CYCLE SEVENTEEN

1. Since Time and Space are effectively behind/beyond the pale of Christianity, it follows that both the Devil and God (however one chooses to define them, i.e. whether with reference to sensuality or to sensibility) will also be such, since the Diabolic devolves on a space-time continuum, while the Divine evolves on a time-space continuum. All that is really relevant to such a religion and, by implication, the civilization that upholds it ... are the fortunes of man and woman (in both sensuality and sensibility), which is why Christianity is a religion of the World and Purgatory - the former devolving in a volume-mass continuum, while the latter evolves in a mass-volume continuum. Consequently God and the Devil, like Heaven and Hell, are extraneous to Christian life, only figuring tangentially in relation to the concept of Judgement in an afterlife, when some kind of association with the Divine and/or the Diabolic is posthumously anticipated. But how inevitable such a situation is to a religion which, making deities out of man and woman, excludes God and the Devil from actively participating in life! Alas, there is no room for Heaven or Hell in a society overly concerned with Purgatory and the World!

2. If such can be said of the Christian West in those centuries when ecclesiastical concerns took precedence over secular ones, then the same can surely be said of it in more recent centuries, when, by contrast, secular concerns have taken precedence over ecclesiastical ones, and the State has accordingly dominated the Church. In fact, so much has this become the case ... that, in the present century, one might be forgiven for having wondered whether the fact of God and the Devil being marginalized in, if not excluded from, Western society has any relevance to the contemporary world at all, insofar as Volume and Mass are manifestly to be thought of in connection with the State, where they take a democratic rather than a theocratic form.

3. Thus whereas formerly one would have thought in terms of man and woman, as opposed to the Devil and God, one now has to think in terms of republicanism and parliamentarianism, as opposed to authoritarianism and totalitarianism, or, put more concretely, of senators and representatives as opposed to rulers and leaders, with the latter categories being no less behind/beyond the pale, for better or worse, of the democratic norms ... than God and the Devil in relation to the humanist Mother and the nonconformist Son of Christian tradition.

4. Thus, once again, the supernatural forms of politics and economics are excluded from the Western norm, and only that which retains a natural basis in Volume and/or Mass is acceptable. One can rise from socialism to capitalism or fall from parliamentarianism to republicanism in this physical/metaphysical civilization, but anything which rises from communism to pacifism or falls from fascism to militarism is undesirable, since manifestly un-Western in its time-space or space-time absolutism. In fact, it can only have the whiff of a 'previous' life about it, the sort of life which is to democratic modernity what the 'Afterlife' was to theocratic antiquity, and thus no more than a peripheral consideration. What matters for the future is surely not time-space or space-time politics and economics but...? A Superchristian rebirth such that puts democracy on the rubbish heap of history and paves the way for the Eternal Life of 'Kingdom Come' in a triadic Beyond. That, at any rate, would be my standpoint!