That Which Endures

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-Dylan Thomas

It’s truly remarkable, and not in a good way, that not one of the remaining presidential candidates cares to bring up the only question that matters: Do the European people have the right to survive as a distinct people? If the answer to that question is ‘yes’, then the presidential candidates should outline their programs for the preservation of the European people, who one would have thought were at least as important a resource as natural gas or oil.

Since no candidate has brought up the most important issue, we must conclude that none of the candidates think the survival of the European people is an important issue. In fact, I would go further. I think all the presidential candidates subscribe to the proposition that the world will be a better place when there is no such thing as a European.

Because the Republican presidential candidates have already given their assent to the extermination of the white race, this upcoming election will not be an election, as some conservatives have suggested, to determine whether the United States will become a third world nation or remain a viable European-style nation. That determination has already been made: the United States will become a non-European third world nation. What the election will determine is just how fast the United States will move toward third world status. The Democrats and their little black idol favor Babylon Now, while the Republicans, with the exception of Gingrich, prefer a slightly slower movement toward third world Babylonian status. I will vote for any Republican other than Gingrich, but in doing so I have no illusion that I’ll be voting for a man who wants to preserve the European people by ending all illegal immigration, restricting all legal immigration to whites only, and evicting all the colored people from the country. I’ll be voting for a President who prefers to execute his European prisoners in small groups at monthly intervals in contrast to his more impatient opponent who wants all Europeans shot at dawn.

The American political contests, in which every candidate tries to be inclusive and non-European, remind me of August Strindberg’s play The Dance of Death. In that play Strindberg, who had the misfortune to marry a feminist, describes a marriage that has become hell because one partner in the marriage has decided to rewrite the laws of Christian marriage. The European, who was wedded to Christ, has become the female harpy depicted in Strindberg’s play. God’s merciful ordering of existence became unbearable to the European rationalist, and he plays the part of the shrewish female: “I will have my way and not God’s way.” Hence the dance of death, in which white, soulless puppets dance to the music with Satan playing the tune.

What would it take to make a European cut the strings binding him to Satan and walk away from the dance of death? It would take a sustained, passionate rage against the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas was speaking not only to his father but to all Europeans when he urged us to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” But against whom should that rage be directed? And who will hear our passionate, enraged cry from the depths of our soul? Does the light still shineth in darkness? The European doesn’t know. He doesn’t know, because the rationalists of Church and academy have convinced the poor, bare, unaccommodated European that the outer crust of existence, the part of existence that can be put into a silver rod to be analyzed and discussed via the dialectic, is the whole of existence.

Faith does not exist on the surface of life, that outer crust that can be seen with the material eye. Faith exists only in the depths of the heart. A man must see life feelingly or he won’t be a man. Europeans are entering the last phase of a hideous dance of death, because they have blinders on their hearts:

Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart. – Ephesians 4:18

If the European stays on the outer crust of existence with his inclusive democracy, fusionist Christianity, and racial Babylon, he will surely die. But if he sees life feelingly and rejects inclusive democracy, fusionist Christianity, and racial Babylon, he will walk away from the dance of death and start to rebuild Christian Europe in whatever blessed plot of land in Christendom that God gave him to love over all. If the European’s love is like unto His love, and the European’s passion is like unto His passion, he will prevail over all the forces of hell which now seem so invincible. Lest we forget, the true European, the European who sees with his heart, knows not “seems.” The Hamlet analogy is apropos. Claudius was guilty of fratricide and regicide. And like Claudius, the modern rulers of Liberaldom are guilty of fratricide and regicide: the fratricide of negro worship, which entails the sacrificial offering of your kith and kin to the black gods, and the regicide of democracy, which entails the murder of all Christian kings and the dethronement of Christ the King, is absolutely essential for the survival of Liberaldom. (1) And the one thing necessary to ensure that fratricide and regicide remain the ruling principles of Liberaldom is the institutionalization of superficiality. There must be no Hamlets, no men of depth, because it is in the depths of the human heart that a man finds the truth about God and man. Listen to Claudius’s attempt to gloss over fratricide and regicide with platitudes:

'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father:
But, you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow: but to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness; 'tis unmanly grief;
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschool'd:
For what we know must be and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie! 'tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd: whose common theme
Is death of fathers, ...

