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The Satan presents the first "god" that can take on the fetishistic qualities ascribed to gods, where adherents offer themselves in flesh, mind, soul, and all things to the deity, in an attempt to channel the deity's favor for the purest road to power. Every other attempt to do this really concerns itself with extracting from the world or directly from the power of other men, e.g. cannibalism and ritual sacrifice to "please the gods". Taking on the will of an abstraction made in Man's image, who in turn recreates Man in its image, is part of a circuit that begins with some form of Satan-worship. But, almost immediately, such a deity laid bare is not one most humans, including those who seek temporal power, would want to offer anything to. Far from an immediate Promethean enlightenement where the Satan's rule was a fait accompli for lack of any deities, the gods utilizing such tactics are usually not "the Satan" and often explicitly state and truly believe they are something other than that. What the Satan provides is the template for this contest for spiritual authority among men, and how men may through ritual take in the mind that such a deity represents. In other words, the Satan is the beginning of the aristocratic stand-in that "gods" became in much of the world. I make the assumption, though I believe it, that "the Satan" was a singular invention, rather than one arrived at independently. Once it came into the world, it was exported as a mystery very quickly - a secret koan of power. Other "Satan-like" precepts would have found the shortest road to success to be the One, upon encountering such a thing. And yet, the One is unique in humanity by design - unique in the world. If there were other "Satans" they would absolve all of their claims before the Satan with the greatest eugenic claim, and there was only one who exemplified its qualities and its ethos. It is a common trope of the Satan to backdate its claims, and for impostors of the Satan to backdate their claims earlier in a spurious effort to usurp the original gangster. Most of these impostors are fickle tales, often told to raw initiates before they are spoonfed the true story of the Satan as is the case in modern occult societies. For example, the claims of the Nazis to harken first to the Aryans so they could shit up the good name of the Persians, then to a mythical Atlantis which backdates their claims long before civilization, are slop sold to fags and rubes who eat it up, as is the habit of the Satan's pablum given to its enablers. Such explanations are of little value for those who saw anything but a crass ambition for power over men and psychological games in religion. The evil of religion is not the fickle evil of men, but of the world. Much of the Satan's stock and trade is nothing but rank faggotry. The Satan's full potential, like any accumulation of superstitions, changes with the times and knowledge its adherents, and the souls brought into its influence. The Satan proper is rarely just "the Satan" as a core principle, but what is uniform is the rot and spiritual faggotry it exudes as its calling card for the plebs.
Since this isn't a very good vision for the world, every deity and its prophet would immediately horn in on the question of temporal authority and the minds and souls of believers. They might advance contrary theories of knowledge and a whole different view of the world and what they are for, or they may remain local to their domain or the national or family gods. They may be the spirits of ancestors or things of little import, understood to be metaphors as a counter to the absurdity of the Satan. The introduction of gods of polytheism means something different from the animism of old, and all of the deities. Every god and force is an intruder on the One, yet all must abide it. So too do men, associations, and states exist at the mercy of the One. This strange condition exists for no reason other than the Satan's insistence that it can be a thing, for it is based on a conceit of human knowledge which is self-referential. Humans can reject this, but if they do, they lose a particular sense of the evil. Rejection of the idea is not enough. If the gods are to struggle, they do so in temporal authority, through their believers, for no reason other than the Satan's insistence once it enters the world. The other "gods" follow suit, because they are beholden to the same foul seed and its methodology, and may possess foulness of their own. Even in the best of cases, the "gods" are stand-ins for an aristocratic evil, and can never be good. A "good god" or even a god that is immune to the evil would be a very different construct, which religion cannot inveigh on, and which thus leaves the realm of superstition. It would be treated as what these superstitions really point to - events in the world that we would construct out of a sense other than superstition or the evil religion deals with. The terminology of "god" and the abasement involved would be wholly inappropriate and seen correctly as a demonic influence.
