Not a Proposition, Part II

What was good in the United States came from the traditions and culture of white Europe. The good had nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution. As the U.S., at first gradually and then swiftly, abandoned the traditions and culture that sustained her, she took ill and died. The country we now live in has nothing in common with the country that once existed. Mexicans openly boast that the southwestern U.S. is now part of Mexico, a white male professor is fired for using the word ‘niggardly,’ and a liberal, white, talk show host is fired for mistakenly using the word ‘coon’ instead of ‘coup’ in the same sentence with Condoleezza Rice’s name. The only race that ever created a Christian culture is now a pariah race in nations that were created and sustained by that race.

And it is whites who have turned whites over to the barbarians. It was white men who changed the U.S. immigration policy in 1965, and it is white men today who have opened up our borders to the colored people of the world. On this issue, church and state are united. The propositional Christians hold hands with the propositional neocons and celebrate the colossal tower of Babel that is the United States.

There are only a few small pockets of resistance to the colored invasion. By and large, white people are not fighting back. Why? There are many reasons but I think the primary reason is religious. The colored races, whether Aztec or African, have a simple pagan view of race: “My race shall conquer and subjugate all other races.” The white man, when he was Christian, had a different view: “My race must conquer and then rule benevolently because without white rule, mankind will descend into darkness.”

As long as the white race was Christian, the colored races were held at bay; but a hideous Gnostic cancer reared its head and opened the colored flood gates. When Christianity became a theory rather than a faith, sin became corporate rather than individual. Evil no longer existed in individual human beings; it existed in groups of human beings. And of course the white male became the source of all evil. The only way a white male could atone for his whiteness was to renounce his white heritage and worship the men of color. One can see a microcosm of this hideous white atonement every time there is some kind of sporting event. White males fill stadiums and gather around the television set to worship the gods of color. In the post-Christian churches, the priests and pastors regularly denounce the white race and extol the virtues and sinlessness of the colored races. The current head of the Catholic Church wanted, or so he said, a black Pope to worship.

The second ‘why’ I ask, having seen that whites have encouraged the colored invasion because they are no longer Christian, is why have the whites abandoned Christianity?

The reason is that paganism is a lot easier. In the Old Testament, the Israelites were always returning to Baal. A personal God who demands a behavior above and beyond pagan behavior can be a very depressing God. But while the gods like Baal, Cybele, or Mithras do not place great ethical demands on their adherents, neither do they respond in an ethical, understanding way to man. That is why our European ancestors preferred Christ to the pagan gods, despite the fact that Christ demanded self-sacrifice and heroism.

The white man’s return to Baal has not made him happy. He never seems quite at home with the colored races. Try as he will to be a ‘natural’ man like the people of color, he cannot do it. He is uneasy, a “brooding melancholy resides in his soul.” This is why the Christian churches have not completely disappeared. They exist as halfway houses for the white man. He can go to them and eat their pagan cakes with Christian icing while he tells his melancholy soul that he has the best of both worlds, the pagan and the Christian. But the Christian-façade churches are halfway houses to hell. When complete paganization occurs, even the halfway houses will be annihilated.

There are some whites who could be brought back to the fold if they could be shown the desolation to come, but they lack vision and heart. They can’t picture a world where there is nothing but the barbarian night; and they do not love the old European civilization enough to yearn for something more fully European than the modern halfway houses.

The journals and magazines that constitute pockets of intellectual resistance to the colored invasion seem to have a policy of “let’s get the facts to the white people and stir up a spirit of righteous indignation.” This is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, but it is not sufficient. Giving the facts to white people will only stir up a tiny non-Gnostic minority. The Gnostic majority will remain unmoved. The New Orleans tragedy was a case in point. What happened in New Orleans was third world barbarism on a scale the major media outlets could not, as they usually do, completely ignore, but it didn’t convert any white people to the white cause. The experts put their spin on it: “It was only a handful of blacks,” “Anybody would have done the same thing under those conditions,” etc. At the root of the race problem is the white man’s deep-rooted conviction that truth, religious and secular, comes from experts. As long as the majority of whites have this Gnostic view of existence they will never be roused to resist the colored invasion. Yes, give the facts to those whites who have not fallen prey to the Gnostic-Thomistic heresy, but then take the battle into the camps of the three greatest enemies of Christian Europe: the organized churches, the organized forces of academia and the media, and the organized forces of corporate capitalism. Above all, the white Christian counterattack must go against the Christian churches, which have spawned the Gnostic heresy that has killed Christianity in Europe and its satellites.

The Lost Thread

“As we have seen, Aquinas regards the direct intuition of divine essences as beyond man’s reach.”

Over the years I have frequently been taken to task for my criticism of St. Thomas Aquinas. And yet it's a curious thing; those who do not like my critcism have never defended Aquinas’s thought; they have just condemned me for criticizing Aquinas. One person even agreed with me about the errors in Aquinas’s thought but condemned me for having the temerity to point out the errors!

I am often tempted, particularly after reading a good topical journal such as Little Geneva Reports or Middle American News to give up writing about metaphysics and just write hard-hitting critiques of the secular, race-mixing, porn-loving society we live in. But I always come up against my own conviction that the reason we live in a secular, race-mixing, porn-loving society is because of muddled metaphysics. Therefore, it seems to me, I can’t ever abandon what the hard-hitting journalists view as “distractions” from the main issues. The metaphysical issue is the main issue.

Holding the views I do about the primacy of the spiritual or metaphysical realm, it was indeed heartening when I received a letter from a friend containing an article by an author who agreed with me on the subject of St. Thomas Aquinas. The author’s name is Philip Sherrard. I must add his name to the list which includes Richard Weaver, Karl Adam, Michael de Unamuno, Herbert Butterfield, and Vladimir Solovyev of authors who have pointed out the connection between modernity and St. Thomas.

My only criticism of Sherrard’s work is that he uses the jargon of the enemy. No-one has ever written more eloquently and correctly about religion than St. Paul, and he managed to do so without resorting to a pseudo-scientific language that is hard to read without a decoding book. Nevertheless, there is gold beneath the jargon of Sherrard’s article.

Sherrard hones in on the essential flaw in St. Thomas’s reasoning:

Unless it is admitted, first, that God is the actual immanent hypostasis, or spiritual cause, of man’s being, and second, that man possesses some faculty superior to the reason and all other natural and created faculties, through which he can ‘know’ that cause, then the idea of his deification is meaningless. For this deification proceeds from God and from man’s direct intuition of His transfiguring light. In that light, man knows, in an absolute sense, both his own divine cause, and the causal energies of all created things. If therefore, either the immanence of God in man, or the possession by man of such a faculty as that indicated, is denied, then the realization in question will be regarded as impossible; and the effect will be to shift attention from it, and to substitute for it the idea that the purpose of man’s life, and the nature of the knowledge he may possess of God, himself and other created things, are conditioned by, and proceed from, the relative and natural faculties, whether mental or sensory, which he has at his disposal.

And further on he states:

The second thing which is apparent follows naturally from the first, and is that the type of knowledge which Aquinas regards as the highest accessible to man is of quite a different order from that of the ‘gnosis’ of the Christian Fathers. As we have seen, Aquinas regards the direct intuition of divine essences as beyond man’s reach: the human intellect as it works in the earthly life can know only by turning to the material and the sensible: ‘Cognitio Dei quae ex mente humana accipi potest, non excedit illud genus cognitionis quod ex sensibilibus sumitur, cum et ipsa de seipsa cognoscat quid est, per hoc quod naturas sensibilium intelligit.’ What knowledge man can have is that which he extracts from the sensible, and this is a created, and human, intelligible knowledge, which resembles uncreated and divine intelligible knowledge only by comparison. Man’s intellect, the highest faculty he possesses or can possess, is, for Aquinas, physical and created, and there can be no direct intuition by it of what is metaphysical and uncreated. All that man can know of the latter, the limit of his knowledge of the Divine, himself, and other sensible things, amounts, after he has gathered together and meditated οn the abstractions he has derived from these things, to a mere collection of concepts which may be said to have an analogical likeness to the Divine, but nothing more.

In short, by denying man any access to God except through the material world, the material world has become everything and God has become a theoretical abstraction.

Scholars are often satisfied with a mere statement of the problem, but the non-scholar, such as me, always wants an answer to the question of “how then shall I live?” If one has come up against the Thomists and discovered, to one’s horror, that they are the unwitting (or most of the time, unwitting) tools of the devil, what is one to do? Well, when someone is trying to kill you, what do you do? You fight for your life. And if someone is trying to kill your soul, what do you do? The answer is obvious. The only question should be, “how do I fight Thomistic modernism?” and not “should I fight it?”

When the Catholic hierarchy took Thomistic theology as its own, they shut off access to God. He could not be known intuitively, intimately, as the Divine Savior; He could only be reached through abstracted reason’s contemplation of the material world. While first, second, third, and umpteen generations of Catholic clergy were still tacking God on to the end of their contemplations of the material world, there were other men, ‘enlightened’ men, who were taking Aquinas’s schema to its logical conclusion. In the Catholic Church, the logical conclusion was Vatican II. Thomists claim that the disaster called Vatican II occurred because Thomistic theology was abandoned, when in reality the Vatican Twoers were just bringing Thomism to fruition. The natural Christ, the harvest God, who stands on an equal level with Buddha and the idols of the Animists, was officially crowned at Vatican II, but his enthronement was made possible by the medieval scholastics.

