That Which We Hold Dear

And Memory, Use, and Love make live
Us and our fields alike—

--Rudyard Kipling

In Arthur Koestler’s autobiography he told of a woman who had spent years as a devoted communist and then one day became an ardent anti-communist. Koestler, now a former communist himself, asked her why she had left the Party. She replied, “One night I heard screams.” Of course there had been nights and nights of screams, but one night the screams of one tortured soul penetrated the soul of a communist who thought there was no such thing as a soul. Such conversions were rare, Koestler went on to say, but they did occur.

Because “one night I heard screams” conversions sometimes occur, we should never stop trying to report the atrocities of the black barbarians. There is always the chance that an atrocity story will penetrate the soul of a liberal and he will be converted, but we cannot make the reporting of atrocity stories our only hope. In the main, the liberals have formed a protective shell around their hearts that makes them immune to an appeal for charity and mercy. Augustine once said that there was one deathbed conversion in Scripture, lest you despair; but there was only one lest you presume. We cannot hope for the equivalent of mass deathbed conversions from liberals as a result of getting the information out about black atrocities. What can we hope for then, in lieu of the conversion of the liberals? We can hope and work for the destruction of Negro worshipping Liberaldom.

In a centralized state such as the United States only a small minority of people are really committed to the preservation of the state. The vast majority of people are merely grazers; they go along with the powers that be, but if a different group took over the grazers would go along with them. The late John Tyndale, a British Nationalist, was well aware of the grazers. He once wrote an article explaining that more often than not he found that the British grazers agreed with him on the necessity of a white Britain, but they wouldn’t support him because they feared the loss of their jobs and the stigma of “racist.” Seize electoral power, Tyndale argued, and the grazers would go along with the new powers that be, the BNP. I agree with Tyndale about the grazers, but I don’t think you can defeat democratic, utopian liberalism from within utopia. You must destroy utopia and rebuild Christian Europe.

Behind Negro worshipping diversity is the desire to eliminate all that elevates a man to a spiritual plane above the nature-worshipping societies of antiquity. And the return to nature, which results in the worship of the savage, occurred in the European world when religious faith became a philosophy. When a man looks at religious faith philosophically he has already started the divorce proceedings between his heart and his head that will lead to the betrayal of his God and his people. He is a man fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. Stanley Weyman, in his novel The Long Night, depicts a staunch and principled Switzer who betrays his people during their wars with Savoy because he succumbs to the philosophical temptation.

After all, a live dog is better than a dead lion – only you will not see it. We are ruled, the most of us, by our feelings, and die for our side without asking ourselves whether a single person would be a ducat the worse if the other side won. It is not philosophical, with another shrug. “That is all.”

Therein lies the key to the demise of the European. The devil bids us divorce ourselves from our people and our God in the name of a higher philosophical principle. In reality, an egotistical adherence to a “higher” philosophical principle, higher than “mere feelings,” leaves a man in a morally ambivalent state in which he can be easily manipulated by the devil.

This brings us to the necessity of concluding that the upholders of mere dialectic, whether they appear in this modern form or in another, are among the most subversive enemies of society and culture. They are attacking an ultimate source of cohesion in the interest of a doctrine which can issue only in nullity. It is no service to man to impugn his feeling about the world qua feeling. Feeling is the source of that healthful tension between man and what is – both objectively and subjectively. If man could be brought to believe that all feeling about the world is wrong, there would be nothing for him but collapse. -- Richard Weaver

The European has been brought to believe that all his feeling about the world is wrong, and he has indeed collapsed. The abstract philosophical poison, the European’s inheritance from Greece, killed the Roman Empire, and then in turn killed Christian Europe. It’s not hard to see why the Greek poison is so deadly, nor is it hard to see why men drink it so readily. The Greek philosophical poison consists of the “you shall be as God” liquid. If existence can be put in the silver rod of the philosopher, the philosopher can become God. It’s ironic that Plato, the most anti-European of the Greek philosophers, has been carried in the humanities curriculums of European universities for century after century. Plato’s cruel utopia, where the patriarchal family is outlawed, abortion is legal, and all ties of kith and kin are obliterated for the sake of the common good of an abstract humanity, was to become a shining light to anti-European intellectuals throughout the long history of Christian Europe.

