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II. By Lyndon LaRouche
July 22, 2007
BOOK REVIEW

It’s About All of Us
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
The following is a book review by Mr. LaRouche of
the then just-released book, Jesus of Nazareth, byJoseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, Adrian J. Walker,
translator (New York: Doubleday, 2007, 416 pages,
hardbound, $24.95).
The reality which confronts mankind, today, is
Apocalyptic.
A friend, an influential priest of about my own age,blurted out the news that, in his nation, there was not asingle person currently in training for the priesthood. I
was shocked for a moment, but only a sobering moment.
In the U.S.A., for example, the percentile of avowed“believers in God” among voters has, allegedly, increased during the most recent decades; nonetheless I
shudder when I ask myself, what, for example, do many
among those believers actually believe?
What, really, is gripping mankind’s will in thesepresently ominous times?
Contrary to a considerable amount of strongly expressed opinion, the decline within the Catholic clergy
was not a product of the process known as Vatican II;
Vatican II was a response to the seemingly unhinderedwrongness of the direction which the post-World War II
world had already taken, almost from the very hour inwhich President Franklin Roosevelt had died. The chiefsource of the worsening moral crisis of trans-Atlantic society today has been most prominently expressed in the
new forms of decadence introduced into the factor of willin certain, chiefly “middle class” communities through­out the Americas and western and central Europe. For thewitting, there was a sense that the world which emerged
Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in EIR Vol.
34, No. 30, Aug. 3, 2007, pp 49-51.
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triumphant over the fascist menace, had betrayed the
purpose for which that war had been fought. This senseof a world gripped by a new, careening decadence, drew
the attention of the most thoughtful to the effect of theconditioning of a layer of chiefly white-collar, middleclass children born, notably, in post-war Europe and theAmericas, between 1945 and 1957-58. This was a socalled “white-collar” generation, whose decadences
would later erupt, violently, in the form of the explosion
by “the 68ers” on both sides of the Atlantic.
The key to understanding this specific change, is torecognize that the pro-existentialist, post-Franklin Roosevelt change in quality of beliefs in both the Americas
and western and central Europe, corresponds, specifically, to the entry into adolescence of a large social, socalled “white-collar” stratum from within the generation which had been born to those nations in theaftermath of Franklin Roosevelt’s death. Typical of thiswere the children born to the family households of what
was known during the 1950s as “The Organization
Man.” President Dwight Eisenhower referred to the expression of that “white-collar” constituency as a “military-industrial complex.”
The most significant factor in bringing about a related change of the Catholic, and relevant other institutions of Europe and the Americas, has been the forcedfeeding of the populations with the wild-eyed,
existentialist dogmas of the Frankfurt School, dogmas
associated with the assigned role of the Congress ofCultural Freedom (CCF) in post-1945 Europe. Notableinfluences have included such as the former Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, his understudy Jean-Paul
Sartre of France, and that Frankfurt School’s Horkheimer, Adorno, Arendt, et al. The same trend wasechoed by the dismal image of Bertolt Brecht in SoEIR

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viet-occupied East Germany. These radical empiricists, these existentialists, as combined in effect withthe work of the London Tavistock Clinic and Bertrand
Russell’s circles, are typical of the leading edge of the
post-1945 campaign to destroy the traditions of both
physical science and Classical culture in Europe, andbeyond.
This development within, and beyond the trans-Atlantic community must be compared with the morally
fatal factor of decadence whose influence was expressed as the collapse of a deeply corrupted Athens
into the follies of the Peloponnesian War.
Inside the U.S.A. itself, this existentialist corruption
was spread from the ideological overlap of the Josiah
Macy, Jr. Foundation, with the brainwashing campaign
conducted by Adorno, Arendt, et al. under the rubric of“The Authoritarian Personality.” One of the notableproducts of those conspirators’ brainwashing campaign
against its U.S. and other victims, has been, thus, thedupes’ now familiar, Orwellian babbling of the cultphrase “I don’t believe in conspiracy theories.”
The result is, that, for the victim of the corrupting
ideological influences of the “Frankfurt School” andkindred modern Sophistries, the essential thing which
is lost as a fruit of that plunge into decadence, is thenotion of the existence of that immortal soul which distinguishes the human personality absolutely, anduniquely, from the beasts. The implications of the formof moral corruption which existentialism expresses, areimmediate, both inside and outside the churches; however, the fuller consequences of the disease became
more and more clearly manifest over the course of time.
Implicitly, thus, the idea of God has been supplanted bycults of the genre shared with the childish dupes of the“Star Wars” and “Harry Potter” cults. All of thosevalues which had been associated with civilized formsof life within, and among nations and peoples, werethus placed in jeopardy.
So, came the Autumn harvest called “the 68ers.” Itcame in the Spring of that year, when the vanguard of
the Baby-Boomer generation had touched, first, adolescence, and then entered adult maturity. So, now, it
has come about, that a new dark age menaces theplanet. The time had come, thus, in which a new Popewould see cause to examine the true meaning of immortality of the soul which inhabits the living humanflesh.
That is the immediate setting for the reading of Pope
Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth.
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I Corinthians 13

