Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes

purposes of law. Roman citizens could achieve their goals and

develop their personal attitudes within the framework set by

fate and legal principles, which characterized an individual’s

situation based on premises having little to do with actual psy-

chological properties. The spiritual life of people lacking the

rights of citizenship was not an appropriate subject of deeper

studies. Thus, cognitive psychology remained barren, a condi-

tion which always produces moral recession at both the indi-

vidual and public levels.

Christianity had stronger ties with the ancient cultures of the

Asiatic continent, including their philosophical and psycho-

POLITICAL PONEROLOGY

47

logical reflections. This was of course a dynamic factor render-

ing it more attractive, but it was not the most important one.

Observing and understanding the apparent transformations

faith caused in human personalities created a psychological

school of thought and art on the part of the early believers. This

new relationship to another person, i.e. one’s neighbor, charac-

terized by understanding, forgiveness, and love, opened the

door to a psychological cognition which, often supported by

charismatic phenomena, bore abundant fruit during the first

three centuries after Christ.

An observer at the time might have expected Christianity to

help develop the art of human understanding to a higher level

than the older cultures and religions, and to hope that such

knowledge would protect future generations from the dangers

of speculative thought divorced from that profound psycho-

logical reality which can only be comprehended through sin-

cere respect for another human being.

History, however, has not confirmed such an expectation.

The symptoms of decay in sensitivity and psychological com-

prehension, as well as the Roman Imperial tendency to impose

extrinsic patterns upon human beings, can be observed as early

as 350 A.D. During later eras, Christianity passed through all

those difficulties which result from insufficient psychological

cognition of reality. Exhaustive studies on the historical rea-

sons for suppressing the development of human cognition in

our civilization would be an extremely useful endeavor.

First of all, Christianity adapted the Greek heritage of phi-

losophical thought and language to its purposes. This made it

possible to develop its own philosophy, but the primeval and

materialistic traits of that language imposed certain limits

which hampered communication between Christianity and

other religious cultures for many centuries.

Christ’s message expanded along the seacoast and beaten

paths of the Roman empire’s transportation lines, within the

imperial civilization, but only through bloody persecutions and

ultimate compromises with Rome’s power and law. Rome fi-

nally dealt with the threat by appropriating Christianity to its

own purposes and, as a result, the Christian Church appropri-

ated Roman organizational forms and adapted to existing social

48

SOME INDESPENSIBLE CONCEPTS

institutions. As a result of this unavoidable process of adapta-

tion, Christianity inherited Roman habits of legal thinking,

including its indifference to human nature and its variety.

Two heterogeneous systems were thus linked together so

permanently that later centuries forgot just how strange they

actually were to each other. However, time and compromise

did not eliminate the internal inconsistencies, and Roman influ-

ence divested Christianity of some of its profound primeval

psychological knowledge. Christian tribes developing under

different cultural conditions created forms so variegated that

maintaining unity turned out to be an historical impossibility.

A “Western civilization” thus arose hampered by a serious

deficiency in an area which both can and does play a creative

role, and which is supposed to protect societies from various

kinds of evil. This civilization developed formulations in the

area of law, whether national, civil, or finally canon, which

were conceived for invented and simplified beings. These for-

mulations gave short shrift to the total contents of the human

personality and the great psychological differences between

individual members of the species Homo sapiens. For many

centuries any understanding of certain psychological anomalies

found among some individuals was out of the question, even

though these anomalies repeatedly caused disasters.

This civilization was insufficiently resistant to evil, which

originates beyond the easily accessible areas of human con-

sciousness and takes advantage of the enormous gap between