Friday, February 26, 2010

The Lay of the European Minstrel


“The way was long, the wind was cold,
The Minstrel was infirm and old;”
--Scott


When I worked in academia, I unfortunately had to listen to the views of academics on a daily basis. Thankfully since leaving academia I have been able to limit my conversations with that strange species. Recently, however, I came into contact with an academic. The subject of global warming came up, and I made an irreverent remark about it. The academic’s response was immediate and solemn: “Global warming is a proven fact.”

Has it come to this? Do such banalities as ‘global warming’ represent the faith of the European? Yes, tragically, such banalities as global warming and such obscenities as the worship of the ‘noble black savage’ do constitute the faith of the European. And it is useless to challenge the false premises behind the global warming assertion or behind the cult of the noble black savage. Both are statements of faith, and from the liberals’ point of view it stands upon them to defend, not to debate. And why should the liberals debate their faith? They hold the field; it would be foolish to yield one inch of it to their enemies.

The faith of the white man before the new nature faith, which will serve as a description for the global warming/black savage faith, was Christianity. Even the neo-pagan who hates Christianity must acknowledge that Christianity was the faith of the antique Europeans. Why the shift to the nature faith?

When I was in grade school, the teachers taught us a short song about Columbus. The part I remember runs,
“The World is round, Columbus said,
Oh, no, oh, no, the people cried,
It’s flat as it can be!”
Of course our teachers pointed out that Columbus wasn’t the only man who knew the earth was round, but he was the first man to venture forth to prove that it was. And after Columbus’s voyage, the European people, by and large, believed Columbus. Belief in the flatness of the world had formerly been believed to be just commonsense and belief in the roundness of the world lunacy. After Columbus the reverse was true.

The first apostles were the Columbuses of the faith. They were presented, in the person of Jesus Christ, with a faith that went against the commonly held beliefs of the rest of mankind. They took the most dangerous voyage of all to ascertain the truth of Christ’s claims; the voyage to the depths of the human heart. And there those heroes of the faith found the truth about God. When they proclaimed that truth to the world, only one group of people, the Europeans, believed them. The colored races clung to their polytheistic nature gods. To use the Columbus analogy, the coloreds remained flat-earthers. When, in the later half of the 20th century, the Europeans returned to the gods of nature, they too became flat-earthers.

The European is on the horns of a dilemma. He wants to be just like the natural black savage, but he cannot be just like him because he has too many years of Christianity in his blood. So he forsakes his blood and takes refuge in his mind. If he can’t be a black man, he can at least worship the black man with a pure, idealized love while building a world free of global warming for a future generation, which he hopes will be black and brown. The pragmatically minded neo-pagan can point out the impracticality of racial suicide to the white liberal from now till doomsday, and his warning will go unheeded. The liberal is in love with the black man, and love is blind.

And what are we to make of the neo-pagan building his own godless Tower of the Übermensch beside the liberals’ new Tower of Babel? What can we make of him other than an enemy? He is against the God of our race, and he is the harbinger of suicidal despair. In a loud and aggressive voice, he proclaims that Christ be not risen. With such creatures there can be no compromise, no pact, no agreement to disagree; for how can we form an honorable alliance with an ally who renounces the source of all honor?

The honor of the European is all and all. When everything else is stripped away, the European must look to the honor code he holds in his heart as a result of his incorporate union with Christ. Walter Scott repeatedly comes back to the theme of honor. A Christian hero doesn’t have to be smarter than the heathen, or even stronger than the heathen, but he must be more honorable than the heathen. Conscious that his honor is linked to His sacred heart, the Christian hero never acts outside of the code, as St. Paul articulated in 1st Corinthians 13.

What Satan came to realize was that it was not necessary to destroy church organizations in order to kill Christianity. It was only necessary to destroy the European by subverting his honor code. Charity flows from the heart of a man who feels connected to his God, his kith and his kin by ties of blood. If ties of blood become unacceptable to the intelligent, enlightened mind, the honor code which stemmed from those ties of blood dies.

The liberals with their instinctive desire to suppress the good and support evil always attack the Europeans who championed the code. Mark Twain, for instance, author of one good novel and countless heaps of trash, quite correctly, from a liberal standpoint, condemned Walter Scott as the most pernicious, insidiously evil influence of his time. To a Satanist like Twain, a man like Walter Scott, the soul of honor and the foremost champion of the code, was a dangerous lunatic.

If we move forward in time and look at the Western movies from 1930 to 1960, we can see, once again, the liberals’ hatred of the code. In the Westerns of that time period so despised by the liberals, evil is not to be found in one particular race; it is to be found in the men who know the code and willingly violate it in order to achieve their own selfish ends. The bad guys in the old Westerns are today’s good guys, the liberals and the barbarians of color. The only Western to be awarded an Oscar, Clint Eastwood’s The Unforgiven, was a Western that proclaimed there never was a distinct honor code which the white man held close to his heart and defended against Satan and his minions. “There was no honor code because there is no God,” is the liberals’ true belief.

Choose what hero you will, the medieval knight, the Scottish clansman, the English grenadier, or the Western cowboy; they are all white men and they all faithfully adhere to the code. They are men of honor, because they see life “feelingly.” Our Lord taught men to see life from inside, which is why the Europeans who followed Christ created a world completely different from the non-European worlds. Certainly the vision was through a glass darkly, but in that dark glass the European saw the son of God crucified, dead, and buried, and on the third day rise again from the dead. How can such a vision fail to produce men with hearts of fire? That is a difficult question to answer, but we do know that the European is no longer inspired by the vision of Christ crucified, Christ risen, as his European ancestors were. Could it be that the modern European doesn’t see what his ancestors saw because the modern European doesn’t see life feelingly? Gloucester certainly didn’t see life feelingly until he was forced to endure incredible suffering. Has the fear of suffering then made the white man forsake his race and the God of his race? I know how Walter Scott, the soul of honor, would answer that question.

Scott would tell us a tale of an aged minstrel, who once, in his youth, chose the path lined with soft linen and golden finery, only to find himself, at the path’s end, chained to a dungeon wall and forced to endure torture and deprivation. Then after years of suffering, a hero appeared. The hero broke the chains that bound the minstrel, led him out of the dungeon into the light, and guided the minstrel back to the path he had originally rejected in favor of the silken, golden path.

“This path is steep and often covered with rocks and thorns, but if you follow it to the end you will find yourself in the sacred woods.” The hero’s voice was gentle and his eyes were kind, and because he had rescued the minstrel from the dungeon the minstrel took the path he had once rejected.

The path was thorny and rocky, but the minstrel remembered the gentleness of the hero’s voice and the promise he had made, so he persevered. And finally at the path’s end he saw three crosses. On each cross hung a man, and in the center was the hero. The minstrel went to the foot of the cross and looked up. Suffering had not altered the look in the hero’s eyes. They were filled with a compassion that set the minstrel’s heart on fire. He threw himself at the foot of the cross and wept. When he finally raised his head, the cross was gone and only the hero remained, with the same compassion in his eyes that set a man’s heart on fire, and now with something else in his eyes as well. The minstrel saw exaltation in those compassionate eyes. It was not the exaltation of vainglory but the exaltation of a knight who has faced a dragon for the sake of his beloved and has conquered the dragon.

Many years have passed and the young minstrel is now an old minstrel. For more than sixty years he has gone throughout the world, telling, through his harp, the tale of the Hero. Some laugh at him and send him on his way. Others scorn him and mistreat him. But a few, the Europeans, weep and believe. +

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