Cambria Will Not Yield

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Of Decadence and Decay



“The love of woman and womanliness is a masculine characteristic, and the love of man and manliness is a feminine characteristic... [I]t is almost impossible for a woman to irritate a real man, and as to the woman, a man is never quite contemptible, never altogether rejectable, as long as he remains a man.” -- Isak Dinesen

That our society is decadent is self-evident. But if the question, “Is our society decadent?,” were put to the American public, you would get an assortment of answers, ranging from, “Hell, no,” to, “The polls say that 90% of all Americans believe in God,” to, “70% of the American people believe promiscuity and stealing are wrong.” In short, there would be no agreement on the subject of decadence. Which is, of course, what one would expect; no society, having achieved decadence (maybe ‘dis-achieve’ would be a better word), is able to identify decadence. To the decadent, health is sickness and sickness is health.

Climbing out of the mire of decadence is not easy for an individual. And it is even more difficult for a society, because a decadent society has lost all connection to reality. The nerve endings are dead. Faith is gone and hence all the sentiments that elevate the human soul are gone as well. An individual living in a decadent society, who has managed to take his first baby steps out of the decadent swamp, will find himself isolated, marginalized, and possibly institutionalized. He will find individuals willing to criticize symptoms of the disease, such as child porn and legalized abortion, but those same individuals will draw back in shocked dismay if he criticizes modernity itself. That we are marching ever onward toward the light, despite some unpleasant detours, is an article of faith for modern man.

Satan is a very clever fellow. He does not make societies decadent by attacking God directly; instead he attacks the connecting links God has to His creatures. And one of the primary links is the divinely ordained, differentiated sex roles. Indeed, a significant indication of a decadent society is the complete blurring of the sex roles, and one of the key signs of a civilized, Christian society is clearly defined sex roles designed to support the patriarchal family.
The patriarchal society was in fact the creator of those moral ideas which have entered so deeply into the texture of civilization that they have become a part of our thought. Not only the names of piety and chastity, honour and modesty, but the values for which they stand are derived from this source, so that even where the patriarchal family has passed away we are still dependent on the moral tradition that it created. – Christopher Dawson in The Dynamics of World History
I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate the evils that are wrought in a society when God’s benevolent ordering of the sex roles is put aside in favor of liberal utopianism. And it is halfway-house Christians who want to retain a faith in God, while destroying all of mankind’s connecting links to God, who allow the liberals to substitute Cybele for Christ.

The late John Paul II was a textbook case of the schizophrenia of half-way house Christians. 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). Gloria Steinem couldn’t have said it better.

Let me defend my critique of the halfway-house Christians, such as John Paul II, who support feminism. Who was the human conduit Satan used to transmit his evil to Adam? Eve, of course. She fell because she made a bargain with the devil, who claimed he could make her equal to God. And Adam fell because he feared the loss of Eve’s love so much that he was willing to love her outside of God’s love.

Staying true to his poetic nature, the Lord God counter-balanced Adam and Eve’s sins with the faithfulness of the Virgin Mary and Christ. Eve was a conduit for Satan, and Mary was a conduit for Christ. Mary, in contrast to Eve, who desired equality with God, desired only to be the handmaid of the Lord. Christ, in contrast to Adam, never consented to any request outside of God’s orbit. “Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men.”

Who is a man imitating when he calls our attention to the “great contributions of the feminist movement”? He is imitating the old Adam. His love for the feminists is illicit; it debases him and the feminists because it separates both from God’s love. Feminism in its very essence goes back to the old Eve. The spirit behind the movement is a desire to make a deal with the devil in order to obtain equality with God. It is positively ludicrous to mildly chide the feminists for their stand on abortion and then go on to praise feminism to the skies, as if abortion is just an inconsequential part of the feminists’ agenda. Abortion is the feminist agenda! How can they obtain equality with God if they do not control life in the womb? Their soul mate is Satan, who promises them divine equality if they will do his bidding and unsex themselves. Lady Macbeth -- “Unsex me here!” -- is the patron saint of the feminists.

The triumph of feminism in society and church has left society and church without any moral authority, because there can be no authority without masculinity. And ironically, there can be no femininity either, because femininity needs masculinity to survive, just as masculinity needs femininity. All decadent societies (Sophocles, Virgil, and Shakespeare wrote eloquently on this topic) lose the ability to distinguish between a man’s and a woman’s divinely appointed sex roles. It is Satan’s wish that such divine distinctions be blurred, because once the blurring takes place, a society becomes decadent and loses all sense of God’s redemptive grace.

As with all modern innovations, we must ask who is being served by feminism? Are Christian men and women benefiting from feminism? Certainly not. Are the feminists benefiting? Of course not. Nothing, not the right to kill their children in the womb or the right to hold jobs formerly reserved for men, will appease them or make them happy. They denounced their souls when they became feminists, and only a ‘road to Damascus’ experience can release them from the feminist hell in which they live and in which they expect others to live as well.

A story from the Brothers Grimm, “The Fisherman and His Wife,” reveals the true aims of feminism, and man’s inability to ever make women happy by appeasement.

As you recall, a fisherman catches an enchanted fish. The fish begs the fisherman to put him back in the water. The fisherman, being a kind-hearted soul, throws the fish back. But upon his return home and after telling the story to his wife, the fisherman is berated by his wife for not demanding a wish from the fish. So, the fisherman returns to the sea and repeating the sin of Adam calls, “Flounder, flounder of the sea, Come, for I am calling thee! My wife, whose name is Isabel, Has a wish against my will.”

Each subsequent wish is granted, and every wish is not good enough for the fisherman’s wife. She goes from a cottage to a palace, and from being a fisherman’s wife to Queen, Emperor, and Pope. With her last wish, she demands to be God. Presto chango! She lands back in her shack and is once again just a fisherman’s wife.

Of course we all know the reason a man acquiesces to a woman, even though he knows, in his heart, that she is wrong. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath lays it right out in the open. But every Christian male knows that he can’t do the bidding of a Lady Macbeth, no matter how compelling the reward for acquiescing, and no matter how unpleasant the punishment for a refusal, because to do so places his soul and the woman’s soul into Satan’s realm. Patriarchy and Christianity are of necessity linked. Feminism and Satan are irretrievably linked as well. The former link must be restored, and the latter must be destroyed.

Feminism, like so many of the heretical –isms, had always lurked on the outskirts of Christendom. You could find its adherents in witch’s covens and the surviving underground cults of Cybele. But in the later half of the 20th century, feminism became mainstream, and patriarchal Christianity became an underground, proscribed religion. And it is significant that institutional feminism had its roots in the ‘civil rights’ movements of the late 1950s and 1960s. Radical women working in the civil rights movements saw themselves as even more disenfranchised than the black man. But because the black man was also ‘victimized’ by the white male, the feminists always reserved their criticisms for the white Christian male rather than the black male. The feminist silence during the O. J. Simpson trial was deafening.

If we just look at the stated beliefs of the feminists, their alliance with the black males seems ludicrous and inconsistent. If they are against masculinity, shouldn’t they be against every single male, no matter what the color? But when dealing with men, and even more so with women, we must, if we want to truly understand them, go beneath the surface of their stated beliefs to the spirit that motivates them. And at the spiritual level, the feminists and the blacks are united. Both groups despise femininity and worship pagan masculinity. We are back with Lady Macbeth. She asks Satan to “unsex her” and make her heart as cold and merciless as a pagan male warrior. And she will only give her husband conjugal rights if he forsakes his Christian masculinity for a perverted and savage pagan masculinity.
MACBETH: We will proceed no further in this business:
He hath honour'd me of late; and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon.

LADY MACBETH: Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself? Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,
'
Like the poor cat i' the adage?

