totalitarian, conquering, exterminatory because it did not develop the notion of the absence and non-action of God here below. It clung to Jehovah as much as to Christ; it conceived Providence in the manner of the Old Testament: Israel alone could resist Rome because it resembled it, and nascent Christianity thus bore the Roman stain before becoming the official religion of the Empire. The harm done by Rome was never truly repaired. God made to Moses and Joshua purely temporal promises at a time when Egypt was straining toward the eternal salvation of the soul. The Hebrews, having refused the Egyptian revelation, had the God they deserved: a carnal and collective God who until the exile spoke to the soul of no one (unless, in the Psalms)?... Among the characters of the Old Testament narratives, only Abel, Enoch, Noah, Melchizedek, Job, and Daniel are pure. It is not surprising that a people of fugitive slaves, conquerors of a paradisiacal land prepared by civilizations in whose labor they had had no part and which they destroyed by massacres -- that such a people could not have produced much good. To speak of a "God who educates" in connection with this people is an atrocious joke. There is nothing surprising in the fact that there is so much evil in a civilization -- ours -- vitiated at its base and in its very inspiration by this dreadful lie. The curse of Israel weighs upon Christendom. The atrocities, the Inquisition, the exterminations of heretics and infidels -- that was Israel. Capitalism was Israel, notably among its worst enemies. There can be no personal contact between man and God except through the person of the Mediator. Apart from the Mediator, the presence of God to man can only be collective, national. Israel simultaneously chose the national God and rejected the Mediator; it perhaps tended from time to time toward true monotheism, but always fell back, and could not help falling back, to a tribal God. The man who has contact with the supernatural is essentially a king, for he is the presence in society, in the form of an infinitely small thing, of an order transcendent to the social. But the place he occupies in the social hierarchy is entirely indifferent. As for greatness in the social order, only he who has captured a large part of the energy of the great beast is capable of it. But he cannot have part in the supernatural. Moses, Joshua -- that is the share of the supernatural for those who have captured much social energy. Israel is an attempt at supernatural social life. It succeeded, one may suppose, in the best possible way of the kind. Useless to try again. The result shows of what divine revelation the great beast is capable. Isaiah is the first to bring pure light. Israel resisted Rome because its God, though immaterial, was a temporal sovereign on a level with the Emperor, and it is thanks to this that Christianity could be born. The religion of Israel was not elevated enough to be fragile, and thanks to this solidity it could protect the growth of what is most elevated.
It was necessary that Israel should be ignorant of the idea of the Incarnation in order that the Passion be possible. Rome too (these were perhaps the only two peoples to be ignorant of it). But Israel had to have some part in God. All the part possible without spirituality or the supernatural. An exclusively collective religion. It is through this ignorance, through these shadows that it was the chosen people. Thus one can understand Isaiah's word: "I have hardened their hearts so that they might not hear my word."
It is for this reason that everything is stained with sin in Israel, because there is nothing pure without participation in the incarnate divinity, and so that the lack of such participation would be manifest.
Is not the great stain the struggle of Jacob with the angel: "The Lord... will render justice to Jacob according to his works. From the maternal womb he supplanted his brother, and in his manhood he triumphed over a God. He struggled against an angel and was victorious, and the angel wept and begged for mercy..."
Is it not the great misfortune, when one struggles against God, not to be vanquished?
Israel. Everything is stained and atrocious, as if on purpose, from Abraham onward (except for a few prophets). As if to indicate quite clearly: Warning! here is evil!
A people chosen for blindness, chosen to be the executioner of Christ.
The Jews, this handful of uprooted people, caused the uprooting of the entire globe. Their part in Christianity made Christendom a thing uprooted from its own past. The attempt at re-rooting of the Renaissance failed because it was anti-Christian in orientation. The tendency of the "Enlightenment," 1789, secularism, etc., have infinitely increased the uprooting through the lie of progress. And uprooted Europe uprooted the rest of the world through colonial conquest. Capitalism, totalitarianism are part of this progression in uprooting; the anti-Semites, naturally, propagate the Jewish influence. But before they uprooted by poison, Assyria in the East, Rome in the West had uprooted by the sword.
Primitive Christianity manufactured the poison of the notion of progress through the idea of a divine pedagogy forming men to make them capable of receiving the message of Christ. This agreed with the hope of the universal conversion of nations and the end of the world as imminent phenomena. But since neither of these occurred, after seventeen centuries this notion of progress was prolonged beyond the moment of the Christian Revelation. From that point on, it was bound to turn against Christianity.
The other poisons mixed with the truth of Christianity are of Jewish origin. This one is specifically Christian.
The metaphor of divine pedagogy dissolves individual destiny, which alone counts for salvation, into that of peoples.
Christianity sought to find a harmony in history. This is the germ of Hegel and Marx. The notion of history as directed continuity is Christian.
It seems to me that few ideas are more completely false. To seek harmony in becoming, in what is the contrary of eternity. A bad union of contraries. Humanism and what followed from it is not a return to Antiquity, but a development of poisons internal to Christianity. It is supernatural love that is free. By wanting to force it, one substitutes a natural love for it. But conversely, freedom without supernatural love, the freedom of 1789, is entirely empty, a mere abstraction, without any possibility of ever becoming real.