European Soil

“And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit.”

Language, as Richard Weaver tells us, is sermonic. And what was the sermon the liberals were preaching when they reported the murder of a white South African nationalist as the murder of a “white supremacist”? We know what they are telling us, because we have heard nothing else for the past 50 years. They are telling us that he deserved to die because he loved his own race and wanted them to survive as a race. That is what is meant by ‘white supremacist,’ and the penalty for that crime is death. If the white South African nationalist had been a black supremacist, he would have been called a ‘freedom fighter’ or maybe even a saint, which is what John Paul II called Nelson Mandela. But he most certainly would not have been called a black supremacist, because supremacists are evil, and no black can be evil. When they murder, they are black nationalists, freedom fighters, or else ‘deprived youths lashing out at whitey after years of torture and abuse at the hands of whitey.’

There is something else in the liberals’ sermon that we should note. There is a warning. They want us to believe that the white nationalist South African was murdered because he was a ‘white supremacist.’ They do not want us to think that he had a very good chance of being murdered even if he had not written or spoken one word in defense of the white race. The liberals want white people to believe that so long as they are without sin, so long as they vote for Obama, condemn South Africa and Southern American white supremacists, and cheer every time there is a mixed race marriage, they will be able to sleep safe and sound in their beds. But they are warned; if they tread the path of white supremacy, which means white solidarity against race-mixing and bestial savagery, they will be exterminated. And of course it is another great liberal lie. A white man increases his chances to die in the one-sided race war if he speaks out against black savagery, but not by much. The white man stands condemned because he is white; no amount of sickening, sycophantic pandering and groveling will make him less likely to die for the sin of being white.

The colored races have not changed. They have always hated the white race. What has changed is the white race. A large minority of whites, possibly even a majority now, hate the white race. And the rest of the whites have become cattle, to be herded to the stockyards to be exterminated or ‘diversified.’ In South Africa, the exterminating-diversifying process can be accelerated because the colored population constitutes such a large majority, but the process of white racial suicide is proceeding at a rapid pace throughout the European world.

It would not be accurate to blame Christianity for white racial suicide unless you accept the apologia of anti-white Christians, such as John Paul II, that Christians prior to the middle of the 20th century were all wrong about Christianity, because prior to the mid-20th century, white people who fought -- and fought successfully -- to defend the white race were Christian. South Africa is a case in point. Can the modern day neo-pagans boast of any heroes that can equal Andries Pretorious, the white Christian leader of the punitive expedition against the Zulus at Blood River? No, they can’t. So it seems that the reality is that the white man is not in decline because he is Christian, but is in decline because he is insufficiently Christian.

Christianity then is not responsible for the demise of the white man. But Christianity does give the liberals the white heat for their furnaces of hate. No barbarian can hate like a liberal because the post-Christian liberal hates as Satan hates; he knows the good, but he rejects Him, just as the liberals do. Their hatred is unrelenting, while the colored savage’s hate abates when he is between bloodlettings.

I got a very depressing form letter a few weeks ago from one of the leading neo-pagan gurus. He wanted money to get “the message out on the Internet.” But what is the message, Mr. Neo-Pagan? The white man has only one message for the world, and it’s a very old message that the white liberals and the white neo-pagans have rejected. Satan has been much wiser than the European Christians. He knew that if you sow the seeds of faith among thorns, the thorns will grow and choke the seeds of faith. The good ground was Christian Europe. Satan turned Europe into a field of thorns by convincing the churchmen that the Christian God is the great illuminator and not the great liberator. Christ came, Satan told the churchmen, not to free mankind from sin and death, but to enlighten men’s minds. They could only be Christian by abandoning the Hero-God, the humane God, for the enlightened God. Then hatred for the old-fashioned human ties that bind, ties to our families and our race, becomes a moral imperative. Satan used the Christian churches to plant the thorns that destroyed Christianity.

In Charles Dickens’ book David Copperfield, the title character takes a trip in an English coach. During the trip all the passengers, save David, fall asleep in the coach. When the coach arrives at its destination, all the passengers wake up and vehemently deny that they were asleep during the ride in the coach. Young David concludes that there must be nothing as despicable as falling asleep in a coach, because the passengers took such great pains to deny that they had fallen asleep.