And of course in the secular world, this maniacal obsession with the scientific is the result of the Thomistic separation of nature and grace. We can see the line: St. Thomas (‘Knowledge of God comes only from abstracted reason’s contemplation of the sensible world’) to Descartes (‘Human reason is supreme in and of itself without any reference to the sensible world or the supernatural order’) to Darwin (‘Reason and nature are one and the same, and they are called “science”’) to Motley Crue or whatever jungle rock band you care to mention (‘We are all apes now’).

And why, we need to ask, would someone be a Thomist? Why did the ‘angelic’ doctor conceive such a pernicious philosophy and why did it gain so many adherents? We can answer those questions if we can answer the question, why did Adam and Eve, who had an intimate, personal relationship with God, succumb to Satan’s offer? Wasn’t it because they thought there was some power in nature to which Satan was privy that would make them equal to or even more powerful than God Himself? Is that not the same temptation to which the Israelites caved in again and again when they returned to the worship of Baal? And when the Greek philosophers contemplated the natural world, was it not with the same desire as Adam and Eve, to come to a knowledge of the great mysteries of life independent from God? That impulse, that original sin, is part of our nature. It is easy to see how a man, in the name of God, could delude himself and his adherents into thinking that the satanic impulse to be like unto God could be an inspired way to know God better. Aquinas, extending and systematizing St. Augustine’s Gnostic tendencies, carved the entire natural world up into a thousand jigsaw pieces. When one took the time to put those pieces together, he saw (so Aquinas maintained) the face of God. That the completed puzzle showed us God became an article of faith in the Catholic Church despite the fact that when the puzzle was completed we did not see God – well, at least not the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and St. Paul.

Preaching a distorted notion of God cannot completely eradicate God from the hearts of those who have been exposed to the Christian revelation. As the Thomistic doctrine of God became prevalent, the Lord God still communicated with man through the human heart, where that intuitive and sympathetic communion with God takes place. But as the Church increased its zeal, the human-divine link with God became an ever-increasingly underground link. And now, in our present age, the places sure to be devoid of God’s grace are the Christian churches.

The most chilling attribute of the Thomistic god is his stoical, Buddhistic self-sufficiency: “I created the world; there it is. I can be found in the world I created; take it or leave it; it’s of no consequence to me.” Is this the God that we find in the Gospels? Is this the God of St. Paul? Is this a God we can love? Missing from Thomism is God the lover. We are created by His love. We are part of Him. He yearns for us as a father yearns for his lost children. He is always trying to break through those barriers of the material, sensible world and make contact with us. And when He can’t make contact, He weeps. “God imparts to human hearts, the blessings of his heaven.” There is no other way to God except through the human heart. If sick, distorted minds want to place Him in a giant laboratory of their own device, how can we let them?

It is ironic that Tridentine Catholicism is called ‘traditional’ Catholicism. Tridentine Catholicism is a radical revision of Christianity, a carrier of the scholastic virus that has murdered institutional Christianity. The Vatican Twoers, whom the Traditionalists hate, are like the children of liberal parents who take the liberalism of their parents to its logical conclusion and act like the members of the animal kingdom to which their parents always said mankind belonged.

Original sin left man terribly flawed, but there was still an untainted spiritual presence in his soul that yearned for God. Using St. Thomas as his instrument, the devil made a very subtle shift. He shifted the focus of man’s reason from the spiritual element inside of man to the material world outside of man. The Protestant rebellion was an attempt to reclaim man’s birthright, his integral relationship with the Lord God. Unfortunately, much of the good of that rebellion was destroyed by Calvin who re-imposed Thomistic theology on what had started out as a rebellion against Thomistic theology.

When someone has only a vague feeling that something is wrong, one is very susceptible to a man with a theory who offers to channel that vague feeling into a system. Calvin’s system still kept man away from an integral relationship with God. Like Aquinas he recognized no spiritual dimension inside of man. Unlike Aquinas however, he saw no spiritual principle in the material world either. He saw spirit only in the heavens: remote, majestic, uncaring, and unloving. C. S. Lewis brilliantly describes that God in The Pilgrim’s Regress:

And when John came into the room, there was an old man with a red, round face, who was very kind and full of jokes, so that John quite got over his fears, and they had a good talk about fishing tackle and bicycles. But just when the talk was at its best, the Steward got up and cleared his throat. He then took down a mask from the wall with a long white beard attached to it and suddenly clapped it on his face, so that his appearance was awful. And he said, ‘Now I am going to talk to you about the Landlord. The Landlord owns all the country, and it is very, very kind of him to allow us to live on it at all – very, very kind.’ He went on repeating ‘very kind’ in a queer sing-song voice so long that John would have laughed, but that now he was beginning to be frightened again. The Steward then took down from a peg a big card with small print all over it, and said, ‘Here is a list of all the things the Landlord says you must not do. You’d better look at it.’ So John took the card: but half the rules seemed to forbid things he had never heard of, and the other half forbade things he was doing every day and could not imagine not doing: and the number of the rules was so enormous that he felt he could never remember them all. ‘I hope,’ said the Steward, ‘that you have not already broken any of the rules?’ John’s heart began to thump, and his eyes bulged more and more, and he was at his wit’s end when the Steward took the mask off and looked at John with his real face and said, ‘Better tell a lie, old chap, better tell a lie. Easiest for all concerned,’ and popped the mask on his face all in a flash. John gulped and said quickly, ‘Oh, no sir.’ ‘That is just as well,’ said the Steward through the mask. ‘Because, you know, if you did break any of them and the Landlord got to know of it, do you know what he’d do to you?’ ‘No, sir,’ said John: and the Steward’s eyes seemed to be twinkling dreadfully through the holes of the mask. ‘He’d take you and shut you up for ever and ever in a black hole full of snakes and scorpions as large as lobsters – for ever and ever. And besides that, he is such a kind, good man, so very, very kind, that I am sure you would never want to displease him.’ ‘No, sir,’ said John, ‘But, please, sir…’ ‘Well,’ said the Steward. ‘Please, sir, supposing I did break one, one little one, just by accident, you know. Could nothing stop the snakes and lobsters?’ ‘Ah!...’ said the Steward; and then he sat down and talked for a long time, but John could not understand a single syllable. However, it all ended with pointing out that the Landlord was quite extraordinarily kind and good to his tenants, and would certainly torture most of them to death the moment he had the slightest pretext. ‘And you can’t blame him,’ said the Steward. ‘For after all, it is his land, and it is so very good of him to let us live here at all – people like us, you know.’ Then the Steward took off the mask and had a nice, sensible chat with John again, and gave him a cake and brought him out to his father and mother. But just as they were going he bent down and whispered in John’s ear, ‘I shouldn’t bother about it all too much if I were you.’ At the same time he slipped the card of the rules into John’s hand and told him he could keep it for his own use.

In the essentials, Calvinism and Thomism are one; both deny men access to the Christian God. They are permitted access to a majestic, remote, cruel God, but not to Christ. In practice, there is more Christianity in the Calvinists because their focus on the Bible often leads them to live a Christianity that is quite different from the one preached by John Calvin. I know this to be true because I was brought up in the Presbyterian Church. Before I had any understanding of Calvinist doctrine, I was already inoculated against it by the Gospel stories I had been told in Sunday school. The Catholic, in contrast, starts right out with the Catechism, derived from Thomistic theology, and is given less of a chance to ever have any genuine contact with the Christian God.

What we are looking at, under the guise of Tridentine Catholicism, is the gradual usurpation of the Church. The Christian Church is once again an underground church, with the added problem of an institutional church that is anti-Christian.

This pernicious doctrine that equates the rational with the spiritual and assigns an inferior and even negative role to the intuitive part of man’s being, which includes his “poor dreams” and his yearning for God, is called Thomism, but it is really Satanism. Quite possibly Satan believes it to be true. His satanic intellect has never understood the heart of God or the heart of man. Oh, yes, he understands man’s predilection for sin. But the heart of man? That he does not understand. There is a divinity buried in the human heart which the satanic intellect can never comprehend.

The glory of European civilization was that for a time satanic principles did not rule it. Man’s poor dreams were given a place above Satan’s intellect. And if Satan currently, and possibly till the end of the world, holds the reins of power, it is still possible to walk through the wardrobe and encounter the living God. So many Europeans have done it before us in spite of Thomism, a much more dangerous enemy than dungeon, fire and sword. It all depends on how we perceive God. Is He the hero of a true fairy tale or is He the answer to a syllogism? It’s the difference between heaven and hell.

Not a Proposition

“America is part of the West, and as both a political and cultural order, is not ‘based on a creed’ or ‘derived from a proposition.’ America is neither a ‘universal nation’ nor an ‘experiment’ con-cocted by ideologues. America is the unique and irreplaceable product of centuries of specific racial, historical, and cultural identities. America and its cultural and political identity will endure only so long as the identities that created it and sustain it endure, and when they die, America will die.”

- from “A Statement of Principles” published in The Occidental Quarterly

I was pleased to see some recent articles in The Occidental Quarterly and Middle American News that criticized the propositional nature of the so-called American experiment. No nation can be a propositional nation – a nation based on an idea – and survive. The clarion call in both magazines was for European Americans to realize that their nation was Europe. We are only patriots to the extent that we embrace our European heritage. The American Legion and George Bush form of Constitutional patriotism is really treason.