Every utopia is antithetical to Christianity, even though many utopian schemes, in fact most utopian schemes, come from heretical Christians. Christianity celebrates the living God who saved individual human beings from sin and death. The utopian celebrates humanity in the abstract, which he plans to deliver from the pain of existence by virtue of the power of his mind. Such egomania always ends in oblivion, because individual human beings cannot live in the prison of the abstracted mind, abstracted from God and from man. The Roman Catholic priest, Jean Meslier, who rejected Christianity for his own abstract theology of utopia, at least had the decency to follow his abstract theory to its logical conclusion: After stating “I myself am not more than nothing…,” he committed suicide. The same fate has befallen the modern European people; believing they are nothing, a people without kith or kin, they are committing suicide.

All my life I’ve heard of the Greco-Roman heritage of Europe. And the unchallenged assumption is that the Greco-Roman heritage is good. But the type of heritage that liberals and conservatives are referring to, the Greek philosophical tradition and the Roman organization, have not been good for Europe. The discarded poetical heritage of Homer, Sophocles, and Virgil, the men who felt that there was a God beyond the gods, would have been a heritage for the Europeans to build upon, but it was not that heritage that became “our Greco-Roman heritage.”

Our Greco-Roman heritage is the heritage of the utopian Greek philosophers and the race-mixing Romans who put loyalty to the idea of Rome above loyalty to one’s blood. The startling fact that comes to the forefront when we look at the European’s history is that the classicists have always regarded the European as a barbarian because the European regarded the purity of his race as something sacred. I remember being shocked, because I had always been told the Europeans who invaded Rome were barbarians, when I first read about the real Europeans, such as Dietrich of Berne and Alaric the Goth, men of great heart and of a great civilization. They kept what was good in the Roman empire, the Christian faith, and discarded what was evil, the Roman policy of mongrelization in the name of Roman unity. It was the task of the European hero then, as it is his task now, to keep the Greco-Roman hell-hound at bay.

Right from the beginning then, there was a Greco-roman dagger aimed at the heart of European civilization. So long as the Europeans’ maintained their bloodlines, they were shielded from the Greco-Roman dagger. But when the shield of race was lowered the dagger of the Greek philosophic tradition and mongrelizing Rome was able to penetrate to the heart of the European civilization. In the purely material world a dagger to the heart is fatal, but in the real world, the world of the European fairy tales, a man and his people can survive a dagger to the heart; they can rise again, and ride triumphant over ruin and death.

Of course all talk of the European riding triumphant over anything is futile if he doesn’t recover his identity as a European. He is the Christ-bearer who preserved the faith by preserving the purity of his race. Whenever he wavered toward a Greco-Roman-philosophical utopia, his faith in the living God diminished. How could it be otherwise? Love, charity, and mercy stem from a living God, a God who is man and God; they cannot exist as philosophical abstractions or the “ethical ideals” of an organization dedicated to one-world, one-family, one-multicolored race.

The first European Christians viewed fidelity to their race as they viewed fidelity to their wife and fidelity to their God. The liberals accept that European vision of race and faith as the true Christianity, and then damn Christianity. The halfway-house Christians condemn the “racist” faith of the antique Europeans and point to a new Christianity where Christ appears, blesses Babylon, and then leaves the stage.

Can there be any faith in Christ outside the hearth fires of the condemned Europeans? The answer to that question is obvious to anyone who has a heart that still lives. The path through the European woods takes us to Him; the path through the new improved woods of the liberals leads to Babylon, and beyond that, hell. I have no desire to be wiser than my ancestors. They knew and loved God because of His divine humanity. They saw the human in the divine, because they were faithful to a particular race of people, not a philosophical utopia or a multi-racial organization. The European cottage in the woods, when inhabited by men and women of our own race, is infinitely more beautiful than the gaudy palaces of Babylon peopled by an indeterminate race of subhuman monstrosities. In the former dwelling we see the face of Christ reflected in his people; in the latter we see only darkness. We’ve truly lost our way if we prefer the Babylonian palace to the European cottage. +

March or Die

“Shadow,” said he,
“Where can it be
This land called El Dorado?”

Dostoevsky stated in his novel, The Devils, that the problem of faith was “whether a man, as a civilized being, as a European, can believe at all, believe that is, in the divinity of the son of god, Jesus Christ, for therein rests, strictly speaking, the whole faith.” Dostoevsky was half right. It was necessary for Karl Adam, in his book The Son of God, to point out that modern man had also lost faith in Christ’s humanity as well as faith in His divinity. (1)

Karl Adam thought as a Roman Catholic priest that Catholicism, if rightly interpreted and practiced, would provide a faith in Christ as true God and true man. Dostoevsky thought a renewal of Russian Orthodoxy and Russian mysticism would restore Christ to His proper place as true God and true man. Both men, although correct in their belief in Christ as true God and true man, were incorrect about the source of an incorporate renewal of that Faith. Neither Roman Catholicism nor Russian Orthodoxy proved to be the answer.

