Thy Life’s a Miracle

Men must endure,
Their going hence
even as their coming hither;

In the great debate between the Franciscan Bonaventure and the Dominican Aquinas, I stand with the Franciscan. St. Francis’s way to God, through vision, through a heart-to-heart relationship with Christ our brother, trumps Aquinas’s system (inferring the existence of God through the contemplation of the natural world) every time. And I have noted that the British writers who came from a nation that successfully resisted the over-legalistic and overly rationalistic Roman system were the most Franciscan of all the great writers. (1) The works of Shakespeare, La Fanu, and Scott, for example, are the embodiment of the visionary, heart-to-heart response to God and to God’s world that St. Francis espoused. The tragedy of the modern European is that he has abandoned the affective, sympathetic way, or what I call the fairy tale mode of apprehension, for the intellectual, Gnostic approach to existence. Even at this late date if we shift our focus and pay attention to our forefathers, those British Franciscans, we can overcome the Gnosticism of the modern age. (2)

Every Christian century has had its Hamlets, men who were willing to risk everything in combating the Gnostic dragon of modernity. But by the twentieth century the Gnostic dragon had grown to such proportion that the combat against him seemed almost hopeless. Boris Pasternak’s character, Dr. Zhivago, is much like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but Zhivago lacks Hamlet’s vitality. Zhivago faces a world that is in an advanced stage of Gnostic trichinosis. The people around Zhivago no longer even remember what a non-Gnostic world or a non-Gnostic person was like. And we can’t look on Soviet Russia as something separate from the rest of the democratic West. The underlying philosophy of East and West is the same: Gnosticism.
Zhivago is an unlikely hero, being an adulterer and a derelict, but Pasternak is not making a case for adultery or sloth. Zhivago is a moral hero because, despite his sins, he is still trying to hold onto a vision of humanity that holds the particular human person above the abstract principle of humanity. This makes him an unfit companion for the walking, talking, cardboard humans that inhabit his world. He tells them:

"Microscopic forms of cardiac hemorrhages have become very frequent in recent years. They are not always fatal. Some people get over them. It’s a typical modern disease. I think its causes are of a moral order. The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s a part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity. I found it painful to listen to you, Innokentii, when you told us how you were re-educated and became mature in jail. It was like listening to a circus horse describing
how it broke itself in."

"I must stand up for Dudorov," said Gordon. "You’ve got unused to simple human words, they don’t reach you any more."

"It may very well be, Misha. But in any case, you must let me go now. I can hardly breathe. I swear, I’m not exaggerating."

The modern world has institutionalized the worldview of Hamlet’s archenemy, Claudius, who thought that the mystery of man could be solved by intellectual dissection. If Claudius were alive today, he would send Hamlet to two psychiatrists called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
If I were to claim that Freud is psychiatry and psychiatry is Freud, most modern psychiatrists would disagree. They would cite their rejection of the Oedipus complex, penis envy, and Freud’s extreme emphasis on the early childhood years. But Freud’s essential premise, that man is a glorified ape that can be examined, probed, and analyzed like a laboratory specimen in order to be “cured,” is the same as that of all the psychiatrists and psychoanalysts that now say they reject Freud.

And because of Freud’s atheistic rationalism, I do not think it is possible to fuse incarnational Christianity and psychology. I know Isaac Stern, the psychiatrist and Roman Catholic convert, advocated such a fusion in his work, The Third Revolution: A Study of Psychiatry and Religion, but I do not think the Church’s attempt to fuse the two has produced anything beneficial to Christendom. In fact, I think the contrary has been the case. The Church has, under the influence of the psychoanalytic movement, overestimated the healing powers of reason and the conscious mind, which is why the late John Paul II consistently claimed that murderers and child molesters could be rehabilitated.

In addition, the Church’s concept that the individual is responsible for his own sin has been, under the influence of psychology, seriously undermined. Instead of blaming an individual for his sin, we now blame social pressures, and/or family influences. I don’t deny that individuals have gone to psychiatrists and been helped with some personal problem, but those individuals were helped because the psychiatrist or psychologist overcame the limitations of his discipline to reach out and help a fellow human being. But I completely reject the notion that an individual could be helped in any way, except to slide more easily down to hell, by a trained psychiatrist or psychoanalyst using the insights of his profession.

I think we must, when talking about psychiatry, go beyond the essentially evil condemnation we would hurl at the computer or the automobile, and label the science of psychology as intrinsically evil.

Nor do I think Jung is a psychologist who is “friendly” to Christianity. He was a Freudian, who studied under Freud and then broke with him. And the cause of the break was interesting. It was on the subject of religious dreams and imagery. Freud maintained that all religious belief, especially belief in the Jewish or Christian Faith, was a sickness. He developed this point brilliantly in his book Moses and Monotheism. As a story, the book makes for an incredible read, but it so obviously intentionally malicious and lacking in rationality that one stands aghast and asks, “How can a man who claims to believe in scientific objectivity have written such an emotionally charged, fictitious critique of Judaism and Christianity? This man obviously needs psychoanalysis himself.”

You know the thesis that Freud put forward to explain away Judaism and Christianity: A tribe of young men, existing in the primeval mists of time, got together, killed their father and then slept with their mother.

