The Rational Lodger

“You have got a rational lodger, who knows how to attend upon himself.” – LeFanu

In the trial scene in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the Jewish merchant expresses his delight with the judge’s verdict, which grants him his pound of flesh, with these words: “A Daniel come to judgment! Yea, a Daniel! O wise young judge, how I do honour thee!”

But when the “upright” judge pushes Shylock’s plea for justice to its logical conclusion and condemns Shylock, it is Antonio’s friend Gratiano who has the last word.

Gratiano: A Daniel, still say I, a second Daniel! I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word.

In the same spirit that Gratiano thanked Shylock, I must thank Thomas Fleming for using the words “infantile ravings’ to describe those who were concerned about the survival of the white race. With those words Thomas Fleming summed up liberaldom’s brief against Christianity. Please note that I do not say a ‘brief against Kinists’ or a ‘brief against Europeans’ but a ‘brief against Christianity,’ because Christianity is synonymous with those who adhere to the Kinist, European vision of Christ.

I have heard this liberal case against Christianity all my life, so let me translate Fleming’s words for the reader: “There is a higher, purer religion than Christianity as it is presented in the Gospels. The mature, thinking man knows that there is a force beyond the tribal, clannish God of the Bible, and that force can be comprehended by human reason. To interpret the Gospels too literally on subjects like the resurrection of the dead and the divinity of Christ is foolish and childish. A grownup doesn’t do such things.”

This was the first liberal’s argument. He told Adam and Eve it was infantile and foolish to adhere to an arbitrary commandment of a primitive, archaic God when they could use their rational powers to tap into a higher, purer power than God. The Athenians told St. Paul the same thing. It has always been thus. Satan attacks us by appealing to our intellectual pride. “By God, I’m no dummy. I’m not a stupid baby – I’ll adopt the higher religion.” Of course, Satan never uses the same disguise twice. He might appear in a lab coat, a priest’s cassock, or the cashmere sweater of a conservative columnist. But he always uses the same method. He appeals to man’s rational faculties divorced from his heart and blood.

In a magnificent short story called “The Mysterious Lodger” Joseph Sheridan LeFanu presents us with a portrait of the devil that is in keeping with Scripture and the great Christian poets. (1) The devil, when he wants to destroy a family or a community, always takes up lodgings disguised as a rationalist.

A few days after, on my return, I found my poor little wife agitated and dispirited. Mr. Smith had paid her a visit, and brought with him a book, which he stated he had been reading, and which contained some references to the Bible which he begged of her to explain in that profounder and less obvious sense in which they had been cited. This she had endeavoured to do; and affecting to be much gratified by her satisfactory exposition, he had requested her to reconcile some discrepancies which he said had often troubled him when reading the Scriptures. Some of them were quite new to my good little wife; they startled and even horrified her. He pursued this theme, still pretending only to seek for information to quiet his own doubts, while in reality he was sowing in her mind the seeds of the first perturbations that had ever troubled the sources of her peace.

At the heart of the Reformation was a desire to hold on to a basic, elemental faith in the divinity and humanity of the man called Jesus. The rationalist pretensions of the scholastics had sown doubts in the minds of the faithful, which they sought to assuage by returning to their apostolic and European roots. They were only temporarily successful in their efforts because, as Fitzhugh has described for us (2), the philosophical speculators stepped in and rationalized the Protestant protest against rationalism.

It is not, as the rationalist critics of bred-in-the-bone Christianity maintain, that there is no rational component in the bardic or kinist Christianity. There is. But ultimately Christianity is beyond reason. Whenever we try to limit its parameters to what is rational, we destroy that which makes Christianity wholly true and wholly unique.

Our chroniclers, the European poets, have shown us that in every age the devil, disguised as a rationalist, is always present. He claimed the European “intellectuals” first, and then in the 20th century, he claimed the European folk or ‘volk.’ In centuries prior to the 20th, the Christian warrior always rallied the folk against the rationalist elite. However, now that there are no folk, the Christian braveheart stands alone. But then again, not quite alone. He stands in line with noble antique hearts, living still, in the arms of our Lord. What kind of advantage, if any, does that give the modern Christian knight over his liberal antagonists? A great advantage, if he doesn’t break faith with the blood of his ancestors. But if he steps away from his ties of blood and decides to be clever, as Toad does when he motors away from Toad Hall, he will place the devil in a “can’t lose’ situation. If the conservative is a rationalist and the liberal is a rationalist, both are in the devil’s camp. The devil wants all of man’s existence to be confined by the rules and parameters of academic study, because he knows that if a man studies the thing he loves on a purely rational basis, he will soon cease to love the object of his study. This is why literary critics know less about literature than anybody else and the reason why modern clerics know nothing about God. Being rationalists they have lost the wisdom of the heart that is necessary for a proper understanding of existence.

In Great Expectations, Mr. Wopsle is not taken seriously when he disputes the pompous Pumblechook, who has a theory about the robbery. He is not taken seriously because “he has no theory.” But Wopsle is correct. The bardic Christian is in the position of Mr. Wopsle. He is correct: race and blood are the building blocks of religious faith. But in a rationalist age, or to be more accurate, a satanic age, only the theoretical is real; concrete reality is considered false. The temptation for the Christian is to come up with a theory to combat the liberals’ theories. But if we succumb to that temptation, we will no longer be among them but not of them; we will be of them. When the Flemings of liberaldom tell us that it is unChristian, infantile, and irrational to concern ourselves with the survival of the white race, we will not run and find a theory to justify our existence. We will hold to our ancestors’ faith, the faith that transcends theory, and become even more recalcitrant and unyielding in defense of our race and our faith.