It was no shock to me that Russian Orthodoxy did not incorporate the whole vision of Christ, since Russian Orthodoxy had no claim to universality. However, it was a shock to me, and remains a shock, that the Roman Catholic Church in its Novus Ordo guise denies the divinity of Christ, and in its Traditionalist guise denies the humanity of Christ. But a man can only remain staring at a dry oasis, where he expected to get life-sustaining water, for so long. Eventually he realizes that it is time to “march or die.”

And it is certainly no time for lies. I’ll have none of that nonsense: “Look, it says right here in the new catechism: ‘Christ is true God and true man,’” or: “The traditionalists say Christ is true God and true man.” The Novus Ordo liberals and the humanity-hating trads are Greeks. They will talk endlessly about God and invoke him for their pet policies, but in the end one is left with the depressing conclusion that “Here there is no faith.”

So finally one marches on. To the fundamentalists? No, they are not fundamental enough. They have forsaken the European cultural inheritance. And by doing so they have substituted a mode of thought for a blood faith. Perhaps then there is no oasis, no El Dorado. But if there is no El Dorado, why do I have such a longing for it?

If El Dorado exists, it is not to be found in the narrow confines of one particular Christian denomination. European Christianity as a whole – Protestant and Catholic – is Christianity, and all other cultures are Christian to the extent that they have Europeanized their own cultures. Latin and Central America Europeanized more than China, and China Europeanized more than Africa, but none have approached the deep levels of Christianity that the Europeans achieved. But it’s all gone. Why did it disappear?

If we distill the reason for the disappearance of the Faith, we see before us, in blazing technicolor, a film called "The Triumph of the Greeks". In the film, we see Athena, the goddess of wisdom, springing newborn from the head of Zeus. We see poets, such as Sophocles, rejecting the wisdom of the isolated mind and following the way of the Cross. But the Greek mind prevails. Then we see the coming of the God-Man that Sophocles yearned for. The God-Man’s birth from the womb of a mortal woman reveals to us that wisdom resides not in the head but in the blood. Wisdom is not something that springs from pure mind but is instead something born through suffering and travail.

Then the assault begins: Satan tries to get Christ to abandon the way of the Cross, first on the mountaintop and then through St. Peter, but to no avail. Christ, the hero, is not to be deterred. No hero – and Christ is the hero – sits on the sidelines and plays mind-games while other poor saps fight the dragons and face the three challenges. It would be like Zorro delegating the final dueling scene to his servant while he, Zorro, gives directions from behind a bullet-proof and sword-proof screen. Likewise, picture the Scarlet Pimpernel sitting in a tailor shop in London directing rescue operations in France through the use of his cell phone: “Chauvelin got another agent. Oh well, I’ll have to come up with a better plan next time.” No, the way of the hero is not the way of the abstracted mind. But let us move on and keep viewing "The Triumph of the Greeks".

We next see a large, rotund Dominican monk (with all the good intentions that the road to hell is paved with) devise a system which separates reason from revelation and elevates reason above the wisdom of the blood. Henceforth, in his system, God will be known only as a derivative product of reason, not as the personal God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and St. Paul.

We fast-forward the picture and see rivers of blood being shed in the great Protestant revolt, and all for naught. The issue is never settled. It is not – or at least it should not be – a question of Protestant vs. Catholic. It is a battle between the blood Faith of the European and the Greek mind. For if we apprehend God by the Greek way, the way of the Scholastics, the way of the Bible exegetes, it simply doesn’t matter whether we go to Mass or go to Bible study; we will be Christian atheists either way.

Need we continue with the film? From the rotund monk, to the hard-eyed man of Geneva, to Ebenezer Scrooge as the embodiment of capitalism, it all ends with the white-coated scientist expertly dissecting and analyzing all of mankind and mankind’s God.