In this way, the contest for temporal authority is replayed in a superstitious spiritual realm. This contest does not truly establish spiritual authority as we would see it. But, every spiritual authority would have to survive in a world that did not exist for us, and did not regard our existence as anything worth keeping. All reliable spiritual authorities will tell us that human consciousness or knowledge generally holds no privilege or a right to exist, and informed us of the dangers at work. The Satan and things like it are both a danger and, to its partisans, a boon that represents the human spirit to be defended at all. The difference now is that the contest, considered to be a spiritual contest apart from the base world, is now decided from the top, and the lowest class is completely subdued in this ordering of affairs. This suits the superstition of mind and the entities which represent the aristocratic self, who commands its appendages even though it does not really have a "brain" or any purpose. It is, in other words, a view of the political particular to life and its vampirism. This is where the "circle of life" from before can now be invoked, after being merely a conceit in the mind of someone for crass temporal purposes. Such a thing was necessary to override the lack of any interest of the other orders of humanity to go along with this, or see that there even is a "natural order" which places this useless aristocratic class at the apex.
The concepts of the political and economic are things we can construct independently. Their significance as a real and present danger is only possible through some sort of religious understanding. Even if we abandoned "the gods" and saw the Satan bare for what it is, we would still possess a religious understanding of why we are here. The reasons for this are because, for all of our spiritual development, we are not constructed of spiritual substance primarily. It is the opposite - human beings, and any consciousness that would exist in the world, is more material and physical, and our spiritual crown is a necessity to navigate a world for the conceits of intelligence and technology. It is for this reason that technology and its communication marks the great epochs of human development more than most of the actual machines we build, or automata found in nature which operate on their own power as they must. Many of the human mind's faculties are products of communication with other humans due to what we are and the extensibility of those faculties. We might, in a better world, not have made this knowledge of the world a proprietary secret in the way we did. It would still be a possession and a local event, but it would have made far more sense to speak enough of the truth and not permit this travesty to gorge itself on the flesh and souls of everyone and everything. What begins now is the proper beginning of theology. Its precursors would be developed as systems for many generations. The establishment of religious institutions and writings which speak not of ideas or philosophy regarding the evil but of the gods and their worldly temples marks a transition away from cruder theology, to theology as something that resembles the religious edifice we have known.
Nowhere is the influence of theology and the gods felt stronger than in the philosophical state. Theological concepts of the state, the role of the priesthood, pharaohs and eunuchs and various characters of ill repute, precede any treatise on the philosophical state that comes down to us. The temples are known as financial and economic institutions. Debt, contracts, and laws pertaining to the them are deemed at heart to be religious matters, specifically so money would not escape its intended purview, and trade could be regulated for the interests of rule instead of the merchants. Merchants would have been seen as untrustworthy and interested in projects that were anathema to the preferred ruling idea that took hold, and this is what later history would affirm all the way to now. In modern times, the merchants - the capitalists, financial institutions, bankers, associations, and eventually the technological interest around which mercantile activity would have been oriented - are a constant thorn in the side to political ideas which are at heart aristocratic, and which were designed with property and the rights of those deemed meritorious over the interests of technology. Some of the structural reasons why have been written of in past chapters. Naturally, the religions almost uniformly see the merchant as untrustworthy and sinister, and see the merchant's task as false, crass, and dominated by opportunism. This mentality would in time be internalized by capital, and we will have much to remark on in later books. Yet, all of this theological approach is itself technological. It is a peculiar technology which relied on superstition and disdains science in any form, and it is not a technology that is standardized by any natural or historical law. It is a technology which is contested, where contests over the right spiritual technology are not about comparisons in a market, but arguments which bargain with the souls and intellects of the people - commoners, nobles, and aristocrats alike.
