One law, 53 catastrophes

The oldest and most obsessive of the idols is power that ceases to be a service and proclaims itself a god. The god-king holds the world upon a single face: as long as he lives and is strong, the order seems eternal. Already Sargon of Akkad (23rd century BC) gathered the first empire in history, and his grandson Naram-Sin was the first to call himself a god — and the Sumerian poem the "Curse of Agade" explained its end even then: the king grew arrogant, offended the temple of Enlil at Nippur, and upon the land fell the barbarian Gutians, famine and disintegration. The idol fell not by another's strength but by its own pride.

After that the same pattern repeats again and again. Alexander of Macedon builds a world-kingdom and demands worship as a god — and dies at thirty-two, and the realm is instantly torn apart by the wars of the Diadochi, and whole peoples become stakes in someone else's game. Napoleon proclaims himself the summit of the revolution, crowns himself — and his glory shatters against the snows of 1812, against a pan-European war, against the restoration of the very monarchies he had overthrown. Third-century Rome turns the throne into merchandise of the legions: emperors are appointed and killed for money, the money is debased, plague comes — and "salvation" is bought at the price of the absolute, deified power of Diocletian.

The mechanism is always the same: power resting on a single bearer collapses all at once in the hour of his death or usurpation. And the living person, meanwhile, is reduced to a subject, to a function of the throne. The collapse ripens from within — an external blow only lays bare a fall already prepared.

The return here is most often incomplete. Sometimes it is a genuine breakthrough: the Russian Time of Troubles ends with a militia raised from below and a new dynasty in 1613; the Great Stand on the Ugra (1480) lifts the Horde's yoke and gives birth to a unified state. But more often it is not a remelting but a substitution: Augustus gives Rome peace at the price of freedom under the façade of a republic; the Napoleonic Code of equality outlives its author, but the monarchies return. The idol of power always falls — yet power learns only rarely to pass judgment on pride itself.

The second idol is subtler than the first: not the face of a king but the System itself — a great order whose complexity is passed off as indestructibility. The empire takes pride in its roads, its accounting, its army, its single coinage, and believes that this is eternity. But complexity carried to its limit becomes fragility: a single blow is enough to bring the whole construction down. So fell the Bronze Age around 1200 BC — the palace kingdoms of the Mediterranean collapsed almost simultaneously under the onslaught of the "Sea Peoples," and for centuries even writing disappeared.

The classic example is "eternal Rome." It was not merely a state but the idea of an indestructible order; when Alaric took the City in 410, it seemed to contemporaries that the world was ending. The West fell apart, the cities emptied — and it was precisely then that Augustine wrote "The City of God," separating the eternal from the earthly Rome. Abbasid Baghdad, the heart of Islamic learning, seemed just such an eternal center: in February 1258 Hülegü's Mongols took the city, executed the last caliph by wrapping him in a carpet, and drowned its libraries in the Tigris — by various estimates tens, even hundreds of thousands perished. The "golden age" broke off within a week.

The law is one: a complex system that has grown fragile caves in as a whole under invasion or pandemic — and life flows on into new vessels. After the Bronze Age come iron, the alphabet and the polis. After Constantinople (1453) the heritage of the Second Rome passes to Moscow; after Baghdad, learning migrates to Cairo and Istanbul; the Song dynasty gives way to the Yuan and then to the Chinese Ming (1368).

The fourth beat here is almost always succession, not restoration. The empire does not rise again as it was: Byzantium after the Justinianic plague reassembles compact and Greek-speaking; Japan after the "black ships" answers not with a restoration of the old but with the Meiji and headlong modernization; Mughal India passes through the colonial Raj and the blood of Partition to independence in 1947. The return happens — but it is always a new form and a new center, never the old order come back to life.

There is an idol especially dangerous because it dresses itself in the holy thing itself. It is faith turned into a magical pledge: as long as the Temple stands, as long as the right formula is spoken, as long as the stone is whole, God is obliged to protect. The living bond is replaced by a guarantee, and the sanctuary becomes an amulet. The classic blow to this idol is 586 BC: Nebuchadnezzar takes Jerusalem, burns Solomon's Temple, drives the elite into Babylonian captivity. It seemed that faith too had ended. But it was precisely in exile, without a Temple, that the Judaism of Scripture and prayer was born — and Cyrus allowed a return and the rebuilding of the Second Temple.