“Oh, for ten toes,” Long John Silver cried. At least he knew he needed five more toes, but the modern atheist Christian doesn’t even know he is without his faith. A man can smile and smile and be an errant knave, and man can go to Mass or go to church, and still be an ardent atheist. Indeed, the Catholic Church today is the leading purveyor of atheism, followed closely by the mainstream Protestant churches, which place second to the Catholic Church only because they lack Catholicism’s formidable organization.

What then? “Where can it be, this land called El Dorado?” Perhaps it always existed and still exists for those who see "with blinding sight". Maybe the ordeal of fire is the inner struggle to strip away the external facade of a speculative faith in order to embrace a living faith. And it was the “racist” Europeans of the old stock who preserved a living faith for us to embrace. They did not leave Christ in the documents and the catechisms, they placed Him at the center of their culture. “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

The techo-barbarians of church and state have set us down in a huge desert, the Sahara of Philosophical Speculation. They have told us this desert is the Faith; there is nothing else. But our European ancestors tell us something different. “Beyond that desert is life, a land called El Dorado.” In whom do we place our faith? I choose the Europeans of the old stock, because they and I are of the same blood. I do not speak the same language as the techno-barbarians, nor do I identify with their bloodless, soulless, impersonal vision of God.

The antique European has been tried and convicted at a trial he never attended. He has been convicted of racism, sexism, and obstructionism. The hunt is on in Liberaldom for unrepentant, unreformed Europeans. The techno-barbarians with their colored lackies are beating the bushes to find the last of them. They won’t succeed. The European’s heart was set on fire by His heart. Every time the techno-barbarian thinks he has killed the European fire, it flares up again in the heart of a European connected to white Europe. El Dorado is not a city of gold, it is something far more valuable. It is eternal Europe, a land where hearts of fire still keep their vows of fealty to their King and their God. And if our loyalty to eternal Europe makes us outlaws, then so be it. When Satan rules, the European must be an outlaw, the sign of contradiction to a world stewing in its own satanic juices. +
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(1) "The Christian gospel announces primarily not an ascent of humanity to the heights of the divine in a transfiguration, an apotheosis, a deification of human nature, but a descent of the Godhead, of the divine Word, to the state of bondage of the purely human. This is the kernel of the primitive Christian message. 'The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us'; he 'emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of man, and in habit found as a man' (Phil. ii. 7) Hence it is just as important to establish that Christ is full and complete man, that for all the hypostatic union with the Godhead, he possessed not only a human body but also a purely human soul, a purely human will, a purely human consciousness, a purely human emotional life, that in the full and true sense he became as one of us, as it is to establish the other proposition, namely, that this man is God. Indeed, the doctrine of the divinity of Christ first acquires from the other doctrine—Christ is full and perfect man—its specifically Christian imprint and its specifically Christian form; its essential difference from all pagan apotheoses and savior gods." – Karl Adam in The Son of God

Why the White Man Can Go Home Again

It is clear that white Europeans no longer believe what white European pagans once believed, nor what white European Christians once believed. This is why they are helpless in the face of the "passionate intensity" of the barbarians of color. The barbarians still believe in barbarism.

The white man's history includes three cultures: the pagan Greco-Roman culture, the Christian culture, and the post-Christian culture. If he were totally pagan or totally Christian, the white man could easily resist the colored hordes. But the post-Christian has taken parts of paganism and parts of Christianity and welded them into a faithless faith inferior to paganism and infinitely inferior to Christianity. Let us look at the three faiths.

Neither the pagan nor the Christian share the post-Christian's notion of progress. The post-Christian, having jettisoned his belief in the Second Coming, looks forward to a secular, earthly, democratic kingdom of God without God. Each successive generation progresses until the final generation achieves… What do they achieve? They have progressed. Isn't that enough?

In contrast, the Greek pagan looks not to the future but to the past. In the past is the Golden Age, which will come again because of the natural cycle of history: birth, youth, maturity, and death. Spengler, despite his encyclopedic knowledge (or maybe because of it), shares the pagan view of history with the Greeks.

The Christian, like the post-Christian, also looks to the future, but the Christian does not believe in the generic perfectibility of mankind. He believes in the personal sanctification of individuals acting within history, but his faith in the future is based on his belief in the Second Coming of the Lord of History.

The Greek-pagan view of history requires the least amount of faith, which is probably why it appealed so much to Spengler. The elements of birth, youth, maturity, and death can be seen in every civilization, while the idea that mankind is becoming perfect is ludicrous to anyone with the slightest touch of objectivity, and the Second Coming of Christ has not yet occurred. I stand with the Christians, but there is no sense in denying that from a purely Spenglerian, Greek perspective, the Christian view of history is nonsense.