MACBETH: Prithee, peace:
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.

LADY MACBETH: What beast was't, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
So true femininity, the type of femininity that Christian European poets used to rhapsodize about, is demonized along with the masculinity of men like Alfred and Tell, who fought and killed in defense of, rather than out of blood lust or desire for material gain. Only pagan masculinity remains, in the blacks, in the feminist Lady Macbeths, and in the white males who kill in the abortuaries at the behest of the feminist Lady Macbeths.

The black and the feminist revolts are compact in their ideological roots. Both movements are anti-European and anti-reality. The black revolution runs counter to the traditional Christian European view of the black man as the descendant of Ham, the lascivious son of Noah, who needed to be held in check by his more godly brothers. And the black movements which advocate black supremacy, under the guise of racial equality, directly contradict the historical reality that whenever blacks rule, Satan reigns. The pigmentation of the black’s skin is not just an insignificant coloring. It is a warning from God; we dare not let darkness rule the light.

The contrast between the traditional European view of women as the life-bearers and life-nurturers, and the modern view of women as masculine pagans with female body parts is best exemplified by the contrast between the Virgin Mary nursing our Lord and the rock singer Madonna... well, we know what she does. It is not possible to be reconciled to, or to live with, people who prefer the later image of women to the former. And which image conforms to reality? Is Madonna the end product of the liberal’s utopian dream?

The assault on Christian Europe is diverse, but the source of the assault is not diverse. There is one, demonic personality behind each assault. Only a people connected to Him can resist the assaults of that other ‘he,’ the malevolent ‘he.’ When we refuse to sever our links to Him, by resisting the new feminist and black ideologies, we are fighting the good fight and being true to Christian Europe. +

Labels: , , , ,

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Serious Play



“Disparage not the faith thou dost not know,
Lest to thy peril thou aby it dear.”

-- Shakespeare

When my children were younger and my mother still alive we used to play, whenever we visited Nana and Poppop, what we called the ‘mountain lion game.’ My mother would put on a yellow sweat suit and chase the children, who were supposed to be baby mountain goats, around the playground. At a crucial point in the drama, when hope seemed nearly gone, the daddy mountain goat (I got to play that role) would come forward and drive the mountain lion off the cliff. Of course to my mother and me it was a game, but not to my children. They had looks of abject terror on their faces when the mountain lion was closing in on them and looks of ecstatic joy when the daddy mountain goat drove the lion off the cliff. On some level of my children’s consciousness they surely knew that their Nana was not a deadly mountain lion and their father was not a large mountain goat, but the overwhelming reality for them during the duration of the game was that Nana was a mountain lion and I was the daddy mountain goat. So what was a game to me was serious play to them.

And it struck me back then, and even more so now, that their serious play was a reflection of the way they viewed existence. There were very deadly monsters in the world who meant them harm, and father figures who could keep them safe from harm. They always wanted to play the mountain lion game, despite their terror during the initial attack of the lion, because they believed that the daddy mountain goat would ultimately defeat the mountain lion.

We don’t change much when we go from children to adults, not in our essential personalities. “Adults” do what my children did: we engage in serious play in which we act out our vision of existence. A crisis occurs in a culture when what used to be serious play to a people becomes meaningless prattle to their descendents. Such a crisis, I would argue, has occurred in European civilization. Great works of art such as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and Shakespeare’s King Lear are no longer treated as the serious play of the European people. They are regarded in much the same way that our European ancestors used to regard Egyptian hieroglyphics or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon: interesting artifacts of a past civilization but not something that touches the inner man. I first became aware of the dichotomy between the pre-modern Europeans and the modern Europeans when I majored in English literature at a modern university. Works that made me weep were treated by the professors of literature as examples of a particular era when people said such and such things and believed certain things, but they did not touch the modern man; he followed a different drummer.

It took me a number of years to realize what should have been obvious to me. The entire artistic output of European man, the serious play, is either implicitly or explicitly about the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If you no longer believe that Christ is exactly who He said He was, the serious play of the people who did believe in Christ will strike you as a mere frivolity or a topic for abstract study.

Of course as C. S. Lewis pointed out, the liberals do have their own sentimental values or serious play that has replaced the serious play of their European ancestors. (1) In literature, for instance, works that reflected a Christian worldview were relegated to artifact status, and the social novel became the serious play of the liberals. A totally different view of existence emerged from the new serious play.

If all mankind is tainted with original sin, there is an element of humility in every social movement. A man realizes that he, as well as those opposed to him, are human and fallible. So there is some mercy, even for his opponents, in a man who believes in the whole Christian story. Not so with the modern liberal. If there is no original sin shared by all mankind then the happiness of mankind is being impeded by one particular group of people. Such a people must be opposed and eradicated so the perfection of mankind can take place. The white Christian male has become, to the white liberal, the fount of all evil in the world.

The faith in the perfectibility of mankind once antique Christianity and the white Christian males are eliminated has become the unquestioned Orthodoxy of the modern world. But like any new ideology it needed its apologists and its proselytizers. Novelists such as Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck articulated the new religion while the academics became the conduits for the new faith. And artifact literature is seen as relevant to the extent it supports the new Orthodoxy. Thus a work like Charles Dickens’ Hard Times is praised for its critique of white capitalists, but the book’s critique of Marxism and the main character’s belief in Christianity is thrown into the garbage bin of irrelevancy. Likewise, Uncle Silas, one of the great works of Christian literature, is called “a Gothic horror story” because that is the only aspect of the book that a modern post-Christian rationalist can take seriously. The ancient faith of the white race is not something that a post-Christian rationalist takes seriously.

The serious play of the new liberal is a seamless garment. In the visual arts, everything that depicts man as an autonomous, isolated atom in a meaningless universe is praised, while magnificent works of art like Michelangelo’s Pieta are praised for their technical virtuosity but still relegated to the artifact category in terms of social relevance. I had an experience in my junior high school art class that’s a perfect example of the new play vs. the old play. My art teacher was fresh out of art school and imbued with all the latest ideas about what constituted good art. She gave me and the rest of her students three months to come up with a creative masterpiece. She was available to advise us if we felt the need for advice, but we were encouraged to be “creative” and “self-reliant.” I frittered away my time in class, talking about sports and playing ‘hangmen’ with some other students. Suddenly, or so it seemed to me, the three months were up and I had one 45-minute period in which to come up with a masterpiece. I splattered some paint on a canvas, with an emphasis on the more somber colors, and called my ‘painting’ “The Void.” Without much hope of getting even a D- on the painting, I handed it in. But lo and behold I received an A+ for my magnificent work! The teacher couldn’t praise me enough. It was a work of “surrealistic genius.” I blush to acknowledge it, but for one fleeting moment I came close to believing my teacher. Maybe I was a genius. But when I saw the painting another student had done, I knew with absolute certainty that my painting was garbage. Kathy (I’ve forgotten her last name) had turned in a wonderful painting of a local pond she often visited with her family. The various members of her family were depicted in the picture, fishing, spreading out a picnic lunch, and so on. It was a beautiful painting. Kathy had a real gift. She received a B- for her efforts. The teacher told her that her painting lacked creativity. I wonder if Kathy believed her and learned how to become an avant garde painter of garbage. As for my masterpiece? I threw it away in the trashcan on the way home from school.

Is it even necessary to talk about the revolution in music? Let one example suffice. I think Bach, with the possible exception of Handel, is the most explicitly Christian of the great composers. I remember one Christmas looking for a copy of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio for a friend who I thought would appreciate it. When I found a copy I was delighted. But the blurb on the back of the album, written I’m sure by a musical ‘expert,’ was quite offensive. The expert praised Bach’s music to the skies but then threw in a little editorial: “We need not share Bach’s faith in order to appreciate his music.” Oh really? Can a spiritual eunuch appreciate a Christmas oratorio? Bach’s Christian faith inspired him to compose his music. The post-Christian rationalist’s desire to have an aesthetic experience inspires him to listen to Bach. The two feelings are not compatible; serious play is antithetical to intellectual masturbation.

