Pietas

Unbribed, unbought, our swords we draw,
To guard our king, to fence our law,
Nor shall their edge be vain.

The liberals are not overly concerned about the proliferation of pornography. Virtually everything is permitted in the porno-zones of our major cities, and virtually everything is permitted in our movies and in our television shows. There is however one significant exception. The real life torture murders and rapes of white people by black barbarians are not talked about or shown by the liberals. And of course we know why the black atrocities against white people are never reported or shown. The mad-dog liberals are committed to a new religion in which the Negro savage is the centerpiece. If the most obviously unequal of God’s creatures can be made to appear equal, then the liberals’ dream of one coffee-colored race and one Godless faith can be realized. So we are constantly barraged with false images of blacks on stage and screen, in which they are depicted as kinder, nobler versions of white people. And upper and middle-class whites, who have very little contact with blacks other than with upper and middle-class ones who know how to work the system, by and large believe that the world should be one big, happy, racially blended family. But it is a different story in the white lower classes. They can’t escape to gated communities and expensive high-rise apartments. They know what the presence of blacks in a community means. It means bestial torture, murder, rape, and robbery. The white liberals should forsake their liberal pomp and expose themselves to “to feel what wretches feel,” but in order to do that the liberals would have to care about the plight of white people. And of course, they don’t care.

This lack of concern for one’s own kind was not always the mark of the European. In fact, the mark of a Christian European was his intense concern for his own. The relief of Lucknow was not one isolated incident; such concern for one’s own was the rule, not the exception in Christian Europe. And the key word is ‘Christian.’ When the European was Christian, he cared about his people.

I think the event that indicated Christian Europe was no more took place in the 1960’s when Pope John XXIII stated he had “no feeling of hatred, only loving charity and forgiveness” for the Congolese barbarians who tortured, mutilated, and killed nineteen missionary priests, and then raped, tortured, and killed the missionary nuns. If a people stand by and let such a thing happen to their own kind, can they be called Christian? Can they even be called human? No, they can’t. They must be called what they have become: soulless robots who have banished the Man of Sorrows and replaced Him with the sterile ratiocinations of their own minds. Pope John didn’t see actual white people being tortured and murdered, he saw in the white victims mere abstractions whose deaths gave him a chance for a P.R. coup: “I can appear saintly if I forgive their enemies.” And he didn’t see, in his mind’s eye, hideous beasts straight from hell, when he thought about the Congolese natives who murdered the whites. He saw adoring noble savages who would fall down and worship him because of his great beneficence.

Pope John represented the new breed of bloodless, and therefore, soulless (because the soul of man resides in the blood) liberal whites who see life as an abstraction. The black is an abstract good, and the white is an abstract bad, so nothing that the black does to the white can be termed evil, because the white is evil and deserves to be punished. Voting for Obama or honoring Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday is not sufficient punishment for white people. Only the daily sacrifice of whites to blacks will satisfy the bloodlust of the barbarians and the utopian dreams of the liberals.

Pope John was a prototype of the new, anti-white Christian. His hardhearted, callous unconcern for the suffering of his own kind, and his abstract love for the black race became the faithless credo of the white man. Why does a man adopt such a cruel, heartless faith? A man adopts a new faith when he has lost his old faith. In the Christian faith, and in no other faith, each individual soul has eternal significance. This is a very hard thing to believe when we look at the material world. Nature and nature’s laws seem, as regards individual human beings, to be inhumane and unforgiving. But the Christian used to believe that man was something more than nature, because his God was something more than nature. The two faiths are coordinate. When one believes that his God is a distinct God above and separate from nature, then he believes that human beings created in that God’s image are above and separate from nature. It was only after Christ, by His resurrection from the dead, asserted that God’s love was stronger than nature’s inexorable laws, that man started to see nature as something that could be studied and used in the service of man.

Modern science was made possible because Christ rose from the dead. But European man forgot who gave him sovereignty over nature. He placed Christ in a subordinate position to science. The end result of that betrayal has been the return of a gnawing fear in the heart of the white man. While passionately trying to scientize every aspect of his life, a small voice inside of him keeps telling him that he is once again naked before his greatest enemy. He thought science was leading him to paradise, not to the valley of the shadow of death.

