After the Hangover

The spirit of chivalry had in it this point of excellence, that, however overstrained and fantastic many of its doctrines may appear to us, they were all founded on generosity and self-denial, of which, if the earth were deprived, it would be difficult to conceive the existence of virtue among the human race. – Walter Scott

For a recent birthday my children gave me a complete set of the old TV comedy Car 54, Where Are You? I found the episodes to be just as funny now as when I was young. And it struck me while watching those old shows that a comedy like Car 54 could not be made today. At the time Car 54 was written, European Americans, like their European counterparts, were still in the “Christian Hangover” stage of their existence; they no longer took Christianity seriously as a faith, but the vast majority still took the ethics that stemmed from Christianity seriously. In consequence the humor in shows like Car 54 occurred within a world where the sanctity of marriage and the virtue of chastity were unquestioned, male friendships were not homosexual, and the good-hearted boob always triumphed over the sneering, heartless intellectual. But Car 54 was at the end of the Christian Hangover era. Modern man was about to emerge on the stage of history, devoid of even a Christian hangover. O brave new world!

The post-Christian era, in which Satan uses the forms of the Christian faith to subvert the Christian faith, is the era of the intellectual sneer. Everything noble is sneered at, and everything base is exalted. Our comedies are so filthy and degenerate that no citizen of the original Sodom or Gomorrah could sit through them without being disgusted. Our drama’s are devoid of sense, soul, and drama. And our churches have outstripped even the heathen in their worship of the heathen. And what or who is behind this plethora of filth? Is it the Jew? No, the Jew aids and abets the filth, but he is not its source. Satan, our ancient foe, is the architect of the brave new world. He was miserable in Christian Europe and uncomfortable in the Europe of the Christian Hangover. Now he is comfortable, to the extent that such a restless spirit can be comfortable.

Walter Scott, in his introduction to Quentin Durward, gives us an excellent portrait of the sneering intellect who presides over hell and over our modern day post-Christian Europe:

Among those who were the first to ridicule and abandon the self-denying principles in which the young knight was instructed, and to which he was so carefully trained up, Louis the XIth of France was the chief. That Sovereign was of a character so purely selfish—so guiltless of entertaining any purpose unconnected with his ambition, covetousness, and desire of selfish enjoyment, that he almost seems an incarnation of the devil himself, permitted to do his utmost to corrupt our ideas of honour in its very source. Nor is it to be forgotten, that Louis possessed to a great extent that caustic wit which can turn into ridicule all that a man does for any other person’s advantage but his own, and was, therefore, peculiarly qualified to play the part of a cold-hearted and sneering fiend.

In this point of view, Goethe’s conception of the character and reasoning of Mephistopheles, the tempting spirit in the singular play of “Faust,” appears to me more happy than that which has been formed by Byron, and even than the Satan of Milton. These last great authors have given to the Evil Principle something which elevates and dignifies his wickedness; a sustained and unconquerable resistance against Omnipotence itself—a lofty scorn of suffering compared with submission, and all those points of attraction in the Author of Evil, which have induced Burns and others to consider him as the Hero of the “Paradise Lost.” The great German poet has, on the contrary, rendered his seducing spirit a being who, otherwise totally unimpassioned, seems only to have existed for the purpose of increasing, by his persuasions and temptations, the mass of moral evil, and who calls forth by his seductions those slumbering passions which otherwise might have allowed the human being who was the object of the Evil Spirit’s operations to pass the tenor of his life in tranquillity. For this purpose Mephistopheles is, like Louis XI, endowed with an acute and depreciating spirit of caustic wit, which is employed incessantly in undervaluing and vilifying all actions, the consequences of which do not lead certainly and directly to self-gratification.

Scott has shown us the way the Evil One undermines a Christian civilization. He does not attack in manly fashion, with a direct challenge. There are no devilish gauntlets thrown in the face of Christian warriors. Instead, the devil uses his “depreciating spirit and caustic wit” to undermine the Creator by destroying the image of God in man. The devil supports everything that dehumanizes man. By zigzags and parallels he attacks every aspect of man’s life on earth that makes him feel, “A personality stands here.”

The dehumanizing and depersonalizing program has proceeded at an accelerated pace since the European left Christendom for Satandom. Once the elite palace guards left their posts, there was no longer any reason why Satan and his minions had to refrain from attacking and destroying the European castle.

The demise of Christian civilization always begins with the satanic sneer. In Eden the sneering devil told Adam and Eve that they would not die. “That was just moralistic God talk.” Liberals today mimic their master; if you love your race and kin, you are sneeringly labeled a white racist; if you protest the torture-murder of your people, you are told, “to cry me a river”; if you protest the murder of the innocents in the womb, you are a sexist; if you protest democratic tyranny, you are a fascist. All the venom of the liberals is spewed out with a satanic sneer. The self-proclaimed lovers of humanity hate humanity. Their generic love for the rights of women, the black race, and democratic humanity is a subterfuge for their hatred of the human personality. Anytime there is any manifestation of the one culture that stressed the infinite value of the non-generic human personality, the liberals go berserk and seek to crush that manifestation. Because the slaughter of innocents, the worship of black people, and the implementation of a draconian, secular democracy, is so antithetical to the values of a Christian European, the liberals must be merciless in their suppression of any European opposition to their brave new world.

