In the West, however, the more God was exiled to the heavens by scholastic theologians and their successors, the more ethics - now a stringent moral code - came to be seen as either the only manifestation of a "Godly" life by those who still needed to have a God, or - on the other hand - as inapplicable to society by those who rejected Him. This led to an obsession with sin and propriety by the former, and an understandable backlash by the latter, to the development of the fundamentalist and the liberal respectively. Once again, in both cases, the immanence of God, of Myth was eliminated.[17]
This immanence was not eliminated, however, in New Rome where the accommodation of the ancient Social Myth by Christianity reflected an ability, common in non-Western peoples, to see meaning rather than material existence as taking priority. If an idea means something, then it can be said to exist in an empirical sense, namely in the sense of being experienced. The Western philosophical tradition, on the other hand, always puts material existence before meaning in its hierarchy of priorities, and thus can neither operate within nor understand societies that work within a construct of Social Myth.
And so the West was left with mere matter, a cluster of atoms that could have intrinsic meaning only if studied, examined, confounded, split apart and rationalised in search of objective Truth. Can this explain Western man's propensity for constant enrichment of empirical knowledge and for expansion, whatever the cost, something quite alien to other peoples? Is the irresistible urge to know about the most minute particle a reflection of the passion that drove on the Western explorer, the imperialist, the scientist and the capitalist?
[17]It’s worth noting that this ‘moralistic’ element is what papacy (as ever) is after, and some Orthodox churches today, wanting to dissolve Christianity into a ‘moral police’.
