Saturday, July 12, 2008

Good Blood

Tirian had never dreamed that one of the results of an Ape’s setting up a false Aslan would be to stop people from believing in the real one.

-- C. S. Lewis in *The Last Battle*
It was the fate of the Hebrews to watch what had started out as a small heretical cult from within their nation become a worldwide religion that left them marginalized. How did this happen? The Hebrews forgot what the essence of their faith was: the fact of a personal God. While the Roman civilization was self-destructing from its refusal to accept a personal God, the Jewish faith became marginalized by the same type of refusal. Christ was the fulfillment of the Jews’ very personal faith. His rejection was like the rejection of a fiancée, to whom one became engaged after a long exchange of letters and phone calls but, when he showed up at the doorstep, was turned away.

It would seem that there is within man a great desire for a personal God as well as a contradictory desire for an impersonal, less human, and more abstracted God. We desire this, I think, because we sense that to be fully human, as Christ is, is too painful. No other poet has ever come close to Shakespeare in describing the pain and suffering involved in the process of becoming human. And Shakespeare shows us that few make it. We stop somewhere along in the humanizing process, create a false, abstracted image of God, the image closest to the point we have gotten to, and declare that image to be the authentic one.

How then can we ever become fully human if we worship at the altar of a false god? If we are forever playing Julian the Apostate by putting classical wings on Christ’s outstretched arms, it would seem that we are doomed to wander forever, like the flying Dutchman, unblessed, unforgiven, and unhallowed. I think the answer lies in the works of P. C. Wren and in the declaration of William Blake:
This Life’s dim Windows of the Soul
Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole
And leads you to Believe a lie
When you see with not thro the Eye.
Yes, we must have a vision, a beau ideal. And we must not accept our actions and thoughts that run counter to the beau ideal as reality because they outnumber our thoughts and actions directed toward the ideal. It is when the white heat is in our hearts that we see the beau ideal and behave like Beau Geste. That is reality; that is the vision that needs to be protected by the entire bureaucratic structure of society and the sacramental structure of the church.

The Catholic Church and the modern Protestant churches have followed the way of the Pharisees and the ancient Romans. The betrothed came to the door and was rejected because of his humanity. And the rejection stems from intellectual pride. We always insist that the voices of the prophets and the reality of the incarnate God be forced to fit our intellectual constructs. And our intellectual constructs are always wrong, because they come from disembodied brains and not the blood. Mary Augustus Evans, the Southern authoress, put it quite well when she said, “Good blood doesn’t lie.” When we are connected to God by a blood tie, whatever comes from the blood will be pure and true.

Adam and Eve had a filial, blood relationship with God. He was their Father, their progenitor. He certainly loved them, but did they love him? Well, obviously not enough. Satan tempted them, and they severed their blood tie to their father in order to study Him in the abstract. “Does God really mean that we should not eat the apple because it will harm us, or is He secretly afraid it will empower us?” That type of “studying” led to the loss of Eden. And the same type of study led to the loss of the new Eden.

European civilization was the second Eden. And it was a better Eden than the first, because in the second Eden God revealed Himself in His entirety through Jesus Christ. Of course the European Eden was not the literal Eden of the Bible. There was sin and death in the second Eden, but there was a presence, His presence, in the second Eden that held out the hope that death, the final enemy, would be defeated.

In our modern, anti-European civilization there is no hope that death will be defeated. There is only the hope that science will render death painless. And His presence has been replaced by the presence of Satan.

Herbert Butterfield, in his masterpiece, Christianity and History, said,
It may be true that nature and history are not separable in the last resort, but at the level at which we do most of our ordinary thinking it is important to separate them, important not to synthesise them too easily and too soon, important above all not thoughtlessly to assume that nature, instead of being the substructure, is the whole edifice or the crown. The thing which we have come to regard as history would disappear if students of the past ceased to regard the world of men as a thing against nature and the animal kingdom. In such circumstances the high valuation that has long been set upon human personality would speedily decline.
I think we should regard the blood and the heart in the same way. For ordinary purposes there is no such thing as a merely physical concept of human blood and the human heart. Heart and blood are mystical, spiritual entities. You have to overturn all of God’s revelation to man if you deny that heart and blood contain the soul of man and are his connecting links to God.
For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
To paraphrase Linus in Charlie Brown’s Christmas, “That’s what Christianity is all about, Mr. White-hating Technocrat.” And all the products of the scientific, rational, modern man have been created to detach man from his heart, which is where the true light of knowledge shines.

To use Butterfield’s term, for ordinary purposes there has only been one civilization of the heart, and that was the European civilization. Liberal-liberals say that civilization was evil. Conservative-liberals say we only need to preserve the intellectual processes and procedures of the old European civilization and not the heart and blood heritage of its people. (1) But the heart and blood of the white man is the soul of European civilization. Without it there is no civilization.

The democratic process, multiculturalism, universal brotherhood, and on and on… are all code words for the rule of Satan. When the white man once again looks to the light of knowledge in his own heart and blood, he will be equipped to fight the only war worth fighting, the war for sacred Europe.
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(1) Patrick Buchanan is an example of the liberal-conservative. In a recent book he writes about the unnecessary war, the Second World War, but it was only unnecessary if you are a kinist, someone who believes that race and faith bind a nation together. If you believe, as Buchanan and his ilk do, that a nation is based on an idea, then World War II was necessary to defend the idea of the universality of democracy.

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