The World Outside The Universe

Life Beyond The Pale

In a recent conversation with the writer Gordon White, I touched upon a theme that has been an unspoken foundation for much of my recent thought.

In speaking about how ressentiment and the “need to be good” heavily define leftist thought, I mention Carl Schmitt’s observation that all modern “secular” political institutions are thinly veiled continuations of theological ones. Put a simpler way, though we think of ourselves as modern and post-Christian, our political framework is still very much Christian.

A historical example should help you understand this point. In the middle ages of Europe, during the time where the Catholic Church had its strongest hold over the meaning frameworks of people there, the idea developed that you were either part of a “universal communion” of believers (the word Catholic means universal, and communion here functions just like the word community), or you were outside it.

In other words, there were two sorts of people: believers and unbelievers.

Being part of the in-group meant that certain laws and moral standards applied to you that did not apply to the rest of the world. For instance, if you were Catholic you could not be made a slave, since slavery was a sin. However, if you were not Catholic, this prohibition didn’t apply to you, and thus you could be made a slave.

Slavery—which is an almost universal form throughout history—was actually quite rare in most of Europe after the fall of Rome, specifically because of this Catholic moral prohibition. When slavery did occur, it mostly occurred in the easternmost parts of Europe, in Byzantium, and in the Muslim parts of Spain, and its primary target gives us the word itself: the Slavs.¹

The Slavs were excepted from the Catholic prohibition of slavery because they were not Catholic. Most had kept to their pagan ancestral ways or had converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. In either case, they were not part of the universal communion and therefore fair game for Catholic kings and lords.

This logic is precisely how Europe then justified treating people in Africa just as they had treated the Slavs (en-slav-ing them, making them like the Slavs), because the people in Africa were not part of the universal communion.²

By this point we should remember that not all of Europe was Catholic any longer. Calvinism and Lutheranism had both arisen, as did a bit later the Anglican church. All three of these splinters from the universal communion, however, maintained the basic Catholic framework about slavery. It was sinful to treat other Christians as you would treat the Slavs, so if you wanted to enslave people, you needed to find non-Christians.

This has always been an important point that is extremely difficult for us moderns to grasp. The initial justifications for the transatlantic slave trade were not racial justifications. In fact, at that point in European history, there was no solidified concept of race, nor of marking people as inferior based upon skin color. ³

The concept of race developed in the early 17th century to deal with a particular problem colonial administrators and religious leaders were facing. Many of the Africans whom they had been treating as Slavs were converting to Christianity. So, too, were the conquered indigenous peoples. Suddenly, the religious prohibition against enslaving people who were part of the universal communion (and its variant Protestant forms) now also applied to the people who had been enslaved.

The crucial shift occurred in the American colonies during the very early part of the 1600’s. Colonial administrators were facing social unrest due to the particular habit of the lower-class European settlers (some of them indentured servants⁴) in the colonies to intermix with the African slaves and the indigenous population. The three groups had much more in common with each other than they did with the slave-owning colonial bosses.

Especially concerning for the colonial administrators was the cultural and religious intermixing. The European workers were adopting religious beliefs and cultural norms of the people outside the communion,⁵ making it much more difficult for the authorities to control their behavior through religious conformity. At the same time, the Africans and indigenous people were syncretizing Christian ideas into their own religious practices, becoming nominally Christian.

And thus race was born. Colonial administrators began using the word “white” in laws and other legal documents to differentiate the lower class Europeans from the other lower classes in the colonies. Negro (the Portuguese word for black) and other terms then found legal usefulness and took on new meanings as well, referring not just to the apparent skin color of people but to their place within the social order.

Let’s go back to where we started in this essay and look at Carl Schmitt’s point again, which is that secular political forms are continuations of theological forms.

You can probably already see that race is exactly this sort of continuation. In Catholic and later forms of Christianity, a set of protections and rights were to be universally applied, but only to those within the theological bounds of that universe. Those within the catholic (remember: universal) communion were one sort of people, part of the same order of meaning (or theological order). Those outside that communion (outside the universal, an odd point I’d like you to hold in your head for a moment) were a different sort of people completely, a kind of non-person to whom you could do anything without divine repercussions.

Anathema

We looked at the roots of race in Catholic theology, but we need to go even further back. The Catholics did not come up with this idea of universal communion on their own, but rather inherited and retooled a political/theological concept from the Roman Empire (which birthed Christianity), who themselves inherited it from the Greeks.

The Romans developed the idea of the civitas⁶, which referred to everything in which the Roman order of meaning (its theological, political, cultural, and economic forms) could be applied. The civitas was the “universe,” the place in which one (uni-) reality existed. Teasing out its etymology even further, the civitas was where everything had been turned (-verse) into one unified whole.

