The Beginning and the Ending

But that which ye have already hold fast till I come. Rev. 2: 25

I’ve always avoided the Book of the Revelation to John because I’ve known so many people who have gone off the deep end because of an obsession with the hidden – or so they say – prophecies in the book. In recent years, however, I’ve been reading the Book of the Revelation with my children. I wish I hadn’t neglected it for so many years, because it is a comforting book. What, after all, does it say? The Book of the Revelation tells us that Christ will ultimately triumph over the evil forces that we feel are about to overwhelm us. No doubt much of the book that is hard for us to understand was more understandable to the Christians of St. John’s time, but the central message -- that Christ and Christ alone is the answer to the riddle of existence -- is made perfectly clear, which makes it all the more troubling that the modern halfway-house Christians have chosen to ignore the warnings contained in Revelation, about fusing Christianity with other religions. The divinely inspired St. John tells us that Jerusalem, which is Judaism, will give way to the New Jerusalem, which is Christianity, and then Babylon, which is Rome, depicted as a marine monster, will be destroyed only to resurface in another form. There is also (merely my opinion) a warning that Judaism will blend with other faiths and continue to be a destructive, anti-Christian force. Am I reading too much into the Book of the Revelation when I say that we are being warned not to blend Christianity with paganism, Judaism, or any other religion? If Christ is truly the beginning and the ending, all religious blending should be avoided, should it not?

At the university I attended, one of my religious studies teachers, a lapsed priest of German extraction, was fond of calling Christianity the most syncretistic of all religions. There was nothing unique about it, he claimed, “except for the part about the God who entered historical time and rose from the dead; everything else was borrowed from other religions.” Nothing unique? Only an academic, the modern equivalent of the Pharisee, could be so blind.

Christianity has been virtually blended to death. Until recent times, the Roman Catholic Church preferred to blend Christianity with paganism, but now, as witnessed at Assisi I, II, and onward, “heaven knows, anything goes.” The liberal Protestants have followed the Roman Catholics and blended paganism with Christianity, while the more conservative, halfway-house Protestants prefer to blend Christianity and Judaism. The Roman Catholics are currently more ecumenically minded toward Islam, which is a blend of Judaism and paganism, then the halfway-house Protestants, who are hell-bent on pushing the Judeo-Christian mix to the ultimate extreme: the crucifixion of Christ.

Despite the assertion of St. Augustine, and the clerical theorists who followed in his train, that there could never be a Christian culture, we must maintain, based on reality, that there was a Christian culture and it was called Europe. I can’t help thinking of the scene from Miracle on 34^th Street in which the then-unbelieving Mrs. Walker denies the existence of Santa Claus when she is looking right at him: “Not only is there a Santa Claus, but here I am to prove it.” Or if you want a less frivolous analogy, I refer you to Pontius Pilate, who asked Christ, “What is truth?” as he looked at The Truth standing before him.

The point is that the blending of the European with other peoples is not a Christian attempt to spread the Gospel, it is a satanic attempt to kill Christianity by destroying the good soil, the European people, where Christianity grew and flourished. All the clerics of the past who screamed about the necessity of racial integration were destroying the distinctly Christian people who believed in the distinctiveness of the Christian God. When the Aztec blended with the Spaniard, was it a Christian faith that emerged? And when the white blended with the black, was the image of Christ enhanced or erased? Christ is now a lesser god in a pantheon of gods, which includes Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela.

Christian Europe is no more because Europeans no longer believe in the distinctiveness of their God. Led by clergymen who neglect Christ’s injunction to preach the Gospel to all nations, which implies that the races are to remain distinct, they choose (contra Christianity) to evangelize by mongrelizing. The first generation of the mongrelizing evangelists, the Francis Schaeffer types, do so with the best of intentions, but the second generation, the Franky Schaeffer types, do so with the worst of intentions. They take a maniacal glee in mocking “cultural Christians” and lauding secular, liberal causes. “Some are yet ungotten and unborn – That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin’s scorn.”

If we can picture for a moment the fairest garden in the world, which is the European garden, then let us suppose that we take the flowers from that garden to another land and leave the roots behind in the European soil. What happens to those flowers without their European roots? Correct -- they wither and die. Far better to show the people of the barren lands the European garden in all its glory and by doing so, encourage them to develop the soil that can sustain a garden rather than a barren waste.

