Onan the Librarian

Foreskins and Tigers

David took his men with him and went out and killed two hundred Philistines and brought back their foreskins. They counted out the full number to the king so that David might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage. — Bible, 1 Samuel 18:27

A Man out of Time

In 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger took up the role of Conan for the “Conan the Barbarian” film franchise. This was, in every possible way, a mistake. For one, as anyone that’s ever read the books can tell you, the author, Robert E. Howard, was incredibly specific about what his character looked like. 1) Blue eyes. Okay. Check. Schwarzenegger does have blue eyes. But 2), Conan has “straight, ink black hair”. Now, you might say that something as trivial as hair color can be overlooked in a movie, and normally I’d agree with you, but this feature of the Barbarian is repeated so often in the text that it’s really sort of jarring to see Arnold up there, being all brunette. Most egregious of all however is simply Arnold’s body type. It’s completely wrong. Yes, Conan is well muscled, more than just about any other man in the world, but, again, Howard is very specific about how. See, Conan is muscled the way an animal is muscled. Like a wolf or a tiger. Repeatedly the character is described as moving “like a panther” or “graceful as a cat”, a feat which the awkwardly large Mr. Universe simply does not pull off on screen. Instead, Arnold appears like every bad stereotype of a body builder come to life. Slow and clumsy. Muscle-bound to the point of being nearly immobile. In the film Conan’s muscles exist, sure… but they appear to have no function. They don’t actually propel his body through space with purpose. If possible, his muscles appear almost artificial, as if he intellectually sculpted his body to have them (indeed, this is exactly what happened). He does not move with the grace or beauty of a man whose body has been forged from actually living in the wild. Climbing mountains, swimming rivers. Chasing down his own food. In Arnold’s Conan, mind and body do not appear to be equal partners.

And now isn’t that a metaphor?

These are the sort of muscles Conan would have.

Further complicating matters is that, in the film, Arnold is something of a thinker. Not much of one, no, but more so than would be true to form. This is not to say that in the books Conan is portrayed as stupid. Not at all. He is however completely and totally unconcerned with philosophical questions of any sort and never, not even for a moment, second guesses his own decisions. Again, Howard’s Conan is animalistic in this way. Just as lions do not ask themselves if they made the right choices and wolves are not concerned with metaphysics, so too is Conan portrayed as a creature firmly grounded in the realm of the five senses. The Here and The Now. And, as central as this trait is to the character in the novels, I can actually get why they didn’t go with portraying him like this in the film. How could you? To a culture which prizes intellectualism and self-reflection above all else, a character like Conan is so alien that it might not even be possible to put him on the silver screen. In Conan there is none of the beloved “character growth” which drives so many of our modern plot lines. Again, how could there be? Does a jaguar experience regret over what might have been and resolve to do it better next time around? No. In fact Conan ends the books in exactly the same mental and emotional space as he began them, as a being which fights and kills and steals and makes love to women. As a creature who travels wherever he will on the summer breeze, free as a cloud and subject to no law save for his own. Indeed, the only thing approaching a “philosophy” that he ever espouses is to say that he “Loves life”, which, to him, means feeling the spray of sea foam on his face and feeling the hot pumping of blood inside his veins.

Conan is a character from another time.

And once, long ago, it really does seem that people were more or less like that.

I mean, can you imagine it? David, in the Bible… you know, the one Michelangelo made that statue of, he goes to the king of his people and asks for the princess’s hand in marriage. This is natural enough. David at the time was a young upstart in the kingdom, roughly equivalent to what we might recognize as a knight, and the people have rallied around him several times after battles, chanting about what a great warrior he is and singing his praises. He’s exactly the sort of man who should be marrying a princess and, exactly for those same reasons, exactly the sort of man that the king feels threatened by.

I mean, you know, Saul, an older monarch, watching this young beautiful warrior whom all the people love coming up through the ranks… If one were the worrying type one might begin to think that such a man might threaten your reign or perhaps the reign of your sons.

And Saul is the worrying type.

So, even though political decorum almost demands it, Saul knows that giving his daughter to David would only further cement any future claims David might make to the throne. He’d be able to rightfully say that he was married into the royal family after all, and that his children have royal blood. And so because politics prevents him from outright refusing David’s request (it would look weak, it would make him look every bit as insecure as he really was), he instead comes up with a clever work around. One that he hoped David would either reject or, even better, accept and die in the attempting. “Sure, you can have my daughter,” Saul says. “But of course any son-in-law of mine must prove his worth. Go out, without my army this time, and slay 100 of our nation’s enemies, the Philistines, and bring back their foreskins here as proof so that I will know you are a man of courage, worthy to be my son-in-law.”