David was on to something. Human beings do not want to confess to something that makes them appear weak or foolish in the eyes of the world. And to confess that you believe in the simple fairy stories of the Old Testament and the fairy story of the New Testament is a confession of weakness and foolishness. But to whom are we afraid to appear weak and foolish? The liberals, of course, the ‘smart people’ who have covered Europe with thorns at Satan’s behest. Europeans have jettisoned the core element of the Christian -- faith in a Hero-God, who saves individual human beings with blood ties to kith and kin -- in exchange for a streamlined Christianity in which there are no ties of blood, only a cosmic, vague connection to all mankind.

We have seen the result of trying to oppose the evils of liberalism with a cosmic Christianity without depth. Like the seeds that fell on stony ground which had no depth of earth, cosmic Christianity was scorched and withered away because it had no roots. Christianity’s roots are in humanity, in the blood. Sever those roots and Christianity becomes liberalism. All halfway house Christians who want Christianity without the depth of feeling that can only be engendered by love for our kind -- our family members and our people -- will eventually become part of liberalism’s kingdom of thorns.

The neo-pagans talk about Viking sperm banks and getting the neo-pagan message out to white people. That is not what the European cares about. He has one message: “I will serve Christian Europe, or else I will not serve.” The thorns must be painstakingly removed from our sacred nation. Then we must plant the seeds of a blood faith deep into the European soil again. It is the European past that we can build upon, not some death-in-life neo-pagan future, or liberalism’s field of thorns. It is never a sign of weakness or foolishness to rise and ride with the God who saved us from sin and death. His Kingdom is forever; Satan’s kingdom is for one brief hour. +

Cultural Atheists

“Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” – Prov. 4:23

I once attended a small community Bible class. The unusual thing about the class was that all the members were believing Christians; they believed in Adam and Eve and the authenticity of the Old Testament, as well as in the ultimate truth of the New Testament. But the sad aspect of the class was that all the members were Christian-culture atheists. By that I mean that they saw no connection between Christianity and the Europe of the past, and they saw no connection between modern irreligion and the modern secular European culture. To them culture was permanently neutral. It was simply culture; it was just there, like the sun and the moon. To me however, every page of the Bible was reinforced by some verse or story from a European author. For instance, when Abraham wrestled with the problem of believing God’s promises when circumstances gave no indication that divine aid was coming –

And God said unto Abraham, As for Sarai they wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall her name be. And I will bless her, and give thee a son also of her: yea, I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; kings of people shall be of her. Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto him that is a hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?

-- it reminded me of Tirian in The Last Battle:

He thought of other Kings who had lived and died in Narnia in old times and it seemed to him that none of them had ever been so unlucky as himself. He thought of his great-grandfather’s great-grandfather King Rilian who had been stolen away by a Witch when he was only a young prince and kept hidden for years in the dark caves beneath the land of the Northern Giants. But then it had all come right in the end, for two mysterious children had suddenly appeared from the land beyond the world’s end and had rescued him so that he came home to Narnia and had a long and prosperous reign. “It’s not like that with me,” said Tirian to himself. Then he went further back and thought about Rilian’s father, Caspian the Seafarer, whose wicked uncle King Miraz had tried to murder him and how Caspian fled away into the woods and lived among the Dwarfs. But that story too had all come right in the end: for Caspian also had been helped by children—only there were four of them that time—who came from somewhere beyond the world and fought a great battle and set him on his father’s throne. “But it was all long ago,” said Tirian to himself. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen now.” And then he remembered (for he had always been good at history when he was a boy) how those same four children who had helped Caspian had been in Narnia over a thousand years before; and it was then that they had done the most remarkable thing of all. For then they had defeated the terrible White Witch and ended the Hundred Years of Winter, and after that they had reigned (all four of them together) at Cair Paravel, till they were no longer children but great Kings and lovely Queens, and their reign had been the golden age of Narnia. And Aslan had come into that story a lot. He had come into all the other stories too, as
Tirian now remembered. “Aslan—and children from another world,” thought Tirian. “They have always come in when things were at their worst. Oh, if only they could now.”