The hazy, lazy days of the Christian hangover, during which we shared some values if not the same faith with our fellow Europeans, are over. The conservatives, the mad-dog liberals, the halfway-house Christians, and the neo-pagans want us to fade away. And if we refuse to fade away, they will gladly, in the name of racial equality, democratic humanity, and the rights of women, have us exterminated.

When Solzhenitsyn came to the West in the 1970’s he stated that the most striking thing about the European people was their lack of courage. And of course Solzhenitsyn was not saying that there were not any Europeans left who would rush into a burning building to save a child or face a firing squad without flinching; he was talking about the courage to defend one’s people against an implacable enemy. In order to have the latter type of courage a people have to be a people. They must feel bound to their people by ties of faith and race. The problem with the Europeans is that they don’t believe they are a people and they do not have a faith.

The colored people of the world do have a faith. They believe in their race as a herd, and they worship the aggregate power of the herd. The European was never able to convert the non-European people to the faith that revered an individual’s race because it was part of a man’s personality, which was connected to a personal God. The halfway-house Christians who deny a man’s race is part of his personality have already said in their hearts there is no personal God, only an abstract God who rules an abstract utopia created by the mind of the liberal.

As Scott pointed out in his introduction to Quentin Durward, the devil destroys a man’s faith by making all the human bridges to Christ things of ridicule. When we hear halfway-house Christians such as Thomas Fleming mock white people for wanting to protect and defend their own, or when the clergy tell us to shun our blood ties to our kith and kin in the name of a universal religion, we are hearing Satan speak. There is no higher religion than the religion of the God-Man, who revealed Himself to mankind through the provincial, human things that all the modern, authoritative voices want us to abandon. The European’s answer is ‘no.’ He will not abandon the European hearth, because that is where his heart is, with his God. Outside of the European hearth there is nothing, no love, no virtue, and no charity. All is dark and deadly if we acquiesce to the liberals and consent to fade quietly away into the dark night. The heart revolts at such a surrender. And it is our hearts, filled with European prejudices that make us prefer our own to the stranger, honor to treachery, and Christ over Satan, which will take us through the dark night of Europe to a brighter day where we will see our Lord and kinsmen. +

The Mutual Flame

So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix’s sight;
Either was the other’s mine.

--Shakespeare

Let’s be clear about what the new Supreme Court nominee’s condemnation of the white male means. She did not condemn white males for being too liberal, for ceding white civilization to the colored barbarians; she condemned everything associated with the white male of history, namely Western civilization and the God of that civilization. But she was careful to follow the proscribed liberal formula and leave the white female out of her condemnation.

Liberals have taken the Christian doctrine of original sin and made it applicable to only one sex and one race. All females and all non-whites are without sin. This is why the colored man takes race so seriously and the liberal white male denies the existence of race. As a member of the sinless race, the colored wants race to be the determining factor in everything. Then he will be granted sainted status in everything. The liberal white male, on the other hand, has a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that there is no such thing as race. In his world of pure mind, race doesn’t exist. And in contrast to the colored male, the white male must always deny the existence of masculinity. The result of that denial is the end of chivalry. Instead of Beau Geste, the white Christian model of masculinity, we now see only colored masculinity which celebrates pure animal lust and barbarism. The white females need only refrain from marrying white men from the old European stock in order to avoid the taint of original sin. And the vast majority of white females have voluntarily refrained from marrying white Christian males. But I think a time is fast approaching when white Christian women will be forbidden to marry white Christian males.

The consistent liberal will rejoice that the Christian male is extinct (see The Underground Men), because he knows that Christianity is a patriarchal religion. If there is no patriarchy there can be no Christianity. But there are some halfway-house Christians who want to retain the benefits of living in a Christian society while supporting the principles of a primitive matriarchal society. The late John Paul II was a classic example of this type of religious schizophrenic. On the one hand, he condemned abortion, and on the other hand he supported feminism.

The late Pope praised the feminist movement, saying it had championed “the dignity of women.” In his weekly audience of November 29, 1995, he called feminism “in great part legitimate,” and said it had added to a more “balanced vision of the question of womanhood in the contemporary world.” He further went on to say that feminism had reacted against everything that has “impeded the value and full development of the feminine personality” (from Inside the Vatican, January 1996).

We must make up our minds. Is the story of Adam and Eve true? If it is, then the responsibility for the original sin rests on the shoulders of the male and the female. In fact, the responsibility rests even more squarely on the female’s shoulders. So if we exempt the female from original sin, we are not behaving like Christian gentlemen; we are behaving like the male devotees of the religions of Cybele and Isis.

