The Revolutionary Personality
Am reading a biography, "The Godwins and the Shellys" by St. Clair. It helps us to understand the mind and origin of the English Revolutionary Personality.
Many revolutionaries or proto revolutionaries, I am discovering, are children or grand-children of, for example, strict Calvinists or strict Jansenists. Historians, applying the theories of Freud, claim that they adopt unitarianism, liberation, and other revolutionary ideals as a way of unleashing the repressed.
What then, would be their penchant for revolutionary acivity? It would be another form of unleashing of the repressed. They tend to arrive at a point when they deny the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, original sin, and other fundamental doctrines. They only accept what is "rational" from the Bible, assuming that whatever is Catholic cannot be rational.
In effec, they become like the revolutionaries of early Christianity. The Arians come to mind. What do they repress? In the interest of pursuing their passions, they repress God, Redemption, authority, and sacrifice. So, when they advocate revolution, they are advocating temporal redemption, human authority (that becomes totalitarian), and instead of sacrificing themselves, they sacrifice the blood of others.
Many revolutionaries or proto revolutionaries, I am discovering, are children or grand-children of, for example, strict Calvinists or strict Jansenists. Historians, applying the theories of Freud, claim that they adopt unitarianism, liberation, and other revolutionary ideals as a way of unleashing the repressed.
What then, would be their penchant for revolutionary acivity? It would be another form of unleashing of the repressed. They tend to arrive at a point when they deny the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, original sin, and other fundamental doctrines. They only accept what is "rational" from the Bible, assuming that whatever is Catholic cannot be rational.
In effec, they become like the revolutionaries of early Christianity. The Arians come to mind. What do they repress? In the interest of pursuing their passions, they repress God, Redemption, authority, and sacrifice. So, when they advocate revolution, they are advocating temporal redemption, human authority (that becomes totalitarian), and instead of sacrificing themselves, they sacrifice the blood of others.
Labels: Arians, bible, Calvin, Christianity, Freud, Jansenism, Original Sin, revolution, revolutionaries, revolutionary, sexual liberation, Trinity, unitarianism
posted by Joe Philipowicz at 9:58 AM
1 Comments:
I do not feel a need to defend revolutionary projects in general, but as a Unitarian-Universalist who understands Marx,"Leninism," Maoism, and Trokskyism and sees them as ultimately failed and "all too human" attempts at human liberation, I wonder why this apparent religious fundamentalist feels a need to attach Unitarism in the same breath. The fundamentaist can accuse a UU of being an apostate - I'll accept that label with a smile - but to group UUism with totalitarism(invoking his version of God; is that the correct cosmic totalitarianism?) is an unjust smear. Call us utopian liberals if you must narrow your mind, but the "red baiting" is just stupid.
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