And in the Bible, when the mysterious stranger, Melchizedek, of no known parentage, suddenly appears to help Abram:

And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God. Genesis 14: 18 .... Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually. Hebrews 7: 3

I can see Melchizedek in Shane, a man of unknown parentage, who helps the Starrett family against the forces of evil:

He was the man who rode into our little valley out of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done rode back whence he had come and he was Shane.

I cannot read a single Shakespeare play without thinking of St. Paul. The two poets are of the same spirit:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal... For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. – I Corinthians 13: 1, 12-13

Compare this to Portia’s speech in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:

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 the 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. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea,
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.

-- The Merchant of Venice

Every author of note always points to Him as our only hope, like Dickens's Sydney Carton in The Tale of Two Cities:

She kisses his lips; he kisses hers; they solemnly bless each other. The spare hand does not tremble as he releases it; nothing worse than a sweet, bright constancy is in the patient face. She goes next before him—is gone; the knitting-women count Twenty-Two.

“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces, the pressing on of many footsteps in the outskirts of the crowd, so that it swells forward in a mass, like one great heave of water, all flashes away. Twenty-Three.

And from John 11: 25, 26:

And Jesus said unto her, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?

The liberals are being satanically consistent; they should work for the destruction of the white man and his past. That past is the embodiment of Christianity, which they despise. But why is the remnant band of Christians so ready to abandon the European cultural heritage? Well, if you’ll forgive my coming back to the same theme, it’s because the remnant believers are in the Christian halfway house. They cling to the Bible or to a traditional interpretation of the church documents, but they don’t see the importance of maintaining their blood ties to a race of people who took the Bible and the church documents seriously enough to make them a part of their culture.

The words 'fire' and 'heart' appear in the Bible with great frequency, while the words 'rational' and 'mind' never or seldom appear. If we abandon the cultural element, we leave behind the human component of religion that gives us the fire and heart to respond to God’s grace. If God is with and in His people’s culture, then they come in contact with Him in every aspect of their lives. But if He exists only in the minds of the doctors of theology, He becomes a distant God, and then an absent God, and finally a non-existent God. We need to feel that God is truly present with us. As soon as Moses, who made God’s presence known to the Hebrews, left to go up to Mt. Sinai, the people immediately started worshipping the golden calf. They needed to feel that God was amongst them.

My heart goes out to believers like the men and women in the Bible class I attended. They are struggling to hold to the Christian faith at a time when all the powers of this world are arrayed against them. But I also feel like shaking the aforementioned Christians and telling them: “The reason there are only five of us meeting in the basement of the church is because we have abandoned the fire-and-heart Christianity that was so deeply ingrained in the Europeans’ culture.” An intellectual faith only is “as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal”; it is devoid of fire and heart.

A religious culture is not an optional ‘extra’; it is a necessity because divine faith must have a human dwelling. And a culture, if it is to be true one, must be passed on and maintained by a race of people. There cannot be a multi-racial culture; that is a contradiction in terms. The Tower of Babel was not a culture; it was the antithesis of culture.

The majority of liberals do not even claim to be Christians. But there is a significant minority of liberals, represented by such men as Billy Graham and the late John Paul II, who claim that multi-culturalism is the logical outcome of Christ’s teaching. “Are not all men brothers in Christ?” Yes, they are. Christ did not come to save only one race of people, but did He choose to save mankind by race-mixing? The entire canon of Scripture says the opposite. And when the Europeans were Christian, they opposed race-mixing. In order to support multi-culturalism, you must reject Scripture and claim that your European predecessors were not sufficiently Christian. This is precisely what the Christian liberals do.

Christ’s saving grace comes to individuals who have distinct identities within a race of people. The Civil War in this country and the on-going wars of immigration in the European countries were and are being fought over the Greek idea of God, that He is an abstraction who can only be known through the intellect, versus the Hebraic belief that knowledge of God comes to us through spirit and blood. The ongoing racial war is of eternal moment. If the European surrenders, he will lose his soul. If he refuses to surrender, if he keeps faith with his race and the God of his race, he will save his soul. +

The American Dichotomy

America is the only country, formed by Europeans, which was founded on a false utopian idea. Other countries, like France, sought to replace a traditional government with a utopian one, but they did have traditions and customs prior to their new order.