Leaving aside for the moment why Jews have this strange thing about foreskins (another post perhaps), just sit back with me for a moment and appreciate how wild of an ask that is. Further, appreciate how wild it was that such an ask was seen as appropriate or normal. I mean, from where we all sit in 2023, the idea of requiring your daughter’s fiancé to go out and kill one hundred people, mutilate their bodies, and return with a sack of their parts seems a little… unhinged. A bit like if today someone asked for the nutsacks of 100 Russians before they’d give their Ukrainian daughter to some American G.I.

Bit crazy. Right?

David had more in common with Conan than he did Pastor Jim or your local priest.

And yet, far from being put off by the barbarism of such a request, David leapt to it. He even went the extra mile to get not one hundred, but two hundred foreskins, and brought them all back to the king in a bloody bag. I mean, it’s one thing to kill a man. It’s another to strip the pants off his corpse and shave off part of his penis and carry it home.

But.

That’s what they did.

That’s the sort of people that populated the Old Testament.

That’s the distance of the gulf between their mindset and our own.

And the truly difficult thing to reconcile for us, for we non-barbarians in the twenty-first century, is that the people to whom the Gospel was first preached were like David. That the people who first believed The Good News were a lot more like Conan the Barbarian than they were a metrosexual living in Atlanta, or a girlboss in NYC. And is it possible that that is why they were able to believe it?

Is it possible that that is why we can’t?

I’ve thought a lot about this.

I believe, in some very real sense, that Christianity is a religion for violent men.

Locked In Your Head

“From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.” — Jesus, Matthew 11:12

It’s hardly novel to point out but the extreme levels of violence of the people in the Bible, God’s people, really is a theological problem for us today. More to the point, the violence of most of Christianity through the ages is… equally thorny. Suffice to say, men like Charlemagne or Godfrey of Bouillon or Richard the Lionheart apparently saw no conflict between being faithful Christians and full-throated warriors, a thing that most of us might see as a rather blatant contradiction. Issues like is this right, or am I doing good, or is this moral… just honestly never seemed to occur to them when they were out on campaign. Like Conan, like animals, they more or less appeared to have acted mostly on instinct, never pausing to reflect on their actions or second guess if their choices were correct. All the moral quandaries which would arise almost instantly for us and freeze us into inaction… simply didn’t come up. Godfrey of Bouillon marched on Jerusalem, killed whom he killed, went to sleep soundly and then got up the next morning to go to Mass.

A different perspective on life.

To say the least.

In my lifelong effort to understand the Bible I have routinely tried to get myself into the mind of such men. To see with the eyes of a bronze age nomad, or to look out with the longing gaze of a classical man upon Mount Olympus. I have tried to feel as they felt and to think as they thought. In that sense one might say that a lot of my life has been a LARP. A role play in which I have (mostly unsuccessfully) tried to live like a man out of time. I went through a period of learning historical fencing for example, and still remember the pain of a spear (thankfully blunted, and I deflected it at the last moment with a shield) being thrust violently into my torso. I have tried to kill animals for food, to hunt and to fish. I have tried to face the deaths that have come my way (so far very few, thank God) head on, and to feel every ounce of grief and despair without intellectualizing any bit of it away. I have sat in sackcloth and ashes and danced like a fool beneath the moon with the buffalo on the open plain. I have burned incense and communed with the sun. I have sat in the remains of the ancient temples in Greece and listened quietly to see if I could hear the gods.

And… I think I kinda I get it.

A little. Anyway.

And I would say that the difference, the fundamental disconnect between ourselves and our ancestors…

is just how damned self-conscious we are.

How self aware.

Truly.

Think about it for a moment. Really let this sink in. For most of history, the vast majority of humanity didn’t have ready access to a mirror.

Get that.

For most of history… people didn’t know what they looked like.

I learned from experience that charging into a sharp piece of metal being swung by a large man is genuinely terrifying.

Yes, sure, they would of course once in a while see a poor reflection of their faces in a pool or a particularly polished piece of metal, okay. But throughout history proper mirrors have routinely been expensive and of poor quality and a desert nomad or an ancient German migrating south for the winter or a peasant in the land of Ur…

A lot of the time there was just no way to see your own face.

