That's probably true for a lot of "traditions", as their adherents like to call them, although exactly how much of that sort of thing is symbolic and how much is literal seems to vary. Honestly, trying to dissect Wicca beyond the very basic just gives me a bit of a headache; there are so many inconsistencies between traditions, and so little serious thought lent to the core beliefs as compared to the frills, that I just end up floundering.
It probably helps that, in practice, Wicca is so often an exercise in self-empowerment draped in vaguely mystic symbolism, rather than a "religion" as such. Certainly, the seeming obsession with gender polarisation is a particularly Wiccan quirk; it's rather less prominent in most "pagan" traditions (however you chose to define that).
All this is true of most religions, of course - or at least of some forms of most religions. I do think it would be unfair to say that Wicca or Neo-paganism in general lacks any serious thought given to the basics - in every religion there are always at least some people who do this - but I would agree that there are probably fewer people, proportionally speaking, doing that.
With Wicca it's also important to remember that there are
very different forms of the religion, some of which very much look down on others - for example, many group-based Wiccans have a pretty low opinion of solitary Wicca. Also, of course, a lot of the more structured stuff in group-based Wicca, in which it most resembles traditional "religion" as opposed to personal spiritual development, is secret and not discussed with non-members. So that makes it a bit tricky to evaluate.
As you have mentioned Enochian literature and in particular the Book of Watchers, can I ask whether anyone has noticed that Tolkein's cosmology (in LOTR and particularly the Silmarillion) seems much closer to that in Watchers than to the canonical version in Genesis, despite Tolkein being a good Catholic? I'm particularly referring to good and and angels coming down to earth, tempting man, provoking the Fall, and the Flood. Maybe this is deliberate, Tolkein wanting to stay within Judaeo-Christian tradition for an explicitly religious part of his myth, but not wanting the familiarity of the Genesis story (obviously elsewhere he uses more north European mythology).
Well, that I don't know - you'd have to ask the Tolkien scholars about that. I always assumed that Tolkien, like Lewis, modelled much of his mythology upon classical paganism - he has the same idea that Lewis does in both the Narnia books and his science fiction of what are effectively pagan gods who are subordinate to the Christian God. That was Lewis' way of reconciling the pagan mythology that he loved with his Christianity, by keeping the pagan gods but basically turning them into angels. Tolkien's mythology seems similar to me, although less explicitly monotheist (does his God ever really do anything? Everything seems to be left to the Valar, and they don't do very much). It has struck me how little role religion, as such, seems to play in Tolkien; no-one in
The lord of the rings ever prays, there are no temples or churches, or anything like that. I find that Denethor says at one point: "No tomb for Denethor and Faramir. No tomb! No long slow sleep of death embalmed. We will burn like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed hither from the West." That very much stands out because as far as I remember there's no indication anywhere else in the whole book that the kings of old were "heathen" or what that means, or what religion everyone follows now. Of course the book still features a lot of Christian imagery, but it is mostly more subtle.
Continuing the "afterlife and the morality of killing" theme.
We had come to the conclusion that, if the existence of Heaven and Hell in their more fundamentalist tradition is to be accepted as true, then the act of murder is very wrong, since it forever dooms a sinner to Hell and forever takes away the opportunity for a virtuous person to spread the good news more.
But as it seems to follow, it's the most liberal interpretations, who make murder more morally acceptable. Since Hell doesn't exist and repentance is possible in the afterlife too, murder becomes not such a bad thing. It's still wrong, because the murdered's relatives will miss him, etc., but it's not that wrong now.
It seems that a severe, but a temporary Hell is the variant of Hell which is the most consistent with a layman's morality. Thoughts?
There are two things that occur to me about that. The first is that, on this reasoning, murder always has roughly the same moral weight on the liberal view but varies greatly on the fundamentalist view. That is because, according to the liberal view, everyone's post-mortem fate is the same, or at least has the potential to be the same. So by killing someone you are not sending them to hell. On the fundamentalist view, however, some people will go to bliss when they die and some to damnation. It would seem, then, that killing one of the elect would be a good thing (sending him to his eternal reward) while killing one of the reprobate would be a bad thing (sending him to his eternal punishment). But surely that is very much out of kilter with lay morality, which would hold that murder is always equally wrong; or, if it is not always equally wrong, that has nothing to do with the sanctification or otherwise of the victim's soul.
It's like in Hamlet where Hamlet is about to kill Claudius while the latter is praying, but stops because it occurs to him that if he does that Claudius will go to heaven. The implication is that killing him at such a time, with such a consequence, would be too merciful.
The second and perhaps more fundamental point is that you're assuming a consequentialist ethic, according to which the rightness or wrongness of an act is a matter of its consequences (in some way). So a killing that results in the victim enjoying eternal happiness is less wrong than a killing that results in the victim suffering eternal punishment, because its consequences are less bad. But a deontologist, who holds that the rightness or wrongness of an act has nothing to do with its consequences, could just deny this and say that murder is very wrong no matter what the consequences. This is where the attempt to map philosophical ethics onto lay morality starts to break apart, because I think most people are sometimes a bit deontologist and sometimes a bit consequentialist, without necessarily having a consistent theory at all. I've written about this in more depth elsewhere.
Oh, and when speaking about the "Problem of evil" you mentioned the "free will defence". What do those who use this defence have to say about the free will in Heaven? (After all, Satan is often considered a former inhabitant of Heaven who fell, so...)
The traditional view is that the blessed are impeccable, i.e., unable to sin. Augustine held that, before the Fall, human beings had free will in the sense of the ability to do either right or wrong. After the Fall they largely lost the ability to do right. After the resurrection they will have only the ability to do right, and not the ability to do wrong, and this is the greatest freedom of all. I suppose on that view Satan would have had libertarian free will before he sinned but lost it once he sinned, on the assumption that Satan is even more depraved than sinful human beings.
Are there any cool writings by medieval ascetic Christians on the tenants behind the monastic life? If so, what are they?
Yes! Although it depends on what you mean by "tenets". The foundational documents for medieval monasticism are the writings of the church fathers on the subject, especially those of
Basil of Caesarea, Athanasius's
Life of Antony, and of course
Augustine (skip past the "doctrinal" ones here to the "moral" ones). In the Middle Ages proper the most important text is
the Rule of Benedict of Nursia. There are supplementary texts written for the use of monks, such as Aelred of Rievaulx's writings on love and friendship (which I can't find online). There is also the
Ancrene Wisse, for nuns, and also treatises on the holy life that aren't aimed at monks or nuns, such as Walter Hilton's
Treatise to a devout man. I'm sure there are lots more like these that don't come to mind so quickly.