There will be no counter-revolution in this country until the propositional notion of country is washed away. It will be a welcome cleansing. Standing foursquare against the counterrevolution are the mad-dog liberals, the Evangelical Protestants, and the Irish Catholic Americanists. It is easy to see why the mad-dog liberals want America to remain a propositional nation, but why do the latter groups want it? I would suggest the reason lies in their flawed concept of religion. Both groups have embraced the propositional faith of the medieval scholastics. The Protestants inherited it from our “enlightened” founding fathers, and the Irish Catholics received it from their church. “If God is a propositional God,” the evangelicals and the Irish Catholics reason, “then why not embrace a propositional country?” It is largely pagans who have rejected the false propositional nature of the American experiment because they do not have the same intellectual handicaps that the pseudo-Christians have. The destruction of constitutional America and the restoration of European America can only take place after the defeat of the liberals, the evangelicals, and the Catholics, after which, one will still have to convert the counterrevolutionary pagans to a non-propositional Christianity (which, come to think of it, was the original Christianity of the Europeans).

It seems from whatever side one tackles the ‘Decline of the West’ problem, one is always faced with the same dilemma. In order for the West to become the West again, it is necessary for a man, who is also God, to be born of a virgin, suffer and die, and then to rise from the dead. Eugene O’Neill once wrote a play called "Lazarus Laughed." In the play, O’Neill depicts Lazarus, after he has been redeemed from the grave, as a man without fear. He now knows that he can laugh at death, and the people close to him laugh at death as well. But then the talking begins, the propositional talking: “How do we know Lazarus was actually dead? How does one define death? Maybe it was only an illusion,” etc. And soon no one is laughing any more, not even Lazarus.

That metaphysical laughter is gone from European man. All that remains is a few dirty jokes. And we lost the laughter when we sat down with the scholastics at that great medieval talk show.

The Scholastic Heresy

I made the mistake recently of reading the introductory foreword to a newly released edition of H. Rider Haggard’s book, The Brethren, which is about the Crusades. In the Introduction by the Protestant editor we are told that it is all right to read about the Christian Crusaders of old because their spirit, although misguided, was to bring forth the glorious Protestant Reformation, after which all things were right in the Church. I find such drivel offensive. But it should not surprise me; I have read and heard similar drivel on the Catholic side. In both camps, the question of “By what authority,” has been settled, but in my mind it has not been settled; it is still an open question.

The Catholic answer to the question, ‘by what authority,’ is the organized Roman Catholic Church with the Pope at its head. Ultimately then, the will of God, the word of God, is known through the Pope, the vicar of Christ.

The ultimate authority in the Protestant church is the Bible. Just as a Catholic would be justified in claiming someone who denied the Pope’s authority to be no longer Catholic, so would a Protestant be justified in claiming that anyone deviating from the ‘inerrancy of Scripture’ doctrine is no longer a believing Protestant. That doctrine is more essential to Protestantism than any subsequent interpretation of Scripture. Hence one could not claim a Protestant ceased to be a Protestant Christian because he no longer followed Luther or Calvin; he would only cease to be Protestant if he denied the inerrancy of the Scriptures.

In theory, the Roman Catholic solution to the ‘by what authority’ problem makes more sense to me than the Protestant one does. But in practice the Protestant solution seems better. It seems better because I think a sincere struggling pilgrim would get a clearer picture of Christ from an unaided reading of the Gospels than he would from an immersion in the Catholic whirl of Novus Ordo vs. traditionalism, and infallible vs. fallible arguments.

When reality proves your theories wrong, you must go back to the drawing board and make an effort to find out where you went wrong. I believe that I went wrong when I saw a straight path from Protestantism to the Enlightenment to modernity. In reality, the path of modernity runs like this: the very modern medieval scholastics, the Protestant rebellion against them, the scholastic inspired Enlightenment, and then modernity. The Protestant world finally caved in to modernity not because Protestants were in rebellion against medieval scholasticism but because the intellectual upper crust of the Protestantism abandoned fundamentalism for the pagan inspired scholasticism of the Catholics. I really see that this was the pivotal turning point of western Christendom. Scholasticism, smooth it over how you will, was the revolt of man against God. Man’s reason was placed on a summit above revelation. The scholastics maintained more of the traditional God language than the Enlightenment philosophers, but the Enlightenment thinkers were the natural heirs of the medieval scholastics.

The Catholic party line, which I have often used myself in the past, is that the Catholic Church does not change its doctrine, it simply makes explicit that which was implicit. But that explanation is not tenable. The Catholic Church, at least since Aquinas, has been an evolutionary and a revolutionary Church. No doctrine is safe from possible revision, not even the bodily resurrection of Christ. The fundamentalists remain the last static, the last non-evolutionary, branch of Christendom. But they have no intellectual support. The Protestant intelligentsia is with the Catholics as are the secularists. The secularists often quarrel with the Catholics over sexual matters (the Catholic hierarchy is squeamish about facing the logical conclusions of their modernism), but both groups are united against the fundamentalists, who desperately need some intellectual support.

N.B. One example (among thousands) of the Catholic Church’s desire to be in step with the times and against the fundamentalists was Cardinal Paul Poupard’s recent support of the evolutionists against the fundamentalists on the ‘intelligent design’ issue.

I certainly can’t prove my next assertion, but I’ll make it nonetheless – the first century Christians were Catholic fundamentalists. Their beliefs about God were in line with the modern fundamentalists and their worship services were similar to those of modern Catholics. There should be a fusion of Catholicism and fundamentalism, but so long as the Catholic Church remains wedded to the Enlightenment the fundamentalists are right to regard the Catholic Church as a vessel of evil.

The medieval scholastics wanted to throw more light on God by freeing reason from the passions. What stops reason from serving our passions? Nothing. An evil passion cannot be overcome by reason because reason is ethically neuter. It will serve whatever passion predominates. It is passion that rules us all. Only a stronger noble passion can defeat an evil passion. Our passion must be grounded in His passion.

There is something incredibly repulsive about the fundamentalists and something incredibly noble. They repulse one when they articulate and expound, and they inspire love, the love one has for steadfast courage in behalf of a noble cause, when they defend the inerrancy of Scripture against all comers. I find, in the ranks of Catholicism, that only converts have some understanding of the fundamentalists. A convert knows that belief in Him is greater than the system. A cradle Catholic who has been brought up to believe that incorporation into the Catholic system is the whole of Christianity is completely unsympathetic to the fundamentalists. (The argument between the Novus Ordo Catholics and the traditionalists is not doctrinal – both believe that the system is all – their argument is simply a difference over systems.)

The Catholics (one hopes not irretrievably) have gone completely wrong, because they have eliminated that essential personal component of religion: man, poor unaccommodated man, standing before the abyss with only a single divine thread and a divine promise keeping him from total annihilation, is the stuff that our dreams are made of. If you take away that dream and replace it with a system derived from the stuff of this world only, you have consigned man to satanic oblivion.

The fundamentalists at least place man where he belongs, in front of the living God. They err when they attempt to reason because they have but poorly learned the art of reasoning, for they believe it to be the art of the devil. No, it is the art of the devil to use reason in order to serve his regime. But to reason in the service of His reign is no sin. Reason unfettered, as practiced by the scholastics, always becomes demonic. But reason willingly placed at the service of the living God is one of the rungs on Jacob’s ladder.

The medieval scholastics wanted to throw more light on God by freeing reason from the passions. What stops reason from serving our passions? Nothing. An evil passion cannot be overcome by reason because reason is ethically neuter. It will serve whatever passion predominates. It is passion that rules us all. Only a stronger noble passion can defeat an evil passion. Our passion must be grounded in His passion. We always come back to the Shakespearean solution – strip off the layers. He is not up there – He is not contained in a golden bowl on top of a tower built with the bricks of philosophy. “Oh no, He is there,” says the pilgrim shade, pounding his chest, “He is at the center of the human heart which is all too often surrounded by briars and thickets too dense to be cut down.” But when we get close, the briars and the thickets fade away, just as they did for the faithful prince in “Sleeping Beauty.”

In the coal town where my father grew up, there was a town character named Bup-Bup Schupp, who always said, “Space is no place.” Some fifty years later, the American astronauts confirmed what the town character knew, that space was indeed no place. And light is not light when it merely lights up a vast empty space that is no place. The light must illuminate the human heart, thus revealing His heart, before it can be said to be the true light that leads us to a place that is the complete antithesis of no place.

The Unholy Alliance

We supposedly have a free press in this country, and yet every major print and television news outlet always prints the same stories. Odd, isn’t it? And the major news outlets never print the real story, the story that concerns the real man, Unamuno’s man of flesh and bone. The real story for a man of flesh and bone for the last 38 years has been the colorization of the United States, capped off recently by the importation of Somalians and Bantus from Africa to small towns throughout the United States. And by colorization I don’t mean the process of turning black and white pictures to color; I mean the deliberate undermining of white European culture by an unholy alliance of post-Christian whites and non-white barbarians.

Of course, our media elite is part of the clique that has allied itself to the barbarians, so one would not expect them to report on the “real story.” But the colorization is an event that has never before taken place in human history. No race has ever before invited other races to annihilate it. Races and cultures have succumbed to other races and cultures – through invasion – but no race and culture has ever before said, “Come on in and destroy our race and our culture.” The white race is unique in this.

