Did Christianity Create Feminism?

           

            Reading Week seemed to last a very long time, though not in the sense of it being boring. It just felt full. It was nice not to have to leave home at 9:00 for a Tuesday, a Thursday and a Friday.

            When I arrived at Philosophy class the door to the lecture theatre was shut and when I opened it I saw the room was full of students taking an exam. I sat down in one of the chairs in the hallway. The exam was over at 10:00 and so I had less time to get my computer set up for class.

            My TA, Sean, was wearing a suit. I asked him if he had a meeting afterwards. He told me that he had to give a speech relating to his fellowship, but there would be free food.

            Professor Gibbs came in and stopped to talk to Sean, who was sitting behind me, about the Nietzsche text we were currently reading. He said, “It makes you wonder why people find Foucault interesting when Nietzsche does it so much better and with verve!”

            He began the lecture by welcoming us back and telling us that if any of us went to someplace warm, “we hate you, but that’s good! In the Nietzschean world that’s as it should be.

            He told us that all of his illnesses had cleared up except for having a cold, but he hoped that he wouldn’t leak too much. He added that the suffering we experienced during the cold snap was also very Nietzschean.

            He said that our second essay topics would be uploaded soon and reminded us that there are strict rules against using our previously submitted philosophy essays. I was thinking that there’s something ironic about being forbidden to plagiarize oneself.

            He told us that Nietzsche is not interested in the story he is telling but rather in the way we think. It’s bad enough that morality has a history, but piggybacking on that is the history of thought. Philosophy itself is permeated by the moral story. Nietzsche asks in the preface, “What does it mean to be a knower?” It is to be part of this moral story.

            Democracy is vulgar and exists as a type of revenge for the weak.

            The people of the land were fine doing their thing in harmony with the land until the noble conquerors came along and took charge. The Norman knights took over and changed everything. They ruled with a good versus bad system. Their chief interest was going and doing so they went and did what they wanted and enjoyed doing it.

            In many cultures, even in Europe during the Middle Ages, the priests were warriors. Part of their power was to engage in practical abstinence. Rather than pushing, they pulled back in a physicalized exercise of power that is really not a very healthy thing to do, because healthy people do what they want. The priests turned against the self and elevated negation. They had the energy to stop. They had the power to do nothing and to make others do nothing. The Vikings didn’t know this kind of power. The Vikings only knew violence but the priests had hatred and knew how to crush with it.

            Nietzsche was not an Aryan warrior. He was an academic. The professor then confessed to us that he has a fantasy that he will one day become a hockey player, but not right now. The professor is around seventy years old.

            The Jews staged a revolution thanks to Jesus and the meek inherited the earth. The slave revolt was so successful that we don’t even see it anymore.

            The story is not as simple as it looks. We can’t become Vikings again but can we survive as slaves?

            Christianity elevated hatred to love. When Nietzsche says that Christianity is the greatest error in history he means that it is great.

            Secularism is so last century. The end of god is a Eurocentric Protestant skew but it’s wrong. People think that democracy displaced Christianity but the secular world is embedded in Christian values.

            The Christians were too weak to exact physical revenge and so they enforced imaginary revenge in which their enemies would suffer later. Their resentment was fecund. But there is an acoustic illusion here because Christian society still depends upon powerful overlords.

            Christians do nothing. They are secretive and clever. The Viking just does, but for the Christian reaction is action. The weak plot and maintain a private morality, hating their enemies, while the nobleman loves his enemies because he takes them seriously.

            Nietzsche rejects resentment.

            Then Professor Gibbs asked, “Has anyone seen the new Star Wars movie? …. So few? I’ve seen it!” Someone else called out that they’d seen it four times. Gibbs said that the movie has lots of blowing stuff up and heroes not being meek. We take revenge in imaginary worlds.

            With all of our energy turned in upon ourselves will we eventually burn out?

            Nietzsche was one of the best diagnosticians of Nihilism.

            To be a spy in the factory where ideals are made. Are ideals apparent? I’d like to be better than I am! That’s not where ideals come from. The factory makes a lot of lies. Ideals are vengeance on the powerful. The strong will be punished and the end of time is a convenient holding place for our frustrations.

            Nietzsche talked a lot about the smell of ideas.

            The Romans thought the Jews were unnatural. When the Jews became Christians they changed the name of hate to love and now all of Rome bows down to four Jews. The Renaissance tried but failed to raise Rome above Christianity.

            Nietzsche was not a fan of democracy.

            Napoleon was a short Viking that did what he wanted.

            Is the slave revolt over? There’s Viking in all of us. Good and bad is a part of our heritage. What happens when you are used to being Christian? Nietzsche says that you can’t win forever.