The answer to any social ill is integral Christianity. You can’t take just one aspect of Christianity, such as respect for women as the life-bearers and life-nurturers, and make it the whole of Christianity. David C. Reardon illustrates this half-way house Christian approach to women in his book, Making Abortion Rare.

Mr. Reardon says the pro-life movement failed because pro-lifers failed to make the movement a pro-woman movement. If we shift our focus from the harm abortion does to babies to the harm it does to women, Mr. Reardon says, we will win the support of middle America and gradually win the abortion war.

Mr. Reardon suggests pro-lifers start initiating malpractice suits against abortion doctors for not following the guidelines of Roe vs. Wade. Doctors never inform women that abortion harms the woman having the abortion, nor do they inform the woman having the abortion of the emotional trauma her abortion will trigger. The doctors’ failure to comply with the Roe v. Wade guidelines will leave them open to legal action and hurt them where it counts – in the pocketbooks.

The launching of malpractice suits against abortion doctors for cruelty to women and spending more money to tell women about what abortion does to them is not evil. But Reardon’s strategy of appealing to the woman’s self-interest and not to her soul has many holes in it.

First, he claims that the pro-life movement has been too judgmental about unmarried pregnancies. My wife and I spent a few years “sidewalk counseling” outside abortion clinics, and we did not detect the “judgmental” attitude among our fellow counselors that Mr. Reardon writes about.

Secondly, Mr. Reardon assumes that the pro-life movement was anti-woman in the past. Again, I don’t see that. People I worked with did stress, rightly I think, that the baby was the primary victim; but pro-lifers have always stressed and been concerned about the physical and spiritual well-being of the woman having the abortion.

Thirdly, on the subject of free will and forgiveness, Mr. Reardon frequently makes statements like this one: “All too often pro-lifers have tended to characterize aborting women as selfish and immoral. A far more accurate generalization would be to portray aborting women as confused and driven by despair. This insight is a vital one to our pro-woman/pro-life strategy.” He misses the point. An aborting woman is selfish and immoral, and there can be no forgiveness for her sin if the sin is never her fault, but only the result of confusion and despair.

Mr. Reardon further claims that we should let women who have had abortions know that God forgives them. No, that is bad theology. We should let them know that if they repent, God will forgive them. It seems to me to be a crucial distinction. Do we really want to treat women as inferior creatures who are incapable of sin because somebody else has forced them into their decision? Do we not then deny them the opportunity to, “Like Mary kneel, like Mary weep, ‘Love much’ and be forgiven”?

Mr. Reardon thinks his woman-based strategy will win over the 70% of Americans who are “personally opposed but...”; by making it a woman’s rights issue, the 70% will turn against the abortion industry. Here I must ask: if we make it a woman’s rights issue, are we not conceding that the baby in the womb has importance only if the woman says the baby has importance? If we say abortion is bad only because it harms the aborting woman, which it certainly does, and we enshrine that concept in law, haven’t we permanently damned the unborn to a nebulous status? The unborn will exist only if women say they do.

Reardon’s suggestion that we can make abortion illegal without restoring patriarchal Christianity is of course absurd. But there is also a dangerous reaction against the matriarchal pretensions of our current feminists that must be avoided, and which is exemplified by Patrick Mitchell in his book, The Scandal of Gender: Early Christian Teaching on the Man and the Woman. Mitchell’s earlier book on the feminization of the military was quite good (the author wrote under the name Brian Mitchell); Mitchell was the only author I’ve come across who based his argument against women in the military on the Christian principle that women should not be in the military rather than on the merely pagan principle that they could not.

The case that Mitchell makes against Christian feminists is a pretty standard one, but it is a case seldom made these days. I felt, while reading it, a bit like I did when I read Mary Lefkowtiz’s Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History. It seemed ludicrous that anyone should have to write a book proving that Socrates, Beethoven, Cleopatra, etc., were not black, but nevertheless, the insanity of the modern world made it necessary. By corollary, it seems ludicrous that someone would have to write a book about Christianity being the patriarchal religion, but of course even John Paul II thought one could have a Christian feminism, so this book is a refreshing antidote to the current prevailing nonsense about gender.

Mitchell calls himself a “reader” rather than an “author.” Presumably he does so because he merely cites Scripture and the Church Fathers on the subject of gender. To wit:

Within Christian teaching, loving one’s wife cannot mean ceding to her the husband’s headship or freeing her from her duty to obey and revere. This is the lie of the serpent by which both the man and the woman were and are undone. For while the women’s deepest need is for communion in submission, ultimately to God, Satan deceives her into revolting against God with an offer of power in equality.

And:

No doubt our Christian Fathers would condemn the feminist reorganization of modern society, with its strenuous denial of sexual differences and coercive integration of women into all activities at all levels, on all three counts: (1) for turning the natural order upside down by making men subject to women and deposing husbands and fathers from their rightful headship in the home; (2) for opening the door to immorality by mixing men and women together as if sexual temptation were either easily avoided or not worth resisting; and (3) for obscuring the divinely ordained differences between the sexes so important to the social, sexual, and spiritual health of individual men and women.