Of course, there was something outside the universe of the civitas. Rome was one universe, and outside that universe was the rest of the world, a place full of other ideas and peoples and beliefs over which Rome had no influence and against which Rome fought.

That world outside the universe had multiple names, but one common Roman slur against the people who lived there was pagan (paganus). Originally a word meant to denote certain boundary markers at the edge of the civitas, paganus became synonymous with all those ideas, customs, beliefs, and ways of being in the world that had thus far not been conquered and subsumed into the universe.⁷

As I mentioned, the civitas was a continuation of a Greek concept. That concept was of the polis⁸, which denoted specifically the boundaries of the Greek city-states. Past the reach of the polis was again the rest of the world, which for them was much larger and more a matter of curiosity than it was for the Romans (the Greek equivalent of universe is kosmos, which does not bear the sense of unification that the Roman term has).⁹

For both the Greeks and the Romans, this outside realm had an element of terror and savagery to it because Greek and Roman political and theological norms didn’t apply. It was ultimately a land of monsters, of wolves, of strange languages and incomprehensible customs where the protections and benefits that came with being part of the Greek polis or the Roman civitas had no recognition. ¹⁰

One of the worst punishments that you could suffer in Greece or in Rome was to be expelled into those lands and never allowed to be returned. The Roman concept for this was homo sacer, literally “sacred man.” The person who was homo sacer was stripped of all the legal protections the Roman civitas granted and “given over to the gods.” Another way of putting this now would be “thrown to the wolves,” which were for thousands of years in Europe the symbol of all that was outside the community.

The Greeks had a similar concept, that of anathema. A thing was anathema when it was taken out of the world and given over to the gods (by sacrifice), with a later connotation of being “expelled” or “banished” from the mundane, every day world.

Anathema is better known in its later Christian use as a form of excommunication or a thing that is so evil it must be banished or destroyed.

Returning to the earlier conversation about the progression from universal communion to the modern concept of race, consider what excommunication actually was. It was not just our current sense of the word (“we don’t talk to that person any longer”) but rather complete ejection from the universe. A person who was excommunicated was “thrown to the wolves,” their fate left up to the one-god.

When the Pope excommunicated a king, for example, all other Christian kings were then free to wage war against him and his kingdom. An individual who was excommunicated could be killed on sight, or treated as the Slavs were treated, and no other person within the universal communion was permitted to give them help, aid, or protection.

Anathema was the original word used by the early Christian authorities for what later became excommunication. The later replacement of anathema with the word excommunicatus probably had two reasons. First, since the core meaning of anathema in Greek was “to devote to the gods” with the sense of banishment being only a secondary connotation, the word was a bit too extreme to fit all the many reasons a person might be expelled from the community.

The more important reason I suspect is that anathema denotes a permanent state. When something is given over to the gods (or in the Christian order, The God), anyone taking it back (that is, allowing the person back into the universal communion) is committing a blasphemy.

So, anathema became the term used for the extreme excommunication of people based on unpardonable sins for which there was no possible redemption and reconciliation. A person who was excommunicated could later be re-admitted to the universe by confessing their sins and showing penance, but a person who was anathema was so sinful, so in error, that they can never return.

Beliefs Beyond The Pale

What crimes were so bad, so unforgivable, that they would make a person anathema rather than excommunicatus?

Heresy.

Heretical beliefs did not only make you subject to becoming anathema, but were anathema themselves. To hold them, to speak them, and especially to teach heretical beliefs to others was an unpardonable sin for which you could never be forgiven nor ever re-admitted into the universal communion.

For the Catholic Church, some beliefs were so extreme that those who held them were an existential threat to the very order of things. For example, questioning the trinity, the divinity of Jesus or his simultaneous dual nature, or the existence of the Church as the one mediator between man and God (and the Pope as the vicar of Christ, Christ’s stand-in on earth), or the virginity of Mary—these all could subject you not just to excommunicatus but the label of anathema.

Other ideas were also similarly verboten. Most of the millenarian sects were seen as anathema, because they held beliefs which were anathema. Some of those ideas appear to us now merely esoteric and theological—infant baptism, or questioning the celibacy of the priesthood—and therefore apparent over-reactions or purposeless exercises of authority. This is a deeply short-sighted view, however, and misses how such ideas were key aspects of the political order of the universal communion.