The lesson had to be repeated. In AD 70 the legions of Titus besiege and burn the Second Temple; dispersion follows, and a ban on Jews living in the city itself. And again out of catastrophe something new is born: the Judaism of the Torah and the synagogue, gathered by the sages at Yavne — a faith that no longer depends on a single building. The same temptation belongs to churchly power: in the sixteenth century salvation is reduced to merchandise, to the sale of indulgences — and the schism of the Reformation, for all its blood, returns the Bible to the vernacular and the personal responsibility of conscience.

The law runs thus: a holy thing taken as a pledge, or reduced to a formula, loses its inviolability — the stone falls, and faith learns to live without it. The idol dies precisely where God was made into a possession.

Here the return can be genuinely deep — faith really is purified and grows beyond the stone. But relapses are frequent too: Akhenaten's reform (14th century BC) did not survive its author, and the priesthood of Amun erased his name; the mutual anathemas of 1054 split the Christian world into West and East, and their lifting in 1965 opened dialogue but did not restore unity; the Fourth Crusade of 1204, reduced to the plunder of Christian Constantinople, broke Byzantium beyond repair. The idol of the temple-as-guarantee always falls — but the rise to a faith without an amulet does not succeed every time.

The youngest of the idols and perhaps the most merciless: a utopia that promises heaven on earth and, for its sake, dissolves the living person into a function — into a class, into "historical necessity," into a cog of the state machine. This idol has neither the face of a king nor a temple-stone; its fortress is in words, in a newspeak by which a lie is passed off as truth. And it falls otherwise than the rest: not before an outside conqueror, but rotting from within on its own lies and fear.

The twentieth century gave this its purest examples. The ideology of class and "inevitability" turns into civil war, famine, the Great Terror and the Gulag — a society of silence where the human being is stripped of name and personhood, and fear soaks into daily life. The utopia-as-absolute builds a cult of the leader, camps and deportations, and the summit is not a victory but a universal muteness under the threat of nuclear self-annihilation, sustained for half a century. And in 1991 a superpower that had declared its ideology the crown of history falls apart on its own, with no single conqueror — exactly by the law: the cause of the collapse was laid down in the first beat, in the lie of its foundation.

The law here is especially plain: an ideology that dissolves the person into an idea accumulates emptiness within itself and disintegrates of its own accord. Depersonalization is not a side effect but the very mechanism of ruin.

The return in this type is almost always incomplete, and rests not on institutions but on the single human being who has kept a conscience. It comes as witness: the new martyrs and the confession made in the camps, the defense of human rights and the dignity of the person, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the return of memory, of the word, of the archives and the reopened churches after 1991. But repentance as a common act more often does not occur — the idol is unmasked, yet the judgment upon it remains the private affair of a few. "Partial" here prevails almost hopelessly.

The idol of the Enlightenment seems the most noble of all: not power, not gold, but reason, knowledge, progress. Yet it too can become a god — when knowledge tears itself from conscience and declares itself the only measure of the human being. Then the world turns into a soulless clockwork, and the human being into a machine. The temptation showed itself already on the threshold of the modern age: the condemnation of Galileo (1633) and a mechanistic picture of the world in which the universe is a clock without a Maker; mathematical natural science liberated reason, but it also slipped in the temptation to count as rational only the measurable.

The French Revolution carried the idea to its limit: Reason was set upon the altar literally — in 1793 a "cult of Reason" was celebrated in the churches of Paris, and the human being was reduced to an abstract citizen. And the goddess of Reason turned into the guillotine: the Terror, mass executions, the blood of the Vendée, the dictatorship of the Committee, a freedom that turned into fear. The law worked itself out still more harshly in the twentieth century. The nineteenth century's faith in progress, nation and machine burned in the trenches of the First World War — the first industrial slaughter, which took some ten million and gave birth to a "lost generation." And in August 1945 science-as-boundless-power showed its bottom: two atomic bombs, some two hundred thousand dead, and humankind entered an age beneath the shadow of its own self-annihilation.

