In Spite of Doom

The way is long, my children, long and rough –
The moors are dreary and the woods are dark;
But he that creeps from cradle on to grave,
Unskill’d save in the velvet course of fortune,
Hath missed the discipline of noble hearts.

-- Walter Scott

There is a point in Shakespeare’s play, King Lear, when Edgar, the faithful son of Gloucester, feels that he has nothing left to fear from existence because he has reached the lowest rung on the existential ladder. And he has good cause to think as he does. He has, in a few short days, gone from a princely state to that of an outcast and a beggar.

Yet better thus, and known to be contemn’d,
Than, still contemn’d and flatter’d, to be worst.
The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune
Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear.
The lamentable change is from the best;
The worst returns to laughter. Welcome, then
Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace!
The wretch that thou has blown unto the worst
Owes nothing to thy blasts.

But then he sees his blind father, who, having had his eyes gouged out for loyalty to the King, is being led by an old man.

But who comes here?
My father, poorly led? World, world, O world!
But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,
Life would not yield to age.

Edgar then concludes:

O gods! Who is’t can say, “I am at the worst”?
I am worse than e’er I was.

With Edgar’s wise observation before us, we will refrain from saying that the white, Christian, European has reached the depths of Godforsakenness. Instead, we will claim he is worse, much worse, than e’er he was. And where was the European?

The answer might surprise you. For approximately 1300 years prior to the 20th century the European lived in a fairy land. In this land, beautiful and virtuous princesses were rescued from fire-breathing dragons by handsome, brave knights. Third dumb brothers who were full of the charity that never faileth became rulers of kingdoms, and the Crowned King of Fairy Land, Jesus Christ, reigned in the hearts of His subjects.

Now, it would be quite easy to refute my preposterous assertion that European man lived in Fairy Land for 1300 years. One need merely cite the external evidence. During the years I claim the European lived in Fairy Land, we see, when we look with the eye, the all-too-familiar sins: murder, adultery, lust, theft, etc., ad nauseum. What then is different about the European? Well, nothing is different, according to a certain theological school which claims there is the city of God, which consists of the Christian Church, and there is the city of man, in which sinful men endure their brief tenure on earth. But that theory was hatched before the fairy tale began. Are not we, as Christians, obligated to abandon theoretical truth when it conflicts with actual truth? And the actual truth is, if we look at the internal evidence that can be seen by looking through the eye, that the European Fairy Land did exist. In the souls of the Europeans something was born that never existed in any people before or since. A faith was born and came to fruition.

Someone from completely outside the European tradition can see the distinctiveness of the European culture, although he wouldn’t have any appreciation for it, and someone from within the European tradition can appreciate the distinctiveness of European culture. But those liberals who have retained the material comforts of European civilization while abandoning the ancient faith cannot see the Fairy Land at all.

God so loved the world that He gave us His only begotten Son. And that Son drank the cup to the dregs; He experienced everything that we experience, even the Godforsakenness of the world. But He overcame the Godforsakenness of the world through faith. And what the European tried to do was to build a civilization, despite the fact that the religious experts tell us there is no such thing as a Christian civilization, in which the feeling of Godforsakenness was transformed into faith. The European experience reads like a great religious novel. We see in the lives of ordinary Europeans and in the art of extraordinary Europeans the working of divine grace.

Now we come to the liberals. They no longer look at life through the eye. They see with the eye and they see only externals. Only the empirical, physical fact counts with them. They see no need to look for the Fairy Land behind the external world because they believe the external, natural world is all the world there is. And that world is Godforsaken. In fact, the liberals have institutionalized Godforsakenness, because a world founded on the a priori conviction that there is no personal God above nature is a closed world, devoid of God’s grace.

Of course the European Fairy Land existed in the hearts of individual Christian Europeans. Outwardly, it appeared that they were like unto other non-European human beings. But when one sees some outward manifestation of the vision contained in their hearts, one realizes that the difference between the European and the non-European was a difference between heaven and hell. (1) And I say between heaven and hell rather than between heaven and earth, because after the coming of Christ there is no possibility of an intermediate pagan civilization such as the Greek worshippers are always trying to institute.