The Jews, Freud contends, repeated primeval man’s sin by killing their father, Moses, in the desert. Christianity was successful, again according to Freud, because it allowed for the relief of the guilt complex from which mankind suffered for the primeval killing of the father. The son died at the request of the father, thus making up for the initial murder of the father.
Of course, Freud’s whole theory falls apart when one simply asks the question, “Why the initial guilt? Why, if man is only a glorified ape, should he feel guilty about killing his father and sleeping with his mother?” When Freud projects a feeling of guilt onto primeval man, he assumes a spiritual dimension to man’s existence that is derived from the religion which he says is a sick delusion.

While still accepting most of Freud’s theories, Jung rejected the notion that religious belief was necessarily a neurosis. He found in his study of dreams that all people had dreams with religious symbols in them. Was everybody then neurotic? Yes, Freud said. No, Jung said.
On the face of it, it would seem that Jung is the friend of religious faith, and that the believer and the seeker can cozy up to him for warmth and protection. “There, there, you are not neurotic or sick like Grandpa Freud says. It is perfectly all right to believe what you believe. Just trust Papa Jung. Here is a candy bar.” And indeed, many Catholic priests and Protestant ministers have cozied up to Jung.

But I would rather have an enemy like Freud than a friend like Jung. I’ll never forget the excitement with which I read Jung’s book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, and that by his disciple, Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Nor will I ever forget my disappointment – actually ‘depression’ would describe it better – when I finished the books. Jungian psychology is just pantheism. “Your religion is okay, Mr. Hindu, and yours, Mr. Christian, and yours, Mr. Moslem, and everybody else’s. We are all part of the great cosmic force...” Blah, blah, blah. Just another form of atheism, but more dangerous than Freud’s because it presents itself as benign. I remember screaming at Jung, after reading Modern Man in Search of a Soul: “Are you not man like me, subject to death and decay like me? What think you of Christ and His claim, ‘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’?
And to Campbell: “If Christ is not the Hero, above all other heroes, the one to whom the rest of the heroes point, of what use is the hero’s journey? For what purpose does he sally forth?”
Jung and the Jungians are a pantheistic dead end.There is no personal element in their ‘cosmic force,’ and hence no real religion either; nor is there any real religion in all of the psychiatric desert.

It’s all a closed world if we allow the Claudiuses of psychiatry, of philosophy, of theology, of science to assign us a part in their kingdom of the dead. The purveyors of modern Gnosticism come in diverse colors. But they all come from the same multi-colored, seamless garment. The propositional Christian, the Jew, the neo-pagan, and the black barbarian are all united in their hatred of incarnational Christianity, which was not only the religion of St. Francis and Shakespeare, it was the religion of the ordinary European for thousands of years. I don’t see what new revelation the current bred of Gnostics are in possession of to make me or any other European reject the God who took flesh and dwelt among us. __________________________________________
(1) And, therefore, once the Roman conquerors had glutted their first rage for plunder, their main effort was to induce their Western subjects to assimilate Latin life in all its aspects. Their success with the Gauls was permanent, and became the starting point of modern European history. But in Britain, after a great initial success, they had complete ultimate failure. ‘From the Romans who once ruled Britain,’ wrote Haverfield, the great student of the archaeology of the occupation, ‘we Britons have inherited practically nothing.’

(2) I love the British Franciscans because they seem so focused on Christianity as an incarnational faith rather than as a dialectical philosophy. So many seemingly insoluble problems of dialectical philosophy, such as how God can be both universal and particular, and how He can be both God and Man, are resolved in the person of Christ. Le Fanu expresses this so well in his novel Uncle Silas:

Next day was the funeral, that appalling necessity; smuggled away in whispers, by black familiars, unresisting, the beloved one leaves home, without a farewell, to darken those doors no more; henceforward to lie outside, far away, and forsaken, through the drowsy heats of summer, through days of snow and nights of tempest, without light or warmth, without a voice near. Oh, Death, king of terrors! The body quakes and the spirit faints before thee. It is vain, with hands clasped over our eyes, to scream our reclamation; the horrible image will not be excluded. We have just the word spoken eighteen hundred years ago, and our trembling faith. And through the broken vault the gleam of the Star of Bethlehem.The psalmist reminds us that we walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The saints and poets of incarnational Europe show us that He walks with us through that Valley to the Mountains beyond it.

The Mind-Forged Wall

Lost in all the celebrations, eight years back, of the new century we were entering was the fact that the 21st century is the first of the post-Christian centuries. Christianity was certainly in trouble at the beginning of the 20th century, but by no stretch of the imagination could it be called dead. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the old time religion can certainly be certified as dead.

And it is striking to me how easily the intellectuals of both the Catholic and the Protestant denominations have succumbed to Satanism. By isolating man’s intellect from his other faculties, they have left him at the mercy of the dialectic, and it is in the dialectic mode that Satan thrives.

Satan’s task, when he confronted Adam and Eve in the garden, was to get them to disobey God’s command not to eat from the forbidden tree. He needed to engage them in a dialogue if he was to succeed. Once he persuaded Eve, and through Eve, Adam, to look on God’s command as something abstract and debatable, he had them both hooked.

That original sin – the pride in our own isolated abstractions and the desire for the power we think our prideful cogitations will bring – is always with us; it is part of our sinful nature. And it must be fought tooth and nail lest it consume us. Yet the very guardians of the citadel of Christ have encouraged us to indulge our sinful appetites to abstract and depersonalize. We have depersonalized man and we have depersonalized the living God. ‘Our Father who art in heaven’ has become ‘Our abstracted, derivative By-Product who art everywhere and nowhere.’ When, following the lead of the clergy, we depersonalize God; we have created, to paraphrase Blake, a mind-forged wall between God and man.