If the state were a purely political beast, it would be so unsightly and evil that it would simply by its existence create a civic religion out of necessity, with its superstitions and theology. This theology is never a wholly superficial thing. Much is made of ideology and the imposture of civic religion that "civil society" invokes. For those who take their political standing seriously, such a contemptuous tool would be viewed correctly as contemptible faggotry. The institutions are very real in their consequences, and cynical detachment is a cycle strategy - often a Satanic Cycle strategy - that follows the methods used in religion. The people who are truly detached from the political never believed they possessed a stake based on any idea or pablum sold to them. At most, the masses believed that political leaders would not be so stupid that they would willfully cannibalize anything productive. This makes sense to a naive member of the masses because, for most of history, the state's civic religion was only occasionally so beastial that it would mandate, against all sense, to do this. Usually, states have enough real enemies and face uncertainty, and the ancient world being what it was, death and the malice of the lower orders was enough to punish the weak with deliberate neglect. Since no ancient state suggested the people had any rights whatsoever and explicitly rested their claims and the law on imperium, few would have suggested that the consuls or chancellors had any expectation of especially good government. It was more often the state's holders themselves who advocated for good government, because the typical rot and depravity of humanity produced unnecessary suffering and dislocation that impeded productivity and property. So far as the state almost entirely concerned the trinitarian setup - priests, warriors, and "everyone else" - the passivity of the state was a religious tenet so sacred that many foolish aristocrats actually believed it at their own peril.
On what basis does the state appear as more than a machine impudently asserting the laws of jabbering, sadistic, hypocritical apes? A better machine by better animals, born and raised without the flaws of humans, would still suffer the same defect. Religion is a hotbed of lies and malice, but simply by knowledge of the evil, religion proves a far better basis for concepts of the state. What arrests humanity most effectively and at the least cost? It is the evil which would lead to caution by something other than force or half-sensical rationalizations. Nothing about the state is defensible by pure reason or anything from simple knowledge, or by much that is meaningful in the world. The state appears both to the world and to most humans as a beast to be avoided, but a beast that will persist so long as the world can be arrested. Since it certainly can be - we can speak of definite things and place those definite things in a context and must do so - the argument that the state's absurdity makes it unreal and a thing to ignore does not meet what sense and reason would tell us about its existence. It still has no particular purpose or justification. The philosophical state can only exist because in some way it is considered just or right and demonstrates merit. Insinuations, educations, or dictation of laws by some officer won't make it true. Labor itself clearly does not control the state for its purposes, for if it did, all hitherto known political thought would have been an absurd impossibility, and humanity would ask a very different question. The proclivities of labor, as will be clearer in the next two chapters, were towards provincial interests and occulting, because the laborers in the end hated the weak more than their masters, and hated each other for spurious causes that could be insinuated trivially. The workers who overcame this cajoling either were unusually determined, benefit from the inertia of what was necessary or superstitiously held in spite of the human spirit, or saw that their bretheren were a waste of their time and joined the exploiters. Their hatred of the lowest class came prior to anyone obligating them to act "against their interests", because their interests were already inclined to kick down to get ahead. Even when there were clear benefits from staying their hand, labor's proclivity had a different conception of religious authority and the evil. Its cults and secret societies had little concept of the general good or the general will, nor any reason to be interested in such a thing. Had labor retained its hold on technology - had it always understood itself as something more than pure labor and understood its history was something apart from the aristocratic political religion - it might have not turned into something this easily exploited. In either event though, the fate of the lowest class was set by all except the lowest class itself. That was the game that was truly afoot in all iterations of the philosophical state. Prior to the philosophical state's assertion as a political theory with clear written laws and institutions as a norm, this understanding was only partially followed, for the genuine religion at work in states saw class warfare as something alien to any interest that would be held. The interests of Satan-worship have little regard of social class as a mere word, and find their adherents among all of the orders of human society. The workers clamored for positions to feed the beast of slavery, and it did not occur to them that a "free society" would have been a goal or at all desirable. It is even less of a goal if freedom is already presented as a fickle idea, a bleating of a sheep to be mocked and ridiculed, a lie told to the failed and the retarded.
The commons and technology were the necessary fulcrum for the machine, but in early form, the technological interest as a "technological interest" understood to be such is feeble, overshadowed by religious veneration of money and the pre-existing tripartite class structure. In practice, the tripartite structure of society only became relevant when citizen-soldiers relied on state-issued currency and states requisitioned their armies and governments with tax, and free men now had an increased loyalty to the commons rather than "base labor" or what utility they provided to the state. What they did with it was in the end their decision - and it would be a decision they weren't really going to get to make without being intercepted and besieged between the working masses and the "big club" at the apex of all civilizations.