A people that will not have Christ will have Satan. Liberaldom is a perfect example. What has been the end result of trying to find some kind of compromise god? We have Satan for a god, and he has bestowed his benediction on legalized abortion, the worship of the golden calf, and the worship of the colored races. Such is the modern world of liberaldom.

There are times in a Christian’s life when he feels an overwhelming sense of God’s presence. But there are times when a Christian feels forsaken by God. Like the Ancient Mariner, he laments:

O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely ‘twas, that god himself
Scarce seemed there to be.

In a Christian society there are so many unseen forces at work, primarily other Christian souls in union with Him, that come like “ministering angels” to aid the Christian in his hour of need. And the struggling Christian emerges, with the aid of often unseen and always unsung kindred Christian souls, from the dark night of the soul into the light of Christ’s love. But when so many human souls have said in their hearts that Christ be not risen, a Christian who still clings to the faith inevitably spends a good deal of his time battling his feeling of the Godforsakenness of the world. He starts to feel like Tirian in C. S. Lewis’s book, The Last Battle, who wonders why God’s grace is not working as it’s supposed to and as the old stories say it works:

He thought of other Kings who had lived and died in Narnia in old times and it seemed to him that none of them had ever been so unlucky as himself. He thought of his great-grandfather’s great-grandfather King Rilian who had been stolen away by a Witch when he was only a young prince and kept hidden for years in the dark caves beneath the land of the Northern Giants. But then it had all come right in the end, for two mysterious children had suddenly appeared from the land beyond the world’s end and had rescued him so that he came home to Narnia and had a long and prosperous reign. “It’s not like that with me,” said Tirian to himself. Then he went further back and thought about Rilian’s father, Caspian the Seafarer, whose wicked uncle King Miraz had tried to murder him and how Caspian fled away into the woods and lived among the Dwarfs. But that story too had all come right in the end: for Caspian also had been helped by children—only there were four of them that time—who came from somewhere beyond the world and fought a great battle and set him on his father’s throne. “But it was all long ago,” said Tirian to himself. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen now.” And then he remembered (for he had always been good at history when he was a boy) how those same four children who had helped Caspian had been in Narnia over a thousand years before; and it was then that they had done the most remarkable thing of all. For then they had defeated the terrible White Witch and ended the Hundred Years of Winter, and after that they had reigned (all four of them together) at Cair Paravel, till they were no longer children but great Kings and lovely Queens, and their reign had been the golden age of Narnia. And Aslan had come into that story a lot. He had come into all the other stories too, as Tirian now remembered. “Aslan—and children from another world,” thought Tirian. “They have always come in when things were at their worst. Oh, if only they could now.”

Yes, that’s it. If only we could say to ourselves – and believe it: “God’s grace can work for us like it did for those other Europeans.” I have before me one of those nationalist publications dating back to 1979. In one article the author confidently asserts that white people are waking up and are not going to tolerate the black invasion any longer. And still, some 29 years later white people have not stopped the black invasion. But what if white people were to open up those channels of grace that our ancestors used? Then slowly, but in countless unseen ways, the tide will begin to turn in America and throughout Europe. ‘All things are possible in Him and through Him’ was the motto of the European Fairy Land.

But we have to align ourselves with the ethics of Fairy Land if we would restore Christian Europe. In Fairy Land, which is the European’s land, a man’s whole life is a prayer to God. His political activity, his leisure activities are all forms of prayer. When the European broke with Fairy Land he left the integral prayer-filled life behind and became a dislocated man. You can’t pray to liberals to save you from liberalism. And that is what the white neo-pagan and the conservative constitutionalists have been doing for the past 40 years. Prayers such as, “Let me be part of liberaldom," do not receive divine sanction. The Christian European’s prayer is a different one: “Oh Lord, give us the strength and courage to restore Christian Europe.” God’s grace cannot be seen under a microscope, but it is the only remedy for European man. +
_____________________

(1) If a man were to go back in time and observe William Shakespeare as he went about his day, I don’t think he would observe Shakespeare doing anything different from other human beings. But of course Shakespeare was different; he was extraordinarily different because of his heart and because of his vision. And that is the case with the Europeans who lived during the Fairy Tale Era of Europe. They might appear to be similar to the men and women of color if one simply observed them going about their daily lives, but if one looks into their hearts and sees life through their eyes, then, oh what a difference there is between one people and another.