As we might suspect, cultures that differ so widely in their views of history also differ on the subject of God. The Greek pagan gods are cruel (and Prometheus defies them in the name of humanity), but the Greeks found an escape valve in philosophy. If the human mind can systematize and categorize the entire natural world, from which, according to the Greek mind, God emanates, has not the mind of man become God, since that mind can encompass God?

It is this aspect of paganism, which limits God to the confines of the natural world and deifies the mind of man, that the post-Christian has adopted as his own philosophy. And he has grafted that philosophy onto a secularized, eschatological system which measures man's progress by the amount of knowledge he has accumulated about the natural world. This is why scientific thinking is considered the only real thinking in our post-Christian society.

Of course, the profound difference between the Greek and the Christian is their view of God's humanity. The incarnate Christian God is Promethean in that He loves mankind. But instead of stealing fire from the cruel nature gods, He frees us from the nature gods by triumphing over them. Through His birth, death, and resurrection, He defeats the cyclic nature of the pagan system.

So why, we need to ask, do we need the Greek philosophical escape valve if Christ has defeated the cruel gods of nature? The answer is that post-Christians do not believe Christ has defeated the nature gods. They find it too difficult to believe that all human history could hinge on something that cannot be known with certainty by any empirical, scientific test.

The entire European philosophical and theological system is, in my judgment, an attempt to give mankind the scientific certainty that Christ is the Promethean conqueror of the cruel nature gods. That effort reaches its zenith with St. Thomas's historic separation of nature from grace, which paved the way for Teilhard de Chardin and the post-Christian epoch of the white man's history.

The attempt to scientize God, to make Him subservient to a naturalized system that can be controlled by man, is the original temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed. And the Europeans' descent from Christianity to a pagan-Christian mix was equivalent to a second fall. European civilization was not paradise in the literal sense, but it was paradise in that the incarnate God made Himself available to every European willing to abandon the search for the magic, scientific talisman and walk through the mystic wardrobe door.

The second fall, the Europeans' fall, seems to be irrevocable. But it is only irrevocable if we look at history through the eyes of the Greek, and if we look at God through the eyes of the post-Christian. If we look at history and at God with the eyes of a Christian, we will know there is no distinction between the practical world of nature and the world of grace. There is only His realm of charity and the realm of Satan. Every act that supports His reign of charity, no matter how quixotic it seems, is of vital importance. Europeans used to believe this. That is why they were able to defeat barbarians time and time again, and why they are so helpless before them now. It is not science, that false messiah, which will save European man, it is the suffering servant who cannot be seen, heard, or comprehended by the scientific, theological, or philosophical mind.

There are no white men, no women, no children and no nations in the hybrid, pagan-Christian world of pure mind. But that world does not have to be our world. We can reject it.

Let me speak now with the privilege of anger that Kent claimed in King Lear. Why should we countenance and even revere those who have offered us a magic Greek talisman instead of Christ? By what right does Augustine, Aquinas, or any of those deceivers speak to a man of flesh and blood, a man who must die? Revelation ends with Christ and theology with St. Paul. St. Paul's way, the way of charity, the way of sympathetic communion with the God who speaks to the hearts of men, is the European way, the only way to God.

European man was distinct because he was foolish. He believed a fairy tale about a heroic God Man rather than the meditations of the great philosophers. And every Christian heretic since that glorious rejection has been trying to convince European man that the fairy tale is simply too foolish to be believed. But in many fairy tales there is some kind of magic cloak which the hero places over himself that confers invisibility or invincibility or something else that is beneficial to him yet baffling to his enemies. So let us put on Christ's burial shroud with the sure and certain hope that it will not stink of death and decay but smell like the flowers growing in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Oh, to be young and foolish again. To believe, not as the pagans believed, nor as the post-Christians now believe, but as St. John believed, as St. Paul believed, and the European Everyman believed. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

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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What Homer Knew and Plato Didn't

The right-wing pagans who reject Christianity because it is anti-white are partially correct; the institutional churches are against white people and our culture, past and present. But when the pagans suggest a return to Greece, my question is “which Greece?” If you’re advocating a return to the Greek philosophers, you may as well stay with the anti-white Churches because they are the heirs of the Greek philosophical tradition. St. Paul had no luck with the Greek philosophers because everything was speculative to them. They believed in the idea of truth but not in the incarnation of truth. That God could become incarnate was a return to the ‘silly’ gods such as Zeus and Hera which the philosophers had already rejected. Is it true that an advanced culture never had a sillier religion than the ancient Greeks? That’s what the intellectuals, the same ones who admire Greek philosophy, say. But if their religion was so silly, why is the European literary tradition so steeped in Greek mythology? Is it because the European poets are silly too? Well, yes, they are silly to the modern intellectuals; they can be read to produce an effect, an emotion, in the eviscerated academician, but they are not, to the academician, vehicles of truth.