There is yet a fourth charge the early Christians would bring against us for our disregard of the different duties of men and women. It is less obvious in early Christian teaching because of the assumption that mothers would always care for their children out of both social necessity and natural affection. It is now the case, however, that mothers are encouraged not to care for their children and instead to abandon them, at a very early age and for most of their waking hours, to the far inferior care of paid strangers. A powerful taboo in our society suppresses all criticism of mothers who do so, and fathers who let them. The Saints would not have been so sparing.

And also:

The prophecy of Adam that the woman was “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” was deeply meaningful to the Fathers. The woman was not a separate species, created from the earth as all other creatures were, as indeed Adam himself was. Alone among all creatures, the woman was created “from the man.” Her nature is derivative of the man’s. She participates “through the man” in both his earthy origin and his divine likeness.

There is a major weakness in the book, however; an irredeemable one, in my judgment. Heretics from the left de-emphasize or, more often, attempt to abolish structures and forms. They point to the ‘spirit’ of things and use words like ‘love’ and ‘charity’ out of context. Heretics from the right, on the other hand, tend to worship form and discipline and do not stress love and charity, fearing that such things lead to a lack of form and discipline, which will then lead to soft-headed liberalism. Mitchell falls prey to the latter, formalist heresy.

This blasphemous interpretation of the Apostle Paul is an example:

The Apostle Paul commands husbands to love their wives, but wives he commands not to love their husbands, but to obey and revere them. In doing so, he bids that wives render to their husbands that which is most needful and consistent with the natural headship of the man, for it is more important to the one in charge that he be obeyed and revered than he be loved. This truth we find also in the world around us, for in all human organizations it is indeed more necessary that the head be feared than loved. The beauty of the Christian order is that the head also loves the body, as Christ loves the Church.

One thinks after reading this of Shakespeare’s comment in The Merchant of Venice: “The devil can cite Scripture for his own purpose.” Scripture should be interpreted in its entirety. (St. Paul also had a memorable quote about charity superseding all other virtues.)

Should a marriage be primarily a military arrangement? I will concede that even the best of women need some fear of their husbands, but should that be their primary reason for obeying? No! Wives who are obedient only from fear and not from love are not real wives and will abandon their husbands once a stronger, more forceful warlord comes along. The true wife obeys because she loves; Katarina’s injunction to wives at the end of The Taming of the Shrew is an example:

Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor:
It blots thy beauty as frosts do bite the meads,
Confounds thy fame as whirlwinds shake fair buds,
And in no sense is meet or amiable.
A woman mov'd is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord? —
I am asham'd that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.
Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toll and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?
Come, come, you froward and unable worms!
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great, my reason haply more,
To bandy word for word and frown for frown;
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband's foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready; may it do him ease.

I see in Mitchell a man who has gone wrong by only a hair, but it is a significant hair. If we were to adopt Mitchell’s interpretation of the Fathers and Scripture, we would have a religion “that have not charity. Fear is the beginning of wisdom, not the end result. I see in the tradition of chivalry that came to fruition in Europe an elevation of the Church’s teaching on gender. Without abrogating any of the Church Fathers’ teaching, the chivalric tradition shifted the balance in male-female relationships from fear to love, as Christianity shifted the focus from fear to love in man’s relationship with God. When one truly appreciates the nature of the beloved, one only fears disappointing the beloved. One is not fearful of the painful consequences of disobedience for one’s self.

The downside of the chivalric tradition is that the true knight’s reverence for women, which is noble and uplifting when women are obedient as Mary was obedient, becomes blasphemous when women imitate Cybele rather than Mary. This habit of reverence for the female, rightly developed and cultivated in the traditions of chivalry, was continued in the European culture after the female went over to Cybele. Hence, the tradition which was the highest and purest embodiment of true masculinity and true femininity became the embodiment of all that is cowardly in the male and unfeminine in the female.

But the failure of that magnificent synergy between the sexes that was at the core of Western civilization should not force us to make the mistake of Reardon and the liberals, and exempt the woman from original sin. Nor should we settle for Mitchell’s militaristic and juridical arrangement between the sexes. Instead, let us say with Unamuno that we will have all or nothing. We will have knights, chivalry, dragons, fair and virtuous ladies, and the God whose love passeth all understanding, in the civilization to which we bend our knee, or else we will not bend the knee.

The Law Above the Law

Hazleton, Pennsylvania, like many small towns throughout the U. S., has a problem with illegal aliens. The illegals were only asserting their ethnic pride by committing a few rapes and murders. And the cultural bigots of Hazleton responded in a most un-American way to the rapes and murders: they made it illegal for an illegal to work in Hazleton.

A very commendable step, but a Federal court ruled that the law passed by Hazleton to protect its citizens from rape and murder is unconstitutional. And of course the Federal court and the U. S. Government are insane and immoral. But what is our recourse when our own government is insane and immoral? Write a protest letter to our local congressman? No, I don't think so, because that would be the same as seeking redemption from the devil.

