Sunday, January 17, 2010

Till We Have Built Jerusalem


And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads. – Rev. 22: 4

I recently read Charlotte Mary Yonge’s Reasons Why I Am a Catholic and Not a Roman Catholic (1901). I infinitely prefer her brand of Catholicism to Leo XIII’s brand of Catholicism, but my preferences are meaningless and Miss Yonge’s points are moot because neither Yonge’s Catholicism nor Leo XIII’s Catholicism have survived past the 1960’s.

Is this the proof that both versions of the Faith were false? Well, I don’t think the fact that a Faith has not survived is proof that it is false. Islam has retained more of its core than Christianity, but that does not, in my judgment, make Islam true and Christianity false. A religion can only be judged false when it fails the Shakespearean test: the test of reality. And in that test Christianity still stands as the one true religion. But when we are talking about Anglo-Catholicism and Roman-Catholicism, we are not talking about the Faith itself, we are talking about two organizations’ claim that they have preserved the original Faith of the Apostles. In that regard, the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church have been shown to be false claimants; neither have preserved the faith of the apostles (nor for that matter have the Orthodox Church or the Protestant churches). What seems to be missing in all the churches is a desire to see Christ whole, in His divinity and His humanity. And consequently where each church goes wrong is in attempting to incorporate only a portion of Christ’s personality into their theology.

We have all had the experience, particularly in this age of pop psychology and pop theology, of being put into a category that doesn’t really suit our personality completely or that is a totally false category. Our Lord had similar problems with the apostles. St. Peter had to be rebuked: “Get thee behind me, Satan,” and none of the apostles were trusted to impart Christ’s message until after Pentecost. And St. Paul needed a personal revelation before he could understand the personality of Christ. Of course not even a personal revelation would have done him any good if he hadn’t already been struggling to live a life of the spirit.

I think the image that appears to block our encounter with the living God is the false abstracted portrait of God that original sin paints. The remedy, as I have suggested before, is to journey through that labyrinth called the human heart. Anything that impedes the Shakespearean journey turns us not toward God but toward Satan, even if it is called Roman Catholicism, Traditionalism, Orthodoxy, Anglo-Catholicism or Protestantism. (1)

When I look at the churches in the nineteenth century, I see much that is admirable, but I see none that have carried their admirable visions of Christianity into the 20th or 21st centuries. They have all renounced the integral Christ for an abstracted Christ that suits their mundane and often sinister earthly political purposes.
“Another cause inflamed the minds of the nation at large, no less than the tempting prospect of the wealth of England animated the soldiery. So much had been written and said on either side concerning the form of church government, that it had become a matter of infinitely more consequence in the eyes of the multitude than the doctrines of that gospel which both churches had embraced. The Prelatists and Presbyterians of the more violent kind became as illiberal as the Papists, and would scarcely allow the possibility of salvation beyond the pale of their respective churches. It was in vain remarked to these zealots, that had the Author of our holy religion considered any peculiar form of church government as essential to salvation, it would have been revealed with the same precision as under the Old Testament dispensation.”

– Walter Scott in A Legend of Montrose
What Scott observes in the zealots on every side of the British religious wars, a tendency to make the forms of worship the faith itself, has destroyed Christian Europe.

The forms of worship are not the faith itself. They exist only to lead us to the object of worship. You cannot worship the Latin Mass or the ‘born again’ experience without eventually becoming the leading character in a tragedy, the tragedy of a man without a vital faith. European man became, when he embraced formalism, a second-hand man, incapable of coming to grips with any aspect of existence directly.

Some years back I quoted Henri de Lubac, who said that modern man had lost his appetite for God. If that appetite returned, de Lubac claimed, then belief would return. But how can one hunger for any of the rationalized, second-hand gods presented to us by the so-called Christian churches? Their gods are Mr. Rogers and Tash. The antidote for such false faiths is the folk wisdom of the West, which says the human heart contains the secret treasure that will forever remain hidden from the academics. And therein lies the key to the de-Christianization of our churches and our culture: the Church has become academized as has our society. The Christian folk have passed out of existence. Without them there can be no genuine Christianity as it once existed in Europe. We are still reaping the bitter harvest of idea-religion, spawned by the Greeks and brought into the Church for its destruction by Aquinas.