The halfway-house Christian views things differently. He wants the European to share a barren wasteland with the people of the thorny soil. There will be no Christianity in the wastelands, but there will be universal equality. All will have an equal share of nothing, with the usual caveat that comes with all utopias: “Some are more equal than others.” The Europeans will of necessity have to self-destruct so that the barbarians of the wasteland can have their more equal share of nothing.

It was less than 100 years ago when the bulk of white Christians did not believe that a faith in Christ crucified, Christ-risen meant they had to support the extinction, through mongrelization, of the white race. What has happened in the last 100 years to make mongrelization and Christianity synonymous? Many white politicians caved in to political expediency, and many white pundits caved in to the fear of losing prestigious jobs. But that still leaves the majority of white Christians unaccounted for; the men and women who supported extinction by mongrelization despite the fact that they didn’t face the loss of a political office or a prestigious job. We must conclude that the vast majority of white Christians supported mongrelization because they thought it was the Christian thing to do.

Why did the European people abandon the faith of their fathers, who believed in a personal God that spoke to them through those intimate attachments formed with kith and kin, and adopt a universal faith in generic mankind in which attachments to kith and kin were denigrated? The simple answer is that the European laity apostasized from European Christianity because the clergy told them to. But then we are still left with two questions. Why did the clergy apostasize and why did the laity feel compelled to go over the cliff with the clergy? Intellectual pride is the answer to both questions. The clerics made Christianity into an intellectual system where they could confine God to whatever role they wanted Him to play. And in their system there was no room for the poetic of Christianity. In poetry, two seemingly opposing principles can be personal and particular, and general and universal, and still be united, but in an intellectual system that is not possible. In poetical Christianity for instance, the mystical union of all people in Christ can only be achieved if all people are loyal to their own breed and brood. In intellectual, apostate Christianity, there is only the mathematical logic of the impersonal syllogism. “If God calls all people to salvation, then all people must be one people.” It’s logical, as logical as death.

The laity followed their clergy because nobody wanted to admit they were stupid and racist (the “Emperor’s New Clothes” syndrome) by saying they preferred to remain with the old-fashioned “racist” Christianity instead of the new, intellectual, universal, non-racist Christianity. Can we blame them? Yes, we can. There should have been enough passion inside the hearts of the lapsed Europeans to help them prevail over the intellectual bullying of the clergymen. They should have girded up their loins and spoken from the heart: “Not while we live, or where we live, shall we permit the faith of our fathers to dissolve into a blended, universalist dew.” Shame, shame, and eternal shame to the men who accept halfway-house Christianity in place of the blood faith of the ancient Europeans. We won’t blend our race or our faith, because to blend either is to lose both. +

God gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Belovèd over all.

--Rudyard Kipling

Till We Have Built Jerusalem

And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads. – Rev. 22: 4

I recently read Charlotte Mary Yonge’s Reasons Why I Am a Catholic and Not a Roman Catholic (1901). I infinitely prefer her brand of Catholicism to Leo XIII’s brand of Catholicism, but my preferences are meaningless and Miss Yonge’s points are moot because neither Yonge’s Catholicism nor Leo XIII’s Catholicism have survived past the 1960’s.

Is this the proof that both versions of the Faith were false? Well, I don’t think the fact that a Faith has not survived is proof that it is false. Islam has retained more of its core than Christianity, but that does not, in my judgment, make Islam true and Christianity false. A religion can only be judged false when it fails the Shakespearean test: the test of reality. And in that test Christianity still stands as the one true religion. But when we are talking about Anglo-Catholicism and Roman-Catholicism, we are not talking about the Faith itself, we are talking about two organizations’ claim that they have preserved the original Faith of the Apostles. In that regard, the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church have been shown to be false claimants; neither have preserved the faith of the apostles (nor for that matter have the Orthodox Church or the Protestant churches). What seems to be missing in all the churches is a desire to see Christ whole, in His divinity and His humanity. And consequently where each church goes wrong is in attempting to incorporate only a portion of Christ’s personality into their theology.

We have all had the experience, particularly in this age of pop psychology and pop theology, of being put into a category that doesn’t really suit our personality completely or that is a totally false category. Our Lord had similar problems with the apostles. St. Peter had to be rebuked: “Get thee behind me, Satan,” and none of the apostles were trusted to impart Christ’s message until after Pentecost. And St. Paul needed a personal revelation before he could understand the personality of Christ. Of course not even a personal revelation would have done him any good if he hadn’t already been struggling to live a life of the spirit.