The mind-forged wall was built over time by clerics, academics, and self-styled wise men who professed to be Christian but who still thought like Greeks. In the Greek culture the goddess of wisdom sprang from the head of Zeus; she bypassed the blood. In contrast, Christ, the font of all wisdom, came to us through the blood. Therefore, to the Christian, all true knowledge comes to us through the spirit-infused blood of Christ.

The modern Gnostic Christian views any mention of the blood as superstitious and barbaric. His God word is 'reason'; in fact, his God is the rational, autonomous man. Rational man will welcome Christ into his club, but only if Christ agrees to behave rationally. For reason, as Aquinas tells us, is the final arbiter. And if there is a power higher than God, is not that power God? But if we turn from the Greek mode of perception and look at the Hebraic mode of perceiving reality, we see something quite different from the men behind the wall. We see that the spirit of man can only be animated through the blood. Blood without the animating spirit is barbaric, mere voodoo superstition, but when the spirit and the blood are united the mind-forged wall between God and man disappears. And the unholy worship of our ratiocinations is stripped of its religious halo and seen for what it is: blasphemy.

So long as the mind-forged wall of bloodless Christianity exists, there will be a conflict between Christians of the blood and the Gnostic post-Christians in control of the churches. The post-Christians will continue to treat the black man as an object to be worshipped on the one hand (because he has the blood that they lack), and to be converted on the other hand (because he lacks the spirit, which the Gnostic has falsely linked to the intellect, that they possess).

The difficulty in converting the Gnostic post-Christian comes from the fact that the Gnostic has placed himself beyond the ken of humanity. By uniting his spiritual life to the mind rather than to the blood, he has thrown in his lot with the great enemy of mankind. The great poets have always seen Satan as the sneering intellectual, standing aloof from mankind.

And it does little good to hand a Gnostic the Gospel of Christ. He knows the story, but he has redefined it. He is no more open to the Gospel of Christ than he is to a tale from the Brothers Grimm. Both, to the modern Gnostic, are "fun" stories to play mind games with.

Miguel de Unamuno stated the problem clearly. It is first necessary to awaken a tragic sense of life in an individual before he can be convinced to turn to the Gospels and treat them as something other than a series of crossword puzzles. To put it simply – a man needs to believe he is sick before he will seek an antidote for his sickness.

If an individual only looks on death as tragic because it comes too early or because it causes pain and not because it extinguishes a personality, then that individual has no need of a loving, personal God. He needs modern science to prolong life and alleviate pain, but he does not need Christ. Only those who have not forsaken their blood and retreated behind the mind-forged wall can know Christ. Such individuals still feel pain at the loss of the "touch of a vanished hand" and still yearn for the "sound of a voice that is still." One has to feel that Cordelia’s death in King Lear was tragic before one can feel the joy of Thaisa’s resurrection in Pericles.

The tragic sense of life is intimately connected to a fairy tale appreciation of life. In the fairy tale, the hero conquers death and lives happily ever after. The modern man has no need for fairy tales, for castles in the sky; instead, he has self- help books and reads success stories. How petty his dreams are and how superficial his yearnings.

To feel abandoned and forsaken by God is a terrible thing. To feel estranged from God because of unresolved problems with some particular sin is also a terrible thing, but to feel no need for God, for the Man of Sorrows and the Risen Christ, is to be in the most unenviable state imaginable. And such is the state of modern man.

All of existence depends on one central issue: Can we feel, with Lear, the true tragic dimensions of Cordelia’s death? If the answer is yes, then all else will follow and we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Unyielding

"There are many other ways in which men sin against the Holy Ghost, but this is the worst – to destroy deliberately, for the sake of any kind of gain, that which Christ bought so dearly. How can a man ask for mercy, or how can mercy help him, who would wickedly and willfully extinguish mercy?"

-- William Langland

The difference between the European civilization prior to the 20th century and every other civilization is the difference between heaven and hell. There is an impassable chasm between European culture and all other cultures. And the new European-hating Europeans and the people from cultures of color recognize the distinctiveness of European culture, but they view European distinctiveness quite differently than me. The white-hating whites and their colored minions see the older European culture as distinctively evil. Indeed, they view it as the fount of all evil. And if you believe in a worldwide system of democracy, in which all peoples of every nation and every color vote, then Europe does stand condemned. But in a higher court than world opinion, European culture stands alone in the light, while all the other civilizations (which can't really be called civilizations) stand shrouded in hellish night.

The distinctiveness of pre-20th century European culture does not consist of its material achievements – its science, its exploration, etc. European culture is distinct because of its spiritual depth. During the years I taught English literature, I had many opportunities with my students to view staged productions of Shakespeare's King Lear. The students' varied reactions to the play were amazing. Some slept, some made jokes, some were artificially attentive because they thought I'd punish them if they weren't, and some wept and understood. Well, the Europeans wept and understood Christ's passion play, while those of other cultures were either indifferent, hostile, or artificially attentive (like the defeated Aztecs) because of the Europeans' power.

There are numerous theories as to why the Europeans embraced Christ. Some historians point out that the pagan gods of the central and northern Europeans were more humane than the pagan gods of Asia Minor and Rome. Thus, according to this theory, the Europeans were more open to the concept of a loving God than were those of other cultures. And some assert it was simply God's choice: the Europeans were predestined to be the Christ-bearers. But whatever reason, the central fact is this: the Europeans rejected the cruel gods of sacrifice and embraced the God of love and mercy. European civilization was a response to God's love. Certainly, it was imperfect in comparison to God's love for us, but when compared to all the other civilizations… well, there is no comparison.