For example. On the appropriate occasion in 2004, I
delivered a relevant address in Talladega, Alabama,commemorating the immortal memory of the Reverend
Martin Luther King, as a hero in the exemplary tradition of Joan of Arc.1 That same specific quality of immortality to which I referred on that occasion, is mypoint of reference here. So, my emphasis here, is myown persuasion, as in reading his book, that Benedict
XVI’s emphasis upon the importance of knowing areal-life image of Jesus of Nazareth which would be as
accurate as possible, is a key for today’s better understanding of the Christian’s mission.
Contrary to widespread opinion in the U.S.A., andEurope, today, man is no ape of the sort implicit in thedoctrines of the former Nazi Martin Heidegger and his
Frankfurt School intimates. We must suspect that noteven a mere ape could be thrown into a state of affairs
as bestial as Heidegger’s man. The belief in the God
identified by Christians, as by Jews in the footsteps ofthe three great Moses—of Sinai, Maimonides, andMendelssohn—has a scientifically objective basis, as
Mendelssohn’s Phaedon emphasizes this fact. Nonetheless, the nature of the God of the Christians andMoses, is also, essentially, a very personal, subjective
issue.
In the teaching of science, for example, there isusually a gulf separating the definition of “truth” aswhat the modern Sophist would consider as “what I
have been taught to believe, if I wished to earn my credentials.” So, most students were brainwashed into
dupes of a zombie-like mere “consensus,” as in considering Euclidean or Cartesian definitions, axioms, andpostulates as “self-evident”: thus shunning actual experience of efficient knowledge of a universal physicalprinciple, as Bernhard Riemann, for example, definestrue knowledge.
A man who wishes to feel himself important, says:“I believe in God.” So, in the case of the legendary
Bible of a deceased revivalist, we might read the deceased parson’s Bible, where he had written, with flourishes otherwise suited to an impassioned Flagellant:“Text unclear. Shout like Hell!”
An honest man asks him: “When and how did youcome to know God?”
The challenged parson, almost choked with rage, re1. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., The Immortality of Martin Luther King ,DVD: EIRDV-2004-001-STD. Available from EIRNS, $25.

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plies, stiffly: “I believe!”
Therefore, the relevant question is, simply, are we—me and you—made in the likeness of the Creator of thisuniverse? How could we know this? Are we beasts, orare we cast in the likeness of man and woman in Genesis 1: 26-30? So, for the Christian in the time of great
spiritual crisis for mankind, as for Benedict XVI on thepresent occasion, the meaning of the divinity of Jesus ofNazareth, is a most crucial and practical, existential
question for all concerned.
Benedict XVI has replied: What is the evidence weknow from the life of Jesus of Nazareth? What do weactually know, and how are we capable of knowing it?
If I were challenged so, my reply would be, essentially, I Corinthians 13. Faith and Hope depend essentially on the principle of the Apostle John’s Gospel: theSocratic concept of agapē . It is a conception which is
not captured by merely contemporary use of the English charity, nor the term love.
Nor could we represent the meaning of agapē bymere passion. It is a quality which may be referenced
by the term passion, but it is a meaning of passion which
has no commonplace expression in contemporary writing or speech. I usually associate the meaning of theterm agapē with the passion of creativity, as creativity
is used in the more rigorous sense of the act of discovering an efficient form of universal physical principle, as
typified by such actions as Johannes Kepler’s discoveryof the universal physical principle of gravitation.
The most significant, relevant misuse of the purported synonyms for the agapē of Plato and the Apostles John and Paul, for example, is a product of attempted dictionary-nominalist accommodations to themodern philosophical Liberalism in the viciously irrationalist form of Sophist, and implicitly Satanic tradition of the modern magician Sophist Paolo Sarpi: thetradition of his empiricist and Romantic followers suchas his lackey Galileo Galilei, the Anglo-Dutch Liberal
empiricists Locke, Mandeville, the Physiocrats
Quesnay and Turgot, the British plagiarist Adam Smith,and the radical utilitarianism of the British Foreign Office’s Jeremy Bentham and his devotees. This is also themechanistic tradition of René Descartes, and so on, tothe present time.
Precise working definitions of the underlying meaning of agapē are available. From ancient Classical
Greece, the Pythagorean Archytas’ solution for the construction of the doubling of the cube, or Plato’s exercise
in the Theaetetus dialogue, are examples. In modern
science and theology, the most significant discovery is
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Nicholas of Cusa’s discovery of the systemic incompetence of Archimedes’ attempt at quadrature of the circle,
and the consequent application of Cusa’s approach tothis in Kepler’s uniquely original discovery of the principle of universal gravitation. Fermat’s discovery of theprinciple of least action, as the catenary principle wasdiscovered, uniquely, by the collaboration of Gottfried
Leibniz and Jean Bernouilli, is an example, as is theoutcome of Bernhard Riemann’s 1854 habilitation dissertation.
This matter was summarized, late in his life, byAlbert Einstein’s grasp of the unity of the process defined by the benchmarks of Kepler and Riemann: theprinciple of a finite but unbounded universe. Or, the related definitions of the qualitative distinctions of theuniversal phase-spaces of the abiotic, the Biosphere,
and the Noösphere, by Academician V.I. Vernadsky. In
each and all of these cases from the domain of physicalscience, a finite but unbounded universe is reflected in
the quality of the infinitesimal as that is defined by
Leibniz and the work of Riemann, as the reflection of
the quasi-infinity of a finite, but unbounded universality
as a whole.
This infinitesimal expresses the power which moves
the universe. The trajectory of motion, as might be described by finite mathematics, is the shadow of the principle, but not the ontological actuality of that principle.
It is the creative powers which man and woman express as in the likeness of the Creator, the power of theprocess of the continuing creation of the universe,
power expressing the intention of both Creator and created, which reflects the concept of agapē . It is the creative love shared with the Creator, and expressed in thehuman personality’s devotion to the realization of thismission, which is crucial. It is the love expressed bycontributions to the development of the universe we inhabit; it is a quality of love which expresses such creative power.
It is the love which expresses man and woman as
acting in service to, and likeness of the Creator.