When a government forbids legitimate self-defense, that government is in league with those who rape and murder. One has to look to the law above the law in such circumstances. That law is the code of chivalry: "Such things will not be permitted despite all of their laws."

Westerns

The Western has been called America’s finest, most original contribution to the world. I would concur. The American West has fascinated such diverse poetic talents as G. K. Chesterton and Dylan Thomas.

Living under a demonic government of the Deists and for the capitalists, Americans had to go West if they wanted to get a whiff of free air that was not already owned by the robber barons. Father Luigi Ligutti describes in his book Rural Roads to Security how this Western escape valve was lost:

The entrance of women into the industrial field tended to reduce the wages of men, since men were no longer the sole support of a family; the idea of a family wage for the head of the family was slipping to that of a mere individual wage in competition with women and children. Still labor was not at once shackled by this condition. There was still a possibility of escape, and when escape is possible, liberty is not dead.

Harold Faulkner gives the alternative when he writes: As long as public land could be had at nominal cost, “wage slavery, in the sense that there was no escape, did not exist. If times were hard and wages low, the worker could always go West.” (Faulkner, Harold, American Economic History, 3rd Ed. New York: Harper, 1935.)

After 1850, transportation underwent marked improvements. Steam railroads increased 300 per cent between 1850 and 1860.

With steam transportation established, the factory system began that forward leap which continued, with but brief lulls during the great panics, through the remainder of the century.

This twofold development, growth of factories and improvement in transportation, was directly instrumental in changing from bad to worse the conditions of labor. Wages tended to become standardized at a minimum, since goods from one city were brought into competition with the same type of goods from another city. Price plus quality capture the market. By established custom the necessary curtailment was taken from wages. Transportation and growth of factories also made profitable the subdivision of labor, thereby creating vast numbers of detail jobs, simple enough to be classed with unskilled labor and each paid the correspondingly lower wage.

The specialized capitalist, alert to the possibilities of saving by division of production, concentrated industry in fewer and larger plants. Labor, long below the ability of housing itself in health and decency, huddled more densely in the industrial tenements. This urbanization of population paralleled the concentration of industry and was, in greater part, due directly to it.

Labor declined rapidly, losing not only ownership of tools, productive property, and control of conditions of labor, but also home ownership as well. Company tenements, company stores, company commodities were being provided, but in a very inadequate manner, and under circumstances that left only a shadow of liberty or recognition of rights on the side of the working people.

Another factor that greatly stimulated urbanization of population was the rapid disappearance, since 1880, of desirable western land obtainable on easy terms. During the first half of the nineteenth century public land of rare quality was limitless and given on terms that were meant to be an invitation and reward for settlement. Little or no capital was required to secure and work a claim. The disappearance of such public land closed a safety valve of escape from the city and dammed the floods of immigrants in the already close confines of industrial cities. [Emphasis added]

Urbanization, so rapid and so concentrated, created a host of social and economic problems. Of these the most tragic to human freedom was the increasing depth of helpless surrender to which an ever greater and greater portion of the nation's citizens was reduced, succumbing to the unscrupulous and liberalistically sanctioned avarice of the "robber barons." Labor had become depersonalized as regards the relations of employer and employee. Corporate ownership and control lodged in the hands of a relatively few. These few, interested primarily in greater profits, better business, and more production, neither saw nor cared to see the laborers, nor still less the slums in which they existed. Public opinion protested, and government took action again and again, but the philosophy of wealth continued unconquered and almost unquestioned except in subconscious thought, and the conditions of labor, even though improved, lagged behind that of the favorites of fortune as far as ever.

When one couldn’t escape to the West anymore, to live a life uncontaminated by capitalism, one could at least dream of a different world in the movie theaters of America. The code of chivalry might be dead in the land of the robber barons, but it still existed on the silver screen when Roy Rogers, Gary Cooper, and Wild Bill Elliott rode the range.

Walker Percy, in his novel The Moviegoer, describes the feeling many of us have felt when viewing one of the clean and pure Westerns of the pre-1960s:

Fort Dobbs is good. The Moonlite Drive-In is itself very fine. It does not seem too successful and has the look of the lonesome pine country behind the Coast. Gnats swim in the projection light and the screen shimmers in the sweet heavy air. But in the movie we are in the desert. There under the black sky rides Clint Walker alone. He is a solitary sort and a wanderer. Lonnie is very happy. Therese and Mathilde, who rode the tops of the seats, move to the bench under the projector and eat snowballs. Lonnie likes to sit on the hood and lean back against the windshield and look around at me when a part comes he knows we both like…

Clint Walker rides over the badlands, up a butte, and stops. He dismounts, squats, sucks a piece of mesquite and studies the terrain. A few decrepit buildings huddle down there in the canyon. We know nothing of him, where he comes from or where he goes.