The religious view of the state better understood what it had to control - the commons. Its ultimate objectives were further down the line. By political thought, the commons would have the greatest claim to legitimacy if the state served anything good or reasonable, or considered its own existence to be the point. But, the state as an institution or idea is not the true point. The state is necessarily a going concern. It cannot shirk its existence. But, this is simply a fact of no moral worth. The holders of a state or any institution have no intrinsic spiritual connection to it. Religion does not assert its control simply by assuming that it is so, or saying that a god puppets the state and is the true sovereign. Political superstitions are created primarily by, for, and against the commons. The overriding goal - to convince the commons to compete with each other for position based on a spurious goal of merit or belonging to the in-group. This exploits both the proprietor and labor roles' wants that the commons are caught between and would have to inhabit in some way to exist. How can this be done? The obvious is to make crass appeals to the self. But, this has little staying power, because its outcome is self-evident. The other is to advance a liberal idea, but this was undesirable because the commons would become the new aristocracy or its new basis. It would force the aristocracy to assimilate to the values of impurity before it was ready to, and the commons could stray from history's intended course altogether. It would lead to the potential end of the entire project for the first time, and this was unacceptable for those who valued political office and the associated power. Appeals to property as right only pertain to a limited puriew, and do not carry the religious weight that is assigned to fetish objects even at an advanced stage of depravity as modernity attained. The commons would see property and right as things to avoid, rather than embrace, and this would not uniformly serve an imperial core group reliant on occult scheming. It gives rise to an even more horrible possibility than overthrow - members of the commons choosing technology which would lead to eventual dissolution of the entire superstitious basis, and create something new. The commons are the only interest in life that could realistically "emancipate itself", if they see their position and spiritual authority properly and accumulate enough knowledge to see the truth - that a cult-like obsession with technology and the vices of their proclivity are their greatest barriers, and that none of the orders of humanity have anything for the cause the commons envision, and see correctly the threat the commons pose. Only the lowest class would share a potential affinity, simply because they have nothing to lose. We see here at the other pole the very things the German ideology weaponized to destroy the commons as a force, but this only applied at a stage where the liberal order was to be actively dismantled, so that Satanists - let's just call the conservative order of Europe what it is - could step in the edifice and make it the worst parody of anything ever. Such a foul and disgusting ideology is worthless for governing anything, for it can only pervert or destroy. If destroying an institution that is unwelcome is helpful to a good cause, then ideology has its purview, but ideology is a grossly inefficient way to destroy an idea, and hasn't really worked in the way its partisans claim it must.
Religion forms something more than an ideology or story. Its superstitions do not need to claim that they are super-truths to hold value; the power of superstitions is not from insinuation that they are a thing, but from the evil and knowledge thereof. They hold weight that, at least for the purposes of first principles, give the state and the political subject their first true orientation. "The Satan" has no standards of comparison, but this is not good unless the Satanist can devour something else to use as its reference point. Religion proper treats its symbols as more than mere icons or metaphors. The gods and principles that any political thought would deem worthwhile are treated not as cosubstantial with the mortal realm or things that would be given equal deference. They are placed above the vagaries that are typical of human society, and in this way, they present a safeguard against the evils that plague political thought. If the gods remain superstitions without something tangible, this will eventually become brittle. But, when we see the atheistic world and strip politics to its core mechanics and ulterior motives, there is not one of them worth a shit to fight for. Fear can drive political alliances but all of them are short-lived and subverted the moment a stronger force or malevolence makes itself known. No appeal to personal virtue is relevant, for all such virtue is taken from the world. Through the central tenets of the state religion, or a religion which takes on certain political purposes, there is a reference point that requires very little from the world to exist, which can be an inspiration to direct where in the world virtue or victory could be extracted. There is also a consideration in those tenets that the political act is not blind or carried out for crass motives that are fickle. A conception of what the subject could be is at the heart of this, rather than a fear of what it should or ought to be. Potential is not found in the general fear or political intrigues, and in an economic sense it is found only in the raw substance of