But even Americans, despite their ignoble, godless constitution, could not eradicate all European beliefs and customs from their lives in one short generation or even in one hundred years. Thus, there is always a great dichotomy in the American people. There are many great individuals walking through our history, individuals like Nathan Bedford Forrest and Robert E. Lee, men who responded to the European in their souls. And there are many demonic individuals, such as Lincoln and FDR, who responded to the utopian ideals of our false nation.

The American writers whom I would label 'great' all follow Melville's lead when he said in Redburn, "All Americans are spiritually European."

Melville
For me Melville's greatness lies in his discomfort with unbelief. He is not Ishmael, who sells out Christianity for thirty pieces of silver and then sleeps quite well. Melville is more akin to Ahab, uncomfortable with unbelief but unable to reconcile the concept of a loving god with the unloving, created world. Ahab goes mad, but Melville keeps nobly on. Although thoroughly versed in the classics, it is the Biblical that inspires Melville. His work is full of fiery prophets with the mark of the Old Testament on them. And in the early and middle works, such as Mardi, Moby Dick, Pierre, The Confidence Man, and Bartleby, Melville is very much the raging, angry prophet. But his jeremiads give way to Isaiah in "Clarel" and in Billy Budd.

Read Melville's work. Was ever a man more organically steeped in Old Testament lore? And were did that Old Testament take him? To the New Testament and to Him.

Billy in the Darbies

Good of the Chaplain to enter Lone Bay
And down on his marrow-bones here and pray
For the likes just o' me, Billy Budd.--But look:
Through the port comes the moon-shine astray!
It tips the guard's cutlass and silvers this nook;
But 'twill die in the dawning of Billy's last day.
A jewel-block they'll make of me to-morrow,
Pendant pearl from the yard-arm-end
Like the ear-drop I gave to Bristol Molly--
O, 'tis me, not the sentence they'll suspend.
Ay, Ay, Ay, all is up; and I must up to
Early in the morning, aloft from alow.
On an empty stomach, now, never it would do.
They'll give me a nibble--bit o' biscuit ere I go.
Sure, a messmate will reach me the last parting cup;
But, turning heads away from the hoist and the belay,
Heaven knows who will have the running of me up!
No pipe to those halyards .--But aren't it all sham?
A blur's in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am.
A hatchet to my hawser? all adrift to go?
The drum roll to grog, and Billy never know?
But Donald he has promised to stand by the plank;
So I'll shake a friendly hand ere I sink.
But--no! It is dead then I'll be, come to think.
I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank.
And his cheek it was like the budding pink.
But me they'll lash me in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease this darbies at the wrist, and roll me over fair,
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.

And in "Clarel":

But Faith (who from the scrawl indignant turns)
With blood warm oozing from her wounded trust,
Inscribes even on her shards of broken urns
The sign o' the cross -- the spirit above the dust!

Yea, ape and angel, strife and old debate--
The harps of heaven and dreary gongs of hell;
Science the feud can only aggravate--
No umpire she betwixt the chimes and knell:
The running battle of the star and clod
Shall run forever--if there be no God.

Degrees we know, unknown in days before;
The light is greater, hence the shadow more;
And tantalized and apprehensive Man
Appealing--Wherefore ripen us to pain?
Seems there the spokesman of dumb Nature's train.

But through such strange illusions have they passed
Who in life's pilgrimage have baffled striven--
Even death may prove unreal at the last,
And stoics be astounded into heaven.

Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned--
Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind;
That like the crocus budding through the snow--
That like a swimmer rising from the deep--
That like a burning secret which doth go
Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep;
Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea,
And prove that death but routs life into victory.

Melville's work is a rich tapestry that must be studied and looked at in its entirety. If you only have read Moby Dick, you will not see the whole vision. Moby Dick leads to "Clarel" and to Billy Budd.

Hawthorne
Some writers write in affirmation of their countries' values and traditions. And if one's country's traditions and values are good, a writer should write in affirmation of them. Hawthorne lived in Puritan New England, and he wrote in opposition. But the man was gentle. He wrote with love of his people, while condemning the excesses of their creed.