The white race is the only race of people that accepted Christianity in depth and breadth – meaning that most whites were Christians – and it penetrated deeply into many. Certainly other races had Christians among them, but not to the extent of the white race. Is this disputable? No, I think not. The 1930s movie called The Mask of Fu Manchu had the Fu Manchu character cursing the hero by calling him a “white Christian,” correctly linking white and Christian. One can also now link white and post-Christian. Just as only the white race formed a Christian culture, now only the white race has formed a post-Christian culture. And there is a certain sympathy between the post-Christian and the barbarian: both hate the old, white Christian culture. It is this mutual hate that makes the post-Christian white think he can blend with the colored races and form a brave new barbarian race and culture. But there is a significant difference between the colored barbarians and the post-Christian barbarians. The post-Christians are technocratic barbarians. Whereas the Aztecs tore out the hearts of human adults and children in public ceremonies, post-Christians tear out the hearts of human infants behind closed laboratory doors. And whereas the modern post-Christian capitalists sits with his laptop computer and downsizes unseen thousands into oblivion, the Negro walks the streets of our cities and chops up thousands of innocent whites in a perfect imitation of the Mau Maus of the old Belgian Congo.

The white post-Christian thinks by mating with the colored, sharing his prosperity with the colored, and sacrificing his fellow whites to the bloodlust of the barbarians (“always thee, and never me”), he can save his own precious, sterile, technocratic life. But it won’t work for the simple reason that the white technocratic barbarian will always have more wealth than the colored barbarian. And since the barbarian mind always thinks inequality comes from exploitation, the result will be envy, bitterness, and reprisals. Ultimately, the alliance won’t work out well for either set of barbarians. The colored barbarians, once they have succeeded in destroying the post-Christian barbarians, will be incapable of sustaining the wealth and prosperity of the technocratic barbarians and will descend into chaotic self-annihilation. This is already happening in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and in the major cities of the United States.

It used to puzzle me when I heard members of the Catholic old guard rejoicing over the natural savages, usually the Negro, who they believed were going to re-Christianize the West. I didn’t understand, from a Christian standpoint, how the old guard could delight in the destruction of the remaining vestiges of Christian civilization. And I didn’t understand, from a simple pagan standpoint, how white men could rejoice in the destruction of their own people. It was only when I came to understand that the old guard were in that Catholic half-way house with their heads steeped in Greek modernity and their hearts with the old Europe, that I realized they didn’t see the black man as he was. They saw only an abstraction. Hence the black man became, in their sick minds, all that the white man once was: brave, chivalrous, and Christian. But ‘tis not so.

The logical question to ask when looking at the post-Christian civilizations of modern Europe and the U.S. is this: “Why not let the whites perish?” They should not perish, for this reason: The white race possesses “the ten just men.” There is still a remnant of the white race – there will always be a remnant – that is holding together what little of value is left in this Satan-worshipping modern world. In addition, our only link to the Christian past is through those ten just men. If we sever that link by completely destroying the white race, we will cut all races off from God.

I have no exact statistics on this matter, but I do know that there are a great many whites in the halfway house. Their minds are with the unholy alliance, but their hearts are still with white, Christian Europe. A friend, a Jewish rabbi, one of the ten just men, once told me a story about one of those halfway-house whites. This man was an old-fashioned librarian who loved and treasured his books, particularly the older ones. He looked upon himself as a guardian of a precious heritage, yet he had all the modern liberal notions about the colored races. My friend pointed out to him that if “those people” came into power, his old books and what they represented would disappear from the earth.

There are white post-Christians who have turned their backs forever on their own people and the old Christian culture, but there are many in the halfway house who could be reclaimed if their Greek minds could be subordinated to their European hearts. One must wage a two-front war: on the one front, uncompromising defiance to the unholy alliance of the colored barbarians and the white post-Christians, and on the other front, uncompromising refusal to yield one inch to the halfway-house Christians until they listen to the dictates of their own hearts and embrace holy, sacred Europe in its entirety.

Out of the Depths Have I Cried to Thee

Some years ago I had a relative who, almost overnight, went from a healthy, vigorous woman to a bedridden, sickly one. She remained that way for two years with no hope of recovery. But at the two-year mark of her illness, her doctor discovered that he had misdiagnosed her illness and subsequently changed his treatment to something more fitting for the disease which he now believed she had. And, miracle of miracles, my relative made a complete recovery.

It is apparent to me that the seemingly sick-beyond-recovery West has also been misdiagnosed. The patient is supposed to be sick from a lack of rationality, when in reality, he is sick from an excess of rationality. And it is to the neglected poetic voice of the West that we must turn, not to that of the philosophers, scientists, and theologians, if we ever want to see a healthy, vigorous West again.

The disembodied-brain heresy of the Greeks can best be described as the Olympian heresy. The Greek philosophers placed reason on Mt. Olympus in place of the old gods and studied, probed and dissected man from their Olympian height. Plato saw man as a walking universal, as part of the spiritual force of life from whence we all come. But Plato’s universal is not a personal force; it is not a God to whom we can speak to, as the Hebrews spoke to the living God:

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications. If thou, Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in His word do I hope. My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning. Let Israel hope in the Lord: for with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him is plenteous redemption. And He shall redeem Israel from all its iniquities.

Aristotle, unlike Plato, looked at the particular man, but not in a Christian, personal way. He looked at man as a specimen to be dissected and studied, not as a whole, unique personality.

The greatest poet of antiquity, Sophocles, stated that it was better never to have been born than to exist in the closed, meaningless world of the philosophers. And the folk of the Roman Empire rejected the Olympian religion of the philosophers for the more personal mystery religions. Yet it was to the Olympian religion that the Church fathers and the medievals turned when they chose to present the one true God to the folk. Yet the folk have always resisted the Greco-Roman paradigms. In every Christian age, save the latter 20th century, the folk have steadfastly resisted the Churchmen’s attempts to make Christ’s Church into Mt. Olympus.

The struggle has been a dramatic one. And the drama must continue. It is not time to bring down the curtain on Europe. The poets, speaking for the folk, have spoken with one voice about the sickness of the West. Their diagnosis is quite different from that of the philosophers, the scientists and the theologians. Let us hear their voices.

Shakespeare. Most of the poetic depictions of the disembodied mind come from the 19th century and early 20th century poets because they were the first to face it directly and unabated. But Shakespeare, with a remarkable prescience, was the first poet to square off against the heresy of the disembodied brain when he pitted Hamlet against Claudius. Both men are geniuses, but one, Claudius, put his intellect at the service of his satanic desire for power while keeping those virtues of the heart, such as faith, hope, and charity, isolated from and subordinate to his intellect.

At the beginning of the play, Hamlet is in an abstracted state of mind that could lead him to become, like Claudius, a disembodied brain at the service of Satan. But Hamlet has that within which passeth show; he resists the temptation to become a purely intellectual being. Instead he begins a quest toward integrality. All around him are abstracted caricatures of human beings, trying to make him view life as they view it, a game in which one must manipulate human beings as one would chess pieces. Hamlet perseveres. And it is at Ophelia’s grave when he realizes he loves, that the real Hamlet, the integral, heroic Hamlet, comes to the forefront: “It is I, Hamlet, the Dane.” He never looks back nor fails in his duty after that.

The most overlooked scene (overlooked by Christians) in all of literature is Hamlet’s defiance of augury. It doesn’t matter if we, by use of our intellectual powers divorced from their proper subservience to the virtues of the heart, can alter our material future for the better or avert death. It is to those wellsprings of humanity in our hearts, connected to His sacred heart, that our loyalty must be directed in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword. “We defy augury.” With those words, Hamlet speaks for European man and gives us the cure for all the West’s ills.

Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne, among others, is one writer who has placed opposition to the modernist-Gnostic heresy at the heart of his work. His single-mindedness on that topic – it is the central theme of most of his short stories and his major novels – has earned him many sneers from literary critics who suffer from the disease he criticizes. Hawthorne’s insights are so profound that one suspects he had many a personal struggle against the disembodied-brain temptation himself.

In much of the 19th century criticism of the disembodied brain, we start out in a scientist’s laboratory. Not satisfied with the ordinary Wind in the Willows type of life, the simple life of the plowed field and the evening lingerings, the scientific man of the laboratory must create a whole new world of which he, the man of science, is in control. The new world is always supposed to be for the good of the simple moles who are imprisoned in their ordinary, plowed fields, but the simple moles invariably end up annihilated.

Hawthorne’s story, “The Birthmark,” begins with an introduction to a man of science:

In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one. He had left his laboratory to the care of an assistant, cleared his fine countenance from the furnace smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife. In those days when the comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle, it was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman in its depth and absorbing energy. The higher intellect, the imagination, the spirit, and even the heart might all find their congenial aliment in pursuits which, as some of their ardent votaries believed, would ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force and perhaps make new worlds for himself. We know not whether Aylmer possessed this degree of faith in man's ultimate control over Nature. He had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weaned from them by any second passion. His love for his young wife might prove the stronger of the two; but it could only be by intertwining itself with his love of science, and uniting the strength of the latter to his own.

Such a union accordingly took place, and was attended with truly remarkable consequences and a deeply impressive moral. One day, very soon after their marriage, Aylmer sat gazing at his wife with a trouble in his countenance that grew stronger until he spoke.

The trouble was that the man of science’s beautiful wife had a birthmark which Aylmer believed tainted her whole face with the mark of “earthly imperfection.” In order to cure this imperfection, Aylmer… I think you can guess the rest. Of course, his wife dies, a victim of the Utopian aspirations of Aylmer’s disembodied brain:

Yet, had Alymer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness which would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame texture with the celestial. The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.