We are now engaged in a war quite different from the one Stoddard depicts in his book about Haiti. Then, the war was still largely one of white civilization vs. the barbarians of color. Since then, white folk have been engaged in a civil war with a new breed of Gnostic whites, and they have lost the civil war and become a conquered people.

Shelby Foote once stated that the two great geniuses of America's civil war were Abraham Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest. I concur. And the difference between those two geniuses was the difference between the new utopian world and the antique Christian world. Lincoln articulated, as only a genius could articulate, the utopian theory at the heart of the American experiment in democracy, which "brought forth on this continent a new nation, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." And if all men are not equal, then equality will be forced on the unequal.

In contrast, Forrest represented those early adventurers and Southern cavaliers of whom Thomas Nelson Page wrote. Forrest's wisdom was in his blood, and his wise blood told him that the white man and his culture was inherently unequal to all other men and to every other culture.

Forrest's genius, a genius of the blood, was grounded in the particular. Lincoln's genius was grounded in the universal. And the universal won. Despite Lincoln's personal abhorrence for race-mixing, it became an inevitable necessity in a world of universals. There can be no black or white, no man or woman, no child or father in the universal world of brotherhood-without-kinship, sexuality-without-masculinity-or-femininity, and families-without-patriarchal-authority.

Lincoln was a mild lamb compared to the white-hating whites who were to follow him. Each successive generation has become more demonic. And why do so many white men hate their own? Because in the new faith, there is no such concept as "these are my people" or "this is my own, my native land"; everything is a walking universal in the new faith. There is an idea about what constitutes the human, but there is no humanity. Therefore, the white-hating heirs of Lincoln must destroy anything that stinks of humanity. And who is more human than the Incarnate God? The new white man must destroy flesh-and-blood white men, because they are the last conduits of a culture that saw salvation in the God-Man who saved particular men and women from sin and death. Flesh-and-blood white men do not accept the culture that worships a satanic messiah promising to free men's minds from the prison of their own humanity and God's incarnate humanity.

The white-hating whites and their colored lackeys will not defeat us unless we cease to maintain our distinctiveness. We are the men of the enchanted forest not the barbarian jungle, the men of the sacred hearth not the cannibal's stewpot, and the men of bardic Europe not scientific Europe. Ah, there's the rub. Being the conduits of God's grace has placed us closer to God but also closer to satanic lightning. If we see our distinctiveness in our intellects instead of our European hearts, we will be completely ineffectual in the great battle against the white-hating whites and their barbarian armies of the night, for we will be like unto them.

To stay distinct, white men must stay true to incarnational, non-abstract Europe. We must be true to the civilization of mercy. What Robert Frederick said of Shakespeare, the most European of poets, is equally true of Europe:

"What the world owes to other poets can be estimated. What it owes to Shakespeare can no more be measured than what it owes to the light of heaven. The withdrawal of the one from the material, or of the other from the world, would alone enable us to understand our obligations to either."

It is not possible to take white, incarnational European culture out of the world and still have a civilization – and by civilization, we mean that which enshrines such things as faith, love, honor, and beauty. The past and the future of mankind on this earth, without old Europe, would be and will be nothing less than a city without light, without hope, and without mercy.

Although I have Welsh ancestors, they are not the main reason I chose to use "Cambria Will Not Yield" as the title for my blog. The lines, "Keep these fighting words before you, Cambria will not yield," speak directly to the European condition. We must keep the vision of Europe, His Europe, before our eyes, and never yield. His Europe is sacred Europe. His Europe is the only Europe for men who have a tragic sense of life, men who realize that mere sacrifice is not enough.

Our civilization, at its heart, is one great prayer for mercy. When the white satanists bid us drink the multi-racial, anti-European brew, they bid us join them in the ultimate sin against the Holy Ghost, for they ask us – no, they demand it of us – to destroy the civilization of mercy. There can be only one answer to such a demand: Cambria Will Not Yield!

That Within Which Passeth Show

Suspend for the duration all your preconceived notions about Shakespeare received from literary critics and journalists. To understand a real poet, you must strip away all the layers of sludge from around your heart and let it respond to the poet. If we truly have souls, then we have a genuine heart, perhaps unknown to us, that can hear the poetic muse.

Let us meet the poet: he sees, not in a purely rational or clairvoyant sense, but in an intuitive poetic sense, that he stands on the threshold of a new world. This new world is not a better world. It is a world split apart by the Aristotleian-Thomistic separation of reason from grace. And the Protestant reaction to the break has not put the splintered wreck of the faith back together again. Henceforward, that pernicious heresy of the intellect divorced from the heart, the Gnostic heresy, would be a force to be reckoned with.

The poet saw the new force corrupting all of Europe. He saw a new Christianity, crafted onto the old Christianity. This new Christianity, spawned from the isolated intellect, was of necessity a dialectical faith. It set husband against wife, brother against brother, reason against grace, clergy against layman, and the heart against the intellect. In short, the poet saw the complete dislocation of man from the life of God. God would henceforth exist only as an intellectual construct. Man was on his own, left to intellectually conjugate God, but doomed never to know Him again.