The House of the Seven Gables is my favorite Hawthorne novel, but it is the short stories, in their totality, that make me a Hawthorne devotee. In these stories, "Rappaccini's Daughter," "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," and "Ethan Brand" being representative, Hawthorne masterfully lies bare the anti-Christian heresy that can so easily co-opt Christian societies – the pride of intellect, no less subversive or benign when it is pride of one's knowledge of heavenly things. The Puritans, in imitation of the Pharisees who were so proud of their knowledge of the sacred laws that they couldn't recognize the Author of the laws, cut themselves off from God by severing their link with His sacred humanity. With confidence in their own election, they felt free to ignore the human heart, their link to His sacred heart.

Hawthorne didn't realize it at the time, but he also described the process by which the Catholic Church was divesting itself from God. "We have the documents, we have the correct theology, what need have we of humanity?"

Pulp Westerns
The pulp Westerns of the early 1900's, up through the 1950's, were generally not what one would describe as literature; they were formulaic and repetitive like the B-Western movies, but like the B-Western movies, the Western pulp novels were better than the pretentious, artsy literature of moral eunuchs like Flaubert and Sinclair Lewis. I read a great deal of the pulp Westerns as a boy, and I expected and wanted to read basically the same story over and over again: A tough, rugged cowboy fights successfully for the good against the miserable, bad guys.

Some Western writers took the basic pulp novel formula and elevated it to a higher level. Jack Schaefer's novel Shane is an example. Schaefer's work stands as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. Johnston McCulley, the bulk of whose work could be classified as first class pulp, wrote one novel that stands, like Shane, as a great work of literature. That novel is, of course, Zorro.

Then there is Owen Wister. His novel, The Virginian, is certainly a great work of literature, even though he follows the pulp novel formula.

And finally I should mention Zane Grey. Until Louis L'Amour, whose early novels are decent pulp, came along, Zane Grey was the undisputed King of the Western novel. His work is much better than L'Amour's. Grey's heroes are Christian knights, while L'Amour's are virtuous Romans. My favorite Grey novels (although I certainly haven't read all of them) are Riders of the Purple Sage and The Mysterious Rider. In both, Grey very convincingly displays male heroes whose fierceness stems from an overwhelming gentleness. They fight because they love much. And such chivalry! Grey's counterpart in England, P. C. Wren, would have approved.

"Collie, listen," said the old rancher, in deep and trembling tones. "When a man's dead, what he's been comes to us with startlin' truth. Wade was the whitest man I ever knew. He had a queer idee—a twist in his mind—an' it was thet his steps were bent toward hell. He imagined thet everywhere he traveled there he fetched hell. But he was wrong. His own trouble led him to the trouble of others. He saw through life. An' he was as big in his hope for the good as he was terrible in his dealin' with the bad. I never saw his like… He loved you, Collie, better than you ever knew. Better than Jack, or Wils, or me! You know what the Bible says about him who gives his life fer his friend. Wal, Wade was my friend, an' Jack's, only we never could see!... An' he was Wils's friend. An' to you he must have been more than words can tell…

--from The Mysterious Rider

The Southern Writers
The winners write history and also determine what the "good books" are. So outside of Faulkner, I did not have much exposure to the Southern novelists until I was in my twenties, and then I got a chance to read Stark Young, Caroline Gordon, and some of the other lesser known Southern writers. I like the so-called (but not in my estimation) lesser writers better than Faulkner. He, like Conrad, has one foot in the modern world and one foot in the old. I prefer the writers who are thoroughly in the old world, in writing style as well as in spirit.

Which is why my favorite Southern novel is Stark Young's So Red the Rose. The novel's theme is unabashedly anti-modern.

A strong and definite professor from a New Jersey foundation for girls in the handicrafts (who had struck Natchez, Agnes McGehee said, only because he had read of the Mississippi steamboats and the fantastic scene of them) was at pains one day to explain to them—he had been brought out to Montrose by Colonel Harrod—how false the reality was compared to the ideal that Southern people claimed for their way of life. "The fact is," said the professor, "it never existed, but Southerners are already busy creating a romantic Old South."

"But," Hugh said, "the point does not turn on whether some old fool of a colonel—or some scatter-brained old lady—is what we think he is—or she is. No, no. The point turns on what we believe in and desire, and want to find embodied somewhere, even in them."

"Whether it is or not," said the professor.

"That's incidental."

"It's romance," said the professor.

