A little while ago I was talking to two of my best friends (Angie @gnostiquette and Holohaus author Amara Reyes) about Faith and the Holy Spirit (Pistis; Sophia). For those who don’t know my lore (dude, who are you?) yeah I’m a Thelemite but I go to a cool church in my city and have always had a weird relationship with Christianity where I’m drawn to a lot of the core narrative and teachings but am too aware of the clusterfuck around its origins, to say nothing about what it became, to take anything as authoritative on interpretation. I was already reading the Hebrew Bible as a prerequisite for any primary source Kabbalah, and decided I’d go over the New Testament too, and some of the Nag Hammadi texts and secondary sources, approaching it within the broadest possible conceptual matrix and no preconceptions, trying to figure out just what I’m actually looking at.
Reading the Gospels apart from John, and Acts, I get the impression of an oral teaching preoccupied with a different exchange of claims than most Christianity since the Nicene Creed. While John largely presents Jesus’ miracles as an elaborate web of coded signs pointing to the more important fact of his ontological status, in the more Judaic synoptics the miracle, as often as not, is the message. Faith, indeed, is invoked not as how one enters the Kingdom - that is mostly related to acts, and more troublingly ethical thoughts, purity of heart - but how one accomplishes miracles. In Matthew 17:20, Jesus presents his miracles as someone anyone can do if they have “faith the size of a mustard seed”. Though Jesus declares his specialness in various ways, when he does miracles it’s never to prove he’s special; he acts surprised, even disappointed that other people can’t do the same thing, and the “moral” he closes the scene with is always some variation of “see, you can do this too!” (On the other hand, there seem to be places where Jesus’ power doesn’t work because people don’t have faith in him (including Chorazin and Bethsaida, which sound weirdly like Choronzon and Bou Saada); but I think I’d need a whole other post on that, possibly riffing on KamiKatsu as it develops this season.) The amount of the text of the Gospels that sounds straight up like The Secret is probably a bigger embarrassment to a reasonable, progressive Christianity than the relatively few genuine culturally conservative lines. The faith that accomplishes these miracles isn’t “believing the propositions that a) Jesus is the Son of God b) consubstantial with the Father and the Holy Spirit c) died for our sins etc.“, it seems more like the faith that God will answer this prayer in particular, in itself, that Spiral power runs on in Gurren Lagann or battles in Shaman King are won by. The apostles seem to be at best hammering all the object-level beliefs out very slowly, playing Jesus’ Watson or Socratic fool in every parable, all the while performing miracles themselves. There’s a certain ambiguity between whether the miracles are something everyone could always do and Jesus is just reminding them, or whether they’re part of the same ontological transition of the world completed in the Kingdom, partly because the prophecies of total human flourishing fulfilled by the Kingdom would seem to be inherently true of any world where everyone had this kind of faith; an interpretation I like to think about maybe (and of course I’m reading this through AI Alignment, what do you think) the Kingdom simply is the world remade completely by Jesus’ followers. Which would explain why it isn’t here yet.
Of course, any The Secret-type religion unless sustained by a very skilled conman can be expected to fall on the simple test “lol, just try it dude”. Jesus seems to awaken in his disciples the power to perform miraculous acts through faith, and they seem to be able to pass the power on; he emphasizes that “by their works ye shall know them”, and the supposed artificial monopoly imposed early in the Church (and enforced by genocide) on this chain of transmission is the only serious basis for the supposed authority of any priesthood (and thus of all the doctrine accumulated under it). Whether due to the information ecology of the ancient world or actual changes in the structure of reality, well into the 4th century, up to the Constantinian conversion and institutionalization as state religion, regular mass-attested miracles are acknowledged in mainstream historiography as a central driver of the spread of Christianity. Today, they occur no more consistently than my Bayesian default for a slightly unstable, mostly deterministic universe with non-ideal information dynamics and a lot of ways to trick people. If there was ever a chain of transmission it seems to have gotten lost somewhere in two millennia of pedophiles. And yet - o ye of little faith!
Angie brought up another sense of Faith distinct from the standard Protestant “belief”. I was already familiar with the sense of faith as good faith or trustworthiness, long since reduced to Tumblr this-explains-everything factoid; but Angie cued me that Pistis is also good faith in the sense of argument. It appears to be a term used in rhetoric, specifically, for the proper use of enthymemes - deductive arguments from universals. Which is weird because it seems to point to the theological dimension of necessity, whereas miracles generally appeal to the part of divine nature that resists that. But it does suggest one substantial correction to the mainstream sense of abstract negation of doubt. You don’t have “faith” if you’re not convinced. If I want to think about the intersection of faith as trust, faith as argument and faith doing miracles, my go-to text is usually Higurashi When They Cry. But Angie pointed me to another one: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Haruhi Suzumiya fanfic, “Trust In God: Or The Riddle of Kyon”.