A good night: Lonnie happy (he looks around at me with the liveliest sense of the secret between us; the secret is that Sharon is not and never will be onto the little touches we see in the movie and, in the seeing, know that the other sees—as when Clint Walker tells the saddle tramp in the softiest easiest old Virginian voice, “Mister, I don’t believe I’d do that if I was you”)…

The cinematic Western thrived in the 1930s and 1940s in the form of the B-Western. B-Westerns vary in quality. I favor the ones that feature a hero with a moral code written in his heart over the preachy sheriff ones, but the worst B-Western is better than the most critically acclaimed modern movie about a lesbo-policewoman or a sensitive young student who fights a one-man campaign to end hatred and bigotry in the South.

The essential thing in the B-Western and in the good A-Westerns is that the hero supports the code. And by ‘code’ I do not mean the motion picture code; I mean the code of chivalry. The weak, the poor, the mothers, the fair maidens, and the farmers are defended against the barbarians and the chestless, villainous, capitalist masterminds who live to plunder, rape, and murder.

John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), starring John Wayne, was the first A-Western made. (By A-Western, of course, I mean that the movie was a main feature and not just a second feature or Saturday matinee.) The A-Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s that followed generally reinforced the code, but the A-Western heroes of those pictures were more rough-hewn and more flawed than the B-Western heroes and often had to grapple with personal demons as well as with bad guys.

Take the movie Naked Spur, starring Jimmie Stewart, for example. In that movie the male protagonist, played by Stewart, tracks and captures a wanted killer. Stewart’s character had been cheated out of his ranch by a faithless finance while he was away fighting the war. He is determined to get the money to buy another ranch even if it means buying a ranch with blood money. But by the end of the movie in the final showdown with the forces of evil, Steward relents and renounces the blood money, thus maintaining the code.

With very few exceptions, the A-Western hero of the 1940s and 1950s maintains the code. But in the 1960s the code has broken down. Instead of watching Randolph Scott standing tall and declaring, “There are some things a man can’t ride around,” we are treated to a new type of Western. In this Western there is no Christian knight, which is what the cowboy hero was, a “knight without armor in a savage land.” There are now only social commentary movies which demonize the white man and deify the Indian (Soldier Blue, Little Big Man, etc.) and existentialist clap-trap from Italy with anti-heroes such as Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef.

There was, of course, one who took exception to the anti-hero Westerns of the 1960s, and that was John Wayne. He took the code into the 1960s and the 1970s with him. There is an interesting story that illustrates this point. When Don Siegel was directing the final showdown scene in The Shootist (1976), John Wayne’s last movie, the script called for Wayne’s character to shoot one of his antagonists in the back. John Wayne refused to do it. Siegel told him that Clint Eastwood had done it when he, Siegel, had directed Eastwood. John Wayne replied, “Well, I don’t do it.” The script was rewritten to accommodate John Wayne. A minor difference? No, ‘it’ makes all the difference in the world.

John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, Roy Rogers, Joel McCrea, and countless other Western heroes represented a proud, long line of men who supported the code, the code of great knights, swashbucklers, and saints. That code is gone now. Not even our Christian leaders would recognize it, and if they did they would condemn it. But the code existed, and the American Western is one of our reminders that it did once exist.

I have many favorite Westerns. There is The Searchers, Big Jake, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, all starring John Wayne. And there is The Garden of Evil and The Hanging Tree, starring Gary Cooper. And the list goes on: Night of the Grizzly with Clint Walker; Fort Dobbs, also with Clint Walker; The Tall T with Randolph Scott; and South of St. Louis with Joel McCrea.

But the finest and purest of all the Westerns is Shane. In almost every other Western the hero gets to ride off into the sunset with the heroine as his reward for virtue and valor. And there is nothing wrong with that. But the character Shane rises to an even higher level. He rides off alone, having faced and killed the villains, to save a family whose joys he cannot share and a way of life for farmers whom he cannot join.

I used to tell my students that we all, as we are growing up, have a Shane in our mind’s eye. The pity is that most of us replace Shane with the image of Mr. Wall Street or Mr. Go-With-the-Flow. “Such heroes as Shane are only for storybooks; they are not for real life,” the ‘mature’ adult says. Ah, but they are for real life, at least the only real life that matters.

The Nineteenth Century Way to God

I do not hold the traditional Catholic view of Western civilization, which looks on the 13th century as the epoch of Christian civilization followed by a steady decline in each ensuing century. I look on Christendom somewhat differently. I see it as one, whole entity from the 700's until 1917, with each century having some very negative anti-Christian heresies, and each century having some important Christian elements which other centuries lacked. But all the centuries preceding the 20th century in Europe and its satellites, such as America, New Zealand, and Australia, were Christian centuries. My favorite century is the 19th, and I think there is contained in that century the foundations of a future restoration of Christian culture.