Take, for example, the issue of infant baptism. The act of christening a child literally made them Christian, which brought them into the universal communion. It conferred a kind of citizenship upon the person in the same way the circumcision of boys in Judaism brings those boys into the covenant. Thus, to question the age at which children were baptized—or to suggest that some sort of confession or statement of faith should be made before a person is included into the universal communion—undermined the very theoretical framework of the universal communion itself.¹¹

The second anathema idea that I mentioned—the celibacy of the priesthood—likewise has a deeply political dimension that few notice. The requirement of a priest (and remember they were all men) to remain celibate meant that any children he might have would be illegitimate and thus have no property claims due them through their father. Therefore, church property and wealth could never be transferred out of the church to the children of the priests, but would instead always remain the property of Rome.¹²

The point to remember here is that anathema was a category reserved for heresies that threatened the very order of things, rather than merely ideas that were deviant or false. Anathema challenged the foundations of society, of the universal communion, of civilization itself, and those who embraced ideas that were anathema needed to be expelled as far away from society as possible.

There is a phrase we use in English whose origins tend to be quite obscured: “beyond the pale.” For an idea or an action to be beyond the pale, it must be so far removed from the norms of civil society that it cannot be countenanced at all, but rather fought and banished.

The root of this phrase comes from a particular boundary line drawn by the English in their conquest and occupation of Ireland. A “pale” is a boundary marker, literally a wooden stake placed into the ground (it is the root of the English word “pole”), and comes yet again from Latin (palus). The phrase itself was used in the 1500’s to describe the uncivilized, unconquered, “savage¹³” territory in Ireland where English law and customs had not taken hold. It was a place to be terrified of (especially if you were an English soldier), and also incidentally a place a person could run to if they were excommunicated or otherwise exiled from civilization (as, say, bandits, whose name means ‘“those who were banished”).

If the area “beyond the pale” sounds like the same conception Romans had of the pagans (a pagus was a boundary marked by just this sort of palus), then you have already begun to understand my larger meaning here.

Consider again the way we use that phrase now. We do not use it to describe a physical place at all, but rather an extreme way of thinking or acting that is utterly unacceptable. In fact, we use it the same way that the Catholic Church used the word anathema, describing ideas that needed to be forcefully expelled from everyday reality lest they cause untold damage or even undermine the order of meaning itself.

The process of excommunication and especially anathema was that the punishment relied on other people enacting it. The person who was anathema needed to be collectively punished, collectively banished from the universal community. Fellow villagers, family members, local lords, priests, and all those in surrounding areas were told of the person’s anathema status, and each knew that the punishment for helping such a person was becoming anathema themselves.

Ultimately, the person who was anathema was chased out of civilization (if they were not killed, an act for which the killer was immediately granted forgiveness). They were pushed out past the boundaries, the borders, beyond the pale, into the wilderness, the lands of the paganus, and even further.

Basically, they were forced out of the (localized) universal and into the world, the "bare life” of animals and trees, far from human help or companionship. Because they had offended the god(s), they were given over to the gods, who would be the final judges of the person’s fate.

Of course, that world “beyond the pale” wasn’t empty, nor were the vast lands outside the borders of the civitas or polis. A world existed outside of the universe, beyond the reach of the order of meaning the person’s anathema beliefs threatened to destroy. Beyond the pale were the Irish, who were hardly savage or uncultured. Outside the reach of Rome were myriad of cultural groups with their own orders of meaning.

The crime and proclamation of anathema only had power within the order of meaning which that anathema threatened to destroy. If you could escape the reach of that order of meaning, you were free, no longer subject to its rules or proclamations. Most of all, you were free from the violent mob justice of the universal communion, the collective hatred the order of meaning had summoned to its defense against anathema.

We return once again to Carl Schmitt’s point here: our modern political forms are continued theological forms. Anathema continues to be an unforgivable crime for which there is no possible redemption, regardless of whether the modern “woke” mobs even have the historical education to know what that concept is.

What beliefs now are “beyond the pale,” so heretical for which there can be no reconciliation and instead only complete expulsion from the universal communion? I can briefly identify a few of them:

• Race is not the primary terrain of societal oppression, but rather economic class.

• Biological/material (Greek: zoe) existence is at least as relevant to identity formation as social-political (Greek: bios) existence.

• Technological “progress” does not equal human liberation.

• Humans and their behavior cannot be reduced to ideological categories.

• “Left” and “Right” are ever-shifting and localized political fictions and often merely continue the Christian dualism of “good” and “evil.”

So, to say that poor white people and poor black people have more in common with each other than they do with upper class people who share their skin color is to become anathema, as happens to any Black Marxist¹⁴ who dare state this belief.

To say that the material condition of sexual difference and dimorphism is just as important as the social construction of gender (as is the basis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s statement, “trans women are trans women”¹⁵) is to merit complete explusion from the universal communion.

Daring to suggest that industrial capitalist technology has altered our understanding of our own bodies and has only increased the exploitation of human bodies, as Feminist Marxist writer Silvia Federici states, as well as much of the “post-left” and “neo-luddites” have stated¹⁶ elicits agressive smearing campaigns claiming they are of “eco-fascist,” “ableist,” or TERFs (each modern synonyms for anathema).