In Hawthorne's works, a disembodied mind is always the focus of evil, such as Rappacini in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Chillingsworth in The Scarlet Letter, or Ethan Brand in the story of the same name. And Hawthorne is right. What was a small but growing minority in his time has become 'The People' in our own time. The folk have become intellectualized; they are all disembodied brains. No matter where one turns, he meets an Aylmer or a Rappaccini.

P. C. Wren. I think P. C. Wren is one of the great authors of the West, and yet I’m sure he would not appear on any of the literary critics “top ten” lists. That is because literary critics tend to be Gnostics, and P. C. Wren’s works are decidedly anti-Gnostic.

In The Disappearance of General Jason, P. C. Wren is at his anti-Gnostic best. The hero, Colonel Carthew, goes in search of his old friend, General Jason, who has been missing for a long while. The search ends on a small island country inhabited by a people of Portuguese descent but who are independent from Portugal. They guard their isolation jealously, and it was the misfortune of General Jason that he inadvertently violated their privacy.

The island-nation has a queen, but the real ruler is a scientist named Dom Perez de Norhona. De Norhona has developed the ability to isolate a man’s brain from his body; by controlling a certain section of the brain, through hypnosis and surgery, he can make the body of the man do what he, de Norhona, commands. And he has turned General Jason into a dog. Carthew, quite justifiably, accuses de Norhona of murdering General Jason.

“You don’t regard it as a form of murder? The most terrible form of all – soul-murder.”

“No, why should I? Where’s the murder? The whole point is that I did not kill the patient in attempting to perform the experiment. You cannot have a murder without a corpse, can you? And as to murdering souls, I am not scientifically interested in souls. I’m only concerned with minds and bodies.”

Do we not see in de Norhona’s cerebral operation the end result of the Aristotleian-Thomistic separation of reason from grace? I do. For me, de Norhona is St. Thomas. Just as St. Thomas dissects man for the greater good (or so he thought), so does de Norhona.

It seemed to Carthew that de Norhona was a living intelligence, an intelligence almost freed from the hampering restriction and misguidance of emotion; a man whose mind was neither cruel nor kind, but almost purely scientific.

And yet he was human enough in his fanatical patriotism.

Carthew entertained for him curious and contradictory feelings of murderous hatred, fear, considerable respect and almost unwilling liking. So inevitably fair and just himself, Carthew had to admit that de Norhona had done nothing to Jason as Jason, an honest and honourable gentleman who had come to make certain right and proper proposals and suggestions of a commercial nature. Quite obviously de Norhona had used for his great experiment a man whom he believed to be a deadly enemy of his country, inasmuch as he was the first of an invading army, insupportable, detestable and loathsome in the eyes of people to whom independence was the very breath of life and the very religion of their soul.

One feels like screaming with Carthew, “What about the soul?” The Greek-Catholic-disembodied-brain heresy leaves a man without the essence of his humanity, his soul, for the soul is part of the body, not separate from it. A disembodied brain has no soul.

John Buchan. Written in 1916, the novel The Power-House pits a perennial Buchan everyman hero, Leithen, against Mr. Andrew Lumley, a capitalist powerhouse, a brain detached from everything human. At first meeting, Leithen dislikes Lumley. When he tries to find a reason for his dislike, he decides that Lumley is just too “Olympian.” And as he comes to know him better, he realizes that Lumley also is satanic: “Do you know what it is to deal with pure intelligence, a brain stripped of every shred of humanity? It is like being in the company of a snake.”

Lumley’s credo, which he delivers near the end of the novel, is the modern credo, spawned by Satan and nurtured by the Greek philosophers and their Catholic lackeys:

“I am a sceptic about most things,” he said, “but, believe me, I have my own worship. I venerate the intellect of man. I believe in its undreamed-of possibilities, when it grows free like an oak in the forest and is not dwarfed in a flower-pot. From that allegiance I have never wavered. That is the God I have never forsworn.”

It is time for Western man to forswear that false God. The drama is not over. The disembodied brains must wait till the last scene of the last act is played out. For it is always, as St. Paul assures us, in the last scene or at the last trump, if you will, that the Hero turns the tables on the villain.

God is a personality

The Son of God suffers not only as Man but also as God. There are not only human, but also divine passions. God shares in the sufferings of men. God yearns for His other, for responsive love. God is not an abstract idea, nor abstract existence, elaborated by the categories of abstract tjought. God is a Being, a Personality.

-- Nikolai Berdyaev in Slavery and Freedom

The 19th Century Counter-Attack, Continued

Since Oswald Spengler wrote his epic book, The Decline of the West, there has been enough 'decline-of-the-West' books written to fill up the rooms in which the miller's daughter was required to turn straw into gold. Books by Thomas Molnar, Plinio Correa de Oliveira, James Burnham, Richard Weaver, Romano Guardini, Max Picard, and Hilaire Bello come to mind, but there are countless more. Although none of the death-of-the-West authors cockeyed optimists -- after all, they are writing about a death -- they are still more optimistic about the prospects for a revival of the West than subsequent events warrant. Why -- despite no lack of men willing and able to delineate the causes and the cures for the West's decline -- has the West continued to decline? Is it simply that the prophetic voices have gone unheeded? Yes, to a certain extent. But there is also something missing in the analyses of the death-of-the-West authors. What is missing is a sufficient comprehension of the limits of rational analysis. Dostoyevsky wisely depicts Stavrogin in The Devils as "rational to the end" as he hangs himself. And the 20th century death-of-the-West authors with their overly analytic and rational examinations of the West's decline simply tighten the noose around the gasping-for-breath throat of the West.

The Christians of the last Christian century -- the 19th -- knew something that eluded the 20th century death-of-the-West authors; they knew that we are created and sustained by God's love. Outside that love, we cease to exist in a form that is even remotely human. We become ugly caricatures of human beings. The culture that Western man created in response to Christ's love was sustained because we loved it, as a parent loves a child created from a marriage of love. But when the marriage became a marriage of convenience, we ceased to care about the child of that marriage. The child didn’t die, but it became, deprived of love, an ugly, depraved monster.

The decline of the West then is at once a simpler issue than the death-of-the-West authors perceived and a more complex issue. It is simpler in that the West’s decline can be easily summed up: We ceased to love it. But the problem is also more complex because it is much easier to analyze the death of a culture than it is to rekindle a love for that culture, which is why I once suggested that we look at the 19th century Christians. They faced the same cold, scientistic, Godless void that we now face, but they reacted to it differently. They responded to modernity by going deeper, by living the Pauline Christianity of “if I have not charity.” Our century, on the other hand, went cosmic, caving in to the old Greek notion which Christians of every century have had to fight, namely, that the more non-human and cosmic our concept of God is, the more religious we are.

It seems to me, when I read an author such as Walter Scott or George MacDonald, that the 19th century Christians were the last Christians to believe unashamedly in Christ’s humanity. And I say this because they were not ashamed of the ideals, such as chivalry and the cult of the Christian hero, which sprang from a belief in Christ’s sacred humanity. Therein, I think is the reason for the gulf between us and the 19th century Christians. We are ashamed of Christ’s humanity and therefore embarrassed by the older European culture which reflected that sacred humanity. It is more than just a slight fault, this turning away from the human Christ toward a more cosmic Christ. It is a sickness that leads to the death of the soul. Christ warns us about it in Mark 8:38:

Whosever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words, in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

And again in Luke 9:26:

For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the son of man be ashamed, when he shall come in his own glory, and in his Father’s and of the holy angels.

In both passages Christ refers to himself as the Son of Man. Why the emphasis on His humanity? And why the Incarnation if not to emphasize that it was through humanity that one touched the living God.

The 21st century Christian responds to criticism of modern Christianity by saying nothing has changed. “It all goes on as before. People regularly watch the Christmas Carol and read the old fairy tales to their children.” But things are not the same. The 19th century Christians read Grimm and Dickens because they loved the stories; they didn’t study them for psychological insights. They believed in the One who inspired the stories. We study the stories along with the stories of the non-European countries just as we study the other religions along with His religion, but we have no personal connection to the stories of the European culture or to the divine Person who inspired the stories. Our approach is more cosmic and cosmopolitan than the old provincial approach of the 19th century Christians, but is it more Christian? Well, if to be more inhumane and devoid of passion is to be more Christian, then it is more Christian.

And it is the Catholic old guard, those great defenders of the Faith in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who remain the greatest obstacle to a full-blooded Christianity and, hence, a restoration of the West. The great defenders were all, so they claimed, great despisers of modernity and great advocates for the ‘Thing,” which was, of course, Catholicism. But the great defenders were also modernists. Their jeremiads against modernism were merely against the results of modernism. They were like liberal parents who draw back, appalled, when their children put into practice the principles they had been espousing but not practicing.

What is the essence of modernism? The poets and the folk, before the folk became intellectualized, have always known what the essence of modernity is. It is the disembodied brain, the angelic, satanic presence standing aloof from humanity and sneering at humanity. The old guard modernists didn’t sneer as openly as their children, but the sneer was there. They were infected with the notion that the reasoning power of the mind was pure, and the heart was defiled. They believed this despite the fact that the reality of life and the Old Testament prophets as well as Christ Himself all testified to the fact that it was the wisdom of the blood and of the heart that counted.