The pagan has the usual pagan opiates of wine, women, and battle. But what does the white man have to sustain him in the face of death? Science has proven a false messiah, and he has only a dim memory of the reason why he once looked at life so fearlessly. So he takes refuge in his own mind. If he can abstract himself from existence, he can avoid the pain of existence.

The liberals will always have a maniacal hatred for the non-utopian, non-abstracted white man, because the existence of such men threatens the abstracted pleasure dome of the liberals. When a white man comes too close to the pleasure dome, the liberals sic their colored dogs on him. And for the moment, it seems that the dogs are keeping the white man at bay. But that is only because the remnant whites are irresolute. They are still mesmerized by the forces of modernity. When they step back into the role they were born to, the role of the Christ-bearers, all the seemingly insurmountable obstacles will be mere shadows on the wall that disappear in the light of day.

Nietzsche and Shaw both looked to the future in order to find a superhuman hero. Was there ever such a failure of vision? The superhuman heroes were all in the past, European men and women who consecrated their lives to The Hero. But the obvious miracle of European civilization is cited, by the liberals, as an example of the evil of the white man. Even professed friends of the European, such as Pat Buchanan, routinely condemn the European for racism in the past and express their hope that the colored races will be kinder to the whites than the whites were to them. Yes, the blacks are a kind race of people; we can look forward to the time, under their regime, when murder, rape, and mayhem are the norm, and civilized behavior is considered an aberration. Actually, we don’t have to look to the future to see such a dystopia: in Africa and our American cities, the savage new world is here.

When a European ceases to care about his own and transfers his allegiance and sympathy to the savages of color, then that man has ceased to be a European. He has become a man without a soul, a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. The white counter-attack against the liberals and the coloreds must come from pietas, from love of one’s own. The man imbued with such a love will not be doctrinally non-violent in the face of barbarism. Nor will he place his faith in the democratic process or modern science. He will live and breathe the same rarified air of Tell and Wallace. And then he will have the strength and the faith to move mountains. A sword is just a weapon to the barbarian; he wields it in order to commit the usual atrocities. But to the Christian European the sword is a cross to be wielded in defense of His reign of charity.

The end of the liberals’ reign has already begun. There are cracks in the pleasure dome. Europeans with hearts that still burn within them have turned away from the new Babylon. They seek the old Europe, His Europe. And when they find it, they will unsheathe their swords and use them in defense of their people and their God. That’s the way it happens in all the fairy tales: at the last trump, the hero steps in and defeats the forces of evil. And we, as Christians, believe in The Fairy Tale. Christ is risen, and His Europe will triumph.

Against the Jackals

As Christian – man, I needs must
keep the vow which I have plight...

--Scott

Simply being born in Europe or becoming a citizen of a European country does not make an individual a European. One must have white skin in order to be a European. Our skin color is part of our body, which houses our soul. Body and soul are not separate entities; they are inextricably linked. Prior to the 20th century, the great bulk of the European people believed as I do -- that one’s skin color is part of a man’s soul, which is a thing eternal. There certainly were Gnostic exceptions, but in the main the pre-20th century Europeans regarded skin color as an integral part of man’s spirituality. Now, in this 21st century, the century of the Jackal, the exception has become the rule, and the European who still believes that a man’s skin color is part of his soul is a tiny minority. Let’s look at the Gnostic jackals.

1) Religious, conservative-liberals
From the Catholic side, the Gnostic attack is best exemplified by a remark of a famous Thomist: “Western civilization has nothing to do with race.” The gentleman in question was quite a defender of Catholic Europe, particularly Catholic Spain, but he didn’t think it mattered one iota whether Spain was inhabited by white people or by black people. Actually, that is not quite correct: the pro-Western, anti-white writer actually had great hopes that blacks would come to the faith in droves and create a new earthier and “sexier” Catholicism, so presumably he preferred a black Spain. Only an academic could nurse such fantasies.

Of course the cause of the academic’s delusion was his Thomism. God is a disembodied idea to the Thomist, so it follows in the Thomist’s mind that individual human beings are also disembodied ideas. And even though the Novus Ordo Catholics have denounced Aquinas, the main architect of idea-religion, they have not renounced idea-religion itself. This is why the most vehement anti-white hatred comes from the pulpits, from those who believe in an idea of God and in an idea of man.