the material world. We might attach potential to ideology or empty ritual, but this will not do. For the religion's political arm to be relevant, the religion supercedes politics as usual as a cause. This does not supercede the necessary causes for the subject or anyone involved in this project. People retain their hunger, their lives, their wants, their aspirations, and all of these things, which have nothing to do with the state, and which the religion need not directly command as the eternal busybody telling you all of the correct thoughts. The overriding aim of the religion is added to the priority list, and becomes something greater than those that are mortal or things dictated by mere authority of an idea or fact. This is only possible because somewhere, the problem of evil is appreciated by the subject as something worth contesting, over something that is relatively trivial and pointless. Whether we should be tasked with fighting evil or for the good is a different question, but the evils of the world can be considered self-evident, and given further proof if the religion of the polity is sound and worth fighting for on its own terms. This means that just making a cargo cult or superstition, no matter how vast, is irrelevant if there is not a proper theology and it has stood the tests of the world for proof. Any religion exhorting blind faith is ridiculous, and anyone demanding such can be compelled undermines any religion for this purpose, and all other purposes. Religions are believed in because they do offer some authority suggesting there is a purpose to represent, and that the state will have to allow the good to exist through its actions. If the state is a purely political beast, it is a haphazard thing. If the state can claim it is held by something that is more than political, and even more than mere spiritual authority, that motivates behavior that is not predicted by simple physics. Whether the holders of the state exemplify any of those aspirations does not change that belief in such principles would be necessary for the political project to be worth anything more than the fact of its existence and the fear such a beast demands.
A civic religion may seem barren, but its tenets are held as meaningful for something more than the idea of a state or an entity. So it is with a state religion that is organized and makes worldwide claims, like Christianity. These are the true motives of the men in state society, regardless of the class they inhabit. Usually men of different social classes hold, privately, different gods and tenets. For the purpose of something like "the public", everyone has to agree to a status quo that is shared whether they like each other or not, and regardless of any conniving of particular interests. It is known that the public is not a thing in-of-itself, but many associations and interests that happen to be in the same domain. The public interest takes on religious connotations not as a singular One, but as the thing that it actually is. This is to say, the public exists only so long as its members value such a thing as the general good and a general fear of evil. A general fear for mere survival, where everyone is out for themselves, does not allow a "public" to exist except as a legal fiction. Whether someone regards a republic or commonwealth as operative, this concept will exist. It is not synonymous with "society", for society has no moral proposition uniting it whatsoever, in any conception of such a thing. The public implies political life to be "the public", rather than an imagined domain or ecosystem in nature. The public is never a thing defined purely by temporal location or a convenient fiction, if it is to be the public for any political purpose - this is to say, there is a spiritual sense that such a thing can exist, whether it is worth keeping or if the public is a menace. Aristocracy both despises and loves a public. A public that spurns their advances, many of them of a crass sexual nature because humans are perverts, is a thing eliciting horror. But, aristocracy can only exist by any goodwill or sense of necessity that allows a public to be valued. Aristocracy sees the public as a feeding ground for its vices. It then claims that property and merit are the excuses. But, the proprietors, whose political proclivities are self-interest, can easily see the value of mutual self-interest when religious evil is known. They live under a fear that they too become part of the trough feeding aristocracy, stripped of their merit by the cunning and depravity of aristocracy. No matter how big a proprietor is, they are told - at least on the surface - that they only truly safe if they win the political contest, which becomes a spiritual contest. And so, as proprietors become monopolies, they think less like proprietors, and see the aristocratic arts as a more stable avenue to feed their portfolios. The proprietor at the apex has no brotherhood with other proprietors. He has instead a conspiracy, perhaps around the idea of property, but this idea must always be reconciled with all other contending interests. It is possession of any interest or virtue in association that creates the political threat, rather than the deed of property adjudicated by an alien court. If the proprietor had his way, the civic religion would establish private property not as an institutional shibboleth, but as fiefdoms. The private proprietor is not interested in a republic. He is interested in being a warlord, and sees in the public a necessary evil because of conditions outside of his control.