The Brit who said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton was correct. Sport is part of the serious play that defines and forms the soul of a nation. Thomas Hughes vividly depicts, in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the inspirational potential of sport when it is superintended by Christian men such as Arnold of Rugby. The young men of Britain during the time of Thomas Hughes learned the code of chivalry in their athletic contests. That type of serious play produced heroes such as Henry Havelock, the liberator of Lucknow. (2) Duty, Honor, Faith; such was the code. But such heroes are no longer honored today because our serious sporting-type play encourages different values. We honor racial diversity, androgyny, capitalism, and barbarism in our sport.

The most striking aspect of the new play of white liberals is the unreality of it all. Negro savages are given the parts of statesmen, women are assigned the parts formerly reserved for men, and the personal God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and St. Paul, is replaced by nature. The liberals have codified the surreal. And because their world is so unreal, they must suppress every manifestation of reality. Everything from the European past is put in a museum and labeled racist and/or sexist. If a white man tries to bring the values and the faith of old Europe out of the museum and into the light of day, the reigning liberals will suppress, by whatever means necessary, the antique white man’s attempt to interject European reality into the kingdom of liberal surrealism.

In the European fairy tales the knight, armed with the sword of truth and the shield of virtue, prevails against the witches, the wizards, and the dragons. He prevails because his faith, the ancestral faith of the European, provides him with a sword and shield. If he had proceeded against the wizards, witches, and dragons, with the sword of Thor and the shield of democracy, the sword would not have been able to penetrate to the dragon’s heart, and his shield would have withered in his hand. What does the psalmist say? “Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O most mighty, with thy glory and thy majesty. And in thy majesty ride prosperously because of truth and meekness and righteousness; and thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things. Thine arrows are sharp in the heart of the king's enemies; whereby the people fall under thee.”

Our ancestors, in the serious play of their art, their literature, their music and their folklore, bequeathed us a sacred treasure, a treasure much more precious than gold. They left us a vision of the one true God, and neither He nor His culture is meant to be a museum piece. “Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember?” Can’t we see the Hero through the mists? And can’t we hear His voice calling from the mountain top? And don’t we remember that our ancestors were the Christ bearers? If we see what they did, and hear what they heard, how can we not respond? I can hear the voice of Henry Havelock again: “Over two-hundred of our race are still alive in Cawnpore; with God’s help we shall save them or die.” There are thousands upon thousands of our race with souls that yearn for the lost Europe. With God’s help we shall restore it to them or die.+
_______________________________

(1) “A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional or (as they would say) ‘sentimental’ values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.” – C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man

(2) After taking Cawnpore, where they found the whites had been murdered to the last man, woman and child, Havelock and his men went on to Lucknow where thankfully they were not too late, as depicted in this poem by Robert Traill Spence Lowell:

“The Relief of Lucknow”

Oh, that last day in Lucknow fort!
We knew that it was the last;
That the enemy's lines crept surely on,
And the end was coming fast.

To yield to that foe meant worse than death;
And the men and we all worked on;
It was one day more of smoke and roar,
And then it would all be done.

There was one of us, a corporal's wife,
A fair, young, gentle thing,
Wasted with fever in the siege,
And her mind was wandering.

She lay on the ground, in her Scottish plaid,
And I took her head on my knee;
"When my father comes hame frae the pleugh," she said,
"Oh, then please wauken me."

She slept like a child on her father's floor,
In the flecking of woodbine-shade,
When the house-dog sprawls by the open door,
And the mother's wheel is stayed.

It was smoke and roar and powder-stench,
And hopeless waiting for death;
And the soldier's wife, like a full-tired child,
Seemed scarce to draw her breath.

I sank to sleep; and I had my dream
Of an English village-lane,
And wall and garden; but one wild scream
Brought me back to the roar again.

There Jessie Brown stood listening
Till a sudden gladness broke
All over her face; and she caught my hand
And drew me near as she spoke:

"The Hielanders! Oh, dinna ye hear
The slogan far awa?
The McGregor's? Oh! I ken it weel;
It 's the grandest o' them a'!

"God bless the bonny Hielanders !
We're saved! we 're saved! " she cried;
And fell on her knees; and thanks to God
Flowed forth like a full flood-tide.

Along the battery-line her cry
Had fallen among the men,
And they started back; -- they were there to die;
But was life so near them, then?

They listened for life; the rattling fire
Far off, and that far-off roar,
Were all, and the colonel shook his head,
And they turned to their guns once more.

But Jessie said, "The slogan 's done;
But can ye hear it noo?
'The Campbells are coming'? It's no a dream;
Our succors hae broken through!"

We heard the roar and the rattle afar,
But the pipes we could not hear;
So the men plied their work of hopeless war,
And knew that the end was near.

It was not long ere it made its way,
A thrilling, ceaseless sound:
It was no noise from the strife afar,
Or the sappers under ground.

It was the pipes of the Highlanders!
And now they played "Auld Lang Syne."
It came to our men like the voice of God,
And they shouted along the line.

And they wept, and shook one another's hands,
And the women sobbed in a crowd;
And every one knelt down where he stood,
And we all thanked God aloud.

That happy time, when we welcomed them,
Our men put Jessie first;
And the general gave her his hand, and cheers
Like a storm from the soldiers burst.

And the pipers' ribbons and tartan streamed,
Marching round and round our line;
And our joyful cheers were broken with tears,
As the pipes played "Auld Lang Syne."

Havelock died shortly after the liberation of Lucknow. He was always the perfect example of a Christian soldier. When his dear friend, Outram, asked if he needed anything to ease his pain, Havelock replied, “I have for forty years so ruled my life that when death came I might face it without fear.” He died, not knowing that he had become a legend in Britain:
Guarded to a soldier’s grave
By the bravest of the brave,
He hath gained a nobler tomb
Than an old cathedral gloom.
Nobler mourners paid the rite
Than the crowd that craves a sight;
England’s banners o’er him waved,
Dead he keeps the realm he saved.
In 1901 Archibald Forbes wrote these words about Henry Havelock:

“So long as the memory of great deeds, and high courage, and spotless self-devotion is cherished among his countrymen, so long will Havelock’s lonely grave beneath the scorching Eastern sky, hard by the vast city, the scene alike of his toil, his triumph, and his death, be regarded as one of the most holy of the countless spots where Britain’s patriot soldiers lie.”
Needless to say, Britons no longer regard the grave of a ‘racist imperialist’ as sacred. But I do, and I’m sure He does. And He is the only one Havelock ever sought to please.

Labels: ,

Friday, January 16, 2009

Once Upon A Time

“Since you have a good heart, and are willing to divide what you have, I will give you good luck.” – from “The Golden Goose”

For most Europeans born before 1960, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm were an integral part of their lives. My mother owned a large set of children’s books and the Grimm fairy tales figured prominently in those books. When my mother died, my father asked me if there was anything I wanted among my mother’s possessions. Yes, there was. It was the books with the fairy tales of the Brother’s Grimm.

I think the story of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reveals to us the reason for the demise of European civilization and also shows us the way to the full and complete restoration of European civilization. Both brothers were scholars who wrote books for other scholars, on such subjects as mathematics, grammar, and law. But the younger brother, Wilhelm, had a passion for the fairy tales of the Germanic folk tradition. He saw that the tradition was dying, so he set out to make a written record of the tales. His incredible efforts on behalf of that magnificent tradition were depicted in an excellent movie, produced before the decadent age of movies, called The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. At the end of the movie the two brothers both journey to the city of Berlin, where the older brother Jacob is supposed to receive an award for his various scholarly works. Upon their arrival there is a small delegation of pompous-looking pedants waiting for Jacob, while thousands upon thousands of children line the streets waiting for Wilhelm and implore him to “tell us a story!” – which he does. The passing years have proved the wisdom of the children. Who remembers the scholarly works? It is the fairy tales that have endured.