Yudkowsky’s fanfic revolves around Kyon and Koizumi exposing Haruhi Suzumiya - the actual, unknowing God of her universe - to “Epicurus’ riddle”, the tripartite formulation of theodicy that launched a million middle school crises of faith, and then (in the form of a confession) to the fact that she is God. “God,” Epicurus - and Kyon - says, “either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able.” Koizumi mentions that the riddle is a misattribution because Epicurus lived before the invention of monotheism. This isn’t true even if it hadn’t become the worldwide paradigm yet - the Jews were already monotheistic and an erudite Greek might have at least heard of them - but more importantly, the hard-and-fast conceptual division between monotheism and polytheism wouldn’t become established until hard monotheism became a viable competitor to polytheistic worship. Canonical Greek and Roman texts ranging from theatre to the Socratic dialogues use “God” and “the gods” interchangeably, conflate different gods to varying extents and vaguely imply a single divine principle underlying all the varying representations in a sense not unlike the Hindu Brahman- usually identified with Zeus, but the mystery cults all had their own picks for the meta-god’s “true” identity (Dionysus, Eros, Phanes) and Greek philosophy arguably starts with expanding this symbolic competition to increasingly impersonal or abstract concepts (water, fire, the One, change, Truth). It’s hard to say if Epicurus’ riddle is correctly attributed or not - it is first attributed to him by a very early Christian author, early enough to be addressing not medieval sheeple but a cosmopolitan audience who would have been familiar with works of Epicurus lost today - but it fits with his signature positions, including on gods (which he regarded as merely “indestructible and blessed animals”), and his atomism which attacks the problem on the ontological level in a way closer to modern materialism than any previous philosophy. If there is no single underlying principle that must be aligned with moral Good but a sandstorm of countless colliding and swerving atoms, the existence of “evil” - that is, accidental conflict between independent atomic arrangements - needs no explanation.
[spoilers] The actual story ends on a crazier set of religious paradoxes than I even realized talking to Angie. Kyon does very much the opposite of what not just the canon Kyon, a standard status-quo-biased light novel protagonist, but of *what Yudkowsky today would do* - when Haruhi proposes testing her divine powers by creating a banana, Kyon decides “there’s no reason for you to slowly level up and unlock your powers. A hundred and fifty thousand people die every day, which works out to one hundred people dying every minute” - and gives her 7.3 seconds to “wake up and realize her capacity as God in one shot”. Now, even as someone who prefers idealist Yudkowsky to doomer Yudkowsky (trying to intervene in that dialectic is part of why I started this Substack), this is still a shockingly incautious solution. He’s already demonstrated that the solution to Epicurus’ Riddle involves one of the attributes not correlating with the others - God’s omniscience is suppressed. The suppression could even be something external - this shouldn’t be possible because Haruhi’s omnipotent, but we only know that *within her world*, and even there we know that multiple external agencies are containing her. Occam’s Razor, though, she’s self-censoring it according to the logic of the psychoanalytic unconscious - and while 7.3 seconds of trauma *can* make that conscious, it’s not reliable. If he’s even slightly wrong about the conditions for fully awakening Haruhi the world almost certainly ends after she loses the most important anchor in her life. All of this sounds like I don’t have enough “faith in Haruhi”, but which Haruhi am I supposed to have faith in here? The Haruhi he knows is entirely a product of her finite experience. Maybe the omniscient Haruhi decided she shouldn’t awaken.
All the questions this scenario breaks down into aren’t actually foreign to religious metaphysics, as Yudkowsky would know if he’d studied it outside The God Delusion. Maybe she’s Pistis Sophia, trapped in the material world by twelve archons jealous of her for communicating with the highest power of God (which would explain the whole playground magic signal thing). Or she’s Jesus, in which case Kyon is doing a version of what Satan does in the Temptation in the Desert, right down to the falling off a building (The Tower) motif. Jesus refuses to prove his power, or - despite being par excellence the religious figure whose moral perfectionism would give rise to a conclusion like Kyon’s - use it to perfect existence beyond random off-the-cuff miracles. This fact seems to fit comfortably with the quietism of established Christianity - but the extent to which Jesus does seem to encourage his followers to go around remaking the world, or acting as if they could (hence the whole “look to the birds in the air” thing; no seriously, a ton of his message seems to come down to “act as if magical post-scarcity is already here”) doesn’t. The pattern of Jesus’ miracles realizing other people’s faith might make a significant difference here.