I think the image that appears to block our encounter with the living God is the false abstracted portrait of God that original sin paints. The remedy, as I have suggested before, is to journey through that labyrinth called the human heart. Anything that impedes the Shakespearean journey turns us not toward God but toward Satan, even if it is called Roman Catholicism, Traditionalism, Orthodoxy, Anglo-Catholicism or Protestantism. (1)

When I look at the churches in the nineteenth century, I see much that is admirable, but I see none that have carried their admirable visions of Christianity into the 20th or 21st centuries. They have all renounced the integral Christ for an abstracted Christ that suits their mundane and often sinister earthly political purposes.

“Another cause inflamed the minds of the nation at large, no less than the tempting prospect of the wealth of England animated the soldiery. So much had been written and said on either side concerning the form of church government, that it had become a matter of infinitely more consequence in the eyes of the multitude than the doctrines of that gospel which both churches had embraced. The Prelatists and Presbyterians of the more violent kind became as illiberal as the Papists, and would scarcely allow the possibility of salvation beyond the pale of their respective churches. It was in vain remarked to these zealots, that had the Author of our holy religion considered any peculiar form of church government as essential to salvation, it would have been revealed with the same precision as under the Old Testament dispensation.”

– Walter Scott in A Legend of Montrose

What Scott observes in the zealots on every side of the British religious wars, a tendency to make the forms of worship the faith itself, has destroyed Christian Europe.

The forms of worship are not the faith itself. They exist only to lead us to the object of worship. You cannot worship the Latin Mass or the ‘born again’ experience without eventually becoming the leading character in a tragedy, the tragedy of a man without a vital faith. European man became, when he embraced formalism, a second-hand man, incapable of coming to grips with any aspect of existence directly.

Some years back I quoted Henri de Lubac, who said that modern man had lost his appetite for God. If that appetite returned, de Lubac claimed, then belief would return. But how can one hunger for any of the rationalized, second-hand gods presented to us by the so-called Christian churches? Their gods are Mr. Rogers and Tash. The antidote for such false faiths is the folk wisdom of the West, which says the human heart contains the secret treasure that will forever remain hidden from the academics. And therein lies the key to the de-Christianization of our churches and our culture: the Church has become academized as has our society. The Christian folk have passed out of existence. Without them there can be no genuine Christianity as it once existed in Europe. We are still reaping the bitter harvest of idea-religion, spawned by the Greeks and brought into the Church for its destruction by Aquinas.

Those who would be Christian folk cannot wait for the churches to break out of their bondage to the academy, which is a bondage to Satan. They must turn away from the academy, which is the modern church and the modern world, and start on the slow but sure journey through the human heart that our European ancestors made so long ago.

I have conservative nationalist literature dating as far back as 1979 in which the reader is urged to stop illegal and legal colored immigration by writing to his local congressmen. Why do such actions never work? Because we cannot stop an invasion by placing a form of government above the interests of our people. The cry should be, “In the name of our God and our people, this invasion must be stopped!” Fortunately Alfred the Great didn’t have a congressman to write to; if he had, he never would have become Alfred the Great.

Quentin Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury asks his father how he knows life is meaningless. The drunken, nihilist father responds that he knew about the meaningless of existence at the moment tragedy became second-hand. Quentin’s father is a modern European. His death in life is the result of the triumph of formalism in the Christian churches. The Christian faith is a two-edged sword. If it is seen whole and taken to heart, it is our salvation. But if Christianity is dissected, decompartmentalized, and turned into a formalized system, it becomes a virulent poison.

It would be disastrous to follow the advice of the neopagans and jettison Christ in order to save the white race. Christ was, is, and always shall be our only hope. He is our only hope because He is the living God. But jettison the worship of the modern icons of modern, Christless Christianity, such as racial egalitarianism, democracy, and Tridentinism, we must.

The guardians at the gates of the various Christian churches can all present an apologia for their right to be called the true heirs of the apostles. But are they the heirs of the apostles? The apostles lived and worked with the Lord during his life on earth, and they told the Christ story after His death and resurrection. It seems that the heirs of the apostles are the Europeans who lived with Christ on a daily basis and wove the Christian story into the seamless garment of their culture. How can churches who demean and denounce that culture and its people be the heirs of the apostles? They can’t, and they are not. Was the rock, against which the gates of hell would not prevail, an institution with a rational, systemic schema of salvation? Or was the rock St. Peter’s declaration of faith? “Thou are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Faith, the faith that moves mountain, comes from those who have seen the face of Jesus Christ. Do we see His face in the liberal, white-hating, country-club churches of the modern world, or do we see that precious Face in the lives and culture of the ancient Europeans?