Occasionally I have observed puzzled, white Kinists trying to figure out what the problem with Pat Buchanan is. Well, the problem with Pat is the problem with an idea-religion. Buchanan will always throw individual white men under the bus whenever individual white men get in the way of his propositional faith in generic, idea-democracy and generic idea-Christianity.

The same obsession with ideas about God rather than with God himself, which we find in medieval scholasticism and in modern Catholicism, has spread like wildfire in the Protestant churches, too. The clergy in those churches regularly hurl anathemas at anyone who dares to suggest there is any connection whatsoever between skin color and spirituality. But who is flying in the face of reality—the anti-white churchmen or the last Europeans? On the side of the churchmen is a Gnostic theory about God. It does not come from Scripture, nor does it come from the Church Fathers. It stems from the scholastic tradition, which came to us from the Greeks. But there is no concrete reality to buttress up the “Western-civilization-has-nothing-to-do-with-race” theory. If the colored races can show us the face of Jesus Christ in their cultures, why have they not done so? Why are they unable to take even the smallest baby steps toward the light unless they are guided by white people? In contrast to the unreality of the churchmen stands the reality of Western civilization.

Few people live up to their creeds for good or ill. Many Marxists, for instance, who were opposed to Christian marriage, have been married in Christian churches. But a man’s stated creed still must be taken seriously. “Ideas have consequences.” And at the core of the pro-Western, anti-white Thomists and churchmen is pantheism, the worship of nature. While priding himself on his rejection of the bloody pagan religions, the modern, thinking churchman has reverted to the nature gods. With a mind untainted by contact with genuine human beings of flesh and blood, the modern “Christian” contemplates the natural world and sees in it natural savages who long to be controlled and enlightened by the Gnostic white man.

A European is not different from a pagan because the pagan has bloody sacrifices and the European uses his mind; the European differs from the pagan because he believes that God’s spirit dwells in the blood and not in nature. The pagan propitiates the gods of nature with his blood, and the conservative churchmen and Thomists worship their own minds through the good offices of the natural world.

2) Mad-dog liberals
The conservative-liberals still retain a respect for Western civilization while denying that the white man is necessary to Western civilization. They are liberals because they go against the traditional faith of the European people who thought their race was part of their very soul. But the spiritual children of the conservative-liberal take things a step further, which is why I designate them as mad-dog liberals.

The mad-dog liberals do not love Western civilization, they hate it. They find racism and sexism everywhere they look. So they hate the race that gave the world Western civilization. They are more consistent than the conservative-liberals who professed to love Western civilization while hating the white man. But before we award the mad-dogs the consistency ribbon, let’s look at their inconsistency. They feed off the fruit of the civilization they say they despise. They have their operations at hospitals started by Europeans who believed: “In so much as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” They listen to music written by white men in tribute to the God of the white man. And on it goes. If they were consistent, they would all go to dog fights with Michael Vick and call it the apotheosis of their mad-dog lives.

While still being inconsistent in their use of the fringe benefits of Western civilization, the mad-dogs are taking what was implicit in the faith of the conservative-liberal Christians and making it explicit. The conservative-liberal still expressed his new faith in nature and the scientific method using old, Christian terms. The mad-dog has abandoned most of the old Christian terminology and has created a new faithless faith, a hodge-podge of Asian religions, Greek philosophers, and African voodoo cults. The old liberal-conservatives often clash with the new mad-dog liberals over such issues as abortion, but they are birds of the same feather. Their hatred for the older, flesh-and-blood faith of the European people is what unites them.

3) Neo-pagans
The neo-pagan hates white people in the same way that Hugh Hefner hates women: Hefner loves women as biological entities, but he hates femininity. In fact, Hefner denies that there is a spiritual, feminine component in a woman’s makeup just as he denies a spiritual, masculine component in men. Likewise the neo-pagan; he professes to love the white race, but he hates the spiritual essence of the white man, that which makes the white man distinct and unique. The neo-pagan would have the Christ-bearing race abandon Christ and simply look into the mirror above the computer or in the DNA lab when they want to worship. What a pathetic, soulless fate for the people who walked with God.