And for the last two heretical doctrines, I’d offer my own experience these last few years and especially the previous few months. Questioning the belief that specific sorts of humans are “inherently” racist, sexist, or oppressive, as well as pointing out that what Americans believe now as “left” has little historial connection to what the left has ever meant, has led to repeated attacks on my work and livelihood, as well as on those who publically associate with me. “Rhyd is a crypto-fascist,” for example, or “a privileged cis-male upholding white supremacy,” or any other number of such statements can be readily found on social media and blogs.

That is, I am anathema. I suspect that many of you reading this are also anathema.

We are beyond the pale now, you and I, chased repeatedly out of the civitas, out of the polis, the community of believers, the universe itself.

And as it turns out? There’s a world outside the universe. Not just a world, but countless worlds. Bare life, the lands of the paganus, where the wolves hunted to near extinction still reign.

We are given over to the gods, each of us homo sacer, the sacred man marked for cancellation, banishment, and collective punishment for our heretical beliefs.

That is, we are now finally free.

1. The Slavs were the most sought-after slaves from the 800’s until roughly the 1400’s. They were primarily traded by Muslim and Jewish merchants and sold for use in Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) and the eastern Christian borders of Europe. They were quite valuable because of their renowned strength, but as one Jewish slave trader—Ibrihim-ybn-Yakub—noted, the Saqaliba (Arabic for the Slavs) “cannot travel to Lombardy on account of the heat which is fatal to them.”

2. There are two points I’d like to underline here. The trade in Slavs appears to have ended in the early 1400’s, not because of any moral shift in Europe but because of the chaos of the Black Plague and subsequent events. However, treating people as Slavs continued in Byzantium (what is now Turkey) and other Islamic lands, this time with people from Central Africa. When the European Christians took up again their use of chattel labor, they were first buying them from Islamic and Jewish merchants until they got into the “business” themselves. Thus we can potentially say that the transatlantic slave trade was birthed from all three monotheisms, though we now tend to see this only as a “Christian” problem.

Also, I’ve been deeply curious why no leftist efforts are ever made to connect the trade in Slavs to the trade in African slaves. This may be because of the American exceptionalism tendency of those narratives, but I suspect it also presents an uncomfortable problem: the “whites were also slaves” narrative, fought heavily by social justice sorts in the US, has some merit if you include the Slavs as well. This is obviously very messy territory.

3. The Slavs generally have light skin, oftentimes much paler than the more Mediterranean skin tones of the Portuguese or the Spanish.

4. There has been a move to claim that indentured servitude is not slavery in order to head off the “Irish slaves” argument. Without getting into too much of a fight here, I’d like to point out that such a de-listing means that forced prison labor and what is called “sex slavery” (women forced into unpaid sex work) would likewise not be slavery. This is false. Chattel slavery is a particular form of slavery, but these others are also forms of slavery.

5. Hoodoo, Vodou, Santeria, and many other syncretic “African Diasporic Religions” were birthed from this intermixing. Maman Brigitte, the Haitian Vodou Loa, is an example of this mixing (Brigid/Brigitte was a Catholic saint and earlier Gaelic goddess popular with Irish indentured servants in the Caribbean).

6. This is the root of our words city, civil, citizen, civilian, and civilization.

7. Roman state religion never self-identified as “pagan.” It was the Christians, when they finally became the universal of Rome, who then adopted the Roman term for the “backwards” or uncivilized people in the hinterlands to smear those who still clung to polytheism.

8. From which comes our words political, polite, polity, and police. The police are those who enforce the will of the polis.

9. I owe these observations to the book True To The Earth: Pagan Political Theology, by Kadmus. It’s a brilliant book and not just because I was its editor.

10. It is a bit the same unreasonable fear a modern urban American progressive might feel getting lost in the Appalachian foothills in Ohio where I grew up.

11. Another way of looking at this is the modern question of citizenship. In some nations (the United States, for example), birth within the territory of the nation confers automatic citizenship regardless if the parents are citizens. On the other hand, other nations (the vast majority of them) confer citizenship to infants primarily through parentage.

12. This concern was taken so seriously that bishops and missionaries were also forbidden from having any say in the choice of their successors, something that particularly zealous and prosyletizing bishops really hated. For example, see Willibrod’s letters to Pope Zachary, begging the right to choose a successor to ensure his conversion work of the Treverii and Franks could continue. Zachary sternly refused.

13. From French sauvage, meaning “wild.”

14. Watching what has happened to my friend Angie, a Black Marxist woman, for saying these things has been appalling.

15. Her recent open letter is worth your time, especially for the line “we are all angels trying to out-angel each other”.

16. For instance, Paul Kingsnorth. Also, the indigenous and other writers of the Atassa journal, and many, many others.