In the last death gasp of a society, the academicians rule. Plato’s perfect society is a soulless, lifeless society. The European poets knew this, which is why they called on Homer for inspiration rather than on Plato. And it’s ironic that there is more realistic thinking in the metaphors of Homer than in the syllogisms of Plato, just as there is more realistic thinking in the works of Shakespeare, Scott, and Dostoyevsky than there is in the tomes of St. Thomas, Descartes, and Hegel.

If the new pagans prefer Zeus to Plato and St. Thomas, I’m with them. So were the European poets. There is more humanity in the Greek myths than in Greek philosophy, but there is something else that the new pagans overlook. The old European poets deepened the poetry of the Greeks. Homer’s Odysseus and Sophocles’ Oedipus were not looking for a non-human substitute for Zeus; they were looking for a man-god more human than Zeus. And if the Greek philosophers had not regarded Homer’s stories as frivolous nonsense, they would have heard St. Paul’s story of Christ’s Homeric victory over Satan and fallen to their knees and believed, just as Homer and Sophocles did when they crossed that threshold between heaven and hell and were vouchsafed a vision of the incarnate God. They knew him at once as God, because they knew, in contrast to the philosophers, that a divine God is a human God.

It’s not that there aren’t dangers when one follows the way of Odysseus, the way of the man of flesh and blood. Of course there are. There is Circe, there is Calypso, and of course, the Cyclops. But if the heart is alive, there is a chance, a good chance, that the Greek hero will find his way to The Hero. However, the philosopher will never find or see anything; he will be hopelessly lost in a rational maze of his own construction. Yet when the Church condemns paganism, it is generally the paganism of Odysseus that is condemned, not the paganism of the philosophers, which seems to go against Christianity. In order to feel the need for a redeemer, one must still be a man with a heart who sees life “feelingly” and can be moved to passionate repentance for sins done with passion. The philosopher, the man with the disembodied brain, needs no redeemer, for he sees nothing from which he needs to be redeemed. Passion, death, and sin are just ideas that have no real life outside of the mind of the philosopher. He, or more accurately, his mind, is almighty and self-sufficient. He smugly contemplates his own self-sufficiency through all eternity.

The Odysseus type of pagan needs to be converted to a faith that is purer and greater than his own, but since he has a functioning heart there is a good chance he will respond to His sacred heart. In contrast, the philosopher is dead. He cannot respond heart to heart to God because he has willfully constructed mind-forged manacles over and around his heart. Odysseus’s paganism would be a step up for the philosopher.

And the conflict persists today. The Kevin Strom pagans are, with their respect for kin and kind, at least human beings, while the various Greek Churchmen who think they have reached the zenith of human perfection, have yet to be born.

Out of the Depths Have I Cried to Thee

Some years ago I had a relative who, almost overnight, went from a healthy, vigorous woman to a bedridden, sickly one. She remained that way for two years with no hope of recovery. But at the two-year mark of her illness, her doctor discovered that he had misdiagnosed her illness and subsequently changed his treatment to something more fitting for the disease which he now believed she had. And, miracle of miracles, my relative made a complete recovery.

It is apparent to me that the seemingly sick-beyond-recovery West has also been misdiagnosed. The patient is supposed to be sick from a lack of rationality, when in reality, he is sick from an excess of rationality. And it is to the neglected poetic voice of the West that we must turn, not to that of the philosophers, scientists, and theologians, if we ever want to see a healthy, vigorous West again.

The disembodied-brain heresy of the Greeks can best be described as the Olympian heresy. The Greek philosophers placed reason on Mt. Olympus in place of the old gods and studied, probed and dissected man from their Olympian height. Plato saw man as a walking universal, as part of the spiritual force of life from whence we all come. But Plato’s universal is not a personal force; it is not a God to whom we can speak to, as the Hebrews spoke to the living God:

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications. If thou, Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in His word do I hope. My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning. Let Israel hope in the Lord: for with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him is plenteous redemption. And He shall redeem Israel from all its iniquities.