Europe is being engulfed by barbarians of color because white Europeans no longer desire to see the face of Jesus Christ. Gone is the patriotic desire of William Blake:

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

The end result of a second-hand faith is Satanism. The liberals are openly satanic, and the half-way house Christians are unable to resist them because they have a second-hand faith. And when life is viewed from such a standpoint, the dramatic conflict between good and evil is seen as a fairytale that mature, thinking people have left behind. But that is what I love about Ratty’s Europe. It is childlike and Christ-centered. In that Europe, Christ is real, the devil is real, and Christian Europe is a living, breathing entity as well.

The children of darkness have given up their religion of the heart for the religion of the mind. This goes against the wisdom of the race. The white man has always preferred the leaden casket over the one of gold and the one of silver; the cottage in the woods to the sumptuous palace; and the blood of the Lamb to the magic talisman. Let the sons and daughters of this ‘new age of enlightenment’ keep all their magic talismans: rationalism, science, and multiculturalism. The European will stay with the European cottage in the woods that contains the things he loves. And his childlike attachment to the things he loves will keep him bound to the Sacred Heart Who speaks to men through the little things that the clever men and women have discarded. The old fairy tales are correct: the faithful heart always triumphs over the satanic mind. +

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(1) I don’t think one has to have read Shakespeare (although it helps) in order to follow the Shakespearean way to God; however, I do think it is the only way. We must strip away false layer after false layer from our hearts till we get to its center. And then – well – and then we find He has been there all along.

Vision

We were all one heart and one race

When the Abbey trumpets blew.

--Kipling

Thornton Wilder, author of Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and others, has been labeled an optimist by the literary critics. But I always found his works depressing because his “optimism” is grounded in this world only. His religion is Platonic; he believes in love and a divine force but not in a personal God behind that divine force. One must concede however, that his criticism of Catholicism, expressed in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, is well-thought out. And the Catholic Church has not been able to refute Wilder’s critique with traditional apologetics, which is why the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches which have followed in the Catholic train stand in such a pathetic state today.

In The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Brother Juniper sets himself the task of explaining the ways of God to men: “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.”

Having witnessed the tragedy, Brother Juniper decides to answer the question, “Why did this happen to those five?” He fails to come up with an answer and is eventually burned at the stake by the Church, not so much for anything he said, but because he, a lowly monk, presumed to do what the high mucky-mucks of the Church liked to do. Before his burning, Brother Juniper also
attempts an explanation of why the pestilence strikes some individuals and not others:

It was by dint of hearing a great many such sneers at faith that Brother Juniper became convinced that the world’s time had come for proof, tabulated proof, of the conviction that was so bright and exciting within him. When the pestilence visited his dear village of Puerto and carried off a large number of peasants, he secretly drew up a diagram of the characteristics of fifteen victims and fifteen survivors, the statistics of their value sub specie aeternitatis. Each soul was rated upon a basis of ten as regards its goodness, its diligence in religious observance, and its importance to its
family group. Here is a fragment of this ambitious chart:



The thing was more difficult than he had foreseen. Almost every soul in a difficult frontier community turned out to be indispensable economically, and the third column was all but useless. The examiner was driven to the use of minus terms when he confronted the personal character of Alfonso V., who was not, like Vera N., merely bad; he was a propagandist for badness and not merely avoided church but led others to avoid it. Vera N. was indeed bad, but she was a model worshipper and the
mainstay of a full hut. From all this saddening data Brother Juniper contrived an index for each peasant. He added up the total for victims and compared it with the total for survivors, to discover that the dead were five times more worth saving. It almost looked as though the pestilence had been directed against the really valuable people in the village of Puerto. And on that afternoon Brother Juniper took a walk along the edge of the Pacific. He tore up his findings and cast them into the waves; he gazed for an hour upon the great clouds of pearl that hang forever upon the horizon of that sea, and extracted from their beauty a resignation that he did not permit his reason to examine. The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is
generally assumed.

