When lust and private interest gain the upper hand 
                        of disorganized society, the most religious of crusades must 
                        lose its sacred character, but the Thirty Years War lost what 
                        little spiritual meaning it had for other causes. 'The great 
                        spiritual contest', says Ranke, 'had completed its operation 
                        on the minds of men.' The reason was not far to seek. While 
                        increasing preoccupation with natural science had opened up 
                        a new philosophy to the educated world, the tragic results of 
                        applied religion had discredited the Churches as the directors 
                        of the State. It was not that faith had grown less among the 
                        masses; even among the educated and the speculative it still 
                        maintained a rigid hold, but it had grown more personal, had 
                        become essentially a matter between the individual and his 
                        Creator.

            The whole passage is worth citing, but to avoid violating the given copyright conventions, I will skip to the point.

                        Everywhere lip-service to reason replaced the blind impulses 
                        of the spirit.
                                    Essentially, it was only lip-service. The small group 
                        of educated men who appreciated the value of the new 
                        learning disseminated little save the shadow of their 
                        knowledge. A new emotional urge had to be found to fill the 
                        place of spiritual conviction; national feeling welled up to fill 
                        the gap.
                                    The absolutist and the representative principle were 
                        losing the support of religion; they gained that of nationalism.

            C. V. Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War, from which the quotes are taken [Anchor Books, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1961, pp. 372-373], is still in print, although originally published in 1938; and its present publisher's adjective of 'magisterial' is undoubtedly appropriate. At the present point of the reading, I have yet to find a dry or slow patch, something my interest in the topic alone cannot account for.

            But here is one of the keys I have been looking for, thrown off casually three-quarters of the way through the book. One of the reasons for the importance of the Thirty Years War is precisely this shift into the grounds of nationalism. While the war apparently ends in the dynastic confrontation of Bourbon and Hapsburg (as I take it from prefigurative statements in the text), the motive force of nationalism begins to emerge. Its emergence here, in the first half of the 17th century, is a key to the modern.

            I would suggest that, today, we have a serious problem in our failure to distinguish between nationalism and imperialism. Young nations are invariably imperialistic, insofar as their power allows. And the majority of the terrors of the last two or three centuries arises from this fact. Even an ancient civilization, such as China, as a new nation, necessarily poses this threat. And, characteristically, as in the case of China, this is a threat as much to the founding leadership as to the actual and potential victims.
            But imperialism is not inherently nationalism.
            And the issue operates in two directions, since, as Wedgwood has pointed out, nationalism itself has become, by default, the new religion. That is, at the collective level, it takes on the communal force once assigned to religion through the collectivity of church and state. Now the church is the personal community, the personal support system. But the religious force of the collectivity is now the state as the nation.
            If, for example, we have lost the actual democratic and republican thrusts of the ideals as well as the originating documents of the United States, it is not strictly because of imperialism, but because of the religion of nationalism. The founders were caught in the peculiar grip of this religious force, assuming that public service is inevitably the highest ideal. They were not simply converted to this view by their backgrounds as lawyers and the petty magistrates of plantations; it was the new religion of idealism itself, conceived at the level of national community, prior to the Idealism that was just beginning to emerge in the idealism of the individual.
            'Patriots' mouth the phrases and slogans of democracy, when, in fact, their nationalism subverts both democracy and republicanism.
            Perhaps the democratic elements in the foundation of the U.S. point more or less directly to the emerging idealism of the individual. But the force of the structure is not simply on the federating principle of a strong national government, it is inherently also a consequence of the religious imputations of nationalism.

            To love one's native ground, if not universal, is nevertheless characteristic. And, presumably, it is not simply a function of timidity and habit. An urban childhood - and even a suburban childhood, given the homogeneity of development nowadays - may seem to embody a cosmopolitanism that denies place. But the power of place is not only inevitable, it is a grounding condition of the spiritual, second only to the functions of our own bodies as the instruments of consciousness, and hence the ultimate spiritual connection. The body itself is the sign of place, the 'material manifestation' of the spiritual, inevitably linked to the ground, if only through the expectation of gravity. But almost every experiential religion ties back to place in terms of abstract and symbolic descriptions.
            For those who have immersed themselves in the tantric traditions, the western traditions may seem relatively barren, in this regard. But paradise and Zion, as generalized as they may have become, are undoubtedly the signs or markers of this sense of place. The 'kingdom of heaven' seems to universalize it finally as an 'un-place' place. But, if 'the kingdom of heaven is within us', then it is the ground on which we stand, at once both paradise and Zion.

            In the model I have been developing here, of course, what this historical separation signifies is the final separation between God and spirit. The church as state ultimately posited the body of Christ as the complete expression of godhead on earth. Assuming, as I have, that Jesus converts the prophetic into the scientific through the unique experience expressed in the Greek as 'metanoia' - not 'repentance' but the 'transformation of consciousness' - 'godhead' is not God, in the history, but the marker for objectivity: the objective expression of objectivity, shall we say. That is, objectivity as originally experienced by the direct students of Jesus - the immediacy which finds its corollary in the Saying in the Gospel of Thomas: 'Split wood, I am there. Lift a stone; you will find me.' - becomes the 'objectivity structure' of trinitarian godhead.
            The correlation, of course, is exact. Trinity arises from the 'three hypostases' of Plotinus, which is Plotinus' description of reflective awareness. Objectivity, as the consequential basis of science, is also the generalized or commonplace basis of the experience which Plotinus conceived as the rare epitome of philosophy; that is, it is an immediate access to the structure of self-awareness, if we care to use it as such, and not simply as a tool or instrument for scientific investigations of 'fact'. In other words, when objectivity is 'turned around' to view itself in terms of consciousness, what is revealed is the reflective structure of consciousness.
            Here, without the Absolute, is a modified version of Hegelian history. But both origin and outcome are precise. The trinitarian model was not godhead but consciousness. The 'realization' of the model comes to fruition in the recognition of the radical difference between God and spirit. God does not become present or immanent in the world at any point other than the peculiar moment of the direct realization of the otherness of God, a moment implicit in legitimate objectivity and finally 'revealed' in the Great Death.
            Spirit, then, is 'liberated'.

            The problem, of course, is that, while communities, by nature, are spiritual entities, most 'spiritual communities' in fact deny spirit, because spirit is essentially anarchic, at least in terms of collectivities. Until we return to the spirit of place as spirit, and recognize the spiritual power of the body and the spiritual nature of awareness, as well as the structural nature of spirit, apart from the presence of the divine, as a functional ground in religious practice, we lack the appropriate alternative to the artificial enforcement of nationalism as a pseudo-religion.

- Jeremy