What the children who greeted Wilhelm were doing, and what subsequent Europeans who preserved the fairy tales collected by Wilhelm Grimm and ignored the scholarly tomes were doing, was choosing “that good part.” The Sons of Martha have always been dominant on a day to day basis in Western civilization, but the ethos of Mary, who loved much, was the spiritual undergirding of European culture. The Europeans were unique. At the core of their civilization was something that never existed before or since in any other civilization. There was a faith in a fairy-tale ending to life for the men and women with faithful hearts. At the last trump, in the twinkling of an eye, The Hero would step forward and defeat the forces of evil. The antique Europeans did not work on and on “waiting for the light.” They had seen the light and they kept His promise, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world,” in their hearts.

The hope that life is truly a fairy tale with a happy ending belongs to the European alone. Other peoples have always been welcome to share that hope, but they have never chosen en masse to incorporate the light of Europe into their cultures. And “off this stage we have shown,” (see The White Cross) that the white liberal has kept a faith in the future but has divorced it from the faith in the God-Man. Such a faith is the complete antithesis of the fairy-tale faith of the Europeans, because without The Hero there can be no fairy-tale ending to our lives or to the historical process.

The European is in such a desperate plight today because he no longer believes that the world of the Brothers Grimm is the real world and the world of the scientist is the make-believe world. He has lost the ability to see past the physical façade of the natural world to the spiritual world behind the façade. Liberalism is a disease of the soul; it is a virus that destroys vision. “I see nothing at all,” Hamlet’s mother says while in the spiritual presence of her late husband, “yet all that is, I see.” And the liberal sees no spiritual dimension in the culture of the European; he sees only racism and admires only science. The liberal and the barbarian are united in their blindness to the light and their hatred of the light. But they are different in a way that neither the barbarian nor the white liberal fully understand. The barbarian hates the white for the simple reason that he is a barbarian. He has never known any world but the natural world. He has never known a God above the nature gods. But the white liberal cannot, by simply denying the existence of spirit and blood, change the fact that His spirit and blood were woven into the fabric of the white man’s culture. Hence the liberal’s hatred of the white is more intense than that of the barbarian. The liberal’s hate is beyond a natural antipathy. His hatred is fueled by the satanic desire to eradicate that which can never be fully eradicated, the memory that the path through the European forest once led to an enchanted cottage blessed by the Son of God. The liberal’s hate is unending, and his alliance with the colored races is unbreakable, because he must keep the image of the European forest and the God-Man who shed his beneficence upon it from ever coming back into his consciousness. The liberal’s memory of his Christian antecedents must be ruthlessly and violently suppressed lest he be forced to see the God he dare not look upon.

The blood red tide that Yeats wrote about is cresting. A policeman in England is suspended for being a member of the British Nationalist Party. A teacher in Canada is fired because it is discovered that he is a Christian of the Old School. And in America, the first Western country to place a Mau Mau on the throne, when whites protest the torture-murder of white people by blacks, the U. S. government monitors the protesters. And so it goes, on and on to the Nth degree.

And yet the “practical” men of the Right urge us to petition, vote, and beg for mercy from the liberals and barbarians, in order to stop the white-hating mania of modern Satandom. “And God forbid,” they scream at us, that we should try to separate from Satandom. “That would be giving up!” (1) But who is giving up? It is the practical men, the same men who would have dismissed the Grimm’s fairy tales as mere frivolity and taken the grammar book to bed with them. The practical men suffer from the same disease as the liberals. If they were well, if they saw life in the fairy-tale mode, they would realize a religion which has no spiritual dimension cannot be defeated by democratic platforms also devoid of any spiritual dimension. They would also see that a people who have returned to the savage gods are never going to extend mercy to those who champion the God of Mercy. No, the practical right wingers of the pagan variety and the ‘get out the vote and write letters’ variety have not given up. They have never been in the fight. The fight is "against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of the world..." And it takes a man, a hero, who is wedded to sacred Christian Europe, body and soul, to do battle with and triumph over the powers of darkness.

The plight of the Christian European is worse than it seems, and it is better than it seems. It is worse because the Christian European's allies have the same ‘this world only’ philosophy that his enemies have. The right wing pagan invokes Thor and tells us that the older Christian European was either a fool, a dupe, or a coward (see "Christ or Thor"). The democratic conservative of the Middle American News variety worships the democratic process and sees no hope for the white man unless he can win liberal whites back and prevail at the ballot box. But Thor is simply a nature god; he is incapable of inspiring a counterrevolution. And since the liberals are not going to “come back,” it would appear, by the lights of the Christian European’s pagan and democratic allies, that the white man has fought his last battle. Just write ‘Finis’ on his gravestone.

Now, let us look at reality, which is always less depressing than the statistics of the materialists. The reality is that the European fairy tales, which tell us the natural world is merely a reflection of a deeper spiritual dimension to life, are true. There is a malevolent, evil, supernatural being who roams the earth seeking the ruin of souls. And there is a Hero who is God and Man who fights with us and for us, against the evil one.

It seems stunningly imbecilic to me that the modern European thinks that he is wiser to the extent that he distances himself from a fairy-tale understanding of, and a fairy-tale response to, existence. Fortunately there are still some Europeans who believe in fairy tales. Which is why things are not as dark as they seem. Numbers are not important to a hero from the Brothers Grimm stories. It wouldn’t even occur to him to count how many liberals, Negroes, and Mexicans blocked his entrance to the castle in which the fair maiden was held captive. Nor would he wait until he had a large majority of supporters. The hero sees only what must be done and he ventures forth. “Let others follow if they choose!”

If you would like to believe in the fairy tale of a European resurrection but find it all too fantastical to believe, just look at the tapestry of Christian Europe. The liberals have woven their own satanic tapestry to replace the Christian one, but they cannot unweave the tapestry of Christian Europe. And that cloth tells a story of a people who were so inspired by The Hero that they built a civilization based on the unscientific belief that man is more than nature and divine charity can raise the dead.

For the sake of their souls, we wish white liberals would forsake liberalism and return to sacred Europe. But we don’t need them in order to reconquer Europe. We need only to reject all magic talismans, whether pagan or democratic, and stay wedded to the really true fairy tale of the third dumb brother, who set out to make His fortune in the world while holding on to the rather quaint notion that charity never faileth. Against all odds He prevailed over ruin and death. And we shall also prevail if we look past the false materialist façade of the modern world and embrace the fairy-tale reality of the suffering servant who turned out to be the Crowned King of Fairyland.+
_________________________________________________
(1) If the European does not separate from mainstream liberaldom in church as well as in society, he will be swallowed up by the leviathan and his children’s children will not know there was once a non-materialist civilization consecrated to the God-Man. And we cannot merely campaign for an equal portion of the satanic pie. Satan does not permit diversity in his kingdom. The faithful whites must separate, grow strong in spirit, and then reconquer Europe for Christ the King.

Labels: , , ,

Friday, January 09, 2009

Above the Sceptred Sway

Lord have mercy upon us.
Christ have mercy upon us.
Lord have mercy upon us.