Actually, it’s interesting to look at this story more closely with the Riddle of Kyon under our belt. There’s no point in the Gospels where Jesus clearly “awakens to” his divine nature - and apocryphal legends about him doing all sorts of weird stuff as a kid or even in the womb - but there is one at which the Holy Spirit, identified throughout the New Testament with the miraculous power of faith, “descends” on him (as with the apostles on Pentecost). This is his baptism by John. Immediately after baptism, he goes into the desert to face the tests with which Kyon confronts Haruhi - a test of faith, a test of Alignment. Note that the baptism of the Holy Spirit which John - who real heads will know Tracy Twyman identifies with a number of psychopompic figures including Enoch, Al-Khidr and Hermes - bestows is analogous to the “Baptism of Wisdom” the Templars supposedly ciphered as “Baphomet” and worshipped in the form of an oracular head attributed to John the Baptist. (“Baphomet”, like the Holy Spirit to the early Christians, is presented within various occult traditions as a “universal agent” - but unlike the Holy Spirit, appears morally “orthogonal” and capable of being forcibly “aligned”, at least in the left hand path traditions, with the will of the particular magician.) Having faith “in Christ” could then be reframed, not simply as asserting the human and divine being coexistent in Christ - but believing that the human Jesus and the divine Christ are perfectly aligned, so that any action the human Jesus takes in executing his divine power is equivalent to what the divine Son would do, and vice versa. This strikes me as more important than the various metaphysical controversies around consubstantiality which might be entirely meaningless in a Wittgensteinian sense.
Anyway, I don’t wanna go too deep into building a grand unified theory of Christianity off this (but like - the prohibitions on sinful thoughts make so much more sense if you assume you’re training everyone to have God powers!) and instead wanna focus on the personal psychological angle, which matters even if you don’t believe any of this shit. Because crazy as it sounds, I am actually intimately familiar with this problem.
My OCD has periodically afflicted me with delusions of power over the entire world. Afflicted, despite the fact that to many this would seem the most enviable of conditions. For the simple reason that despite this I do not feel in control of my mind - my own control is snatched away from me, through me, by a sort of Cartesian demon. This demon I understand to some extent as my own anxiety, or death-drive - whatever opposes my will in the moment of my willing it. Whatever makes it so that, for instance, whenever I try to fall asleep, I stay awake, or whenever I look for words, none come - internal processes whose outcome I cannot explain as entirely external to me without reverting to almost as problematic superstition, and which seem not merely separate subprocesses but maddeningly recursive. Recursive in the same sense as sin - this agony Paul describes so well of willing the opposite of what one wills. In short, I do not trust myself with absolute power over reality - even within my own utility function. This distrust can itself become a source of existential torture: I am the Haruhi of Yudkowsky’s fanfic, and have chosen to leave this world a vale of tears and rape and childhood diseases because it is what I am familiar with, and my entire self-concept and value-system depends on existing within it, beyond which I am afraid to try and even imagine a total perfection, and because I am afraid that the imp of the perverse riding on my shoulders like the Wren in Gwydion’s fable will launch itself just ahead of me and make it irrevocably worse. The limits of physical reality at least impose a distribution in which successes and failures are legible, measurable, negotiable and mostly endurable. As much as I wish to leave that distribution - and I have had enough genuine magickal experiences to believe I might have explored a bit out of it already - fear and trembling would stop me not much further than a deterministic reality thoroughly impermeable to miracle. On the other hand, the fact that deep down some part of me believes it should be possible for anyone to achieve anything with faith (a continuity from Christianity through Gurren Lagann, Fate/Stay Night and Shaman King), that this is in fact theodically necessary is part of why I continued to agonize over the possibility that I might somehow make evil win all of reality by a failure of my own will in the last instance.
But what if that’s what everyone’s supposed to feel?
And suppose what Christ asks is - what are the conditions under which you could exercise the power of God without doubting your own judgment? In those conditions, which you may not know yourself, God will grant it. This security in one’s own will and its accordance with the world is the proper sense of faith. It is not “belief” in a given state of reality external to you, whose rightness or truth it would be possible to doubt. It is belief in the sense that underlies all belief in true argument - what Yudkowsky calls “coherence”. Wittgenstein articulates it when he throws away the ladder. Shaman King depicts it as the condition for all shamanic breakthroughs, and I have experienced the same in my own creativity (and feeling like it could be withdrawn from me triggered all the crises above). Everyone probably has to an extent - it’s the thing you notice whenever you learn anything, common to anything true actually or hypothetically, that generalizes across any set of distributions - even miracles and mechanistic physics, human and divine - and makes communication between them possible. The self-evidence of which accounts for the intuition in Yudkowsky both that a sufficiently intelligent AI could remake the world by definition, and that to some extent this should be possible for us already (perhaps not even an extent that makes a distinction between the “magickal” and “scientific” modes of change-under-will). The relevance of “enthymeme” to “pistis” might be something like “argument from a higher level of pure coherence”. If you can - like Pistis Sophia - pray directly to the highest manifold of coherence, there should be nothing you can’t do. And if this isn’t true, it might be tomorrow - what man knows the day or the hour?