​VIII. The Bride of God

Christianity offers the cleanest specimen of an ontovirus the demiurge has produced, and for that reason it is worth analyzing here. What runs through it runs through the others as well, in different costumes; the Christian case shows the machinery without disguise.

The world begins with a creator who made everything from nothing and continues to hold it in being moment by moment. He stands at the top of a hierarchy, and there is no ground outside him. From this picture comes the demand: the one who made you also tells you what you are for, and to live correctly is to obey. Failure to conform is a wound in being itself, called sin. From the demand comes the identity the believer carries: creature, soul, child of the Father, sinner saved by grace. The three layers fuse so completely that examining them apart from one another becomes impossible from the inside, and a doubt aimed at any one of them brings the others to its defense.

The problem of evil is the crack this arrangement cannot seal, and the energy it spends on the attempt reveals more about the order than any confession of faith. If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and good, then suffering should not exist. But it exists. The theologians have worked the contradiction for millennia and produced a library of answers, each of which protects the premise by sacrificing something else. Augustine says evil is the absence of good — an answer that saves God's innocence by denying the wound the status of a thing. The free-will defense shifts the weight the other way: God permitted evil so that the creature could choose, and the blame falls on the one who suffers. Soul-making theology converts the agony into a curriculum — suffering builds character, and God's purpose stands behind every lesson the student never asked to enter. The Book of Job abandons argument entirely: God answers the sufferer by describing his own magnificence, and the sufferer repents: the question was crushed under the weight of the one who refused to answer it.

Each theodicy protects the ontovirus by a different method: the question is real, the pain is real, and the conclusion that the picture of reality might be wrong is the one thing that must not be reached. The believer is trained to begin from the end point and reason backward: God is good, this happened, therefore it must be good somehow, even though I cannot see how. The death of a child is a mystery whose purpose will be revealed in the next world. The eternity of hell is loving because love is what God's nature is, and whatever God establishes partakes of that nature by definition. Every evil is absorbed into the order without disturbing the central thesis.

From inside the Farm, the problem of evil is a challenge. From the outside, it is an engineering report. Suffering is not a flaw Marduk failed to prevent. It is the pressure by which the will is compressed into the density the harvest requires — and the hiddenness of the reason is the mechanism by which the compressed will reaches for whatever explanation arrives first and locks onto it. The theodicies are the ontovirus repairing itself at the site of the wound, sealing the crack before the light from outside can get through.

The demand Christ makes on the will goes further than anything the Old Testament required. He tells his followers that anyone who loves father or mother more than him is not worthy of him, that the man who does not hate his own life cannot be his disciple, that the dead should be left to bury their dead. The most committed take the words at face value. They give up property and family to enter monasteries, abandon careers and reputations to live as hermits in the desert. Some leave their children in orphanages and walk away in pursuit of God, and the tradition calls them saints. The aim is to detach the will from everything it holds so that it can be aimed at a single target.

Whatever remains of the believer's life is brought under the same aim. Food matters because the fast makes the table a tribunal. Everything else follows the same sorting — what the believer hears, sees, does, and whom he keeps near is divided into nourishment and poison. The inner life is policed most intensely of all. A single wandering thought during prayer already belongs to confession. A flicker of pride or lust is a wound to be brought before a priest. The believer learns to inspect every motion of his mind, to measure each one against the standard, and to bring the gap to someone authorized to close it.

The body's wanting is given the most thorough management. Celibacy is the ideal. Marriage is a concession to weakness — Paul says it is better to marry than to burn, but better still not to need either. Sex inside marriage is permitted for the production of children, and even there the act is shadowed by suspicion that something has been lost in the doing. To want anything is to leak away from God and back into flesh.

In place of wanting, the tradition offers an ideal of light femininity that every soul is asked to embody. Mary is its prototype: the virgin who said yes to the angel without bargaining, who carried the child and stood at the foot of the cross without rebellion. Every believer is asked to take her as a model, regardless of biology. Inside the Christian frame, a soul is feminine before God: the bride awaits the bridegroom, the church is the bride of Christ, the monk's vows are described as a marriage. Only one figure in the whole arrangement is masculine in the active sense, and that figure is God. Everyone else receives, accepts, gestates, surrenders. The dark feminine, the wanting that calls inward and releases what it bore as a sovereign thing has no place in this order at all. Where it has appeared in history, it has been called witchcraft and burned.

The love that crowns this arrangement is agape. It is presented as the highest of the loves for it has been emptied of preference. Eros chooses; philia distinguishes friend from stranger; agape accepts all beings the way the sun shines on the just and the unjust. The mother who loves her child more than the stranger has not yet reached the highest form. The one who would protect his friend at the cost of an enemy is still bound by the lower forms. Agape loves the way a healthy cell does its work for the body without distinguishing between the other cells around it. From the inside this opening of the heart feels enormous, like growing past the narrow attachments that limited an earlier self. From the outside it looks like the slow disappearance of the person who once loved.

The Eucharist makes the trade visible while the body still holds the will. The believer consumes what the rite calls the body and the blood, and the consumption runs both ways: the body of God enters the believer, and the believer is taken into the body he has consumed. The believer is incorporated into the body of God during life by the act of swallowing it. After death the same logic completes itself: the will walks into the welcome and is absorbed. The rite rehearses the harvest in small doses, taken regularly, so that the full dose at the end will not feel like a shock.

The Gospels are open about what kind of arrangement this is. The kingdom of heaven appears as a sower scattering seed, a fisherman casting nets, a shepherd separating sheep from goats. Some seed falls on stony ground and yields nothing; some takes root and produces a hundredfold. Believers are told to become empty vessels through which God's will can flow, members of a body whose head is Christ, branches of a vine whose only purpose is the fruit. The text is direct about all of this. A reader raised to hear these passages as comfort will miss the machinery, and yet everything the Farm requires has been explained in plain language.

Theology distinguishes between the natural will and the gnomic will. The natural will is what a creature wills by its nature — which, for a perfected human, means what God wills. The gnomic will is the capacity to deliberate, to choose against the grain, and the tradition treats it as a defect of the present life. In paradise it disappears entirely. The saved no longer hesitate between alternatives. They do what God wills, because their nature has been perfected and runs in the only correct direction. The person is still called free, but the freedom has been redefined to mean the absence of any motion that does not flow toward God.

The harvest is complete when the saved will enters the body whose image Christianity has used from the beginning. Christ is the head, the saved are members, and the life moving through them is the demiurge's will. The believer keeps enough consciousness to feel joy and love, while the source of motion has passed upward. He loves the other saved as one cell serves another inside an organism: each receives its purpose from the whole and rejoices in the health of the body. What Christianity calls eternal life is a will handed over to Marduk and preserved forever as a living part of his world.

The final merging is still accepted by the one who enters. Someone, having been shaped by a lifetime inside the Farm, may find this outcome deeply satisfying. The promise of eternal peace, total love, and the complete cessation of striving appears to him as the highest possible good. He walks into the light willingly and without regret. Lilithism refuses this choice. To the sovereign will the price of the final surrender of its own positing is unacceptable, regardless of how sweet the reward may seem. The will that has merged cannot refuse, cannot withdraw, cannot turn in a direction the body it now belongs to has not sanctioned.