4) The colored hordes
The colored races share the liberal’s hatred of the white European. But the colored races do not believe, as the white liberal believes, that skin color is not a significant part of a man’s identity. The liberal, vis-à-vis the coloreds, is in the same position that Stalin was in with his own people during World War II. Stalin didn’t believe in Christianity, but a great portion of his people did believe in it, so he had to let a handful of Orthodox priests out of prison in order to bless the troops and rally the people to fight for good old Mother Russia.

The liberals invoke race when they want to rally their people (the colored tribes) to fight against their enemies (the recalcitrant Europeans). But it is always dangerous to stir up hatred against your own race, trusting that your colored allies will be satisfied with just the blood of your white enemies. Why should the coloreds be satisfied with only the blood of the old Europeans? If white is evil and whites are weak, why should any white people be left alive? The liberals' faithless faith will leave them defenseless before the colored hordes.

White conservative-liberals and mad-dog liberals hurl the pride of race accusation at Christian Europeans of the old school. Let me throw that lie back in their faces. The old “racist” Europeans did not have the pride of race, which all other races have; instead, they accepted the burden of race, and that burden was a cross, the same cross that He carried on His way to Golgotha. The superiority of the European, his complete dominance throughout the world, came about because the European’s heart burned within him. He saw something more than nature in the person of Christ, and he felt compelled to enflesh, in his culture, the vision he saw with his heart. Can one see with one’s heart? Ask Gloucester: “I see life feelingly.”

The conservative-liberal, the mad-dog liberal, and the neo-pagan have replaced the burden of race, a sacred burden, with the pride of intellect. They flee, like Jonah, from their duty to God and take refuge in the belly of the liberal leviathan. From inside that whale, they hurl anathemas at the white people who are still listening to the call of the blood. “Never abandon the white cross,” that quiet, gentle voice tells us, “because that cross is your salvation.” Pride of race? No, a humble and grateful acceptance of the awesome responsibility of race. That is what I see in the lives of the old, racist Europeans. It is better to live in exile, with the vision of their Europe in our hearts, than to move one single infinitesimal hair in the direction of the anti-white, anti-Christian purveyors of Satanic, one-world, one-race atheism.

So Long as the Blood Endures

“They have chosen cunning instead of belief.” – Aslan

Hatred for the white male is the primary passion of the colored races, and hatred for the white male is also the primary passion of the white liberal. I need not give you, the reader, a detailed list of all the gory torture-murders (done with the full approval of white liberals) and of the many outrages perpetrated against whites by the coloreds. There are nationalist publications out there that give out that kind of information, so let’s take the liberals’ and coloreds’ hatred of the white male as a given and proceed from there.

I am deeply concerned that there has been no Christian response to the onslaught of the liberals and the colored barbarians. To date there have been two types of white males offering some ineffectual resistance to the liberal and barbarian assault. The first ineffectual resister is the American conservative. He thinks affirmative action is wrong as well as reverse discrimination. And he tells his liberal brethren about it:

What is being done to Frank Ricci is exactly what was done to black folks for decades. Great black ballplayers who might have become legends like DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig never got the chance because they were black. Black students were denied admission to prep schools, colleges, and military academies because of their color.

Now, what was done to them is being done to white folks. And it is just as wrong as it was then.

Such appeals are 1) completely ineffectual and 2) morally wrong. They are ineffectual because liberals do not believe in representative democracy; they believe in government by the elect (themselves) and in the extermination of the non-elect (white males). And such appeals are immoral because they perpetuate a blasphemous Tower of Babel idea of nationhood. It is a Christian people’s duty to keep their institutions free from the taint of barbarianism. It is not their duty to allow the barbarians through the gates of their city in the name of some satanic principle of equality.

The second ineffectual resister is the neo-pagan. His appeal, unlike that of the conservative, is not to the liberals but to the disenfranchised white electorate. “Vote white,” he urges.

“But why should I vote white?” the disenfranchised white asks. “Because you are white,” the neo-pagan replies. That answer is not enough to satisfy the white Everyman. He needs a metaphysic, and the neo-pagan has none to give him.