Aristotle, unlike Plato, looked at the particular man, but not in a Christian, personal way. He looked at man as a specimen to be dissected and studied, not as a whole, unique personality.

The greatest poet of antiquity, Sophocles, stated that it was better never to have been born than to exist in the closed, meaningless world of the philosophers. And the folk of the Roman Empire rejected the Olympian religion of the philosophers for the more personal mystery religions. Yet it was to the Olympian religion that the Church fathers and the medievals turned when they chose to present the one true God to the folk. Yet the folk have always resisted the Greco-Roman paradigms. In every Christian age, save the latter 20th century, the folk have steadfastly resisted the Churchmen’s attempts to make Christ’s Church into Mt. Olympus.

The struggle has been a dramatic one. And the drama must continue. It is not time to bring down the curtain on Europe. The poets, speaking for the folk, have spoken with one voice about the sickness of the West. Their diagnosis is quite different from that of the philosophers, the scientists and the theologians. Let us hear their voices.

Shakespeare. Most of the poetic depictions of the disembodied mind come from the 19th century and early 20th century poets because they were the first to face it directly and unabated. But Shakespeare, with a remarkable prescience, was the first poet to square off against the heresy of the disembodied brain when he pitted Hamlet against Claudius. Both men are geniuses, but one, Claudius, put his intellect at the service of his satanic desire for power while keeping those virtues of the heart, such as faith, hope, and charity, isolated from and subordinate to his intellect.

At the beginning of the play, Hamlet is in an abstracted state of mind that could lead him to become, like Claudius, a disembodied brain at the service of Satan. But Hamlet has that within which passeth show; he resists the temptation to become a purely intellectual being. Instead he begins a quest toward integrality. All around him are abstracted caricatures of human beings, trying to make him view life as they view it, a game in which one must manipulate human beings as one would chess pieces. Hamlet perseveres. And it is at Ophelia’s grave when he realizes he loves, that the real Hamlet, the integral, heroic Hamlet, comes to the forefront: “It is I, Hamlet, the Dane.” He never looks back nor fails in his duty after that.

The most overlooked scene (overlooked by Christians) in all of literature is Hamlet’s defiance of augury. It doesn’t matter if we, by use of our intellectual powers divorced from their proper subservience to the virtues of the heart, can alter our material future for the better or avert death. It is to those wellsprings of humanity in our hearts, connected to His sacred heart, that our loyalty must be directed in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword. “We defy augury.” With those words, Hamlet speaks for European man and gives us the cure for all the West’s ills.

Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne, among others, is one writer who has placed opposition to the modernist-Gnostic heresy at the heart of his work. His single-mindedness on that topic – it is the central theme of most of his short stories and his major novels – has earned him many sneers from literary critics who suffer from the disease he criticizes. Hawthorne’s insights are so profound that one suspects he had many a personal struggle against the disembodied-brain temptation himself.

In much of the 19th century criticism of the disembodied brain, we start out in a scientist’s laboratory. Not satisfied with the ordinary Wind in the Willows type of life, the simple life of the plowed field and the evening lingerings, the scientific man of the laboratory must create a whole new world of which he, the man of science, is in control. The new world is always supposed to be for the good of the simple moles who are imprisoned in their ordinary, plowed fields, but the simple moles invariably end up annihilated.

Hawthorne’s story, “The Birthmark,” begins with an introduction to a man of science:

In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one. He had left his laboratory to the care of an assistant, cleared his fine countenance from the furnace smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife. In those days when the comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle, it was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman in its depth and absorbing energy. The higher intellect, the imagination, the spirit, and even the heart might all find their congenial aliment in pursuits which, as some of their ardent votaries believed, would ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force and perhaps make new worlds for himself. We know not whether Aylmer possessed this degree of faith in man's ultimate control over Nature. He had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weaned from them by any second passion. His love for his young wife might prove the stronger of the two; but it could only be by intertwining itself with his love of science, and uniting the strength of the latter to his own.

Such a union accordingly took place, and was attended with truly remarkable consequences and a deeply impressive moral. One day, very soon after their marriage, Aylmer sat gazing at his wife with a trouble in his countenance that grew stronger until he spoke.

