Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84 Plough Quarterly • Summer  system does not fall to pieces. The demonic forces of profit-seeking are united among themselves, pursuing the same course even when seeming to compete with each other in the marketplace.2 So then those who possess are possessed: demonically possessed. Property, money, and the economic system have become laws unto themselves just as in the case of disorders in which the sexual function has broken out of the harmony of the body’s organs and become a law unto itself. Such autonomy is demonic. It is the curse of the present century that we bow our knees before the idol of autonomy, especially the autonomy of money and of the economic system. Western civilization is heading rapidly downhill. In the Middle Ages the church was dominant over the state and over everyday life. Later, in the age of absolut- ism, the state dominated the church, the economy, and daily living. Today we stand in a period of development in which the economic system dominates state, 2. Arnold’s view of the “demonic” forces active in economic life is based on his reading of Matt. 6:24 (“You cannot serve God and Mammon”). As he writes in his 1915 essay “God and Mammon”: “Mamona was the Aramaic word for wealth; and it was behind this wealth that Jesus saw the true power of Satan. The latter had said even to Jesus himself, ‘I will give you all this if you will fall down and adore me.’ We cannot devote ourselves to a life of outward ease and pleasure without the value we assign to these outward things becoming the predominating force in our lives. All service of Mammon contains within it a kind of reverence or secret worship of these things, a clinging to them and a love for them that denotes a decision against God. . . . Already in the early Christian period, some scholars (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa, who died after AD 394) interpreted Mammon as a name of the devil Beelzebub. Others (including Nicholas of Lyra, ca. 1300) inter- preted it as the name of a demon particularly connected with money in Satan’s realm.” From Salt and Light (Plough, 1967), 76–77. Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau, Lower Market Street, oil on board (1908), private collection Photograph from Christie’s Images, Bridgeman Images © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York