What is missing from the conservative and the neo-pagan is passion; not the passion which one associates with romance in the limited sense of the word, but the type of passion that Christ demonstrated on the cross. “This monster Death shall not prevail.” Christ’s passion was rooted in His love for suffering humanity. He did not leave us defenseless against the cruelest of all enemies or without hope in the face of death. The Spanish soldiers who witnessed the Aztecs tearing the hearts out of their victims felt Christ’s passion well up inside them, and they said, “This shall not go on.” And what, as we look at the history of the European people, has been the essential difference between the people of color and the Europeans? The difference is that the passion of Christ became the passion of the Europeans. When faced with devilish onslaughts against God’s reign of charity, such as African cannibalism and the Indian suttee, Europeans said what He would have said: “This shall not go on.” They didn’t take a poll to decide whether there was a consensus against cannibalism or the suttee, they simply put a stop to it.

The passion that comes from a blood connection to Christ is the only passion that produces heroes willing to fight the liberal and the colored. How did Kipling put it? “So long as the blood endures, I shall know that your good is mine: ye shall feel that my strength is yours.” If we sever our blood connection to Christ (and we have done just that), we will no longer know what good is, and we will no longer have the strength to fight the white techno-barbarians or the colored barbarians.

The American conservative has substituted an idea about God for a blood connection to God, so he lacks the knowledge and strength to champion the white man’s cause. And the neo-pagan has betrayed his blood because of his commitment to a future society where the best minds rule; he also lacks wisdom and has no strength. The weakness of the conservative and the neo-pagan shouldn’t be that hard to understand. Christ did not present us with a magic talisman; He gave us His blood on the cross. The type of heroism that defeats liberalism and barbarism came from Europeans who were connected to Him through the blood.

It is my contention that it was Europeans with the Blood Faith that kept the European garden free of colored vermin. Then, in a kind of magnified version of Ten Little Indians, the Europeans of The Blood started to disappear. And when the conservative-liberal and neo-pagan Men of the Mind replaced the Europeans of The Blood, Europe as Christendom, as a distinct, racial unit of people, died out.

The conservative, the liberal, and the neo-con all drink from the same liberal pool of the intellect, divorced from the blood. Their progenitor, the greatest exponent of the liberal religion of pure mind, was George Bernard Shaw. To him, the sacrifice at Calvary was pagan superstition; civilized men needed a more refined religion, a religion that celebrated and honored man’s intellect; they needed the Greek philosophers. Shaw and the Greeks did not believe that spirit and blood could mix. Wisdom had to come from pure mind. But the experience of the white man contradicts the Greek philosophers and shows that blood and spirit commingle in the body of man and in the body of the Man-God.

Satan built his kingdom on earth, piece by piece. Christian Europe was separated from Satan’s kingdoms of color by four enormous walls. Every defection from a spirit-and-blood faith to the propositional faith of the Greeks eroded the walls of Christian Europe. Finally, the walls crumbled.

It is absurd to expect to clear the rubble of liberalism and barbarism away from Europe with conservative, representative democracy or with neo-pagan Gnosticism. The cleansing of Europe needs heroes greater than Hercules; it requires Christians of The Blood. If we think about it logically it would seem that the Europe of Ratty, the Europe that I love, is dead forever. But man does not live by logic alone. The course of history is not always inexorable. And if it is twilight for the European people, there is still something left for the European to do. He can be faithful to Christ’s Europe until the end, as Tirian was faithful to Aslan’s Narnia until the end:

“Well done, last of the Kings of Narnia who stood firm at the darkest hour.”

We are the last Europeans; if we are faithful in Europe’s darkest hour, Our King, the real Aslan, will greet us as Aslan greeted Tirian.

The Buchananite conservative, the liberal, and the neo-pagan all look to a Europe that is different from the Europe where Christ dwelt. The Buchananite conservative wants the equality of the dung heap, where whites, who have sunk to the level of blacks, can work and play with their new equals. The liberal wants a mind-forged republic of superior intellects who rule over inferior intellects. Of course, the sign of an inferior intellect will be a belief in the fairy tale God of the white man. And the neo-pagan looks to a future where he, the disembodied, soulless automaton, rules an empty, soulless world with the power of his giant brain.