The trouble was that the man of science’s beautiful wife had a birthmark which Aylmer believed tainted her whole face with the mark of “earthly imperfection.” In order to cure this imperfection, Aylmer… I think you can guess the rest. Of course, his wife dies, a victim of the Utopian aspirations of Aylmer’s disembodied brain:

Yet, had Alymer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness which would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame texture with the celestial. The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.

In Hawthorne's works, a disembodied mind is always the focus of evil, such as Rappacini in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Chillingsworth in The Scarlet Letter, or Ethan Brand in the story of the same name. And Hawthorne is right. What was a small but growing minority in his time has become 'The People' in our own time. The folk have become intellectualized; they are all disembodied brains. No matter where one turns, he meets an Aylmer or a Rappaccini.

P. C. Wren. I think P. C. Wren is one of the great authors of the West, and yet I’m sure he would not appear on any of the literary critics “top ten” lists. That is because literary critics tend to be Gnostics, and P. C. Wren’s works are decidedly anti-Gnostic.

In The Disappearance of General Jason, P. C. Wren is at his anti-Gnostic best. The hero, Colonel Carthew, goes in search of his old friend, General Jason, who has been missing for a long while. The search ends on a small island country inhabited by a people of Portuguese descent but who are independent from Portugal. They guard their isolation jealously, and it was the misfortune of General Jason that he inadvertently violated their privacy.

The island-nation has a queen, but the real ruler is a scientist named Dom Perez de Norhona. De Norhona has developed the ability to isolate a man’s brain from his body; by controlling a certain section of the brain, through hypnosis and surgery, he can make the body of the man do what he, de Norhona, commands. And he has turned General Jason into a dog. Carthew, quite justifiably, accuses de Norhona of murdering General Jason.

“You don’t regard it as a form of murder? The most terrible form of all – soul-murder.”

“No, why should I? Where’s the murder? The whole point is that I did not kill the patient in attempting to perform the experiment. You cannot have a murder without a corpse, can you? And as to murdering souls, I am not scientifically interested in souls. I’m only concerned with minds and bodies.”

Do we not see in de Norhona’s cerebral operation the end result of the Aristotleian-Thomistic separation of reason from grace? I do. For me, de Norhona is St. Thomas. Just as St. Thomas dissects man for the greater good (or so he thought), so does de Norhona.

It seemed to Carthew that de Norhona was a living intelligence, an intelligence almost freed from the hampering restriction and misguidance of emotion; a man whose mind was neither cruel nor kind, but almost purely scientific.

And yet he was human enough in his fanatical patriotism.

Carthew entertained for him curious and contradictory feelings of murderous hatred, fear, considerable respect and almost unwilling liking. So inevitably fair and just himself, Carthew had to admit that de Norhona had done nothing to Jason as Jason, an honest and honourable gentleman who had come to make certain right and proper proposals and suggestions of a commercial nature. Quite obviously de Norhona had used for his great experiment a man whom he believed to be a deadly enemy of his country, inasmuch as he was the first of an invading army, insupportable, detestable and loathsome in the eyes of people to whom independence was the very breath of life and the very religion of their soul.

One feels like screaming with Carthew, “What about the soul?” The Greek-Catholic-disembodied-brain heresy leaves a man without the essence of his humanity, his soul, for the soul is part of the body, not separate from it. A disembodied brain has no soul.

John Buchan. Written in 1916, the novel The Power-House pits a perennial Buchan everyman hero, Leithen, against Mr. Andrew Lumley, a capitalist powerhouse, a brain detached from everything human. At first meeting, Leithen dislikes Lumley. When he tries to find a reason for his dislike, he decides that Lumley is just too “Olympian.” And as he comes to know him better, he realizes that Lumley also is satanic: “Do you know what it is to deal with pure intelligence, a brain stripped of every shred of humanity? It is like being in the company of a snake.”

Lumley’s credo, which he delivers near the end of the novel, is the modern credo, spawned by Satan and nurtured by the Greek philosophers and their Catholic lackeys:

“I am a sceptic about most things,” he said, “but, believe me, I have my own worship. I venerate the intellect of man. I believe in its undreamed-of possibilities, when it grows free like an oak in the forest and is not dwarfed in a flower-pot. From that allegiance I have never wavered. That is the God I have never forsworn.”

It is time for Western man to forswear that false God. The drama is not over. The disembodied brains must wait till the last scene of the last act is played out. For it is always, as St. Paul assures us, in the last scene or at the last trump, if you will, that the Hero turns the tables on the villain.