Most of the old guard are dead now; why not let them rest in peace? After all, they meant well. Whether they meant well or ill is more than I know. What I do know is that their heirs in the Platonic Novus Ordo and the Aristotleian traditionalist ranks still live and still perpetuate the lie that Christianity is merely a transmutation of Greek philosophy. Christianity didn’t die out because people no longer yearned for a personal savior; it died out because people yearned for a personal savior whom they could not find in the Church. When the 20th century Church ceased to resist the Greek separatist heresy, their church became a Christ-less church. And the old guard was so intent on defending the Greco-Roman walls of the Church that they neglected to check if Christ was still within those walls. It would sound nicer, but it would be a lie, if I said I harbored no resentment against the Catholic old guard. I resent them because I and countless others followed the path that they had laid out and yet never followed themselves, ending up in a dark dungeon with no light, no air, no anything.

Permanently etched in my mind is a conversation I once had with one of the Catholic old guard. I had asked the great man why he quoted St. Thomas so much and what he actually thought of St. Thomas. “Personally,” I told him, “he leaves me cold.”

The gist of his reply was that the great thinker did not think very much of St. Thomas, and he would not read him if he was trying to learn about the Christian Faith, but he quoted from St. Thomas all the time because St. Thomas was the reigning king in conservative and traditionalist Catholic intellectual circles, the main audience for the great man’s books and articles. So much for the old guard.

At the end of the day there is only one, absurd, archaic hope left for the West, and that hope is the Christian hero. He is a man so blinded by love for the old European culture and the One who inspired it that he doesn’t pay any heed to the new, false, Christless versions of Christianity and the new, emerging cultures of darkness. He is not a Nietzscheian Übermensch, a man of the future; he is a man of the past, the European past. And he endureth all things and hopeth all things because he has that burning flame in his heart that the 19th century Christians and St. Paul called charity.

The Nineteenth Century Way to God

I do not hold the traditional Catholic view of Western civilization, which looks on the 13th century as the epoch of Christian civilization followed by a steady decline in each ensuing century. I look on Christendom somewhat differently. I see it as one, whole entity from the 700's until 1917, with each century having some very negative anti-Christian heresies, and each century having some important Christian elements which other centuries lacked. But all the centuries preceding the 20th century in Europe and its satellites, such as America, New Zealand, and Australia, were Christian centuries. My favorite century is the 19th, and I think there is contained in that century the foundations of a future restoration of Christian culture.

What I call the separatist heresy, that which separates man's physical nature from his spiritual nature and his reason from his other senses, has been with us since the Greeks, but it was codified in the "great Catholic century": the 13th. In each subsequent century, that heresy ate away at the vitals of the Faith, and in each century until the 20th century, there has been a Christian counter-attack. These counter-attacks were not planned, reasoned attacks; they sprang up organically from the mystical body of the Christian Church.

In the 19th century, the attack was fiercer than in any of the preceding centuries, but the counter-attack was also greater than in any other century. The attack came in the form of Darwinism, capitalism, and communism, which were logical outgrowths of the Catholic separatist heresy. The Christian counter-attack came in the form of a greater interiorization of the Christian Faith. The Pauline Christianity of "if you have not charity" was developed more fully in the 19th century than it had been in any previous century. It was as if the European Christians were saying, "You have driven us to the wall, so we will cling to the most essential element of our Faith." That precious element was of course Christ's sacred humanity. God is human, God is humane, and hence our link to God is through the human.

My assertion of the greater interiorization and humanizing of the Christian Faith in the 19th century is not based on the number of people who attended church but on the testimony of that century's great authors, because I believe the great authors reflect not only their own personal vision but also the soul of their age. The one exception to this is Shakespeare, who, as Ben Jonson correctly stated, did not belong to any age. In fact, to the extent that he does belong to an age, it is the 19th century.

I do not see the Pauline Christianity in the British writers alone; I find it in Dostoyevsky, Spyri, and Schiller as well, but I will limit this discussion to the British authors. A partial list includes the following: Sir Walter Scott, Jane Porter, Charlotte M. Yonge, John Ruskin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, George MacDonald, Thomas Hughes, William Edmoundstoune Aytoun, Kenneth Grahame, John Buchan, P. C. Wren, and C. S. Lewis. The last four did their work in the 20th century, but they were very much men of the 19th century.

The Greek Heresy. It is not intrinsically evil to study the Greek and Latin languages. Nor is it evil to study classical cultures. In fact, both intellectual pursuits can be a great good. The danger lies in the adaptation of the Greek mindset. If one goes down that dark alley, he will be at the mercy of every self-proclaimed Socrates and will be hopelessly cut off from the personal, revealed God of Christianity. Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's School Days and Tom Brown at Oxford, is aware of the difference between Plato and St. Paul. He realizes there is more than a slight difference in the shifting of emphasis between an impersonal force, even if it is called a spiritual force, and a personal God with a name.

The result of Hardy's management was that Tom made a clean breast of it, telling everything, down to his night at the ragged school, and what an effect his chance opening of the Apology had had on him. Here for the first time Hardy came in with his usual dry, keen voice, "You needn't have gone so far back as Plato for that lesson."

"I don't understand," said Tom.

"Well, there's something about an indwelling spirit which guideth every man, in St. Paul, isn't there?"

"Yes, a great deal," Tom answered, after a pause; "but it isn't the same thing."

"Why not the same thing?"

"Oh, surely, you must feel it. It would be almost blasphemy in us now to talk as St. Paul talked. It is much easier to face the notion, or the fact, of a demon or spirit such as Socrates felt to be in him, than to face what St. Paul seems to be meaning."

"Yes, much easier. The only question is whether we will be heathen or not."

"How do you mean?" said Tom.

"Why, a spirit was speaking to Socrates, and guiding him. He obeyed the guidance, but knew not whence it came. A spirit is striving with us too, and trying to guide us--we feel that just as much as he did. Do we know what spirit it is? Whence it comes? Will we obey it? If we can't name it--we are in no better position than he--in fact, heathens."

That quote illustrates the great 19th century Christian counter-attack. The Greek philosophers can be read but only with a critical eye, not with the eyes of a devotee seeking guidance. The way of the Cross and the way of Platonic thought are two separate things. The one weakness in C. S. Lewis's masterpiece, The Last Battle, is when the Professor says, "It's all in Plato, all in Plato." Well, it's not all in Plato.

The 19th century Christians did not defeat the Greek heresy, which outlasted them into the 20th century, but there were the beginnings, in the 19th century, of a necessary rebellion against the Greek mindset. The rebellion was and is necessary because when faith becomes philosophy or pure mind, the heart and soul of that faith is eliminated. The Faith becomes a myth, which can be studied and examined and found to be necessary for the psychic health (Jung, Campbell) of the individual, but it cannot be acted upon as if it were literally true. What the Greeks and their Catholic followers fail to grasp is that pure mind will always fail to find God because God can only be found through the fairy tale mode -- the Christianized version of the myth -- of apprehension.

Chivalry. What had its tentative and rather formalistic beginnings in the medieval ages was deepened and enlarged upon in the 19th century. Tennyson's Arthur is a saint while Mallory's Arthur is a pagan with a few Christian trappings. Mere fighting skill is not sufficient; the knight must be fighting for those causes that support His reign of charity. Again, this is expressed well by Thomas Hughes:

Here all likeness ends, for the muscleman seems to have no belief whatever as to the purposes for which his body has been given him, except some hazy idea that it is to go up and down the world with him, belaboring men and captivating women for his benefit or pleasure, at once the servant and fermenter of those fierce and brutal passions which he seems to think it a necessity, and rather fine thing than otherwise, to indulge and obey. Whereas, so far as I know, the least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief that a man's body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, and advancement of all righteous causes and the subduing of the earth, which God has given to the children of men. He does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worth of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down, or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he.

And what are the works of Walter Scott if not an attempt to bridge the scholastic-created gap between God and men by way of chivalry? The fair damsel was imprisoned in the Darwinian tower and guarded by a capitalist dragon. (Yes, I know Scott wrote before Darwin's thesis was published, but the scientistic worldview that spawned Darwin was present when Scott wrote.) It was left to the knight with "But the greatest of these is charity," engraved on his shield to rescue the maiden from the dragon.

The Hero. There is a false apologetics which for many years was the unofficial official apologetics of the Catholic Church: Thomas Aquinas's infamous five proofs for the existence of God (five proofs which never convinced anyone of God's existence but did in fact make millions of potential believers believe that there was no God). And then there is the real apologetics that has led countless unbelievers to the foot of the cross. The real apologetics consists of the apprehension of something Godlike in one particular human being. It may be a parent, a friend, or a sibling, but we see in that person more than a mere collection of molecules.

That apprehension is not necessarily limited to one individual; we may see that quickening spirit in other individuals as well. And that vision of something more than nature in another human being enables us to see and believe in the God-man. Through humanity and through humanity only can we come to Him. If we only cogitate God, we will forever go around and around in a philosophic gyroscope, getting an occasional blast from some cosmic force as we whiz by, but we will not see the living God.

In contrast, the sympathetic bond we form with the hero is our true link to God. Let us look in on Tom Brown as he comes to do homage to his deceased hero, Arnold of Rugby, in Tom Brown's School Days:

He raised himself up and looked round, and after a minute rose and walked humbly down to the lowest bench, and sat down on the very seat which he had occupied on his first Sunday at Rugby. And then the old memories rushed back again, but softened and subdued, and soothing him as he let himself be carried away by them. And he looked up at the great painted window above the altar, and remembered how, when a little boy, he used to try not to look through it at the elm-trees and the rooks, before the painted glass came; and the subscription for the painted glass, and the letter he wrote home for money to give to it. And there, down below, was the very name of the boy who sat on his right hand on that first day, scratched rudely in the oak panelling.