But the Bard knew God. Giving his hero the name of his dead son, who was living (he firmly believed) in the arms of his Lord, the Bard launched Hamlet into the world to attack the Gnosticism of the new religion. But he wanted his hero to be a real hero. He wanted his hero to face the heresy of the age and of the future and to defeat that heresy.

Hamlet comes from the University, where students regularly have their heads severed from their hearts and souls. He suffers from the Gnostic disease himself and seems to be at a loss as to how to deal with the ill tidings he has received from his father's ghost. He is scared, confused, and angry. He is out of joint and not capable, as he acknowledges – "Oh cursed spite" – of setting things right.

But by the end of the play he does set things right. How? Because Hamlet loves. If one looks only at external events, Hamlet is a murderer, a usurper, and a cad who drives a young woman to suicide. But we who have followed Hamlet through the maze know differently. Hamlet loved his noble father; those pseudo-theologians who tell us that Hamlet is damned for following the vengeful dictates of his father fail to see how the Ghost's injunctions differ from mere pagan blood-letting ("Leave her to heaven") just as they fail to see how nature and grace blend together in a Christian soul.

Likewise Hamlet loves his mother in more than just the Freudian sense. And Ophelia? Is it possible to doubt that he loved her? No! It is at Ophelia's grave that Hamlet finally puts his own fragmented soul together: "This is I, Hamlet the Dane."

And when Hamlet walks out alone to fight a duel that he knows will mean death, he does so because he accepts that --

[T]there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.

The reason Hamlet has held such fascination over the years for the general audience and for the literary critic is that he is the first stage hero to confront modernity. Thus the literary critic will delight in dissecting the 'sicko' who defies modernity, and the base, common populace will champion or condemn Hamlet depending on how far down the modern slope they have traveled.
But let us not have any doubt that it is modernity which Hamlet confronts in the person of Claudius. Claudius is the post-Christian man, the precursor of the anti-Christ. He knows the ways of God, he can ape the good well enough to fool even the elect, but his heart and soul are at the service of the devil.

It is significant that Hamlet, who is a genius, cannot move successfully against Claudius until he ceases to try to combat him with only his own genius. When he gives himself up to Divine Providence and acts in the fullness of his personality as King and son, he defeats Claudius. And between his discovery of his uncles' treachery and his death, Hamlet gives us the definitive refutation of modernity. Remember when Rosencrantz and Guildendstern, acting for Claudius, try to exploit their former friendship with Hamlet in order to "pluck out the heart of his mystery"? Hamlet finds them out with ease and speaks not only to them, but to Claudius and all psychotherapists, neoclassicists, formalist theologians, and Gnostics of the modern world when he enjoins them to "play upon the pipe."

Hamlet. Will you play upon this Pipe?

Guildenstern. My Lord, I cannot.

Ham. I pray you.

Guild. Believe me, I cannot.

Ham. I do beseech you.

Guild. I know no touch of it, my Lord.

Ham. 'Tis as easy as lying: govern these ventages with your finger and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most excellent Music. Look you, these are the stops.

Guild. But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony, I have not the skill.

Ham. Why look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me: you would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops: you would pluck out the heart of my
Mystery; you would sound me from my lowest Note, to the top of my Compass: and
there is much Music, excellent Voice, in this little Organ, yet cannot you make it. Why do you think, that I am easier to be play'd on than a Pipe? Call me what
Instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

Yes, only the heart can know the mystery of another heart. To the intellect alone, the heart remains an enigma. Horatio, whose philosophy is inadequate, still has enough heart to pronounce the correct benediction for his friend and King.

Now cracks a noble heart. –good night, sweet prince;And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!—

Shakespeare sets the stage for us. The Gnostics will always be at war with the God-Man. They hate, like Satan, anything that is tainted with humanity. So above all, they hate the Incarnation and the civilization that placed the Incarnate God at its center. What Shakespeare tells us in the conflict between Claudius and Hamlet is that we cannot defeat the Claudiuses of the world if we are like unto them. It cannot be brain against brain, Moriarity against Holmes. It must be the integral, heroic man of heart and blood against the disembodied, heartless, bloodless villain – it must be Hamlet vs. Claudius, Tell vs. Gessler, Bulldog Drummond vs. Peterson, and the Scarlet Pimpernel vs. Chauvelin.

The bloodless, chestless men will always be with us. They are the waste products of a Christian civilization; but they should not be at the center of our culture. It is the duty of white Europeans to push them back to the dark fringes of civilization.

Hamlet curses the day that he was "born to set it right." But he ultimately accepts his destiny and he does set it right. The white European hero culture is Hamlet's culture. It is our culture, and it is His culture. We are called to defend it against the white technocrat, the colored hordes, and against all the forces of hell.

Dead on Arrival

“What your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light.” --from William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing

“Since you have a good heart, and are willing to divide what you have, I will give you good luck. There stands an old tree; cut it down, and you will find something at the roots.” – from the Grimm Brothers' tale “The Golden Goose”

In the classic film noir, D.O.A., Edmund O’Brien plays a man who has been fatally poisoned and has only 48 hours to live. In those 48 hours, he attempts to find the “who, what, where and how” of the poisoning.

The existential moral is obvious. We are all D.O.A. from the moment we are born. And, according to the existentialists, all we can do is struggle nobly until we succumb. Well, at least the existentialists spare us the sentimental slop: “Dying is perfectly natural; there is nothing to it.” Or how about the Blood, Sweat and Tears line? “There’ll be one child born in this world to carry on.” It’s all sheep-dip. The existentialists are preferable to the false comforters.