Introduction
I’m more familiar with the Roman Catholic tradition than I am with the Protestant or Orthodox traditions, so I chose a Roman Catholic priest for the following interview. But I don’t think the other Christian churches are devoid of their own Father Trendies. What I see in all the Christian churches is a battle between polytheistic atheists and halfway house Christians. The halfway house Christians don’t like all the radical conclusions the Father Trendy types draw from the premises of halfway house Christianity, but once you go halfway down a slippery slope it is only a matter of time before you go all the way down. The antique European stays away from the slopes altogether.

This interview is a composite of actual opinions and statements of liberals that I’ve known and had inflicted on me over the years. Only the names have been changed, etc.

Father Trendy is 63 years old. He was ordained a priest in 1973. Five of his most famous books are: 1) Vatican II: The Hope, the Promise, and the Call (1980), 2) I Jogged with God (1983), 3) Beyond Christianity: A Syncretistic Look at Buddhism and Christianity (1990), 4) Sodomy and the Catholic Tradition (2001), and 5) The Emerging Black Church (2007)
__________________________________________________

Interviewer: In a recent article for Radical Catholic magazine, you stated that a spirit of conservatism was sweeping the Church. I do not see that spirit. Would you explain what you mean by ‘a spirit of conservatism’?

Fr. Trendy: Pope Benedict still speaks in the language of what I call patriarchal Christianity. He still uses anarchic terms like ‘God the Father’ and ‘Christ the Lord’. Those are tribal terms, not universal terms for modern man.

Int: I don’t quite understand your meaning.

FT: The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, but also the New, is a reflection of a particular time period and a particular people’s – a tribal, nomadic people – concept of god. It is not a magic book that is relevant, without modification, to modern man.

Int: So you reject the notion that the Bible is divinely inspired?

FT: I reject the traditional notion of divinely inspired scripture. I do not reject the notion that a life force inspires works of creative literature.

Int: And that is how you view the Bible, as a work of creative literature?

FT: Yes.

Int: If you reject the authority of the Bible, what is your touchstone of reality? Is it the Pope?

FT: No, of course not. Benedict is the head of an organization called the Roman Catholic Church, but he is not the head of the evolving church of the holy spirit.

Int: Who is the head of that church?

FT: There is no head of that church. We are all evolving to our own omega points. No bogeyman authority figure from the Dark Ages can guide an evolving human being. Pope John Paul II was beginning, at the time of his death, to understand that concept. The present Pope doesn’t seem to grasp it.

Int: I must say that I don’t grasp it either. The faith you describe sounds less substantial than Casper the Friendly Ghost.

FT: I’m afraid you just don’t understand things of the spirit.

Int: Well, we’ll let that alone for the present. Let me ask another question. Don’t you ever get tired of trying to keep up with the latest trends in liturgy, theology, and sexual practices?

FT: It is difficult, but if one is to stay in touch with humanity, one must stay in touch with the times.

Int: I don’t agree. There can be no humanity if there are no concrete men of flesh, blood, and spirit. The integral, true man does not drink from the well of modernity. He takes his life-sustaining drink from a well that is not subject to the ever-changing water of the ever-changing times.

FT: All things change. That is the law of life.

Int: I would call it a law of death. And didn’t Christ conquer death?

FT: Evolve, evolve, evolve – that is our sublime mission.

Int: I refuse to evolve.

FT: Then you are doomed to extinction.

Int: If nature is supreme, as you seem to imply, then yes, I am doomed to extinction. But you are also doomed, aren’t you? If Christ be not risen... You know the implication, don’t you?

FT: No man will become extinct who is part of nature. He doesn’t die, he simply returns to his source.

Int: Not to his Maker?

FT: No, that is a primitive, out-dated concept.

Int: What is the significance of Jesus Christ to the Catholic Church?

FT: He was our founder. He taught us how to evolve.

Int: But you have evolved beyond Him now?

FT: You put it rather crudely, but yes, we have evolved beyond Christ. We still respect him for having shown us the way. But these concepts are probably new to you and therefore hard to grasp.

Int: No, they are not new. I’ve been through the university system. But while at the university, I also came across the European poets. And in their works, I saw the reflection of a face. Do you have any idea whose face I saw?

FT: You saw the face of a tribal god of one particular group of people who occupied a geographical region called Europe.

Int: No, I saw the face of the one true God. And having seen that face in European culture, I looked for confirmation of the truth I had seen. I went to a priest who was teaching at the university, and I asked him how I could verify the vision. The priest said something very interesting. He did not drag out the party line and tell me to read the Baltimore Catechism and the latest papal encyclical. He told me to read the Gospels. It was good advice, because the Christ of the Gospels and the Christ of the European people are one and the same. I don’t think it is possible to evolve beyond that vision. That vision is reality.

FT: I would say that it is one man’s fantasy.

Int: It is not just my vision.

FT: All right, I’ll grant you that. It is a fantasy of a whole group of people who used to occupy the continent of Europe. They were a distinctly insular and cruel people.

Int: I know your views on the Europeans. But before we discuss your book, The Emerging Black Church, let me go back to a book you wrote in 2001 called Sodomy and the Catholic Tradition.

FT: All right.

Int: You stated in the book that sodomy could be very beneficial for one’s soul under the right circumstances. Could you elaborate on that statement?

FT: I would be happy to. Sodomy is an expression of love. Love is from the divine essence. Love between consenting adults is always life-enhancing and, therefore, holy.

Int: That’s a rather disgusting syllogism. Do you really believe it?

FT: Of course I do. It is the essence of the true Christianity.

Int: Sodomy?

FT: No, love.

Int: Then any physical act between two consenting adults is a life-enhancing, loving act, and therefore the act is Christian?

FT: Yes.

Int: Suppose a man decides he loves his neighbor’s wife. And suppose that love is reciprocated. If they act on their mutual attraction, is that interaction life-enhancing and therefore Christian?

FT: Yes.

Int: But what if the woman’s husband does not think his neighbor and wife have participated in a life-enhancing act? Suppose he thinks his neighbor is a scoundrel and his wife is a slut?

FT: The husband would be wrong. He would be looking at the whole thing from the antiquated prism of conventional non-evolutionary Christian morality. If he had a properly evolving Christian perspective, he would understand that the truly loving relationship does not entail the stifling of another’s life-enhancing acts.

Int: But isn’t the husband suffering when his neighbor sleeps with his wife? Can something be life-enhancing if it destroys the life of another human being?

FT: The husband only suffers when he sees life through a false prism.

Int: So it’s his own fault if he suffers, because he doesn’t see the world properly?

FT: I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but, yes, that is essentially correct.

Int: How about rape, then? If a man rapes a woman, is that a life-enhancing act and therefore a Christian act?

FT: Most definitely not.

Int: But it is life-enhancing, is it not? Let’s suppose the man loves the woman he raped.

FT: No, the act cannot be life-enhancing because the man did not get the woman’s consent.

Int: But in the case of the adulterous couple, they did not get the husband’s consent.

FT: That’s different; the husband was not looking at life through the proper window.

Int: Well, couldn’t we say that about the hypothetical rape victim, she was just not looking at life through the proper window?

FT: No, we couldn’t; you’re making a mockery of my words. I don’t believe you really want to have a serious discussion.

Int: Is it possible to have a serious discussion with a man who could write this passage. I quote from a book you wrote called Language and the Objective Correlative: “There is no real connection between the words we use and objective reality, because there is no such thing as objective reality. All reality is relative. The spiritual principle of life is that the spirit is a relative concept. Words as they have been traditionally used are jailers, used to keep us prisoners in charnel houses of objectivity.” End quote.

FT: I stand by those words. But I don’t think that passage is relevant to the issue of sodomy, which is what you said you wanted to discuss.

Int: I wouldn’t think you would see the relevance of the passage. But it is relevant to everything we have been discussing. If we cannot know anything but our own ever-evolving minds, then we become shadows that simply pass over the earth like an evening mist. We are without a god, without an identity, and without human fellowship. But as a consolation, we can be sodomites and adulterers because in the land of pure, evolving mind, there is no such thing as sin.