If the proprietor imagined a society where everyone had their merit, their piece of land, and property, he is not averse to this vision necessarily. No necessary deprivation of others legitimizes his property at the most basic level. That which is outside of property may as well not exist from the view of mere property. But, aristocratic office, technology, labor, and the raw material of human bodies, are themselves property to be held, and all are held in people who very much resist domination of their own property, as they face the same situation in the public. Who really governs, and who grants to property any sacrosanctity beyond a fact of some record, is that which holds spiritual authority and a connection to the evil. This in practice meant that aristocratic office finds its way to control by various schemes the state, with property as its most evident shield against the lower orders. But, it also entails a fear of the commons who are most amenable to conspiracy regarding wealth, and a fear of labor who have been for most of history the chattel purchased by proprietors, going back to herds of cattle that were the wealth of pastoral society. The lowest class does not register as real in the regimes of property, but it is very real to both aristocracy for its perverse sentiments, and to the commons who view the lowest class with a disgust peculiar to them. But, the religious view affects all, and the lowest man could some day be something. The existence of a public entails this risk, or reward, or a condition that may be allowed. The beggar had done not a single thing to contribute to this running atrocity that is civilization, and some fortune which is the bane of aristocracy would make the impossible happen - a reversal of that ancient creed "once retarded, always retarded". If not for that, then it does not take long to see that humanity is guilty and unworthy of any of its claims, temporal or spiritual. That is a simple realization that will be reproduced no matter what, given human history.
For Empire, the purpose of religion is very different - worldly power, by any means necessary. Empires do not live with the expectations of states or any "public interest", and see such a thing as a resource to be used and abused. To understand this best, the state's ulterior motives and the ulterior motives of people are not the motives of Empire, or any rationalization for Empire. Empires, for the purposes of religion, make their own spiritual reality - they invoke the names of the gods and the rituals as a weapon to dominate and control, and think nothing of this. Whether it is "good" to have an empire is purely a matter of the interested parties looking out for themselves. The empire does not see any contradiction between "empire" and "state". For the empire, "God is Greater". The empires of history are often polytheistic and cosmopolitan, ruling over people who keep their local deities and keeping those interests at each others' throats. One god ruling one empire is more appropriate for the empire's laws and the basis of its institutions, than any necessity of the empire itself. This cheat is built into both Christianity and Islam, allowing governors wide latitude to interpret religion as they see fit and reconciling disputes within the grand imperial religion. In practice, the Satanic rites are kept by elites and those who aspire to temporal power as their super special secret, and so too are obscure and occult gods operative. The pretenses of the state give way to the reality - that Empire trumps the philosophical state. The law, particularly religious law, serves entirely different masters in the long term. The law as a beast unto itself is something more terrible than any lesser deity.
The Arian heresy of Christian history is illustrative of religious law and how arguments that appear esoteric and informational point to something markedly different - where superstitions have assembled and formed institutions that see correctly that the matter discussed has importance for spiritual authority and what the project of religious institutions are doing in this world. Thanks to the internet, I can post a link to introductory articles about the Arian heresy, and many can be found from reliable sources. Rather than recount the heresy, I ask the reader to investigate it for themselves. A starting point - and I caution the reader of Wikipedia's unreliability - can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianism.