It would be easy to just dismiss Thornton Wilder as the village atheist. But his critique of Catholicism is completely correct. Brother Juniper’s ill-advised attempt to present a rational defense of suffering is the embodiment of pre-Vatican II Catholicism. The reason the “sound apologetics” of the pre-Vatican II era were abandoned was because they were false. No one believed them. But the old Brother Juniper apologetics were not replaced by sound apologetics, they were replaced by Wilder’s faithless faith. He had faith that humanity would survive but not individual human beings. He believed in love but not the God of love. In short, Brother Juniper’s Aristotelian apologetics was replaced at the Council by Wilder’s Platonic apologetics. The Church is still in need of a defense of the Faith that is not made of Greek vapor.

I think of Thomas Campbell’s assertion that the faith is not a theory or a philosophy. He is right; it is a vision. I ask the question, what would be wrong if the Church actually started to preach about a man who was both God and man, who came down from heaven, was crucified, died and was buried, and on the third day rose from the dead? That would indeed be something. And I think that something is what the first missionaries from Rome told our European ancestors: a simple straight forward story about the King of Kings. Our ancestors listened to that story and they believed!

Men have done deeds in the name of God which would have made Christ weep, but the story of the conversion of England to Christianity, with which Durham is so marvellously linked, is, I believe, one of the loveliest stories since the New Testament. Look back to a time long before the Council of Whitby, and you see the pilgrim monks tramping the weed-grown Roman roads to speak to men and women under an oak tree in a wood. These simple, holy men trudged the heather, traversed the mighty woods, and crossed the lonely hills to baptize the heathen Saxon beside wells and at the edge of streams. They were uplifted by a magnificent single-mindedness, inspired with a Christ-like humility, strengthened by a superb sincerity. How real a thing in those rough days was the brotherhood of the holy men. (1)

The simple story made England become England and Europe become Europe.

Some twenty years ago I saw the Protestant Reformation as a very regrettable attack on Christ’s church. But now I see the Reformation, in its essence, as an attempt by the Christian faithful to reclaim the Christ that had been wrested from them and replaced by an abstract philosophy. The great tragedy was not that there was a Protestant revolt; the great tragedy was that the revolt failed when the philosophical speculators took over.

The philosophers seized upon it... and made it the unwilling and unnatural parent of the largest and most hideous brood of ills that had ever appeared at one birth since the opening of the box of Pandora. (2)

The speculating European has reached the end of the line. He has speculated himself out of existence. He rejected the light, and as a consequence he is now lost in the darkness. The Hebraic parallel is apropos. When a people forsake their God they cease to be a people; they become a loose collection of blasphemers huddled around the golden calf. (3)

The Christ story, the Hebraic Fairy Tale, is the story that the Europeans took to their hearts. Burn every single cathedral, church, and art work that celebrates the Christ story, and you still won’t eradicate the sacred remembrance of Christ that lives in the blood of the European. There will always be some Europeans that will never let go of the European past. Against all logic, against all practicality, a certain breed of men will simply not let go of the vision of the one true God, who lives and reigns in eternal Europe.

It seems, when you look at Europe and the world today, that darkness has conquered the Light. And one could say that this is no time to talk about fairy tales. But I think it is precisely the time to talk about fairy tales. Christ’s resurrection from the dead was The Fairy Tale of all fairy tales, the truest and the most magnificent fairy tale of all. Beyond the graveyard of European civilization is the Kingdom of Europe where He reigns. It can be seen only by men who have hearts that burn inside them like the apostles’ hearts burned within them on the road to Emmaus. Brother Juniper got it wrong. The Sacred Heart only reveals Himself through the narrows of the human heart. The wide-gated community of intellectual pride will never know the Man of Sorrows. The true European knows this in his blood. The European’s task then is to never forsake his blood. +
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(1) In Search of England by H. V. Morton
(2) Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters by George Fitzhugh
(3) I think that it was the issue of suffering that brought the Christian churches down. The question of human suffering cannot be solved by a syllogism; it can only be understood at the foot of the cross. We need King Lear, not the Summa or the Institutes.

The River vs. the Open Road

…the innate conservatism of youth asks neither poverty nor riches, but only immunity from change. – The Golden Age by Kenneth Grahame

If we can judge by the literature of that century, and we can, the 19th century was the century of war between principalities and powers. God and the devil were going at it hammer and tongs. Melville put it quite well: “The light is greater hence the shadow more.”

European man entered the 20th century spiritually exhausted and very much under the spell of satanic ‘isms. The first world war was one of the most startling proofs of Satan’s new dominance over the hearts and minds of the European people. In sheer number of adherents and societal influence, Satan had triumphed over our Lord. The old Faith still had an influence; it had not been thoroughly eradicated, but it would no longer be the centerpiece of Western Civilization. It would now be an underground faith, hidden in the subterranean vault of the European heart.