However, there used to be a religious Faith that didn’t seek to ignore the existential view of life. Quite the contrary, this faith absorbed it, made it its own, and then transcended it. Camus’ Sisyphus was transformed into Christ carrying his cross to Calvary.

What the Christian churches have succeeded in doing over the centuries is to take a mystery religion in which the Hero conquered death through divine charity and make it into a Coca-Cola commercial. The existential view of life is not confronted and transcended in modern Christianity; it is simply covered over with artificial Log Cabin syrup.

I have given various names to the artificial ‘syruping’ process over the years: the ‘dislocated intellect’, the over-intellectualization of the Faith, Gnosticism, and the Triumph of the Greeks. Since the last is most recent, let’s go back to the Greeks.

The existential view of life, which sees man as worth something but doomed to die and sink into nothingness, was presented by Aeschylus and Sophocles. The more cynical view that man was worth little and doomed to die and sink into nothingness was presented by Euripides. Camus is in the Aeschylus/Sophocles line, while Beckett (Waiting for Godot, etc.) is in the Euripides line. I side with Aeschylus and Sophocles; I think their view of existence, sans Christ, is the more correct one, and I think they represent ancient Greek culture at its best.

Now we come to the intellectuals, the self-proclaimed “the best and the brightest.” Plato and Aristotle stand at the front of a long line of intellectual giants who have offered us solutions to the existential dilemma, “I am a man, and I must die.” Plato is at his best when he breaks his own injunction against the poets and waxes poetic about the cave, intuiting a divine force. And for this reason he was considered by the early Church Fathers and Christian intellectuals to be compatible with Christianity. Aristotle, on the other hand, was not considered to be compatible by the early Church Fathers: there was no mystical element in Aristotle; he was a straight materialist, the first great cataloguer, an entomologist, a systems analyst man, the man with a white lab coat. Aquinas, at first opposed fiercely by the Platonists, managed to get Aristotle into the Catholic pantheon by showing that the real and the particular were the nuts and bolts of Christianity and not the nebulous mysticism of Platonic philosophy. But both Plato and Aristotle are harmful. And the Church, by attempting to pour Christianity into the faithful using classical cups, over time gradually poisoned the faithful. The salvation process was reversed: we once were saved but now are lost. Or, to use the existential parlance, we are again D.O.A.

To see why the classical-Christian mix has been so damaging to Christianity, let us look back to the Roman Empire shortly before the coming of Christ. What type of religion prevailed? Was it the borrowed Greek religion of Zeus, Hera, Apollo, etc.? No, that religion was given mere lip service. Was it the religion of the philosophers? No, there were some Platonists, Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics among the intelligentsia, but those faiths did not move the masses. The great mass of people were attracted to the oriental mystery religions emerging everywhere throughout the Roman Empire. And what did these mystery religions provide that the philosophic systems did not? Personal contact with the deity.

Even the gods, with whom the believers thought they were uniting themselves in their mystic outbursts, were more human and sometimes more sensual than those of the Occident. The latter had that quietude of soul in which the philosophic morality of the Greeks saw a privilege of the sage; in the serenity of Olympus they enjoyed perpetual youth; they were Immortals. The divinities of the Orient, on the contrary, suffered and died, but only to revive again. Osiris, Attis and Adonis were mourned like mortals by wife or mistress, Isis, Cybele or Astarte. With them the mystics moaned for their deceased god and later, after he had revived, celebrated with exultation his birth to a new life. Or else they joined in the passion of Mithra, condemned to create the world in suffering. This common grief and joy were often expressed with savage violence, by bloody mutilations, long wails of despair, and extravagant acclamations. The manifestations of the extreme fanaticism of those barbarian races that had not been touched by Greek skepticism and the very ardor of their faith inflamed the souls of the multitudes attracted by the exotic gods. – Franz Cumont in Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism <http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/orrp/orrp06.htm >

The Greco-Roman gods and the Greco-Roman philosophies failed to reach the deeper regions of the soul; hence, they were abandoned; but the Oriental religions, while allowing for a more personal contact with a human deity, did not fulfill man’s need for a humane deity. However, the masses were ready, much more so than the intellectuals, for a personal savior, because of their involvement in the mystery religions. They needed Mithra with humanity. And this is the great insight of Europe’s most Christian of writers:

To arouse the hope that there may be a god with a heart like our own is more for the humanity in us than to produce the absolute conviction that there is a being who nade the heaven and the earth and the sea and the fountains of waters. Jesus is the express image of God’s substance, and in Him we know the heart of God. –

George MacDonald in The Miracles of Our Lord

What the Roman masses needed – a humane God who took a personal interest in their salvation – is what we all need, even intellectuals who don’t know they need such a God and who would have us accept a different type of God. I see the entire history of the Church as an attempt by the faithful to cling to the personal over the impersonal and to the incarnate God over the Olympian God. In the Catholic Church this struggle manifests itself in devotions to the Sacred Heart, the cult of the saints, and the cult of the Virgin. Unfortunately, the intelligentsia of the Church often intellectualizes the various devotions until the devotions have little of the original spirit left. In Protestantism, the struggle for the personal savior is seen in the fight for the Gospels as the intimate story of the Christ vs. the Biblical exegetical Gnostics who analyze away the religious content of God’s word.