Now? Today? I mean what woman doesn’t go through her life seeing her own reflection a hundred times an hour? Doing her makeup. Taking a selfie. And we not only know what we look like today but we also spend a great amount of mental energy trying to alter that appearance for other people. Trying to look more appealing, or to convey a certain message, or to project some sort of status. And, again, such behaviors were certainly not unknown in the past but they were far, far less prevalent. Moreover… nothing was ever recorded.

Think about that.

Think about how differently you would view yourself and the world you lived in if you seldom saw your own face and nowhere on earth was they any document that said you existed or recorded your name.

If you were an Emperor or something, sure, some of your daily activities were written down. But most people were not emperors and they lived without any sort of paper trail whatsoever. There was no record of their conversations. There were no receipts from their monetary transactions. Bank statements did not exist. They were just born, in a house, and nobody ever brought round a birth certificate or had the name of the child logged in some official registrar. You didn’t get credentialed. Schools did not have keep a “permanent record.” You never wrote your thoughts down. You said what you said and your words vanished, quickly as they were spoken, leaving not a trace behind. Everything you did existed only in the memories of those who had seen you do it and faded just as easily into nothing, like fingerprints on an abandoned handrail. No video evidence. No audio recordings. No documents. No mirrors.

You were simply less you.

Am I making sense?

You were less… ego?

You felt you existed sure, of course, but also everything about “you” seemed more ephemeral. Less permanent and more subject to change if for no other reason than your lifestyle simply caused you to think about yourself a lot less. You, personally, seldom came up in your own mind. Moreover, it seems to be the case that ancient people felt that their thoughts and emotions happened to them, rather than such being something they caused or did. Certainly ancient man did not often feel himself responsible for his actions. The Greeks spoke of men being possessed by Mars and driven to blood lust, or women made hysterical by some goddess or some nymph. The Passions, the Desires, the Fears… unlike how we see them today, ancient people didn’t believe these things belonged to you. They weren’t your passions. They weren’t your desires. No. Instead they came upon you. Possessed you. Made you dance like a puppet on a string. The poet might have a fine voice, but he was nothing without The Muse. The intellect might be sharp but absent the blessings of Sophia, all enterprises were doomed to fail. A man could not even be counted on to get an erection unless Aphrodite spurred his desires on.

Today, by contrast, we take ownership of every thought we have. Every feeling. We are constantly self-policing, self reviewing, analyzing our impulses and our motivations. We have whole professions dedicated to such, psychiatrists and counselors and therapists whose job it is to help us “process” our internal worlds. A consequence of this is that we always feel anxious and guilty for everything. After all, unlike the ancients, we do not believe our desires and thoughts happen to us, but that we in some way cause them, own them. We therefore for example have ceased to see poverty or wealth as the whim of Fortuna, but rather as the natural consequence of a person’s character. We think people just have to Hustle more, or that they are only homeless because they refuse to Grind. Today it’s your fault your relationship failed, not Venus’s. In the past even addiction was viewed as something which happened to you, not something you were responsible for. The god of wine had hold of you… and in his grip you had no self control.

How different.

How strange.

How less in your head.

As a consequence of our evolution into a more self conscious species (largely, I believe, brought about by technology), Christianity of the past several hundred years has tended to focus itself largely on that self conscious guilt anxiety and shame. Indeed to the point that, for most people raised in church, they cannot conceive of the religion as anything but. For them Church is just where you go to be made to feel bad about how broken you are. The religion of Godfrey of Bouillon is far from them. Religion of a man who it seems, like Conan, rarely if ever felt guilt or shame at all.

The Violent Take it By Force

I am not here casting judgment. Either on the past or the present. It is simply how things were and how things are. But I am asking if, perhaps, a certain degree of anti-intellectualism is needed for the modern man to find faith again. Not because God is irrational, or stupid, or doesn’t make sense but just because much of what we consider our intellect is in fact just our ego in disguise. Our self consciousness. Perhaps you need to be anti-intellectual precisely in proportion to how much you’ve bought into the misguided modern belief that you are your thoughts.