Jesus of Nazareth

Let me therefore state the case from the ecumenicalstandpoint of the same Platonic tradition which I sharewith Moses Mendelssohn’s Phaedon. This is history,
but is much more than a mere account of past history;
nothing less than that history is required to express theessence of the ongoing process which grips the planet
as a whole, still today.
With the close of the Second Punic War, a new qualEIR

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ity of an old evil came upon the civilization centered in
the maritime system of the Mediterranean: the insurgency of the emerging Roman Empire. It was alreadyan old evil, what was known, generically, as the old oligarchical model, assuming a new form. During thegreater part of the following two centuries, there was agreat struggle over control of the new empire-in-themaking.
So, the time came, when the putative heir of the deceased Julius Caesar, Octavian, while resident on theIsle of Capri, negotiated an alliance with the cult ofMithra against Octavian’s political rivals, Antony andCleopatra. Octavian crowned himself the Caesar Augustus of the time when Jesus of Nazareth was born. It
was while the Emperor Tiberius was resident on thesame Isle of Capri, that the Emperor’s representative,
Pontius Pilate, ordered the death of Jesus of Nazarethby crucifixion.
The Roman Empire, sometimes called “The Whoreof Babylon,” has passed, but it was succeeded by Byzantium. Byzantium died, too; but, it was superseded byits heir, a new descendant of Rome, the empire overwhich the Venetian financier-oligarchy reigned throughits arrangement with the Norman chivalry. Then, fromFebruary 1763 on, came a new successor on the imperial throne, Paolo Sarpi’s neo-Venetian, Anglo-Dutch
Liberal empire of the British East India Company andits successors, the reign of the imperial usury which
dominates the world still today.
So, the evil which Jesus of Nazareth was born toface, the imperial evil which perpetrated the judicial
murder of Christ, persists still today. For us, therefore,
who live within that continuing span, the mission for
the unshackling of man and woman in the likeness of
the Creator, thus, remains still to be fulfilled.

that Jesus of Nazareth. By means of that attempt, thereader is presented with the opportunity to immerse his,or her sense of being within the mission which that account expresses as the future. That mission must
become our passion.
What, therefore, is man’s mission? To what outcome of our mortal lives, even far beyond our mortal
death, do we, should we yearn? Not what we do for
ourselves, but what we do for all mankind. When our
flesh ceases, what remains of us which is not a mere
beast? Where does that poor soul go to pray? What is
our interest in the outcome of the simultaneity of eternity? As immortal beings, what should our passions be?
The passing of the successive reigns of that imperial, oligarchical model of society which Augustus’ andTiberius’ reigns reflect is not the goal of our existence,but only an unshackling of mankind for the missions
beyond. In the meantime, our duty is not to wait, as if
hat in hand, for the evil to be marvelously taken away.
The change to be made, is one in which we must participate. It is we, from our place in the simultaneity of
eternity, who must participate in all the suitable missions for mankind, acting in our role as creatures in thelikeness of our Creator.

Who, Then, Are We?

Who, therefore, are the man and woman, made in
the likeness of the Creator, of whom Genesis 1 speaks?
If we are immortal, then where were we—where are wein the simultaneity of eternity—when Jesus of Nazareth
was born? By what agency do we participate in thesweep of the history of the events? Better said: Howshould we experience that simultaneity of eternity?
How are the personalities of the deceased to be justified?
Benedict XVI has written a book which takes thereader through the known aspects of the experience ofJesus of Nazareth. The attempt is made, and it is a persuasive one, to place the reader inside the experience ofNovember 11, 2022

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