FT: You have twisted everything I’ve said. The evolving minds that you deprecate have given us mercy. For the first time in the history of mankind, man, at least the evolving man, knows what it feels like to be free of guilt and free of a vengeful god that sees evil in every life-enhancing act.

Inter: You have no right to use the term ‘mercy’. Mercy is only given to those who believe in the Christian God. What we always come up against is the essential question: Is Christ the Son of God? If He is, then far from being a vengeful, cruel, antiquated faith, orthodox Christianity is man’s only hope to actually know what it is like to be loved by a merciful God. In your scheme of things, there can be no mercy because there is no God to extend mercy. But you do keep the concept of sin.

FT: That I categorically deny.

Int: Yes, you do. The sinners are the recalcitrant Christians, like the husband of the unfaithful wife, who still hold on to a belief in God, sin, and redemption.

FT: You’re not going to try to justify the story of Adam and Eve and original sin?

Int: I don’t have to justify it; the reality of life confirms it. Melville once remarked that modern man, in rejecting original sin, was rejecting the one tenet of Christianity that was most obviously true.

FT: Don’t quote a white European to me.

Int: The white Europeans whom you deplore showed us the face of Jesus Christ. And that face is a merciful face. To whom can we turn for mercy if not to Christ? And to what people can we look, if not to the white Europeans, to see the mercy of God embodied in a culture? The barbarians have no mercy and the post-Christian rationalists like you have eliminated the divine source of mercy.

FT: I must stop you there. The white Europeans have defiled the earth. Our only hope is to embrace the black race and...

Int: I’ve read your book, you needn’t go any further. But I wonder if you have ever looked at the Gospels with an open heart, or looked at the Western cultural heritage from any vantage point other than a hate-filled, Olympian vantage point. There is a remarkable synergy between the Gospels and the European poets who were inspired by His presence in their civilization. You claim that you and like-minded, evolving men invented mercy. The European tradition gives the lie to that blasphemous claim.

FT: Again, I must protest.

Int: No, you’ve had your say, in countless lectures which I’ve had to sit through.

FT: You’ve never attended one of my classes.

Int: Yes, I have, for you and your ilk are legion. You exist in every university throughout the Western world and you haunt the airwaves and print mediums of the world. So just this once, you’re going to be lectured to.

In the deceptively simple parable of the prodigal son, we have all the elements of Christian drama. The drama of the Greeks was the drama of fate. Oedipus’s triumph consisted of the way he played the cruel hand which fate dealt him. In Christian drama, the triumph and tragedy consist not in the drama of fate, but in the drama of free will. There are no Grecian goddesses of the fates spinning our destinies; our wills are free, and we can send ourselves to perdition or be astounded into heaven. Such is the substance of Christian drama.

The prodigal son has lived all his life in his father’s house but has never really known his father. If he had, he would never have left him. It is only when he is completely outside of his father’s house that the prodigal son appreciates what he had but never knew. The prodigal’s plight illustrates a point Chesterton made in his book, The Everlasting Man: “Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it.”

So, the prodigal son returns. His father is not content to simply wait for his son to get to the house. When he sees him, “yet a great way off,” the father runs to his son and showers him with kisses. The father is like our Lord, who is just waiting for us to make the slightest move in His direction, and He will pursue us as an ardent lover pursues his beloved. One can hear the father using the words Francis Thompson ascribes to Christ:
"All which thy child’s mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!"
The prodigal son returns to his father’s house with the love that “casteth out fear,” and on bended knee with true contrition says, “I have sinned against heaven and before thee, I am not worthy to be called thy son.” The father, much to the chagrin of animal rights' advocates, kills the fatted calf.

Our joy in the return of the prodigal son is mitigated by our sadness at the spiritual state of his brother. On merely face value, the brother seems in good shape. He, unlike his prodigal brother, has stayed in his father’s house. He has not “devoured his substance with harlots,” and he has kept the commandments. Yet his soul is a knot of vipers. He is angry with his father for celebrating his brother’s return. His anger reveals that he does not love God or his neighbor. If he loved God, represented by the father, he would not think to have been separated from the father was a great joy for his brother ; and if he had loved his neighbor, represented by his brother, he would rejoice that his brother was once more united with the father. I would not venture to say that the prodigal’s brother is damned, but I do think we are meant to see that the brother’s soul is in dire straits.

The prodigal’s brother has been practicing only the externals of the Faith. There is nothing in his heart. It is a great error to sneer at any mention of the heart, as many traditionalist groups do, and falsely label the heart as an invention of the liberals. The liberals have hardened their hearts to Christ more thoroughly than any of the formalist religious sects that the liberals are so fond of caricaturing. But it is clear from the parable of the prodigal son and so many of Christ’s other parables, that the heart, the interior soul, is central to a man’s faith. If a man’s heart is right, the externals will generally be there too. But all of the externals can be in place, and a man’s heart can still be a knot of vipers. A house, no matter how beautiful its outside walls, is an empty shell without a hearth fire.

Let us proceed from the prodigal son to that heroic knight of charity: Mr. Samuel Pickwick, Esquire, the founder and President of the Pickwick Club. Mr. Pickwick, as we know, wandered throughout England accompanied by his trusty manservant, Sam Weller, and by his fellow Pickwickians, trying to extend the reign of charity throughout England. Mr. Pickwick’s greatest adversary is Mr. Jingle. Jingle wanders throughout England cheating widows and fleecing the poor. Mr. Pickwick repeatedly tries to bring Mr. Jingle to justice and is repeatedly thwarted in his attempts. Toward the end of the book, Mr. Pickwick, who has been unjustly cast into prison by the law firm of Dodson and Fogg, meets Mr. Jingle; Jingle is a fellow prisoner. Mr. Pickwick has quite rightly sought to bring Jingle to justice, but when Pickwick perceives that Jingle has had more justice than even Jingle deserves, he forgives Jingle and saves him from starvation. Their meeting is worth witnessing:

‘Come here, sir,’ said Mr Pickwick, trying to look stern, with four large tears running down his waistcoat. ‘Take that, sir.’

Take what? In the ordinary acceptation of such language, it should have been a blow. As the world runs, it ought to have been a sound, hearty cuff; for Mr Pickwick had been duped, deceived, and wronged by the destitute outcast who was now wholly in his power. Must we tell the truth? It was something from Mr Pickwick’s waistcoat-pocket, which clinked as it was given into Job’s hand, and the giving of which, somehow or other imparted a sparkle to the eye, and a swelling to the heart, of our excellent old friend, as he hurried away.

-- from Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Mr. Pickwick, upon his own release from prison, facilitates Jingle’s release, and procures a job for Jingle. Those of us who know Mr. Pickwick are not surprised, but it is an act of mercy that only a man of Pickwick’s nobility would have performed. Just as Quixote rides on that lonely road in Spain, so does Mr. Pickwick ride the lonely roads of England; however, the roads are not as lonely because of Mr. Pickwick.

From England and Mr. Pickwick, we go to France and Jean Valjean. You know the story: Valjean serves nineteen years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. When he gets out, he is an embittered, vengeful man. He stays the night at the home of a saintly cleric (there were a few back then) named Bishop Bienvenu. After dinner, he steals the bishop’s silver plate and flees the house. A couple of gendarmes bring the captured Jean Valjean back to the bishop’s house in the morning. The bishop, instead of renouncing Jean as a thief, asks him why he forgot to take the silver candlesticks, since he, the bishop, had given him both the plate and the candlesticks the night before. The gendarmes leave, and the bishop speaks to Jean Valjean:

“Forget not, never forget that you have promisted me to use this silver to become an honest man.”