            We like to hurt people, but that’s not bad.

            To be able to keep a promise means that we have the power to forget or to dismiss, which is one of the greatest powers to have. Intellectuals work on what is hard for them but historians have the ability to forget.

            Ethics struggles to overcome ethics.

            The essence of morality is the promise, but promising that you will do whatever you want is not a promise. Morality wants to be predictable but children are not moral or predictable. Children have no customs until they are trained to dominate themselves and exercise freedom against their instincts.

To have conscience one needs memory that is sourced in pain. Nietzsche says the Germans are good at this but he has nasty things to say about everybody. All the great thinking cultures come from torture and violence. Schools with corporal punishment produced generations of great thinkers. How do any of us remember anything now that we are not whipped at school anymore?

Naomi didn’t come to class.

I had enough time to ride home, sit in front of the computer for twenty minutes and then to take an hour and a half siesta. Now that the bedbugs are gone I can be decadent again and just flop myself down in bed for a nap with my clothes on. I didn’t even remove my boots but rather just put an old towel under them so I didn’t muddy my mattress cover.

While I was waiting for class to start, I heard a student complaining about having to read a 600-page novel in two weeks for his Russian Literature course.

Just before beginning the Short Story lecture, Andrew was discussing film adaptations of comic books, and though most people thought that Green Lantern was a horrible movie, Andrew didn’t think it was that bad. I felt the same way about Daredevil. Andrew agreed that the latest Fantastic Four film was pretty bad.

In class we talked about the first two stories from “The Road Past Altamont”. Andrew said that Gabrielle Roy is his favourite Canadian writer and added that she is almost Proustian. He had to get special permission to cover her book in the course because, since it was originally written in French, it is technically not English literature.

“The Road Past Altamont” is about the rediscovery of the past simultaneously with the future told by a Janus faced narrator. Andrew said, at the risk of sounding clichéd, that the book is about the circle of life and death.  The title contains the “past”. The first story takes place past Altamont, where the last story ends.

The past is an imaginative idealized refuge constrained by practicality.

Roy’s own father was working poor and he called her “Petite Misère”

            Creative imagining equals creative recall and falsity. Memory is fragile.

            The past here represents youth and joy. It anticipates the future.

            The future represents old age and sorrow. Contains the past in retrospect.

            Both have abiding ties to the family.

            Experience is tied to the self.

            Loss and consolation are prominent in every story and love is intertwined with it. One consolation is the telling of the story. There is danger if the pain persists so relief can be transient.

            There are three kinds of loss: the pain of leaving; the pain of the death of a loved one; and the pain of contemplating one’s own death.

            In the story about her grandmother, Christine’s boredom at sunset is consoled with a doll.

            The grandmother’s regrets are consoled with usefulness and later by the family album, which also consoles the mother.

            In “The Old Man and the Child”, Christine travels to the mountains in her imagination and reconquers the west for the French.

The old man takes Christine on a journey to Lake Winnipeg, which becomes a metaphor for the human lifespan with one end being youth and life and he other being death and the imagined other side. The lake is both permanent and restless like the philosophical river. Both the old man and the child are fragile. Christine, in telling the story, brings the end and the beginning together.

            “The Move” prepares her for her own travels.

            The Prairie ironically draws one forward in its sameness.

            During the break, I eavesdropped on the conversation of a couple of students behind me. She told him that she was taking a course on Christianity and Feminism. He was snacking and talking with his mouth full when he said that Christianity and feminism had always seemed to him to be mutually exclusive. I found this interesting because of the lecture that morning where I heard Nietzsche’s idea that only Christianity could have created modern democracy. It occurred to me at that moment that feminism could not have come into being without democracy and so if Nietzsche is right about Christianity leading to democracy, then it follows that Christianity created feminism.

            After the break we talked about the final story from the book of the same name, “The Road Past Altamont”.

The Altamont hills only show themselves when one climbs them. There is a need to take action.

Andrew asked if we thought that Mount Royal is a mountain, then said, “It’s not a mountain!” I’d always thought that it was, and so I looked it up later. There is no universally official measurement as to what constitutes a mountain. It just has to be impressive and notable when compared to its surroundings. But the United Nations has its own criteria based on height in relation to sharpness of the angle of elevation, and since they don’t recognize any elevation lower than 300 metres as being a mountain, by UN standards, Mount Royal is not a mountain. For me though, when I compare it to the little hills in the part of New Brunswick where I was raised, it seems like a mountain to me.

We talked of memory being a lens. The memory is how we catch up with one another.

Andrew returned our tests. One anonymous student had their “exemplary” test placed on Blackboard to show us how it’s done. I managed to squeak an A-minus.