Those who would be Christian folk cannot wait for the churches to break out of their bondage to the academy, which is a bondage to Satan. They must turn away from the academy, which is the modern church and the modern world, and start on the slow but sure journey through the human heart that our European ancestors made so long ago.

I have conservative nationalist literature dating as far back as 1979 in which the reader is urged to stop illegal and legal colored immigration by writing to his local congressmen. Why do such actions never work? Because we cannot stop an invasion by placing a form of government above the interests of our people. The cry should be, “In the name of our God and our people, this invasion must be stopped!” Fortunately Alfred the Great didn’t have a congressman to write to; if he had, he never would have become Alfred the Great.

Quentin Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury asks his father how he knows life is meaningless. The drunken, nihilist father responds that he knew about the meaningless of existence at the moment tragedy became second-hand. Quentin’s father is a modern European. His death in life is the result of the triumph of formalism in the Christian churches. The Christian faith is a two-edged sword. If it is seen whole and taken to heart, it is our salvation. But if Christianity is dissected, decompartmentalized, and turned into a formalized system, it becomes a virulent poison.

It would be disastrous to follow the advice of the neopagans and jettison Christ in order to save the white race. Christ was, is, and always shall be our only hope. He is our only hope because He is the living God. But jettison the worship of the modern icons of modern, Christless Christianity, such as racial egalitarianism, democracy, and Tridentinism, we must.

The guardians at the gates of the various Christian churches can all present an apologia for their right to be called the true heirs of the apostles. But are they the heirs of the apostles? The apostles lived and worked with the Lord during his life on earth, and they told the Christ story after His death and resurrection. It seems that the heirs of the apostles are the Europeans who lived with Christ on a daily basis and wove the Christian story into the seamless garment of their culture. How can churches who demean and denounce that culture and its people be the heirs of the apostles? They can’t, and they are not. Was the rock, against which the gates of hell would not prevail, an institution with a rational, systemic schema of salvation? Or was the rock St. Peter’s declaration of faith? “Thou are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Faith, the faith that moves mountain, comes from those who have seen the face of Jesus Christ. Do we see His face in the liberal, white-hating, country-club churches of the modern world, or do we see that precious Face in the lives and culture of the ancient Europeans?

Europe is being engulfed by barbarians of color because white Europeans no longer desire to see the face of Jesus Christ. Gone is the patriotic desire of William Blake:
Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
The end result of a second-hand faith is Satanism. The liberals are openly satanic, and the half-way house Christians are unable to resist them because they have a second-hand faith. And when life is viewed from such a standpoint, the dramatic conflict between good and evil is seen as a fairytale that mature, thinking people have left behind. But that is what I love about Ratty’s Europe. It is childlike and Christ-centered. In that Europe, Christ is real, the devil is real, and Christian Europe is a living, breathing entity as well.

The children of darkness have given up their religion of the heart for the religion of the mind. This goes against the wisdom of the race. The white man has always preferred the leaden casket over the one of gold and the one of silver; the cottage in the woods to the sumptuous palace; and the blood of the Lamb to the magic talisman. Let the sons and daughters of this ‘new age of enlightenment’ keep all their magic talismans: rationalism, science, and multiculturalism. The European will stay with the European cottage in the woods that contains the things he loves. And his childlike attachment to the things he loves will keep him bound to the Sacred Heart Who speaks to men through the little things that the clever men and women have discarded. The old fairy tales are correct: the faithful heart always triumphs over the satanic mind. +
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(1) I don’t think one has to have read Shakespeare (although it helps) in order to follow the Shakespearean way to God; however, I do think it is the only way. We must strip away false layer after false layer from our hearts till we get to its center. And then – well – and then we find He has been there all along.

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