"Very well. Then the point is: not what the colonel is, being Southern, but what he would be if he were not Southern."

The professor regarded this remark as mere bombast. He had not been invited to Montrose, but had felt free to call because he was collecting statistics. Collecting statistics was already a new kind of entre. Nobody in the county had heard of statistics, before, but the Negroes were very much impressed. They welcomed investigation so heartily that what had at first seemed to the professor a gold mine of data began to irk him as excessively African detail, as communicative as it was imagined.

-- from So Red the Rose

I should also quote a passage from Caroline Gordon's None Shall Look Back – it is one of my favorite 'white' moments:

Rives looked and saw that the door of one of the red-brick houses on the square had opened. A slender woman dressed in black was coming down the path. She had a
handkerchief in one hand. A silver spoon glinted in the other. She was coming straight up to the General. Rives heard her voice, low but distinct: "General Forrest, will you back your horse for me?"

The cavalry commander looked down, startled, then lifted his hat and obediently pulled on the reins. The horse, a powerful gray, took two steps backward. The women bent over and with the silver spoon scooped up some of the earth on which the charger's hoof had rested and put it in the handkerchief, then without a word to the General she walked back up the path, the laden handkerchief clutched in her hand.

The crowd cheered tumultuously and cried, "Forrest! Forrest!"

Forrest was riding toward them. His hat was still off, a lock of black hair had fallen across his forehead. His expression was stern then as if he had just realized what the woman's action meant; he smiled and held up his hand for quiet. The people, he said, must go to their homes. The town was safe, the Yankees would not get it again but the soldiers still had work to do; the detachment of infantry across Stone's River was yet to be dealt with. He let his hand sink to his side. His face resumed its usual stern expression. He was riding off through the crowd, his escort pressing close behind.

The crowd began to disperse. Here and there torches were extinguished. Those that were left flickered palely as the morning light grew. People started and looked at one another when from behind the courthouse a single shot rang out.

Rives, standing with the others, drew in deep breaths of the cool air. He had seen a man led off to die, had just heard the shot that killed him. He knew that he himself would not be standing here in this fresh morning light if the Confederates had not captured the town and his eyes followed the towering figure on the gray horse till it was lost in the crowd. +

The Young Drummer At Bay

“Why do the Old and New Testaments read like fairy tale books and why does our
Lord speak in parables if we were meant to theorize about God in the manner and
style of the heathen Greeks?”

The late Victor Herman subtitled his autobiography, An Unexpected Life. And indeed to go from an American home to the Russian Gulag is certainly unexpected, but I think most of us would probably tack on Herman’s subtitle to the book of our own lives. I know I would.

The most unexpected aspect of my life involves the Catholic Church. I never, having once entered the Church, would have thought that I could feel such an intense loathing for it some thirty years later. A day never passes in which I fail to ponder the difference between what I imagined the Catholic Church to be and what it turned out to be in reality. The imponderables and the perplexities of the dichotomy whirl through my head day and night. And unfortunately (or fortunately?), I cannot take refuge in the traditional refuge from Catholicism, namely fundamentalist Protestantism.

I once said that Catholicism and Protestantism needed each other because neither was complete without the other. Well, yes, they do need each other because neither is complete without the other, but even if fused together, they still would lack something. Both lack a poetic vision; both have adopted different systems to block out the poetic vision, but both lack that essential element. Let me define what I mean by poetic vision.

The poetic vision is the integral way human beings see reality, a kitchen sink full of passions, intuitions, sentiments, and ratiocinations. It is messy; it seems unnecessary, arduous, and imprecise compared to pure reason, but it is the way we human beings perceive reality.

When organized religion circumvents the poetic process in order (we are told) to clear a path that leads directly to God, we end up losing God. We lose God because we can no longer see Him.

Human beings are wedded to the poetic. We cannot see reality through abstractions. We can see a distorted reality through abstractions, but we cannot see true reality. It is no tragedy when non-Christian religions adopt distorted, abstracted versions of reality and worship their inhuman and debauched abstractions, but it is a tragedy when the true religion of the God-Man becomes an abstracted false religion of debauchery and inhumanity.