What I call the separatist heresy, that which separates man's physical nature from his spiritual nature and his reason from his other senses, has been with us since the Greeks, but it was codified in the "great Catholic century": the 13th. In each subsequent century, that heresy ate away at the vitals of the Faith, and in each century until the 20th century, there has been a Christian counter-attack. These counter-attacks were not planned, reasoned attacks; they sprang up organically from the mystical body of the Christian Church.

In the 19th century, the attack was fiercer than in any of the preceding centuries, but the counter-attack was also greater than in any other century. The attack came in the form of Darwinism, capitalism, and communism, which were logical outgrowths of the Catholic separatist heresy. The Christian counter-attack came in the form of a greater interiorization of the Christian Faith. The Pauline Christianity of "if you have not charity" was developed more fully in the 19th century than it had been in any previous century. It was as if the European Christians were saying, "You have driven us to the wall, so we will cling to the most essential element of our Faith." That precious element was of course Christ's sacred humanity. God is human, God is humane, and hence our link to God is through the human.

My assertion of the greater interiorization and humanizing of the Christian Faith in the 19th century is not based on the number of people who attended church but on the testimony of that century's great authors, because I believe the great authors reflect not only their own personal vision but also the soul of their age. The one exception to this is Shakespeare, who, as Ben Jonson correctly stated, did not belong to any age. In fact, to the extent that he does belong to an age, it is the 19th century.

I do not see the Pauline Christianity in the British writers alone; I find it in Dostoyevsky, Spyri, and Schiller as well, but I will limit this discussion to the British authors. A partial list includes the following: Sir Walter Scott, Jane Porter, Charlotte M. Yonge, John Ruskin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, George MacDonald, Thomas Hughes, William Edmoundstoune Aytoun, Kenneth Grahame, John Buchan, P. C. Wren, and C. S. Lewis. The last four did their work in the 20th century, but they were very much men of the 19th century.

The Greek Heresy. It is not intrinsically evil to study the Greek and Latin languages. Nor is it evil to study classical cultures. In fact, both intellectual pursuits can be a great good. The danger lies in the adaptation of the Greek mindset. If one goes down that dark alley, he will be at the mercy of every self-proclaimed Socrates and will be hopelessly cut off from the personal, revealed God of Christianity. Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's School Days and Tom Brown at Oxford, is aware of the difference between Plato and St. Paul. He realizes there is more than a slight difference in the shifting of emphasis between an impersonal force, even if it is called a spiritual force, and a personal God with a name.

The result of Hardy's management was that Tom made a clean breast of it, telling everything, down to his night at the ragged school, and what an effect his chance opening of the Apology had had on him. Here for the first time Hardy came in with his usual dry, keen voice, "You needn't have gone so far back as Plato for that lesson."

"I don't understand," said Tom.

"Well, there's something about an indwelling spirit which guideth every man, in St. Paul, isn't there?"

"Yes, a great deal," Tom answered, after a pause; "but it isn't the same thing."

"Why not the same thing?"

"Oh, surely, you must feel it. It would be almost blasphemy in us now to talk as St. Paul talked. It is much easier to face the notion, or the fact, of a demon or spirit such as Socrates felt to be in him, than to face what St. Paul seems to be meaning."

"Yes, much easier. The only question is whether we will be heathen or not."

"How do you mean?" said Tom.

"Why, a spirit was speaking to Socrates, and guiding him. He obeyed the guidance, but knew not whence it came. A spirit is striving with us too, and trying to guide us--we feel that just as much as he did. Do we know what spirit it is? Whence it comes? Will we obey it? If we can't name it--we are in no better position than he--in fact, heathens."

That quote illustrates the great 19th century Christian counter-attack. The Greek philosophers can be read but only with a critical eye, not with the eyes of a devotee seeking guidance. The way of the Cross and the way of Platonic thought are two separate things. The one weakness in C. S. Lewis's masterpiece, The Last Battle, is when the Professor says, "It's all in Plato, all in Plato." Well, it's not all in Plato.

The 19th century Christians did not defeat the Greek heresy, which outlasted them into the 20th century, but there were the beginnings, in the 19th century, of a necessary rebellion against the Greek mindset. The rebellion was and is necessary because when faith becomes philosophy or pure mind, the heart and soul of that faith is eliminated. The Faith becomes a myth, which can be studied and examined and found to be necessary for the psychic health (Jung, Campbell) of the individual, but it cannot be acted upon as if it were literally true. What the Greeks and their Catholic followers fail to grasp is that pure mind will always fail to find God because God can only be found through the fairy tale mode -- the Christianized version of the myth -- of apprehension.

Chivalry. What had its tentative and rather formalistic beginnings in the medieval ages was deepened and enlarged upon in the 19th century. Tennyson's Arthur is a saint while Mallory's Arthur is a pagan with a few Christian trappings. Mere fighting skill is not sufficient; the knight must be fighting for those causes that support His reign of charity. Again, this is expressed well by Thomas Hughes:

Here all likeness ends, for the muscleman seems to have no belief whatever as to the purposes for which his body has been given him, except some hazy idea that it is to go up and down the world with him, belaboring men and captivating women for his benefit or pleasure, at once the servant and fermenter of those fierce and brutal passions which he seems to think it a necessity, and rather fine thing than otherwise, to indulge and obey. Whereas, so far as I know, the least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief that a man's body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, and advancement of all righteous causes and the subduing of the earth, which God has given to the children of men. He does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worth of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down, or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he.