For today we think we exist, almost entirely, inside our own heads. To the point where many people really do believe that one day soon we might just be able to upload that existence into a computer. Modern people believe they are their intelligence. Their thoughts. The idea that maybe instead we are our bodies, or that we our hearts, or our communities, or that our true selves are, perhaps more accurately, some impossibly tangled mesh of all of those things… is very foreign. And I think that maybe a people who believe they exist just inside their heads… well I think maybe such people just can’t be religious.

Because God is something you feel.

He’s not something you think.

And perhaps that’s why Christ said that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the violent. To those of action instead of those of thought. Christ, actually, tells us very little about what we ought to believe. He lays out next to zero doctrine or dogma. Instead, he insists all the time, on what we are to do. Christ lays out orthopraxy. On orthodoxy he said almost nothing at all.

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’, but do not do what I say?” - Jesus

And so a man who goes out into the world, more animalistically, more like David, or like Conan, or even like John the Baptist, pursuing what feels right to him by instinct without a lot of self doubt or introspection…

Such a man might be nearer the Kingdom of God than any theologian, or any monk locked in his cell in prayer.

I’m not sure.

But I do know that the lives of the saints are filled with people of action. Who did and said wild things, often on what would seem to us the most spurious of a whim. In Jesus’s words: “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” And so perhaps it is in the moment of Passion… and Christ, after all, had his Passion, not his Thesis or his Axiom… perhaps it is in the moment of passion that we are closest to who we really are. Closest to our heart’s center.

Closest to God.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we go out and put on a loin cloth and start slaughtering people with a machete in order to find Jesus.

No.

But, it is a simple matter of fact that those who have dealt in blood are more religious than those who haven’t. If you want proof of that, go to any prison, talk to any hunter, or survey the beliefs of any soldiers who’ve seen real actual war. And so maybe God is real and has never been very far away at all… maybe it’s just that he’s not on TikTok, or inside your video game. Maybe he’s not in your office cubicle, or beneath your high-thread count sheets. Maybe instead God is in the moment of making love with wild abandon, or giving birth, or in dying, or in the heady rush of blood that swells up in your chest as you try to summit a mountain or free dive for a pearl. Maybe God is in Life, and… as it says in the Old Testament, maybe Life is in the Blood.

Maybe Conan didn’t need a philosophy.

Maybe he was doing theology with a spear.

Like David.

Like I say. Maybe.

I repeatedly emphasize that I’m no one of authority save the authority I have over my own self and my work. You don’t have to listen to me, and perhaps you shouldn’t. I’m not a pastor, I’m not a priest, I’m ordained by no church and have no relevant degrees nor institutional claims to expertise.

I am, truly, no one of consequence.

But…

If Conan the Barbarian is too much in one direction then surely Onan the Librarian is likewise too much in the other. That creature so many modern people have devolved into. Locked inside their heads, stuck in a loops of guilt and self doubt and mental masturbation. Believing they are their thoughts. Worshiping their own intelligence.

Maybe you aren’t closer to God because you’ve spent your days reading theology instead of getting your nose broken. Maybe, this Passion, this Life Affirming Drive to Exist, bodily, in the world and not solely in our heads, is part of what The Apostle Paul was getting at when he suggested that women can be saved through childbearing. Through the passage of blood and tears and screams.

The men and women of the bible fought wars, they killed, they died, they made love and they made children and they communed with God beneath the open sky in the fresh air of the mountains and the cool salt of the sea. They grasped goats by the horns and raised knives high and slit their throats, spilling hot blood upon the altar and the ground. God himself, in the climax of his Love, nailed his own Son to a tree and had him stabbed.

Theology with a Spear.

It’s a real thing.

Christianity is a religion for violent men. I hope now that maybe you can see that that doesn’t necessarily mean hateful or vengeful men. It doesn’t mean unjust men. It doesn’t mean mean men. No. I don’t think Christ was hateful or vengeful or mean.

But he was violent.

He was wild.

He was a man who spent most of his ministry sleeping outside. A man who made a cord of whips to drive money changers out of the temple. A man who consented to his own ghastly torture. Jesus was closer to Conan than most of us would be comfortable with. Certainly closer than the caricature of him we get from the whole “Jesus is my boyfriend” praise music scene that is today so popular. Closer to Conan too than Thomas Aquinas, or Chesterton, or anybody else the chubby bearded guy looks up to as a model of purely intellectual holiness.

Because the Mind ain’t it.

No.

The Word was made Flesh.

The Word wasn’t made Thought and God is not an intellectual pursuit.

Amor Vincit Omnia.