The law is merciless and exact: knowledge without conscience turns against the human being, and progress itself discredits its own cult — through slaughter or through a limit of annihilation past which there is nowhere further to go.

The return here is always only partial, because reason itself can neither be abolished nor needs to be — it can only be humbled. The Declaration of the Rights of Man outlived the Terror; out of the trenches came not repentance but a weary disillusion and a fragile League of Nations; after Hiroshima came arms treaties, the memory of the hibakusha, and a sober awareness of the limit. The idol of progress is not cast down — it is tamed by fear; the cult fell, but science itself remained, awaiting the conscience that alone makes it human.

This idol demands no worship — it demands profit, and for its sake it turns the living person into a thing. Not a subject, not a citizen, but a resource, a commodity, working hands, a line in a ledger. The idol of wealth is colder than the rest: it has neither throne nor altar nor slogan — only a system that accumulates the price of another's suffering until that price becomes unbearable. Its first great sweep is the Conquista: Spanish gold and the conqueror's "right" bring down the civilizations of America — demographic collapse, forced labor, cultures erased. And at once, from within the Church itself, a voice of defense arises — Bartolomé de las Casas, a bishop who stood for the human being against the system.

Then the idol grows together with the world. The transatlantic slave trade of the 16th–19th centuries turns the human being into inheritable, lifelong property: the Middle Passage across the ocean, millions carried off, slavery as an economic norm. The Industrial Revolution of the 18th–19th centuries does the same to the worker: brutal labor, child shifts, slums, the death of the crafts, the alienation of the human being from the fruit of his hands. The common thread is one — the living reduced to a number, to a "factor of production."

The law is this: the human being turned into a thing accumulates the price of violence until conscience gives birth to protest and abolition. The idol of wealth does not collapse on its own — it holds long and profitably; it is felled by an awakened conscience.

And so the return here is not a crash of the system but its slow overcoming, almost always incomplete. Abolitionism begins with the Quakers and Christian preachers; slavery is abolished in the British Empire in 1833, and in the United States — at the price of a Civil War — by 1865. But after abolition come segregation, the "Jim Crow" laws, new forms of the same slavery under other names; after the factory hell come factory laws, trade unions, social Christianity, but not the end of exploitation. The idol of the thing is defeated not all at once but by name, again and again — wherever conscience refuses to see a commodity in a human being.

The last idol takes the most natural of feelings — love for one's own — and makes a god of it. Nation, race, "blood" are proclaimed the highest value, and everything outside the circle of "our own" is turned into the faceless, the second-rate, fit to be used or destroyed. The idol of the nation is treacherous precisely because it is born of a genuine good — of loyalty to what is one's own — and so it long goes unrecognized as an idol. In the nineteenth century it dressed itself in a "civilizing mission": the partition of Africa, uprisings and their suppression, the horror of the Belgian Congo, where a whole people was reduced to labor on the rubber plantations. The direct subjugation of the planet was passed off as the duty of a higher race toward the lower.

The same idol drove the wave of national uprisings and their suppression, the sweeping reaction and restoration. But the law worked itself out to the very bottom in the twentieth century, when race was declared a biological mechanism and the nation a right to another's death. The result was the bloodiest war in history and the Holocaust — the factories of death, the occupation. And here the law bared its impartiality to the end: the idol was executed upon the idolater himself — Germany, having deified its own blood, burned in its own fire.

The law runs thus: the exaltation of "our own" over the faceless "others" drives to genocide — and the sentence is carried out upon the one who pronounced it. The idol of race in the end always devours its own priests too.

Here is the rare case where the return came close to genuine repentance: the Nuremberg trial named the crime a crime, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 proclaimed the dignity of every human being above blood and nation. Out of the anti-colonial catastrophe grew a consciousness of the self-determination of peoples. But even here the beat is incomplete: nationalism and racism did not vanish, only were driven into shadow, and they return under new names. The idol of "one's own blood" is unmasked more clearly than the rest — and yet it remains the most tenacious, because it feeds upon love.