And what are the works of Walter Scott if not an attempt to bridge the scholastic-created gap between God and men by way of chivalry? The fair damsel was imprisoned in the Darwinian tower and guarded by a capitalist dragon. (Yes, I know Scott wrote before Darwin's thesis was published, but the scientistic worldview that spawned Darwin was present when Scott wrote.) It was left to the knight with "But the greatest of these is charity," engraved on his shield to rescue the maiden from the dragon.

The Hero. There is a false apologetics which for many years was the unofficial official apologetics of the Catholic Church: Thomas Aquinas's infamous five proofs for the existence of God (five proofs which never convinced anyone of God's existence but did in fact make millions of potential believers believe that there was no God). And then there is the real apologetics that has led countless unbelievers to the foot of the cross. The real apologetics consists of the apprehension of something Godlike in one particular human being. It may be a parent, a friend, or a sibling, but we see in that person more than a mere collection of molecules.

That apprehension is not necessarily limited to one individual; we may see that quickening spirit in other individuals as well. And that vision of something more than nature in another human being enables us to see and believe in the God-man. Through humanity and through humanity only can we come to Him. If we only cogitate God, we will forever go around and around in a philosophic gyroscope, getting an occasional blast from some cosmic force as we whiz by, but we will not see the living God.

In contrast, the sympathetic bond we form with the hero is our true link to God. Let us look in on Tom Brown as he comes to do homage to his deceased hero, Arnold of Rugby, in Tom Brown's School Days:

He raised himself up and looked round, and after a minute rose and walked humbly down to the lowest bench, and sat down on the very seat which he had occupied on his first Sunday at Rugby. And then the old memories rushed back again, but softened and subdued, and soothing him as he let himself be carried away by them. And he looked up at the great painted window above the altar, and remembered how, when a little boy, he used to try not to look through it at the elm-trees and the rooks, before the painted glass came; and the subscription for the painted glass, and the letter he wrote home for money to give to it. And there, down below, was the very name of the boy who sat on his right hand on that first day, scratched rudely in the oak panelling.

And then came the thought of all his old school-fellows; and form after form of boys nobler, and braver, and purer than he rose up and seemed to rebuke him. Could he not think of them, and what they had felt and were feeling--they who had honoured and loved from the first the man whom he had taken years to know and love? Could he not think of those yet dearer to him who was gone, who bore his name and shared his blood, and were now without a husband or a father? Then the grief which he began to share with others became gentle and holy, and he rose up once more, and walked up the steps to the altar, and while the tears flowed freely down his cheeks, knelt down humbly and hopefully, to lay down there his share of a burden which had proved itself too heavy for him to bear in his own strength.

Here let us leave him. Where better could we leave him than at the altar before which he had first caught a glimpse of the glory of his birthright, and felt the drawing of the bond which links all living souls together in one brotherhood--at the grave beneath the altar of him who had opened his eyes to see that glory, and softened his heart till it could feel that bond?

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

The 20th and the 21st century movements that purport to be Christian all seek to copy the technique of former times but care nothing for the spirit of those days. They seem to want Christian ethical behavior for utilitarian purposes, but they do not want a Christian spirit. But it is the spirit that we should seek to recapture:

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, are more than they.

Ah, what a perception! Does not Tennyson echo St. Paul? "Our little systems have their day" -- "And though I have the give of prophecy and understand all mysteries..."

They sinned much in the 19th century by placing a Darwinian monkey beside His altar. But the 19th century Christians did not respond to scientific wizardry with a wizardry of their own. They saw their Redeemer in the faces of His creatures and faced modernity with only St. Paul's assurance that charity never faileth. They followed the path of the Ancient Mariner:

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

We of the 20th and 21st centuries have chosen a different path from the ancient mariners of the 19th century. We have chose wizardry over the God-man. We have killed the albatross, but we have not repented. Instead we have gone on to shoot down robin redbreasts, sparrows, doves, and every other bird that is the harbinger of fair weather. Why? I suppose it is because we do not want fair weather. We have become so used to foul weather that we think it is beautiful and fair weather. To us, "fair is foul and foul is fair."

It is useless to posit a faith in God as a response to modernity if that Faith is only a faith in a computerized caricature of the true God. We need first to join Lear in the hovel and learn the difference between mercy and sacrifice. Then, and then only, will we be in union with the 19th century Christians and with Him.

Addendum:
I do not see the deeper, more developed Christianity reflected in just the great authors of the 19th century. Its artists reflect the same vision. Gustave Dore is the prime example; his illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Bible, Idylls of the King, and other works are also examples of the great Pauline Christianity of the 19th century.