Christopher Dawson once said that the Catholic-Protestant wars ended with Europe divided and seemingly estranged forever. But he then went on to say that there was a unity that still existed. That unity consisted of the devotion to classical culture shared by both the Protestant and Catholic intellectuals. Dawson suggested that this was a good thing. I disagree, and I would suggest that the conflict is not between Protestant laymen who believe in the Christ of the Gospels and Catholic laymen who say the Rosary, but between Protestant-Catholic peasants and the Greek intellectuals of the Catholic and Protestant worlds.

The reason I claim that Fundamentalism has outlasted Catholicism is because Fundamentalism has preserved more of its peasant faith than has Catholicism. Because of clerical dominance, the former faithful of the Catholic Church have been more thoroughly Gnosticized than remnant Fundamentalists. More ideological peasantry is needed in the Catholic ranks. Whereas Protestantism has its peasant fundamentalist remnant, Catholics instead have only the Platonic Novus Ordo and Aristotelian traditionalism. The former tends to impersonal, Jungian ecumenism and the latter tends to impersonal man-as-insect theology; in both, the personal savior, the God-Man, is lost in Greek vapor.

The old apologists can be forgiven for their over-reliance on the Greek forms. Before Vatican II, the rotting Greek foundations of the Church still seemed strong. But now that the rot is visible, it is not permissible to continue to fuse Christianity with classical philosophy. To do so overlooks the fact that Christ came to deliver us not only from the barbarism of Isis, Cybele, and Mithra, but also from the tyranny of the academy from which devotees of the mystery religions had sought relief. And in fact, there are devotees of Cybele in the Novus Ordo seeking refuge from academic Platonism as well as devotees of Mithra in the traditionalist ranks seeking refuge from academic Aristotelianism. Both groups should seek Christ, and they might still find Him if the Church ever lifts the Greek shroud from His face.

We need, if we are to conquer Greek Gnosticism, to recapture the tragic sense of life. We must turn off the Coca-Cola commercials of the Platonists and Aristotelians and sit with Lear in the hovel and expose ourselves to “feel what wretches feel.” It is a mystery, but it is always in stables and hovels, on our knees, that we see the living God. Tragedy is turned into a triumphant fairy tale ending, but only when we have rejected the Greek way and taken the humbler route through the stables.

White Suicide

The casualty statistics of the white nations in World War I are truly staggering. The white race has never recovered from that war. In school they told us that the war was a result of entangling alliances and Kaiser Wilhelm’s failure to sign the reassurance pact with Russia. But those events were only logs on the fire. What really set Europe and its satellites aflame was the Gnosticizing of the Western elites. Throughout Europe, and in America as well, the ruling classes had become Gnostics. Christianity was just an idea to them. And they used the Christian men of Europe as chess pieces in their Gnostic games.

In World War I the ruling parties of both sides were Gnostic, but in our uncivil Civil War, which was a precursor of World War I, only the North had adopted the new Gnostic Christianity, which is not Christianity at all. This is the terrible significance of our Civil War. We saw for the first time, on a large scale, the results of Gnostic Christianity.

Educated Idiots

“Had Shakespeare been as learned as Ben Jonson, he would have written no better than Ben Jonson.”

--George Fitzhugh

I have always, possibly because America is not a true nation, considered myself free to adopt as my own whatever European tradition to which I felt drawn. If asked to rank my cultural favorites, I would place the 19th century English first, the 18th century Scottish Highlanders second, and the King Arthur Welsh third. Of the so-called Latin nations, I prefer the Spanish to the Italians and French. But to me, they are all my ancestors.

It has been and still is my contention that all the nations of Europe have betrayed their heritage. The first betrayal was made by Greece. The poetic core of that nation, as articulated by Homer and Sophocles, was forced to give way to the philosophical speculators. And it was the philosophical speculators who thought that St. Paul’s vision of the risen Lord was “foolishness.” But it was the children of Homer and Sophocles, the men and women with a poetic core such as St. Luke, who embraced the foolish faith of St. Paul.

Recently I heard from an irate man of Greek ancestry who took me to task for criticizing the Greeks. Well, if he had taken the trouble to read all my articles through, he would have seen that I was criticizing the Greek philosophical tradition, not each and every Greek. But yes, I am criticizing the Greek philosophical tradition. And that does seem to rankle nearly everyone.

[Thomas Molnar, echoing Thomas Hughes, once made the following statement about Voegelin: “Voegelin remains a ‘Greek,’ placing us in the metaxy, the field of force between man and God, but in such a manner that the upward pull remains the experience of a force, not more, rather than the Unknown God, whom Paul met at Athens.” In Dietrich von Hildebrand’s response to Molnar, he said that Plato was the teacher who prepared the way for Christ. He was not, Hildebrand claimed, a roadblock to faith. His reaction was typical of the attitude then and now toward the Greek philosophical tradition.]

But the Greek way, or more accurately, the Athenian way, is the way of death for the individual and for a culture. The Greek way separates the mind of man from his blood. And wisdom is in the blood not the mind. The Christian churches have been supping with the Athenian speculators ever since the 1st century. It seems that only St. Paul was able to keep the Athenian heresy at bay. It is such an appealing heresy. The idea that we can know God and harness His power through our mind is heady stuff. It thrilled Adam and Eve just as it thrilled Satan. In the past the laity always seemed to be the steadying influence on the clergy. The clergy pushed Gnosticism and the laity resisted. It was not until the latter part of the 20th century that the Christian laity became completely Gnosticized, although we see an advance preview of 20th century decadence in 19th century Paris: “In Paris, when they want to disparage a man, they say: ‘He has a good heart.’ The phrase means: ‘The poor fellow is as stupid as a rhinoceros.’” The end result of philosophical speculation is the Parisian sneer and smirk.