The argument of God and Christ's substance would, taken as if it were a literal appeal to nature, seem absurd. The substance in question is a spiritual and religious superstition. But, everyone at this council and everyone involved in the argument is speaking about something that was very sensical at the time. The substance of the godhead says something about the entire project and the role of the institution, and the role of the emperor who very much wanted God and Christ to be of the same substance. In that way, he'd be that much closer to God. It is not an axiomatic given that any emperor would want this for an ulterior motive. For Constantine, it was very relevant for his position. The more important thing is that Constantine is not the only interested party, and the heresy was not a conspiracy to deny the truth of substance or something insinuated by a small gaggle of men over the whole nation. There were priests and laymen who had much riding on this superstitious question because of what it implied about the resulting theology. The claims were treated as very real and worth killing over, rather than pablum demanded for the sake of conformity. It would have been very simple for Arius to recant all such claims and see the light, if it were purely performative. The claims do not map onto any preferred historical narrative, in the way a crude mind insists that these theological facts and debates must be rooted in a material motive to suggest reality is a fait accompli. That is the claim of Germanism and the eugenists, who must violently recapitulate that claim ad nauseum - and it is for that reason alone that Christianity had to be dismantled. It is not that Christianity was a bold opponent of the eugenic creed - it was latent in the religion and Christianity repeated aided and abetted the eugenic creed's rise. It is this cosmological question which made Christianity in any recognizable form incompatible with eugenics, and why eugenics relitigated pseudoscientific claims about biology which could be rejected by a child. Those claims were described in part in the first book of this series, specifically the fourth through sixth chapters. If we look at the modern mechanism-vitalism debate, it bears similarities to this "substance of god" argument in Christianity. The modern debate was a test of rank dishonesty and disdain for the laity, who were to be culled by the eugenic creed and tortured for the thrill of doing so and the glory of the eugenists' gods. If we saw that the "mechanists" and "vitalists" were really arguing about spiritual authority in scientific institutions - and of their personal claims to fame - rather than anything real, the debate would be resolved without the screeching. In the modern debate, rank dishonesty was the point, weaponized in advanced by the deterioration of spiritual authority and the stripping of science away from any genuine basis for its practice. In the debate of Late Antiquity, the aims are not about a cynical ploy to grab power, but a statement of principles for the Church leadership moving forward. This would not by far be the last such debate about the nature of the divine, angels, and the legalistic doctrine that Christian institutions - like any organized religion - would have to maintain to continue as a credible force.
The malfeasance of actors is among the reasons why religious law has to be established. Someone or something must be able to counteract that influence. Within the law itself as an institution or principle, there is no defense. But religious law will have to answer this pernicious influence early, and in doing so, affirms that there can be something other than ratfuckery. It is this which grants to religion - including those who would use it for evil - its true value. The superstitions are, without any institution that truly believes they refer to a thing that can be analyzed scientifically, things which are local to a person or an association. They remain an injoke or a thing to be feared, but they are trivially dismissed when serious people must talk. There was no prior state where humanity posssess perfect knowledge that was corrupted by religion or "the wrong religion", and no religion can seriously make such a claim without Satanic Cycle-like interventions. Humanity began its political crusade not for any rational purpose or ulterior motive, but because it could and because a superstitious fear was justifiable enough to the senses. Humans only possess the faculties available to them to ask by knowledge or reason what they are really doing. It is a wonder they have been able to cobble together the understanding they possess. It is not a poor understanding for some jabbering Satanic apes given over to intrigues and emotion, with few tools suggesting they had anything going for them after such a disgusting origin to their society. Out of superstitions, it appears strange to debate on the substance of an obviously fictitious character like the Christ and an even more indescribable deity. Leaving aside the treatment of spiritual "substance" and asking why a god would itself be made of a singular substance without invoking some alchemical kookery, this seems like a strange thing to make into a whole heresy. The weight of the name of Christ cannot be taken for granted. Christ is followed not because someone said Jesus' name ad nauseum and assumed it had to be true because so many people talked about the new hotness that was this "Christ" character. The example of Christ is supposed to evoke something in believers, and what that is will vary - and this is the genius of the intriguers who managed the church.
A long history of such intrigues, inherited from the philosophers, mystery cults, and the secret societies that always lurk in empires, was known to all of the men at the Council of Nicaea. It is this history, obscure to those who never heard of this madness called the Cult of Jesus, that the men are aware of, and it is in that context they debate. Yet, the debate is comprehensible to us without being great theologians. It is not a simple controversy and it was not the only controversy on the docket. The full implications and the occulted secrets of any religion will not be obvious. The resulting actions are there for all to see, and commanding the people to ignore what their eyes see is not the first command of any serious religion. If that was the purpose, the enterprise is meaningless and no one has any reason to believe in this particular superstition. It would be regarded as just another Satan - which in many cases, it is. But, a Satanist still has to abide reality to make their religion a thing to truly fear, whatever they may exhort those cast out to believe. Only at a high stage of faggotry can such a command be taken seriously, and that faggotry is always militant or reliant on a terrible fickleness in humanity and discovering its laws of motion - this is to say, a religion of science has made habitual lying a tenet for a group marching in lockstep. For the purposes of religious law, much like any law worthy of the name, the public domain is there for all to see, and the charlatan's trick to say it isn't happening will not hold for long. For those in attendance, who have a stake in the institution of religious power, lying is certainly not in their interest. But, for all who are looking at this religion, they will judge regardless of anyone screaming fanatically that it is illegal to think for yourself or say on to it with any seriousness.