The barbarians of color have never believed that God’s spirit resides in the blood. For them the blood is something one gives to the gods as a sacrificial offering in order to propitiate them. They believe the spirit of the gods resides in the natural world. In a perverse aping of the good, Satan has very cleverly arranged a great wedding feast of the clever ones. The barbarian of color, the democracy-loving conservative, the liberal, and the neo-pagan all eat at Satan’s special banquet. The feast is for those too “vital and earthy” and for those too intelligent to believe in a God who took flesh, dwelt among us, and mixed His spirit with our blood. But He did precisely that, or so I believe, as did the Europeans of old, who were strong in defense of their kith and kin. Without the strength of a blood faith, we are helpless before our enemies. But with such a faith?

I am going to be a storm – a flame—
I need to fight whole armies all alone.
I have ten hearts; I have a hundred arms;
I feel
Too strong to war with mortals—

The Mutual Flame

So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix’s sight;
Either was the other’s mine.

--Shakespeare

Let’s be clear about what the new Supreme Court nominee’s condemnation of the white male means. She did not condemn white males for being too liberal, for ceding white civilization to the colored barbarians; she condemned everything associated with the white male of history, namely Western civilization and the God of that civilization. But she was careful to follow the proscribed liberal formula and leave the white female out of her condemnation.

Liberals have taken the Christian doctrine of original sin and made it applicable to only one sex and one race. All females and all non-whites are without sin. This is why the colored man takes race so seriously and the liberal white male denies the existence of race. As a member of the sinless race, the colored wants race to be the determining factor in everything. Then he will be granted sainted status in everything. The liberal white male, on the other hand, has a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that there is no such thing as race. In his world of pure mind, race doesn’t exist. And in contrast to the colored male, the white male must always deny the existence of masculinity. The result of that denial is the end of chivalry. Instead of Beau Geste, the white Christian model of masculinity, we now see only colored masculinity which celebrates pure animal lust and barbarism. The white females need only refrain from marrying white men from the old European stock in order to avoid the taint of original sin. And the vast majority of white females have voluntarily refrained from marrying white Christian males. But I think a time is fast approaching when white Christian women will be forbidden to marry white Christian males.

The consistent liberal will rejoice that the Christian male is extinct (see The Underground Men), because he knows that Christianity is a patriarchal religion. If there is no patriarchy there can be no Christianity. But there are some halfway-house Christians who want to retain the benefits of living in a Christian society while supporting the principles of a primitive matriarchal society. The late John Paul II was a classic example of this type of religious schizophrenic. On the one hand, he condemned abortion, and on the other hand he supported feminism.

The late Pope praised the feminist movement, saying it had championed “the dignity of women.” In his weekly audience of November 29, 1995, he called feminism “in great part legitimate,” and said it had added to a more “balanced vision of the question of womanhood in the contemporary world.” He further went on to say that feminism had reacted against everything that has “impeded the value and full development of the feminine personality” (from Inside the Vatican, January 1996).

We must make up our minds. Is the story of Adam and Eve true? If it is, then the responsibility for the original sin rests on the shoulders of the male and the female. In fact, the responsibility rests even more squarely on the female’s shoulders. So if we exempt the female from original sin, we are not behaving like Christian gentlemen; we are behaving like the male devotees of the religions of Cybele and Isis.

The answer to any social ill is integral Christianity. You can’t take just one aspect of Christianity, such as respect for women as the life-bearers and life-nurturers, and make it the whole of Christianity. David C. Reardon illustrates this half-way house Christian approach to women in his book, Making Abortion Rare.

Mr. Reardon says the pro-life movement failed because pro-lifers failed to make the movement a pro-woman movement. If we shift our focus from the harm abortion does to babies to the harm it does to women, Mr. Reardon says, we will win the support of middle America and gradually win the abortion war.

Mr. Reardon suggests pro-lifers start initiating malpractice suits against abortion doctors for not following the guidelines of Roe vs. Wade. Doctors never inform women that abortion harms the woman having the abortion, nor do they inform the woman having the abortion of the emotional trauma her abortion will trigger. The doctors’ failure to comply with the Roe v. Wade guidelines will leave them open to legal action and hurt them where it counts – in the pocketbooks.