And then came the thought of all his old school-fellows; and form after form of boys nobler, and braver, and purer than he rose up and seemed to rebuke him. Could he not think of them, and what they had felt and were feeling--they who had honoured and loved from the first the man whom he had taken years to know and love? Could he not think of those yet dearer to him who was gone, who bore his name and shared his blood, and were now without a husband or a father? Then the grief which he began to share with others became gentle and holy, and he rose up once more, and walked up the steps to the altar, and while the tears flowed freely down his cheeks, knelt down humbly and hopefully, to lay down there his share of a burden which had proved itself too heavy for him to bear in his own strength.

Here let us leave him. Where better could we leave him than at the altar before which he had first caught a glimpse of the glory of his birthright, and felt the drawing of the bond which links all living souls together in one brotherhood--at the grave beneath the altar of him who had opened his eyes to see that glory, and softened his heart till it could feel that bond?

And let us not be hard on him, if at that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes. For it is only through our mysterious human relationships--through the love and tenderness and purity of mothers and sisters and wives, through the strength and courage and wisdom of fathers and brothers and teachers--that we can come to the knowledge of Him in whom alone the love, and the tenderness, and the purity, and the strength, and the courage, and the wisdom of all these dwell for ever and ever in perfect fullness.

The 20th and the 21st century movements that purport to be Christian all seek to copy the technique of former times but care nothing for the spirit of those days. They seem to want Christian ethical behavior for utilitarian purposes, but they do not want a Christian spirit. But it is the spirit that we should seek to recapture:

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, are more than they.

Ah, what a perception! Does not Tennyson echo St. Paul? "Our little systems have their day" -- "And though I have the give of prophecy and understand all mysteries..."

They sinned much in the 19th century by placing a Darwinian monkey beside His altar. But the 19th century Christians did not respond to scientific wizardry with a wizardry of their own. They saw their Redeemer in the faces of His creatures and faced modernity with only St. Paul's assurance that charity never faileth. They followed the path of the Ancient Mariner:

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

We of the 20th and 21st centuries have chosen a different path from the ancient mariners of the 19th century. We have chose wizardry over the God-man. We have killed the albatross, but we have not repented. Instead we have gone on to shoot down robin redbreasts, sparrows, doves, and every other bird that is the harbinger of fair weather. Why? I suppose it is because we do not want fair weather. We have become so used to foul weather that we think it is beautiful and fair weather. To us, "fair is foul and foul is fair."

It is useless to posit a faith in God as a response to modernity if that Faith is only a faith in a computerized caricature of the true God. We need first to join Lear in the hovel and learn the difference between mercy and sacrifice. Then, and then only, will we be in union with the 19th century Christians and with Him.

Addendum:
I do not see the deeper, more developed Christianity reflected in just the great authors of the 19th century. Its artists reflect the same vision. Gustave Dore is the prime example; his illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Bible, Idylls of the King, and other works are also examples of the great Pauline Christianity of the 19th century.

Murder Most Foul

Only two men, Shakespeare and Doystoevsky, would not be surprised at the depths of depravity that our society has reached. Doystoevsky, because he had great vision and because he lived in a century where the seeds of decadence were starting to sprout; and Shakespeare, because of the depth of his vision and his unparalleled insights into the human soul, would not be surprised. But if we were to take any other man or woman from any century other than the 20th or 21st century, they would die from shock if they could see what we have become.

Murder like the Shiavo murder is something that goes on daily in our hospitals, but this murder took on a particularly depraved aspect when the news hounds gleefully reported the torture and death of the young woman. Unspeakably foul. Only Shakespeare could have written about it.

I kept hearing about the ‘law.’ Jeb Bush couldn’t call out the National Guard and order a military doctor to put the feeding tube back in because we “must respect the law” you know. What law? There is no law in this country. True law comes from God. It is a by-product and not a thing in and of itself. If the law is not God-based then it is not a law. We are a Godless nation and therefore a lawless nation. Naked power – no, let’s put it more strongly – satanic power rules this nation. Lukewarm pagan-Catholicism and moral majority Protestantism will be crushed like mush before the star-spangled citadel of Satan that is the United States. We need the fire of the Old Testament prophets and the sword of King Arthur if we truly want to rid the nation of a depravity that is unrivaled by any previous civilization, whether it be Nazi Germany or Sodom and Gomorrah.

Evolution

I remember a very earnest 8th grade social studies teacher getting quite upset with me when I laughed at her slide presentation on the subject of evolution. I didn’t laugh because I had been brought up as a fundamentalist; my mother was a liberal humanist and my father was a middle –of–the–American-road Protestant, and both were pro-evolution. I laughed because the idea seemed preposterous. And the idea still seems preposterous. Now I know people inside the religious community as well as outside take evolution very seriously, but I don’t think they take it seriously because they have examined the theory and find it credible; they take it seriously because they like the notion of a force stronger than God. It is a way of hedging their bets. If God turns out to be too hung up on their personal lives, they can always appeal to a more impersonal and more powerful force above God who is not too particular about personal sin. But the downside of the evolutionary god is that, having no distinct personality, he is not concerned with particular persons. So in order to lose one’s sins in the great nature god’s indifferent center, one must also lose one’s personality. There is no personal resurrection with evolution; there is only an impersonal splattering of dust into the cosmos.

Evolution is not something discovered by Darwin. He gave it the ape-to-man formulation, but the idea that a natural impersonal force controls our destinies and not God is as old as Satan, who peddled that idea in the Garden of Eden. And it seems to be a litmus test for sanity. Accept evolution and you are with the sane, the rational, and the scientific. Reject it and you are with the insane, the irrational, and the nonscientific. Well, why not live dangerously? I reject it completely and without any attempt at some kind of Augustinian compromise. I simply reject it.

The Monks of Bangor’s March

When the heathen trumpet's clang
Round beleaguer'd Chester rang,
Veiled nun and friar grey
March'd from Bangor's fair Abbaye;
High their holy anthem sounds,
Cestria's vale the hymn rebounds,
Floating down the silvan Dee,
O miserere, Domine!

On the long procession goes,
Glory round their crosses glows,
And the Virgin-mother mild
In their peaceful banner smiled;
Who could think such saintly band
Doom'd to feel unhallow'd hand?
Such was the Divine decree,
O miserere, Domine!

Bands that masses only sung,
Hands that censers only swung,
Met the northern bow and bill,
Heard the war-cry wild and shrill:
Woe to Brockmael's feeble hand
Woe to Olfrid's bloody brand,
Woe to Saxon cruelty,
O miserere, Domine!

Weltering amid warriors slain,
Spurn'd by steeds with bloody mane,
Slaughter'd down by heathen blade,
Bangor's peaceful monks are laid:
Word of parting rest unspoke,
Mass unsung, and bread unbroke;
For their souls for charity,
O miserere, Domine!

Bangor! o'er the murder wail!
Long thy ruins told the tale,
Shatter'd towers and broken arch
Long recall'd the woeful march:
On thy shrine no tapers burn,
Never shall thy priests return;
The pilgrim sighs and sings for thee,
O miserere, Domine!

– Sir Walter Scott

Tempest Toss’d

I’m weary of the game, “Let’s pretend there is a unified Church with a coherent doctrine,” but apparently most people are not tired of it. If you want to score some points by calling me a Protestant, that’s fine, but no Protestant sect would welcome me as a member, which is why I prefer the name, “unchurched Christian.” I don’t really think my confusion is so different from the state of those who criticize me for being confused, but let’s leave it at this: When every icon, every human prop of the civilization of your ancestors has turned topsy-turvy around and seems to exist only to plunge you into darkness, one must, or so it seems to me, cling to the vision of Le Fanu:

Next day was the funeral, that appalling necessity; smuggled away in whispers, by black familiars, unresisting, the beloved one leaves home, without a farewell, to darken those doors no more; henceforward to lie outside, far away, and forsaken, through the drowsy heats of summer, through days of snow and nights of tempest, without light or warmth, without a voice near. Oh, Death, king of terrors! The body quakes and the spirit faints before thee. It is vain, with hands clasped over our eyes, to scream our reclamation; the horrible image will not be excluded. We have just the word spoken eighteen hundred years ago, and our trembling faith. And through the broken vault the gleam of the Star of Bethlehem.

Everything else, while not necessarily wrong, is derivative. And when one is in the midst of a tempest, there is no time for derivatives. Of course being tempest tossed can turn out to be advantageous. Ferdinand never would have discovered that enchanted island and Miranda if the tempest had not forced him to perceive that his formerly comfortable ship was a ship of hell. “Hell is empty And all the devils are here.” My sentiments exactly. I would not be swimming in the ocean if my ship had not been full of devils.

Swimming in the ocean brine has turned some intuitions of mine into full-blown hardened opinions, the paramount opinion being, theology is death to faith. Why do the Old and New Testaments read like fairy tale books, and why does our Lord speak in parables if we were meant to theorize about God in the manner and style of the heathen Greeks? It seems that behind all theology is an attempt, done in the name of God, to place a force above God. That force is nature, not man’s nature, but raw, physical nature. Teilhard’s deification of the evolutionary process is a logical development of Catholic theology from Augustine to Aquinas; these theologians seek to put a natural, scientific process that only they understand at the center of the Faith. Therefore it is the mind of man that rules, not God. It is the oldest temptation. Adam and Eve were convinced by Satan that there was a power in nature itself that could make them gods. For all we know, Satan might actually believe that nature is more powerful than God. We are constantly encouraged, by our theological wizards, to keep munching on the apple. They play Satan to our Adam and Eve.

