The Boxed-In World of Liberaldom

Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or Love in a golden bowl?

-William Blake

For the past month two door-to-door traveling Mormons have been stopping at my house. I listen to them for about 30 to 40 minutes and then I send them on their way. I’m kind of betwixt and between with the young Mormons. On the one hand I would like them to be antique Christians and give up their denial of the triune God and their devotion to Joseph Smith, but on the other hand, it is good to see young white males who still have “the animation of the European in their eyes.” Added to that, the Mormons are very conservative on many of the social issues such as abortion. I would hate to see the young Mormons who have been coming to my house become less animated and less conservative by joining one of the mainstream churches of either the Catholic or the Protestant denominations. That is the appalling tragedy of modern Europe: a heretical sect like the Mormons is more Christian than the mainstream and the halfway-house Christians.

The Mormons are spiritually sounder than the halfway-house Christians and their mad-dog liberal brethren in the same way a cancer patient of one year’s standing is healthier than a cancer patient of five years' standing who is two days away from death. Both are ill, but both are not ill to the same degree. The Mormon’s heresy from the 1820’s is not quite as heretically advanced as the modern European’s anti-Christian Christian theology.

The modern Christian anti-Christians have no right to sneer at Joseph Smith, because they drink from the same heretical trough that he drank from. Joseph Smith wanted God to become conformable to the narrow perimeters of his 2+2=4 mind. He was unable to tolerate a God who gave poetical certainty, the certainty that is found only in the depths of the heart, rather than mathematical certainty. He answered Blake’s question:, “Can wisdom be put in a silver rod, Or love in a golden bowl,” with a resounding ‘Yes!’ The modern liberals have copied the methodology of Joseph Smith. They condemn the present day Mormons not because the Mormons put God in a narrow rationalist box, but because the Mormons’ God-in-the-box is more conservative than their God-in-the-box.

The halfway-house Christian, the Mormon, and the liberal are all united in their theology. They are all good, semi-Pelagian Thomists. For them God is a rational construct that can be grasped and contained by the human mind. They stand opposed to the intuitive, visionary, heartfelt faith of the European people. “Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart.” – Ephesians 4:18

The blindness of the heart! St. Paul certainly views the heart as the spiritual organ of sight, and so did the prophets, and so did our Lord. If it is true that the spirit resides in the heart, shouldn’t we view the religious tradition of a people as the history of their heartfelt, blood faith, and not a history of a series of church documents or one or two experts’ opinions of the Holy Bible? If the ‘silver rod’ wisdom of experts constitutes a tradition, then the Mormons, the halfway-house Christians, and the mad-dog liberals are traditional. They all believe that man creates his own religion in his mind with no reference to the touchstone of reality, the human heart.

The heresy of the “Great Divorce,” in which God becomes a construct of the human mind is the second oldest faith. It is the satanic faith: “Ye shall be as gods.” The oldest faith is the faith of the heart; God, through the warmth of His love, seeks to draw our hearts to His. The history of the European people, as with the ancient Hebrews, has been a history of the tug of war between Satan and God. Satan pulls the European toward his orbit with the ‘pride of intellect’ temptation. It makes no difference to Satan whether the European is proud of his esoteric knowledge of the ways of God or whether he is proud of his accumulated knowledge of the natural world; so long as the European has divorced himself from his heartfelt faith in Jesus Christ Satan has the European all locked up. And if Satan has the European he has all mankind – the colored tribes will not leave Babylon to rescue the European from Satan. They are content to live in Babylon.

The heart must be served. If the white clergymen designate religious faith as just an intellectual system, white people will satisfy their intellectual pride by playing with various theories about religion, but they will go to Babylon to satisfy their hearts. All faiths built on the intellect of man end up as a faith in Babylon. The men who least understood Christ were the Pharisees, the guardians of the faith. Isn’t that also the case with the European people? The guardians of the faith replaced Christ with their own Pharisaical systems and as a result the Christian churches became a breeding ground for Babylon. Intellectual pride and Babylon go together like a pimp and his whores.