The launching of malpractice suits against abortion doctors for cruelty to women and spending more money to tell women about what abortion does to them is not evil. But Reardon’s strategy of appealing to the woman’s self-interest and not to her soul has many holes in it.

First, he claims that the pro-life movement has been too judgmental about unmarried pregnancies. My wife and I spent a few years “sidewalk counseling” outside abortion clinics, and we did not detect the “judgmental” attitude among our fellow counselors that Mr. Reardon writes about.

Secondly, Mr. Reardon assumes that the pro-life movement was anti-woman in the past. Again, I don’t see that. People I worked with did stress, rightly I think, that the baby was the primary victim; but pro-lifers have always stressed and been concerned about the physical and spiritual well-being of the woman having the abortion.

Thirdly, on the subject of free will and forgiveness, Mr. Reardon frequently makes statements like this one: “All too often pro-lifers have tended to characterize aborting women as selfish and immoral. A far more accurate generalization would be to portray aborting women as confused and driven by despair. This insight is a vital one to our pro-woman/pro-life strategy.” He misses the point. An aborting woman is selfish and immoral, and there can be no forgiveness for her sin if the sin is never her fault, but only the result of confusion and despair.

Mr. Reardon further claims that we should let women who have had abortions know that God forgives them. No, that is bad theology. We should let them know that if they repent, God will forgive them. It seems to me to be a crucial distinction. Do we really want to treat women as inferior creatures who are incapable of sin because somebody else has forced them into their decision? Do we not then deny them the opportunity to, “Like Mary kneel, like Mary weep, ‘Love much’ and be forgiven”?

Mr. Reardon thinks his woman-based strategy will win over the 70% of Americans who are “personally opposed but...”; by making it a woman’s rights issue, the 70% will turn against the abortion industry. Here I must ask: if we make it a woman’s rights issue, are we not conceding that the baby in the womb has importance only if the woman says the baby has importance? If we say abortion is bad only because it harms the aborting woman, which it certainly does, and we enshrine that concept in law, haven’t we permanently damned the unborn to a nebulous status? The unborn will exist only if women say they do.

Reardon’s suggestion that we can make abortion illegal without restoring patriarchal Christianity is of course absurd. But there is also a dangerous reaction against the matriarchal pretensions of our current feminists that must be avoided, and which is exemplified by Patrick Mitchell in his book, The Scandal of Gender: Early Christian Teaching on the Man and the Woman. Mitchell’s earlier book on the feminization of the military was quite good (the author wrote under the name Brian Mitchell); Mitchell was the only author I’ve come across who based his argument against women in the military on the Christian principle that women should not be in the military rather than on the merely pagan principle that they could not.

The case that Mitchell makes against Christian feminists is a pretty standard one, but it is a case seldom made these days. I felt, while reading it, a bit like I did when I read Mary Lefkowtiz’s Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History. It seemed ludicrous that anyone should have to write a book proving that Socrates, Beethoven, Cleopatra, etc., were not black, but nevertheless, the insanity of the modern world made it necessary. By corollary, it seems ludicrous that someone would have to write a book about Christianity being the patriarchal religion, but of course even John Paul II thought one could have a Christian feminism, so this book is a refreshing antidote to the current prevailing nonsense about gender.

Mitchell calls himself a “reader” rather than an “author.” Presumably he does so because he merely cites Scripture and the Church Fathers on the subject of gender. To wit:

Within Christian teaching, loving one’s wife cannot mean ceding to her the husband’s headship or freeing her from her duty to obey and revere. This is the lie of the serpent by which both the man and the woman were and are undone. For while the women’s deepest need is for communion in submission, ultimately to God, Satan deceives her into revolting against God with an offer of power in equality.

And:

No doubt our Christian Fathers would condemn the feminist reorganization of modern society, with its strenuous denial of sexual differences and coercive integration of women into all activities at all levels, on all three counts: (1) for turning the natural order upside down by making men subject to women and deposing husbands and fathers from their rightful headship in the home; (2) for opening the door to immorality by mixing men and women together as if sexual temptation were either easily avoided or not worth resisting; and (3) for obscuring the divinely ordained differences between the sexes so important to the social, sexual, and spiritual health of individual men and women.