And by following the lead of the theologians, we acquiesce to the enthronement of Satan. When Augustine of Canterbury (as Bede informs us), following the theology of his illustrious namesake, instigates the massacre of thousands of British monks, and when Aquinas logically and maniacally takes a pro-choice position on ensoulment, we are enjoined to overlook such faults as aberrations. But they are not aberrations; they are the logical consequence of a hellish theology that places a natural, mathematical system above Christ.

There is a simple way of determining whether we are following the devil or Him with our theorizing: Does our thought lead to a furtherance of His reign of charity or does it lead away from His reign of charity and from Him? Prospero uses his mental powers to pray and to pardon the deceiver; not to advocate the slaughter of innocents. But of course to be like Prospero rather than Augustine or Aquinas or Calvin or Teilhard one must be willing to risk everything on mercy itself. We are all tempest tossed and in the salty brine; it is simply a matter of which lifeline we choose to grasp. The one leads to Him, and the other leads to those who are legion.

Samuel Francis, R.I.P.

‘They are slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing, and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
From the truth they needs must think:
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.’

There is no one who can fill the void left by Samuel Francis’s death. He was the last white intellectual with moral courage. I once saw a white commentator defend Muhammad Ali’s Black Muslim faith by saying, “He doesn’t hate white people; he just loves black people.” Well, of course the major tenet of Black Islam is the hatred of white people, and what the black-worshipping white commentator said of Ali could be more justifiably be said of Samuel Francis: He didn’t hate black people; he simply loved his own people.

But of course anyone who wants to preserve European values and who esteems the European people is considered evil by black and white. Alone – and I want to stress that word ‘alone’ – Mr. Samuel Francis pointed out that multiculturalism was not, ‘You respect my culture and I’ll respect yours’; it was in reality, ‘The white man must worship the black culture and hate anything white.’

Hounded off the ‘conservative’ Washington Times staff for his refusal to go with the pro-immigration flow, Mr. Francis continued to write columns published in Middle American News and his own newsletter.

Nearly every two-bit commentator on the conservative side of the ledger likes to present himself as a courageous voice of truth crying out in the wilderness, but in reality these conservative commentators are sycophants, moral eunuchs, spouting the same cowardly litany of conformity as their liberal counterparts. Only Samuel Francis had the courage to speak the truth, ‘though the whole world stood against him.'

Reflections on the Old Testament

In many of the old westerns there is a hillbilly father with a gun-toting clan of sons and nephews behind him. This hillbilly father usually kills his hillbilly neighbors and anybody else whom he takes a dislike to without restraint or remorse, justifying his actions by quoting one of the saltier passages of the Old Testament. And indeed the Old Testament would have great appeal to a homicidal maniac. But if it is read by someone with a genuine desire to come closer to God, there is much that can be gleaned by a perusal of the Old Testament. I was somewhat surprised recently (which I know I should not have been) when I read through the Old Testament and found it to be fascinating and completely relevant. A number of issues interested me.

1) Lord, what Fools…
The story of the Israelite people seems to be just one long story of faithlessness. In my childhood, I thought the Israelites had to be the stupidest people who ever lived. How, having seen God intervene so convincingly in their behalf so many times, could they persist in returning to the idols again and again? Now I can see that it was as easy as sin. God spoke to the Israelites through His prophets. The average Israelite had to first trust that Moses or Joshua or Gideon or Samuel was a true prophet, and then he had to believe that God’s will was something that was good for him. In other words, he had to believe something far more difficult to believe in than God’s power; he had to believe God loved him. One can imagine the thought process: “Sure, He parted the Red Sea for us and saved us from the Egyptians but now He plans to let us starve out here in the desert.” And it is not every generation that gets to see a miracle as dramatic as the parting of the Red Sea. Is it that hard then to see how the traditional idols of all the Israelites’ neighbors were more appealing to them than the true God? And in many cases the Israelites did not totally reject God; they simply hedged their bets, worshipping the pagan idols and the God of Israel, much like we do today, attending some nominally Christian service on Sunday and worshipping Baal during the rest of the week. It is embarrassing to read the adventures of the ever-faithless Israelites because one gets the distinct impression that one is reading about oneself.

2) Segregation and Slavery
It isn’t hard to see why the liberals deny that the Bible is true history and declare it to be mostly tribal legends. If they took it seriously, they would have to abandon some of their most cherished beliefs. For instance, if one takes the Old Testament seriously, God does not appear to be a One-Worlder. He is less than delighted with the Tower of Babel, and throughout the Old Testament He insists that the Israelites segregate themselves from those with different views of God. And while not providing a divine sanction for every type of slavery, the Old Testament does indeed sanction the type of domestic slavery that protects the Israelites from contamination and checks the baser instincts of the servant race. It is a domestic slavery much like that of the old South of our country.

3) Prophets and Prophecies
Despite the fact that the age of prophecy was supposed to have ended with the coming of Christ, we constantly are told about new prophets and prophecies, most of which, in the Catholic Church at least, are linked to the Virgin Mary. The Old Testament prophecies are related by God to one individual, such as Moses or Elijah, but are generally meant for the entire Israelite tribe. In the Christian era, the alleged prophecies are generally related to an individual or a small group of individuals. Are they meant for the entire Christian tribe? I think one is better off disregarding them unless the revelations come to him personally.

Unlike the Kings of Israel (Samuel had warned the Israelites not to give up the old prophet / judge system) who were generally stinkers, the prophets (with a few exceptions) were the cream of the crop. My favorite prophets are Gideon, Elijah, and Jeremiah.

Gideon, a prophet judge before the Israelites had kings, I admire for his steadfast fidelity to the Lord and his Agincourt-type victory over the Midianites.

Elijah I admire for the sheer dramatic virtuosity of his entrances and exits. He pops up without warning to the wicked King Ahab and tells him that “There shall not fall upon the ground any dew or rain until I call for it.” Then he disappears as suddenly as he came. And when he departs the earth, he leaves in a chariot of fire. What an exit!

When I was growing up, the only Jeremiah we heard about was the bullfrog. But Jeremiah the prophet was one hell of a man. He is often called the “weeping prophet” because it was his unpleasant task to tell the people of Judah of the evils that were coming. One is never popular when bearing bad news, but Jeremiah spoke what the Lord told him to speak despite imprisonment, rack and rope.

4) God’s Providence
The average Israelite does not seem to have been granted extra years to his life or special individual blessings. But the kings and prophets who adhered to God’s word were. And the Israelite people were granted victory in battle when they collectively obeyed God’s word. When they returned to the idols of Baal, God allowed their enemies such as the Assyrians or the Philistines to defeat them. But does God’s providence work that way now? Was not the Israelites’ situation unique? God had a particular reason for wanting the tribe of Israel to survive and a particular reason for making sure that they did not succumb to a permanent state of idolatry. He intended to bring forth the Christ from their tribe. I know that one could make a case that the sons of Japheth (the Europeans), once the Christ was born, became, when they converted to Christianity, the new Israelites. But I don’t think that case should be made. I think the European miracle was a miracle of grace and free will while the Israelite miracle was one of God’s grace. Nor do I think, as such Christian warriors as Lee and Stonewall Jackson thought prior to the South’s defeat, that God awards victory in battle to those who are in the right. The historical record shows us too many instances of the triumph of evil over the good to believe that the Christian side will always prevail. Every nation always invokes its gods before going to war, but a Christian should, even without having read Shakespeare or Doystovesky, be able to understand that no nation, since the Christ Child was born, will ever have the same divine sanction as Israel did when going into battle.

5) Evil Women
Ahab was probably the worst King of Judea, and yet his wife Jezebel was ten times as evil. Haman was as evil as they come, and yet his wife was worse. The Bible is full of virtuous and pure women such as Ruth, but it also tells us something about women, something that coincides with what the Greek tragedians like Aeschylus and the Christian poets such as Tennyson and Shakespeare have told us: “The difference between a man and a man is the difference between heaven and earth, but the difference between a woman and a woman is the difference between heaven and hell.” The feminine principle, when separated from God, has the demonic power to engulf the earth in the flames of hell. There must be Christian patriarchal restraints placed on women lest we have an entire society based on the hellish instincts of Jezebel. And it doesn’t take a great prophet to see that Jezebelian instincts dominate our own anti-society.

6) Fairy Tale Mode
The Old Testament (and the New as well because there is no dichotomy between the two) strongly resembles the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. There are giants, evil stepmothers, good and evil wizards, talking animals and dramatic divine interventions. To many people, in fact to most, this means that the Old Testament (and the New) is false. But I think it proves the contrary. In the depths of our souls we think in the fairy tale mode, because we have a racial memory of a time when we were closer to God. We don’t go back and forth between Narnia and earth anymore because we are too degenerate. But our great poets who articulate what we have hidden in our souls give us a glimpse of a time when we used to see wonders and hear an echo of God’s voice. When we abandon the fairy tale mode of thought and replace it with theology or philosophy, we place even more layers of atheistic crust over our already over-laden souls.