A godhead or highly esoteric language is not necessary for religious functions to be seen in society. For those who trade in stories of "the Absolute", the deities and forces in question can be set against each other like Goku and Frieza and spend a whole season building up power levels mutually, to drive home the escalation of tit for tat. Any organization of people that wishes an independent existence, and the person itself against the world, will have a religious view which is something more than superstition. There is a law and a way, even if that law is a personal one without any obvious political effects. That law governing oneself exists because a concept of religious law generally can be discerned, even if there were no organized religion or state asserting that, or caring what you, the lowly subject, thought, felt, or did about anything. It would be a necessity of any entity that wants to exist in a world with something more than fear. In fear, the subject will always be conquered by the evil, and slavery appears as a fait accompli. But, even a sniveling coward will have something more than fear to rule his life. This author can affirm that for himself without making this about him, but many humans from the lowest to the highest have a story which is not just personal, but spiritual and tied to a world that they hold to be relevant. Making this about "the Absolute" or other such pretentious postures misses the point of why these arguments happen and establish religious law.
The proper function of religious law is to navigate the evil. It has no claim to affirm what thou must do, or what thou art. Those claims arise either as degenerations of law or superstition, or as the result of machinery which is held as an occult monopoly on the ruled. It is for this reason that an expectation of passivity is inserted in thought about the state, even though the state and political life is by its nature active and its claims are in principle vast and cannot be surrendered. I repeat here my seething contempt for legalistic philosophers who trade in sophistry suggesting that the state must be passive except for some petty conceit or a pseudoscientific "super-rationality". Religious law does not mandate passivity towards all things or limit "the evil" to a story written by some jerks. If it did, and this religious law did not meet what people in society saw as right or evil, that religious law would face a crisis of faith. There is not in history any state which can speak of everyone agreeing with the program, and no religion whose believers are absolutely fanatical and incapable of thinking against the correct ideas. Every religious law is subject to criticism regardless of its own tenets. It is the objective of the religion to withstand such criticism on its own terms and the terms of the world it purports to describe. If religion shirks the world altogether, that is only possible through forced ignorance, which has a predictable result by the judgement of the world. Those who truly value religious law for anything will not shirk this.
It is this which grants to any institution the gravity or laxity it presents. If there were truly no law in this sense, the whole world would be a gigantic and sad joke, and these filthy Satanic apes who live in it would be such absurd creatures that there is only one true justice - to abolish society and grant the world to the lowest class. This is the true way the meek shall inherit the Earth - not because of any prophecy or virtue of meekness, but because such a world would be so stupid, pointless, and sadistic that the only entities who would want it to change are us in the lowest class. We would want this because of a peculiar interest to make of such a nightmare something other than the usual, and that by itself is not much. But, we in the lowest class are not stupid, and not retarded. It is us who made anything that could even be valued or substantive, for the world did not regard any of our conceits about life or social distinction. Anyone who styled themselves in a different order would be for this purpose no different from us scum down here, and they know it. Some of our betters readily accept that and incorporate that into their sense of religious law. Others - we call them "assholes" - project the utmost faggotry regarding this. If no one considered the world a serious proposition at all, it would fall on us to make it as serious as we need it to be for our purposes. This would begin the same investigation those who eventually ruled would have to conduct, on some level, for anything like the ruling program we know to exist. Since religious law has been established, and was around before we were, we learn early the situations which are grave and which are relaxed; who can be trusted, who is in, who is out. For religious law, which all assocations follow, the question of who is in the club and out of the club is one that is not adjudicated by the moral intent of labor. It is judged by religious law that laborers would in some sense have to respect, unless they wish to create a religion of their own.