In every Christian century preceding the 20th century, there were the Athenian intellectuals who treated the Christian faith as foolish or childish, but the sneer of the intellectuals did not affect the Christian faith of the great mass of European people. In the era of the Enlightenment, for example, despite the deism of the philosophers, the faith of the common people remained intact. It is in the 20th century that we see, for the first time in European man’s history, the great mass of people adopting the faithless faith of the intellectuals.

What does it mean when we say a man has a faithless faith? It does not mean that he flat out denies Christ. What it means is that he hedges on all the crucial doctrines of Christianity. Nikos Kazantzakis, in The Last Temptation of Christ, gives us an example of Western man’s faithless faith. In the novel (I didn’t see the movie, but I suspect it was quite different from the novel), Kazantzakis, who revered the person of Christ, presents us with a Christ who is something more than man but also something less than God. Christ does bring Lazarus back to life, for instance, but as a scarecrow Lazarus, not completely alive, and not quite dead. Such is the faith of the modern European.

One doesn’t need an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient civilizations, just a little commonsense will do, to see that when a particular people loses their faith their civilization declines. European civilization retained its vitality when Athenian skepticism was confined to a few intellectuals, but when that skepticism became part of the common culture, the civilization that was once an all-consuming fire became a dying ember.

Of course we can’t artificially recreate the old European faith in order to restore European civilization. That’s not how things work. First comes faith, after which all those things are “added unto” us. But if the European were to embrace Christianity, full and free without let or hindrance, it would not entail the acceptance of a way of life or mode of being that was completely alien to him. It would merely entail the opening of the subterranean vault of his heart and letting his childlike faith in Christ back into the light of day.

It is painfully clear, however, that European man does not want to bring Christianity back into the light. He wants it to remain in the cellar. Yes, occasionally he’ll refer to Christianity when it supports his liberalism, but it is not his guiding light; reason is. And he persists in the belief in his own reason, despite the fact that the evidence is in. Man cannot live a moral life, or any kind of life, when reason alone is his guide.

If, in modern times, they who own the restraint of philosophical discipline alone have not given way to such grossness of conduct, it is because those principles of religion, which they affect to despise, have impressed on the public mind a system of moral feeling unknown till the general prevalence of the Christian faith; but which, since its predominance, has so generally pervaded European society, that no pretender to innovation can directly disavow its influence, though he endeavours to show that the same results which are recommended from the Christian pulpit, and practised by the Christian community, might be reached by the unassisted efforts of that human reason, to which he counsels us to resign the sole regulation of our morals.

In short, to oppose one authority in the same department to another, the reader is requested to compare the character of the philosophic Squire in Tom Jones, with that of Bage’s philosophical heroes; and to consider seriously whether a system of ethics, founding an exclusive and paramount court in a man’s own bosom for the regulation of his own conduct, is likely to form a noble, enlightened, and generous character, influencing others by superior energy and faultless example; or whether it is not more likely, as in the observer of the rule of right, to regulate morals according to temptation and to convenience, and to form a selfish, sophistical hypocrite, who, with morality always in his mouth, finds a perpetual apology for evading the practice of abstinence, when either passion or interest solicit him to indulgence.

--from The Lives of the Novelists by Walter Scott

The delusion that reasoning man can function quite well without Christianity was always the delusion of a segment of European intellectuals. And they never were forced to see it for what it was: a delusion. But now that European man en masse has fallen prey to the same delusion, we must look at it. Why, if reason is sufficient, does European man want to prostrate himself before the gods of color? What is missing in his rational self-sufficiency that makes him go whoring after the savage races? He misses a vital faith and he thinks that the blood orgies of the heathen can provide him with the vitality that he lacks. He thinks this because he has cut himself off from the wisdom of his race. The white man rejected the pagans’ faith because they saw God only in nature. In contrast, the white man saw that God was the animating force behind nature and His motivating principle was mercy and not sacrifice. When Christianity becomes a philosophy, the neopagan is right: it lacks vitality. But when it is a faith, it has the vitality to renew lives and the world. Let the neopagan who doubts the vitality of Christianity ask himself this question: Who fights the more fiercely for the fair maiden – the Christian knight who loves her or the pagan warrior who wants to possess her for a night?

