Well, I see the industrious Paul as the founder of some such Christian orthodoxy and institution. In dismissing the historical Jesus and replacing him with the fabricated Christ of faith (with the dying and rising savior god), Paul dismissed, too, the counterculture and its Jewish matrix.

My question, then, is whether such an institution ought to be preserved. What noble purpose does the Catholic Church still serve? I think you’d answer that this conservative, imperfect orthodoxy helps alleviate the modern meaning crisis, and I’d agree. But some solutions become archaic and counterproductive.

Something I’ve noticed about the Pareto principle is that the public has only a limited bandwidth for superstars. What makes the leaders of cultural trends so important is that there can be only a few of them at a time. These thought leaders guide the public for good or for ill. And often, these leaders are deeply flawed. Cultural promotion isn’t meritocratic.

In Paul’s case, he worked hard to spread the message, but the Catholic cooptation that occurred wasn’t spiritually superior to the Gnosticism that faded into obscurity. Catholicism was better in Machiavellian terms, just as plenty of superstar artists are more ambitious, shameless, and ruthless than their rivals, but not often more overflowing with talent and artistic vision.

My point is that while we can appreciate how Catholic orthodoxy at least addresses the question of life’s meaning, the answers it provides take up a lot of societal bandwidth and thus block out contenders that would be even better (such as transhuman pantheism). This is how monopolies function, too, when they buy up competitors.

As for Jesus’s counterculture, it was a dead end, in any case, because it was saddled with the prediction of the world’s imminent end which never happened. That was the apocalyptic Jewish context which had to evolve.