The liberals think they have reached the final, higher stage of faith. They have gone beyond race, beyond the ties of kith and kin that used to bind ‘unenlightened’ Europeans to each other. But the fruits of their higher faith are hideous. You have to be a soulless mutant to live in our modern rationalist anti-culture and actually view that anti-culture as the summit of man’s achievements on this earth. Only a sick, demented rationalist who has concluded, after much research and careful study, that hell is heaven and heaven is hell could possibly rest content with our unholy present.

The gentle bard is right: a man can never say with certainty that he is at the worst. He is worse than ere he was. But the extent of the de-evolution of European man from Christian to rationalist cannot be measured on any human scale. The fall was from heaven to hell. The European had Christ in his heart and blood. He possessed heaven. When he forsook his blood, he lost heaven and gained hell.

Thomas Nelson Page described the white man’s instinct to preserve his race as an instinct “beyond reason.” To the modern liberal that is heresy. But the liberal is married to hell, and there is no instinct beyond reason in hell, because there is no love in hell. The rational lodger is terrified of that loving instinct of God which compelled Him to reach out to man. And he is also afraid that man will respond to God’s overture with a loving instinct that is beyond reason. When the Europeans did in fact respond to God’s love, Satan became the mortal enemy of the European people. He has no desire to destroy the non-white races because they have steadfastly refused to believe that spirit and blood, God and Man, can be joined. They have always preferred religions of sacrifice to the religion of mercy.

The rational lodger can never rest until the white man ceases to exist, because the white man’s blood was animated by His spirit. This is why he lodges in the formerly Christian churches of the white man. He wants them all to be rational so that they will slavishly worship the colored races and destroy the white race, all in the name of God. And that is the key. If man’s reason alone is the final arbiter, then reason is God. That is the way liberals think. Reason meant something quite different to the apostles. They were not Thomists! To the apostles, reason was subordinate to the heart. It was used as an aid in articulating the faith, not as a substitute for it. “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” (I Peter 3:15).

Yes, something must be in you. There must be an instinct in your heart and blood that is beyond reason which enables you to resist the seductive heresies of the rational lodger and to champion the God born in a manger. The third dumb brother in the fairy tales always in the end triumphs over the rational, clever brothers, because the third dumb brother has that within him which transcends reason: a heart connected to His heart.

In common, everyday English when we say a person is acting “irrationally” we mean to say that he is acting in a way that is not right. “You can’t deal with a person who is not rational.” And when we say a person is acting rationally we usually mean that he is acting in a proper way. But in the metaphysical realm, it is quite a different story. Stavrogin, in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, is perfectly rational when he commits suicide. The Negro savages who tortured and murdered the Catholic nuns in the Congo were acting rationally; it was in their self-interest to murder the whites. And Pope John XXIII was acting rationally when he forgave the murderers; it was in his best interest, the interest of his rational, satanic, faithless faith, to support the colored race and jettison the white.

In the incredibly prophetic Greek myth, Prometheus, because he loves mankind, steals fire from the gods and gives it to man. And he is punished for his act of charity. In the Christian myth, the true myth, God Himself gives fire to man. He descends to earth and sets hearts on fire. And like Prometheus, He suffers because of His act of charity, but unlike Prometheus, He suffers because He wills it, not because the gods decree it.

The Greeks replaced their cruel gods with a rational philosophy. But then, from whence comes the Promethean fire? There is no fire in rationalism. The Christian hearth contains the fire that lights the world. If you kill the white man’s love for that hearth, the world will be plunged into darkness. And if the rationalist were not blinded by his reason, he could see that the only patches of light left on earth are in those places where ancient European hearth fires are still burning. The fires are kept alive by the love of our race, the Christ-bearing race. If we hearken to the new religion of rationalism and vitalism, we will separate ourselves from God. But if we stay close to the European hearth we will be able to counter the assault of the rationalists and the barbarians. We will counter their assault with fire, the fire from the center of the European hearth. +
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(1) On the basis of two works, the short story “The Mysterious Lodger” and his novel Uncle Silas, LeFanu deserves to be placed in the top rank of Christian poets.

(2) “A Washington, a Peel, or a Wellington, never ‘writes himself down an ass’ by appealing to abstract principles to justify measures which are rendered necessary by a thousand minute and peculiar circumstances of the hour, which common sense and experience instinctively appreciate, but which philosophy in vain attempts to detect or to generalize. Common sense never attempts ‘to expel’ nature,’ but suggests and carries through a thousand useful reforms by recurrence to and comparison with the past, and by cautious experimentation. Common sense sometimes errs by excess of conservation; but it is better to err with Pope, who thought ‘Whatever is, is right,’ than with Jefferson, whose every act and words proves that he held that ‘Whatever is, is wrong.’ The Reformation was not the thought and the act of Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, and Erasmus; but the thought and the act of society—the vox Populi, vox Dei. Popes and cardinals are not infallible, but society is. Its harmony is its health; and to differ with it is heresy or treason, because social discord inflicts individual misery; and what disturbs and disarranges society, impairs the happiness and well-being of its members.” – Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters by George Fitzhugh