The Catholic Church keeps the poetic or the fairy tale mode of perception at bay by encircling its parishioners with Greco/Roman/Babylonian walls. Theoretically there are gates in the walls leading to the God-Man, but at each gate there is a sentinel. The parishioner wishing to pass through the gate is ‘searched’ before he is allowed to pass through the gate. If anything that suggests the poetic is found, it is confiscated. Without the poetic vision, the pilgrim parishioner is blind and unable to see God.

The fundamentalist Protestant seems, at first glance, to have solved the Greco/ Roman/Babylonian problem. He has eliminated the Catholic-Pagan walls and sentinels, but there is still a wall and there are still sentinels that keep the poetic vision at bay.

The new wall is the mystical ‘Born-Again’ wall. Unless one can show evidence of having had a ‘blessed assurance’ experience with the living God, one is not allowed through the gates by the new sentinels. This is certainly a bit of a contradiction because if one has had the ‘Blessed Assurance’ experience, why is it necessary to pass through the gates? Nevertheless, those who wish to pass through the gates are still, as in the Catholic-Pagan system, searched for evidence of the poetic. The pilgrim found with poetic contraband is not allowed through the gate. By insisting on the direct infusion of divine grace, the Protestant eliminates the myriad human encounters that authors like Thomas Hughes[i] have written about, which constitute the real divine grace that allows us to be born again. Even St. Paul, who had a genuine born again experience of the kind fundamentalists tell us we all must have to be saved, had other preparatory moments of grace before his road-to-Damascus experience. How do I know that? I know that because St. Paul tells us so in his letter to the Corinthians. Implicit in his “and have not charity” letter is an understanding of the divine-human connection. He reveals in 2nd Corinthians that he understands how the love of one human being for another can lead to a moment of grace in which the lover “can see His blood upon the rose.”

If there are good Christians in the Catholic Church, which most certainly there are, and if there are good Christians in the Protestant churches, which most certainly there are, why make all this fuss about their respective systems? I make the fuss because both systems seem designed to eliminate Christianity. While theoretically holding to the Christian creed, they encourage one to abandon one’s humanity, one’s vision, and thus one’s faith. Without a poetic understanding of the creed, faith becomes a problem in geometry instead of a living, vital faith. Some Catholics manage to smuggle contraband bits and pieces of the poetic past the sentinels and thus manage to get a glimpse of the living God. And an even greater number of Protestants, because their system is not as efficient as the Catholic system, manage to smuggle elements of the poetic past the sentinels. But the systems are designed (and the Catholic one maniacally so) to kill the poetic vision of man and hence, kill his faith in the God-Man.

In the stories of her poets and in the faces of her people, the old Europe reflects the true Christianity. Heart responds to heart and vision to vision. How does a Catholic Christian know that a Feeneyite’s doctrine is straight from hell even though he can back it up with quotes from 17 different church councils? Because the Catholic Christian’s heart rebels against it. He has seen the face of Christ in Christians outside the Church, and no narrow sectarian Catholic heathen can convince him otherwise. And how does a Christian know that he is born again despite the fact that he has not had the proscribed formulaic born-again experience? Because he has had his white moments when he sees, in the many facets of the human experience, the face of Jesus Christ.

The cultural back door is the front door. The European cultural heritage represents the attempt of the faithful to wrest Christ from the sentinels and to hold His pure image aloft for all the world to see. The image of Christ has not disappeared from the world because the Christian churches have failed; it has disappeared because the churches have succeeded: they have succeeded in killing the poetic vision of European man.

The fight for the old Europe is the fight for the faith. Anthony Burgess advised college students to forget relevance and find out who Nausikaa[ii] was. That’s not good enough. We must forget relevance and find out who Maud Ruthyn[iii] was.

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[i] Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Puffin: UK, 1984), p. 288: “And let us not be hard on him, if at that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there, than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship, to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes. For it is only through our mysterious human relationships, through the love and tenderness and purity of mothers, and sisters, and wives, through the strength and courage and wisdom of fathers, and brothers, and teachers, that we can come to the knowledge of Him, in whom alone the love, and the tenderness, and the purity, and the strength, and the courage, and the wisdom of all these dwell for ever and ever in perfect fulness.”

[ii] Nausikaa: a Greek maiden who aids Odysseus in his travels

[iii] The Christian heroine of J. S. LeFanu’s novel, Uncle Silas