What the European liberal finds out when he goes a whoring with the “vital natural races” is that “where man is not, nature is barren.” He needs the Christian fairy land, not heathendom. Take a walk through the forests of Arden or share the oars with Ratty on his river. In those worlds, blood is sacred because it is animated by His spirit. And nature is revered because it houses His Kith and Kin.

It is sad that with our Lord’s words before us, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven,” we still turn to “adult” theologians and philosophers for guidance. It would be much better for our souls if we turned to those poets of the West who retained, in the face of the emerging atheism of the 20th century, their childlike faith.

In The Wind in the Willows (1908), Kenneth Grahame writes a poetic defense of Christian Europe. The white Europeans in The Wind and the Willows are Ratty, Mole, Badger, Mr. Toad, and all those animals who adhere to the same code as the four heroes. In the outer wood are the weasels and the stoats, the savage hordes of color, who do not see, when they view the ancient dwellings of the Europeans, home and hearth. They see only something to be plundered. And they get their chance when Mr. Toad, obsessed with his “cleverness,” decides that “the plowed furrow, the frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingerings,” cannot compare to the open road. And what Toad abandons, the weasels and stoats take. But they can do nothing but destroy, like the blacks in Rhodesia and South Africa; they can’t maintain or restore an ancient European dwelling. It is Ratty, Mr. Badger, and the Mole, who help Toad regain his ancestral dwelling. They face the barbarians of color and defeat them. They are greatly outnumbered, but they prevail because they fight for the homely virtues which only the European knows and treasures as his source of strength. The antique European has no magic talisman. He possesses something of infinitely greater value: a faithful heart. When Ratty declares his love for his river, he describes my love for antique Europe:

“I beg your pardon,” said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. “You must think me very rude; but all this is so new to me. So—this—is—a—River!”

“The River,” corrected the Rat.

“And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!”

“By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.”

Toad’s open-road philosophy leads us to the savage horde barbarism of the stoats and weasels. Ratty’s river leads us back to His Europe.

Two Cities: Supernatural Man vs. Born-Again Man

I was listening to a Protestant radio evangelist the other day discussing the perennial problem of unregenerate man. “Why,” he asked, “were men unable to comprehend the word of God?” He supplied the answer. “Men cannot understand the word of God because they have not been born again.” In other words, “natural man” was not able to become supernatural (he used the word, natural, but I am supplying ‘supernatural’; he used the word, spiritual) without having a mystical born again experience.

The preacher’s words immediately struck me as so very similar to the words of a traditionalist priest I had spoken with many years ago. The priest told me that no ordinary laymen could ever get beyond the natural level without having studied scholastic theology as taught by the traditionalists.

Both the preacher and the priest felt there was a barrier between the natural man and the supernatural or born again man. The difference between their views is the crucial difference between Catholic and Protestant spirituality. The Catholic system places more emphasis on the intellectual comprehension of God and on the role of the priest as mediator. The Protestant system places greater emphasis on the emotional and personal contact with God and less emphasis on the preacher’s intermediary role. So when the Catholic errs it is generally because he over-intellectualizes the Faith, and when the Protestant errs, it is generally because he looses his focus because of an excess of emotion. Neither error is desirable, but I find the Protestant error less repellent than the Catholic one, for the same reason that Chateaubriand said the Adam and Eve’s sin would have been less repellent if they had erred by wanting to feel too much rather than by wanting to know too much.

The common error in both the Catholic and Protestant schools is a false view of natural man – or should I say a false idea of natural man. There is no natural man as distinct from the supernatural or spiritual man. There is only man. And his humanity does not need to be transformed or intellectually enlightened before he can comprehend or love the living God. His humanity needs only to be expanded and deepened. And that happens through the very act of living and loving in this world.
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These two men, both excellent from natural disposition and acquired knowledge, had more points of similarity than they themselves would have admitted. In truth, the chief distinction betwixt them was that the Catholic, defending a religion which afforded little interest to the feelings, had, in his devotion to the cause he espoused, more of the head than of the heart, and was politic, cautious, and artful; while the Protestant, acting under the strong impulse of more lately adopted conviction, and feeling, as he justly might, a more animated confidence in his cause, was enthusiastic, eager, and precipitate in his desire to advance it. The priest would have been contented to defend, the preacher aspired to conquer; and, of course, the impulse by which the latter was governed was more active and more decisive.

-The Monastery by Sir Walter Scott