Toward the end of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha, the third dumb brother, tells the children of the village something from his heart:

“My dear children, perhaps you won’t understand what I am saying to you, because I often speak very unintelligibly, but you’ll remember it all the same and will agree with my words sometime. You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”

From the childhood of our race there are thousands of memories that could sustain us in the battle against principalities and powers. But we have to believe those memories are good and pure and necessary for our faith, which means we have to disbelieve in the utopian liberals and the halfway-house Christians who insist that we are moving upward and onward to paradise if only we repudiate the memories of our European childhood. In our childhood we did not heed the siren call of modernity; we listened to our blood, which told us to hold on to our initial vision of a European hearth presided over by Jesus, the Son of God.

All people construct their governments according to their religious faith. We believe in a lie if we think there can be a religiously neutral state. Madison, Jefferson, and Franklin did not give the world its first religiously neutral state; they created a state based on their religion, which was deism.

The modern liberals have also created a religious state. In modern Liberaldom the hatred of the white and the love of the colored has been institutionalized because the hatred of the white and the love of the colored is the religious faith of the modern European. And it will remain the faith of the European so long as the European remains blind to the wisdom of his heart. So long as he believes wisdom comes in a silver rod, he will never escape from the mind-forged hell of Liberaldom.

I do not like novels in which the author invites us to infer the existence of God by showing us the reality of the devil. My favorite authors can delineate the good as well as evil. But there is something to be learned from the lesser authors who point to God by inference. Matthew Lewis is such an author. In his novel The Monk there is a very sad scene which encapsulates, for me, the tragedy of the modern European. A group of nuns consent to the torture of an innocent young girl, which goes against their heartfelt compassion for the girl, because their Mother Superior has told them that the tortures are for the good of the girl’s soul, and of course the Mother Superior must be obeyed because she possesses the godless wisdom of the Pharisees. She knows the fine points of the law, but she doesn’t know Him, the fulfillment of the law. If you adhere to the law of the Pharisees, your heart will be hardened like the Pharisees.

The modern European resembles the compliant nuns in Lewis’s novel. He might feel twinges of remorse as he watches the extermination of the European people, but he has been taught that wisdom comes from the Pharisaical men of intellect; if they approve of the extermination it must be right. It can truly be said of the European that “he did not die, but nothing of life remains.” If only his heart would “indignant break” over the destruction of his people and their sacred past, then the European would be a man again instead of a caricature of a man.

Is there anything that can stir a people whose hearts have been blinded from centuries of adherence to liberal, Pharisaical law? It doesn’t seem so, but then I think of Melville’s phrase in Clarel, “But through such strange illusions have they passed,” and then of Shakespeare’s phrase, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Satan wants us to believe that the 2+2=4 world is the only world. Then we will cease to look for anything beyond Babylon, we will copulate without love and make merry without joy, and we will worship at the shrine of the Negro forever. But if one European heart still remembers Europe what will happen to Babylon?

Puddleglum was still fighting hard. “I don’t know rightly what you all mean by a world,” he said, talking like a man who hasn’t enough air. “But you can play that fiddle till your fingers drop off, and still you won’t make me forget Narnia; and the whole Overworld too. We’ll never see it again, I shouldn’t wonder. You may have blotted it out and turned it dark like this, for all I know. Nothing more likely. But I know I was there once. I’ve seen the sky full of stars. I’ve seen the sun coming up out of the sea of a morning and sinking behind the mountains at night. And I’ve seen him up in the midday sky when I couldn’t look at him for brightness.”

Puddleglum’s words had a very rousing effect. The other three all breathed again and looked at one another like people newly awaked.

If it was already finished the devil wouldn’t be working so hard to destroy the last Europeans. The 2+2=4 walls of Liberaldom are not impregnable. “Once more, unto the breach, dear friends, once more…” +