H. V. Morton, in his book about Wales (1932), depicts the Welsh people as the most traditional, the most authentically European people in all of Europe. Despite the fact that no great natural boundary separates them from the rest of Britain, they still retained their own very poetic, very musical language. And they retained their own bardic culture. But if we leap forward to the year 2006, we see a newspaper headline about a man being arrested in Wales for handing out Gospel tracts at a gay pride parade. How did we get from Morton’s Wales of 1931 to the Wales of 2006?

Morton supplies us with the answer:

The Englishman in Wales is surprised and rather ashamed to learn that although the idea of a Welsh University was one of Owen Glendower’s dreams in the Middle Ages (his letters about it are preserved in the French archives in Paris), the Welsh people had to wait five centuries before a Parliament sitting at Westminster established the University of Wales in the year 1893! Scotland had St. Andrew’s University in the Middle Ages; Ireland had Trinity College in the Time of Elizabeth…

The Welsh fell victim to what the rest of Europe had fallen victim to: they fell down and worshipped the Golden idol called education. Education breeds the “scientific method” which kills the bardic culture from which genuine religious faith grows. And yes, I know the Athenians thought highly of the university setting, but the truly great thinkers of Greece were Homer and Sophocles, men whose thoughts were in tune with their hearts and with the hearts of their fellow countrymen.

What happens physically when one goes to a university is the same thing that happens spiritually. One physically leaves the bardic village and goes to a cosmopolitan center. And spiritually the mind separates from the blood. One’s former bardic culture is studied; it becomes a thing outside one’s self, a thing disconnected. It no longer lives. And the most important aspect of a man’s being, his mystic connection to God, is severed forever when he goes through the systematic scientizing process that takes place at a university.

Surely I exaggerate? What would happen to science and development if we didn’t have universities? Isn’t it a question of the right kind of thinking vs. the wrong kind of thinking? No, because isolated thought is not thinking. If a man does not think with his blood he is not thinking. It would be different if men were angels, but we are not. Angelic thinking can be good or bad, depending on whether the angel is good or bad. But when humans try to think angelically, the result is always disastrous.

The check on the Gnostic cosmopolitans was always the villager – the rustic, the yeoman, and the peasant. But the university reached out with its giant tentacles and gradually made the village part of the university. Is there any aspect of modern life that does not involve the university? In every aspect of our lives, the expert, with his specialized training at some university, is ever present.

There is a scene in C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle that depicts a contingent of dwarfs who are unable to partake of a glorious feast because all they can see before them is a dark black hole. They “refuse to be taken in” by anyone who tries to tell them there is indeed a feast as well as a provider of the feast. They are too smart. And of course the dwarfs are us. We are too smart to see the feast and the author of the feast.

It is interesting to note that Lewis, in the Narnia books, makes reference to a magic deeper than the deep magic of the White Witch. That magic is, of course, Christianity. But if we perceive reality with the eye rather than through the eye, as the dwarfs and the educators do, we will not have access to the God-man. We will see only what the White Witch and her master want us to see – a black hole. And then our lives will consist of the endless pursuit of commercial interruptions. We will seek out anything that will divert us from the reality of the black hole. But it doesn’t matter what we do; so long as we perceive reality as the ancient Athenians and the educators have perceived it, we will always have the dreaded conviction that beneath the surface of our diversions is a black hole.

It certainly doesn’t appear that European man will abandon the faith of the speculators and return to the older bardic faith of his European ancestors. The speculators have conquered the former Christian Churches and every other major institution of the Western world. And if anyone tries to break through the commercial façade, expose the black hole, and seek out the magic that is deeper than the deep magic, he will find all the forces of the modern world, which are the forces of hell, arrayed against him.

If the modern educators, who pride themselves on their ability to measure and record every aspect of human existence, could put the collective soul of Western man on their soul detection machines, they would not see a single blip on the screen in the last 56 years. There would be no activity; everything would be still.

But one hopes that somewhere, deep in the forest, or high in the mountains, beats a heart that will not yield to the educators nor bend his knee to the White Witch. And that heart will become a flaw in the educators’ machine. And from that flaw will come other flaws. And that great precise recorder of human conformity and sterility will be forced to convey, to the educators, that their perfect, Godless black hole world is crumbling… well, such is the hope. Mere delusion? The ancient faith of Christians is based on such a “delusion.”

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After the Romans had conquered Greece, Athens became the school and center of thought for the civilized world. Men had but one set of ideas, but one set of models to imitate in the whole range of the fine arts. Inventiveness and originality ceased, and genius was subdued. The rule of Horace, Nullius addictus in verba magistri jurare (“Not compelled to swear to the opinions of any master”) was [re]versed and men ceased to think for themselves, but looked to the common fountain of thought at Athens, where the teachers of mankind borrowed all their ideas from the past. Improvement and progress ceased, and imitation, chaining the present to the car of the past, soon induced rapid retrogression. Thus, we think centralization of thought occasioned the decline of civilization. Northern invaders introduced new ideas, broke up centralization, arrested imitation, and begot originality and inventiveness. Thus a start was given to a new and Christian civilization. Now, a centralization occasioned by commerce and fashion threatens the overthrow of our civilization, as arms and conquest overthrew the ancient.

-- George Fitzhugh in Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters

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