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of this promise, stood confounded. The bishop had laid much stress upon those words as he uttered them. He continued, solemnly:

“Jean Valjean, my brother; you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of
perdition, and I give it to God.”

-- from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
The bishop is a truly remarkable man. But Jean Valjean proves to be an equally remarkable man. He responds to the mercy shown to him, by becoming, during the next forty years of his life, a dispenser of mercy. The transformation that takes place in Jean Valjean’s soul illustrates a profound truth of the Christian Faith. In theory, it should be enough for all of us that our Lord, in the ultimate act of mercy, gave up his person to suffering and death to atone for our sins. But if one of the heirs of the apostles does not, at some time, show us mercy, we will never believe in the author of mercy. “See how they love one another,” used to be said about the early Christians. It will always be a sign of a sect when the opposite is said, “See how they hate one another.”

In the encounter between Bishop Bienvenu and Jean Valjean, the grace of God is triumphant because there is a willing dispenser of mercy and a repentant sinner. In the parable of the unmerciful servant (Matthew 18: 21-35), the grace of God is not triumphant because the servant who receives mercy -- “And the Lord of that servant being moved with pity, let him go and forgave him the debt” -- is not truly repentant. He thinks his master is a fool for forgiving him his debt. How do we know this? Because the servant goes out and demands a pitiful sum, in comparison to what he owed his master, from his fellow servant.

And his fellow servant, falling down, besought him, saying: Have patience with me, and I will pay thee all.
And he would not: but went and cast him into prison, till he paid the debt.
Now his fellow servants seeing what was done, were very much grieved, and they came and told their lord all that was done.
The unmerciful servant has nothing in his heart. He knows only the externals of the Faith. He knows how to go on bended knee to his lord to ask for a favor, but he has no idea of the meaning of a bended knee. As a result:

Then the lord called him; and said to him: Thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all the debt, because thou besoughtest me:
Shouldst not thou then have had compassion also on thy fellow servant, even as I had compassion on thee?
And his lord being angry, delivered him to the torturers until he paid all the debt.
So also shall my heavenly Father do to you, if you forgive not every one his brother from your hearts.
There is a danger, in secular times like our own when the idea of God’s judgment is laughable to most people, of over-emphasizing God’s wrathful nature in order to compensate for the rampant secularism. One can see this overcompensating tendency in many of the traditionalist sects around today. Mere reaction, however, is never the answer to rampant secularism. The answer is always integral Christianity. The greatest act of mercy, especially in times of persecution, that our pastors can perform is to preach the pure and unmitigated Gospel of Christ. This point is illustrated for us in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s magnificent novel, Quo Vadis.

The setting of the novel is Nero’s Rome. Late in the book we witness the Christians, who have been herded together by Roman soldiers, about to face death in the arena. A precursor of the Jansenists, a priest named Crispus, speaks to the Christians.

“Bewail your sins for the hour has come. Behold, the Lord has sent down flames to destroy Babylon, the city of crime and shame. The hour of judgment has struck; the hour of wrath and disaster is here. The Lord promised to come, and He will soon be here. He will not come as a meek Lamb Who offered His blood for our sins, but He will come as a Judge Who in justice will hurl sinners and unbelievers into the pit. Woe to the world! Woe to sinners! There will be no mercy for them. I see You, Lord Christ! Stars are falling upon the earth, the sun is darkened, the earth opens its gaping maw, the dead rise from the graves but You are triumphant amid sounds of trumpet and legions of angels, amidst thunder and lightning. I see You, O lord, O Christ!”
Understandably, Crispus’s words do not comfort the Christians. The ungodliness of the godly Crispus leads the Christians to despair. But suddenly the voice of Peter is heard.

At that moment a calm and reassuring voice was heard. “Peace be with you!”

It was the voice of Peter the Apostle who had entered the cave a moment earlier. At the sound of his voice terror dissipated as if by a miracle. People rose from the crowd. Those who were near the Apostle fell on their knees before him as if seeking protection. He stretched out his hands over them and cried, “Why are you troubled? Who can say when the final hour will strike. The Lord punished Babylon with fire but His mercy will be on those whom baptism has purified and you, whose sins are redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, will die with His name on your lips and peace in your hearts. Peace be with you!”

After the merciless words of Crispus, the words of Peter feel like a balm on all present. Not the fear of God but the love of God was more important to them now. These people loved Christ about Whom they had learned from the Apostle’s narratives. Not a merciless judge but a mild and patient Lamb was their God. A God Whose mercy surpasses all understanding, surpasses all wickedness that man can perpetuate. This was great comfort to them all. A great solace and thankfulness filled their hearts.

In the exchange between Crispus and St. Peter, we can see vividly illustrated the difference between heresy and Christianity. The Christian preaches mercy to the repentant sinner, but the heretic preaches wrath and judgment for all but himself.

Closely allied to the Jansenist mentality which preaches hell with such joy, is the Feeneyite mentality. God’s grace must work through the channels they demand or else He is no God. Christ’s promise to the thief on the cross, “This day thou shalt be with me in paradise,” stuffs the lie down the Feeneyites’ throats. Christ cuts through all the red tape and takes the good thief to heaven with him. This does not negate the sacramental system, nor does it mean we should all plan on a deathbed conversion; it simply means that the ways of God are not the ways of man, and that one cannot put “love in a golden bowl.”

If one looked only at the externals of the good thief’s life, one certainly would never have known him. But Christ did know him. He knew of the titanic struggle that took place in the thief’s heart. He knew of the subterranean current of grace that was hidden from the rest of mankind. The current was so strong that our Lord decided that the good thief belonged in heaven. Who are we, and who are the Feeneyites, that presume to judge our Lord? “This day thou shalt be with me in paradise.”

I have refrained from using any images of mercy from the works of Shakespeare because that task would demand a separate book. But I would be remiss if I didn’t quote Portia’s immortal speech from the Merchant of Venice. She confronts the unrepentant Shylock with these words:

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.
What Portia so eloquently explains, my poor, soul-dead Father Trendy, is that we see God most clearly when we practice the virtues that His only begotten Son taught us to practice. Tom Brown might have become a Viking-type pagan, or worse, a post-Christian rationalist, if he had not extended mercy and protection to a poor fatherless boy who was placed in the same dormitory with him. When Arthur’s mother expresses her thanks to Tom, he understands the link between God, mercy, and the civilization of the white man, which you, Father Trendy, and your ilk have done so much to destroy.

Arthur’s mother got up and walked with him to the door, and there gave him her hand again, and again his eyes met that deep, loving look, which was like a spell upon him. Her voice trembled slightly as she said, “Good night – You are one who knows what our Father has promised to the friend of the widow and the fatherless. May He deal with you as you have dealt with me and mine!”

-- from Tom Brown’s Schooldays
I read that work once a year with my children, so I always know that passage is coming, yet still I can’t hold back the tears.

And that, Father Trendy, to paraphrase Linus, is what Christianity and Western culture are all about.

FT: I’m not impressed by reactionary drivel... You struck me!

Int: There is no such thing as striking another person. You are trying to place me in a “charnel house of objectivity.”

FT: It hurt!

Int: It was life enhancing for me; maybe you are not looking at life through the proper prism.

FT: I think I’ll need dental work!

Int: Then, I guess the interview is over.