There is yet a fourth charge the early Christians would bring against us for our disregard of the different duties of men and women. It is less obvious in early Christian teaching because of the assumption that mothers would always care for their children out of both social necessity and natural affection. It is now the case, however, that mothers are encouraged not to care for their children and instead to abandon them, at a very early age and for most of their waking hours, to the far inferior care of paid strangers. A powerful taboo in our society suppresses all criticism of mothers who do so, and fathers who let them. The Saints would not have been so sparing.

And also:

The prophecy of Adam that the woman was “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” was deeply meaningful to the Fathers. The woman was not a separate species, created from the earth as all other creatures were, as indeed Adam himself was. Alone among all creatures, the woman was created “from the man.” Her nature is derivative of the man’s. She participates “through the man” in both his earthy origin and his divine likeness.

There is a major weakness in the book, however; an irredeemable one, in my judgment. Heretics from the left de-emphasize or, more often, attempt to abolish structures and forms. They point to the ‘spirit’ of things and use words like ‘love’ and ‘charity’ out of context. Heretics from the right, on the other hand, tend to worship form and discipline and do not stress love and charity, fearing that such things lead to a lack of form and discipline, which will then lead to soft-headed liberalism. Mitchell falls prey to the latter, formalist heresy.

This blasphemous interpretation of the Apostle Paul is an example:

The Apostle Paul commands husbands to love their wives, but wives he commands not to love their husbands, but to obey and revere them. In doing so, he bids that wives render to their husbands that which is most needful and consistent with the natural headship of the man, for it is more important to the one in charge that he be obeyed and revered than he be loved. This truth we find also in the world around us, for in all human organizations it is indeed more necessary that the head be feared than loved. The beauty of the Christian order is that the head also loves the body, as Christ loves the Church.

One thinks after reading this of Shakespeare’s comment in The Merchant of Venice: “The devil can cite Scripture for his own purpose.” Scripture should be interpreted in its entirety. (St. Paul also had a memorable quote about charity superseding all other virtues.)

Should a marriage be primarily a military arrangement? I will concede that even the best of women need some fear of their husbands, but should that be their primary reason for obeying? No! Wives who are obedient only from fear and not from love are not real wives and will abandon their husbands once a stronger, more forceful warlord comes along. The true wife obeys because she loves; Katarina’s injunction to wives at the end of The Taming of the Shrew is an example:

Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor:
It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds,
And in no sense is meet or amiable.
A woman mov'd is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord? —
I am asham'd that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toll and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?
Come, come, you froward and unable worms!
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown;
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband's foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready; may it do him ease.

I see in Mitchell a man who has gone wrong by only a hair, but it is a significant hair. If we were to adopt Mitchell’s interpretation of the Fathers and Scripture, we would have a religion “that have not charity. Fear is the beginning of wisdom, not the end result. I see in the tradition of chivalry that came to fruition in Europe an elevation of the Church’s teaching on gender. Without abrogating any of the Church Fathers’ teaching, the chivalric tradition shifted the balance in male-female relationships from fear to love, as Christianity shifted the focus from fear to love in man’s relationship with God. When one truly appreciates the nature of the beloved, one only fears disappointing the beloved. One is not fearful of the painful consequences of disobedience for one’s self.

The downside of the chivalric tradition is that the true knight’s reverence for women, which is noble and uplifting when women are obedient as Mary was obedient, becomes blasphemous when women imitate Cybele rather than Mary. This habit of reverence for the female, rightly developed and cultivated in the traditions of chivalry, was continued in the European culture after the female went over to Cybele. Hence, the tradition which was the highest and purest embodiment of true masculinity and true femininity became the embodiment of all that is cowardly in the male and unfeminine in the female.

But the failure of that magnificent synergy between the sexes that was at the core of Western civilization should not force us to make the mistake of Reardon and the liberals, and exempt the woman from original sin. Nor should we settle for Mitchell’s militaristic and juridical arrangement between the sexes. Instead, let us say with Unamuno that we will have all or nothing. We will have knights, chivalry, dragons, fair and virtuous ladies, and the God whose love passeth all understanding, in the civilization to which we bend our knee, or else we will not bend the knee.