Labels: , ,

Saturday, January 03, 2009

Polytheistic Hell



And he said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine: and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters. -- Matthew 8: 32

If we just look at the surface of organizational Christianity, the Christian faith seems to be alive, and if not prospering at least holding its own. But if we go just a little below the surfaces of the various Christian churches, we can see that the Christian faith is very far from thriving or holding its own. There has been an incredible shift in emphasis in the Christian churches. Every Christian church was originally founded on the belief that Jesus Christ’s entrance onto the historical stage (birth, life, death and resurrection) was the colossal event of human history. All of mankind’s existence hinged, Christians believed, on that earth-shattering event. But the new emphasis of the religious intelligentsia is on what Christianity has in common with other religions and what Jesus Christ has in common with other religious leaders. How often have we heard Christ lumped in with Gandhi, Socrates, or -- in the ultimate insult – coupled with Nelson Mandela or Barack Obama? Christ’s importance as a religious leader is not denied, but Christ’s special identity as the Son of God, the Lord of history, is being denied. What has taken place in the latter half of the 20th century and in the beginning of the 21st century is a world-wide apostasy. The Europeans have returned to polytheistic atheism. They don’t deny Christ; they simply place Him on an equal or subordinate level with other gods. And of course that type of non-denial is really the deepest, the most blasphemous denial of all. Christ is the one true God. He is not a religious leader or a great prophet.

The hierarchies of the Christian churches almost never say it explicitly, but what they imply by the causes they support and the people, such as Obama, whom they worship, is that the Christ story in its unadulterated form is too irrational and fantastical for a rational person to believe. They will place the man called Jesus in a place next to Gandhi and slightly below Obama, but they will not grant Him divine status. “The original, un-amended Christ story, you must know by now,” they tell us, “is ridiculous; it’s against nature.” And that is really what is at the crux of the race issue. The white liberals want to return to nature and the polytheistic gods of the colored races.

When the white man believed his God was the true God, he was a racial segregationist. He sought to preserve the integrity of his race because in doing so he was preserving the integrity of his faith. When he ceased to believe that his God was the one true god, he sought to blend with the colored races in order to be part of a natural religion that appeared so much easier than Christianity.

It will not be tragic if the white man discovers that he can never really be happy in the natural, polytheistic world of the non-white races. The real tragedy would be if he was comfortable in their world, because if that becomes the case the white man will have lost his soul.

Right now the white liberals, who are legion, are imitating the swine that St. Matthew describes. They are rushing headlong for the cliff and an ocean perishing. And there is a dynamic energy to their insane rush that can only be resisted by a faith that is just as dynamic as their faith. Halfway-house Christians like the Bob Jones University potentates and the late John Paul II, who think they can run with the swine right to the edge of the precipice and then turn back, will go over the cliff with the swine.

I don’t think white people can ever be comfortable in the polytheistic religions of the “natural races.” I think, for the white man, there is only Christ or the abyss. And it certainly seems like the white European has chosen the abyss. Maybe ‘chosen’ is not quite the proper word for it implies more of a conscious choice on the part of the white man. It would be more accurate to say that the white man feels compelled to plunge headlong into the abyss. Satan is obviously the one who is doing the compelling, but the post-Christian does not believe such stuff and nonsense. One thinks of the French writer André Gide, who remarked, ‘I don’t believe in the existence of the devil, but of course that is what the devil wants me to believe.’

I spent a number of years in the pro-life movement before I realized that abortion would remain legal until the white man repudiated the abortion which spawned legalized abortion. When the white man aborted Jesus Christ from the womb of European civilization, it made every womb a potential death chamber for God’s children. Without a safe dwelling place in a culture that honors mercy and not sacrifice, the Son of Man cannot enter in. In the barbarian cultures He is relegated to the status of a minor deity.

For my entire adult life I have listened to the church men, conservative and liberal, tell us that it is no great tragedy that Europeans have abandoned the Christian faith. Asia and Africa will pick up where the Europeans left off. Is this the case? Organizational Christianity might have gained some converts in those continents, but can an honest man really claim that Asia or Africa have become Christian continents like Europe was once a Christian continent? No, an honest man cannot make such a claim. But a clergyman who has traded in his belief in Christ as the Son of God for a belief in Christ as a religious leader can and does make such a ridiculous claim. What the modern clergymen are telling us is that it is better that the whole world should be enveloped in a polytheistic hell than that they should be forced to give up their belief in a harmonious, one-world-one-race-and-many-gods faith. The post-Christian rationalists (PCR) talk about diversity, but the only type of diversity they support is a diversity of gods. Muhammad, Buddha, Obama, and Gandhi – we know the litany. Christ usually comes in somewhere in the lower tier because after many years of association with white Europeans, His reputation has been soiled in the eyes of the barbarians and the post-Christian rationalists.

Let us be clear about old Europe and the brave new world we are facing. The central event that created and sustained the European for centuries was the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The central event that sustains the new world order is the abortion of Jesus Christ from the womb of European civilization. We have not evolved to a higher form of Christianity. We have de-evolved. There is not and never shall be on this earth a purer, truer vision of Christ than the vision articulated by the hearts of Europeans who saw and believed. And I’m not referring to any one theologian or religious sect; I’m talking about the Europeans who saw through, not with the eye. To the barbarian and the PCR white, the Athenian woods are merely woods. To the European they are an enchanted forest containing fairies and spirits that come to life on a midsummer’s night and carry out His command that charity and mercy shall hold sway in His civilization.

In the polytheistic world of the barbarians and the new age whites, individual men and women do not, once dead, come back to life. Nor do the natural gods of the heathens and PCR whites. They come back in different forms like the seasons but then they die again to be replaced by other gods. But in the Christian faith, the Christ, the God of the European, has broken the bonds of the natural cycle of birth, maturity, death and decay. He can once again become the center of European civilization because He is the only God who cannot die. Yes, the white man aborted Him, but He waits only for the faithful hearts to invite Him back. And He will come because He always responds to the cry from the depths of the human heart. He is one of us; He is our brother and our God.

We don’t need great numbers to restore European civilization. God always works from the particular to the general. Adam stood in for all humanity. One small tribe of people was chosen to bring forth the Christ. And one God-Man was the redeemer of all mankind. It is fidelity to the faith that is needed, not a Mongol horde or a democratic majority.

Our race is the outward symbol of an inner spiritual dimension. It is not a mere pigmentation of the skin or an insignificant accident of nature: “...the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb.” The European has a destiny. He is the Christ-bearer. If he stays close to the incarnational things of Europe, his home, his race, and the non-polytheistic Christ of faith, he will emerge from the seemingly overwhelming tidal wave of color, tattered and scarred, but victorious.

Every modern heresy, such as race-mixing, abortion, and sodomy, has been sanctioned under the umbrella of an evolving democratic system that is supposed to be self-evidently the process by which mankind, minus the recalcitrant white Europeans, will enter into the secular kingdom of the god who is not a god. Even those evangelicals who reject ape-to-man evolution have accepted the premises of democratic evolution. It is the task of the European to repudiate every single link in the evolutionary, democratic chain. You can’t take even one step with the swine. And why should we even consider it? Where is the evidence that the purveyors of democratic evolution have evolved to a higher stage of existence than our European ancestors? Are the PCR whites and the races of color the end product of the evolutionary process? In any other aspect of life besides the accumulation of scientific facts has liberal democracy brought forth the promised demi-gods of the earth? Is the Obama superior to Gordon, Hillary Clinton to Florence Nightingale, Jackson Pollack to Michelangelo, the Beatles to Beethoven, and J. K. Rowling to Shakespeare? And on and on we could go. Our modern Babylon gives the lie to all those who would justify such blasphemies as race mixing under the guise of the evolving democratic process.

The polytheistic gods and their followers are like the swine. They are legion and they have no humanity. In contrast, the European’s God is one God and He has a human heart. He is the soul of humanity. Certainly the antique European is recalcitrant; he refuses to run with the swine. And if he remains steadfast in that refusal, he will eventually see the triumph of His sacred humanity over the swinish herds of a polytheistic hell.

Labels: , ,