The liberals follow the same method as Claudius. They cloak their murderous intentions with high-sounding words: “Tis a fault to heaven if you are not inclusive,” the halfway-house Christians tell us. “Tis a fault to nature if you don’t worship the natural savage,” the mad-dog liberals tell us. And we have heard the other banalities too: we are stubborn, unmanly, simple, and unschool’d -- the liberals must have been schooled by Claudius! But we should look past the platitudes, as Hamlet did, and see the evil that lurks behind the wall of platitudes. Yes, we are stubbornly committed to the God of old Europe rather than the black gods of the modern European. Yes, we are unschooled and simple enough to love our own people, and we are ‘unmanly’ enough to shed tears for the death of our people. But the liberal should take note: first we weep, then we fight. There shall be a reckoning:

Hamlet. Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane,
Drink off this potion! Is thy union here?
Follow my mother! [King dies.

We know against whom our rage should be directed -- against the liberals and the colored barbarians. They have one abiding passion, the hatred of the white European. And we know to whom we should go for aid in the last great fight of all. Dylan Thomas’s prayer was a prayer to the unknown God; our prayer is to Christ the Lord.

When I went to college it seemed that every student in the dorm had the Henry David Thoreau poster: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Every student fashioned himself a rebel stepping to the music of a different drummer, when in reality the students were one large herd of cattle, stepping to the same music, the music of modernity. The rulers of Liberaldom are the same as those students (in fact some of those students are the current rulers of Liberaldom); they fashion themselves as rebels against the status quo when in reality they are the status quo. The liberal rule of misrule is one big carny show. Behind the glittering lights of new, technological gizmos, and newer, better people -- better because they are not white -- is the grinning, hideous face of Satan.

The neo-pagan blames the Christian faith for the demise of the European. ‘Tis not so; the rise of the European people stemmed from their faith in Christ. When the Europeans’ passionate faith in Christ turned into moral theology, then the European people declined. When faith becomes a series of moral precepts, genuine faith dies. The moral theologians, pagan and Christian, never seemed to grasp the fact that a man must have his passions and his sentiments. Those who want to replace passion and sentiment with rationality must be judged, as Richard Weaver said, “the most subversive enemies of society and culture.”

Christ didn’t come to destroy man’s passions; quite the contrary, He came to inflame men’s passion for the things of the spirit. Illicit passions cannot be defeated by philosophy or moral precepts. A man’s passion for all women can only be overcome by his passionate love for one woman. A man’s lust for money and power can only be overcome by a passionate love for the God-Man, who bids us seek a Kingdom that is not of this world. And so it will always be; only passion can defeat passion.

The culture created by the European people was a miracle of grace. Their culture was not, as were the cultures of the people of color, created to give religious sanction to man’s baser passions. The Europeans’ culture, inspired by their passionate love for the Man of Sorrows, was based on the passions and sentiments that elevate a man, rather than debase him.

We come once again to the subject of these wars. The European people are hated because they were the Christ-bearing people. Even those who are willing to renounce their race are still suspect because they are the same color as the Europeans of old. And those of us who will not renounce the antique Europeans and their God? We are to be exterminated. But our hope lies in precisely that which the liberals order us to renounce. If we love the European hearth of our ancestors, where kith, kin and Christ were honored and loved, with a passionate intensity which passeth the understanding of the liberal and the colored barbarian, we will have the best hope of prevailing in the battle against principalities and powers. +

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(1) In a very revealing remark, France’s President Sarkozy said recently that his country is a "regicide country" whose people "could, for the sake of a symbolic measure, overthrow the country." He’s proud of it! It makes me want to rise and ride for God and King!

Satan’s Liberal Reign

Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

--Shakespeare’s Macbeth

In The Lancashire Witches, the English Victorian novelist William Harrison Ainsworth describes the havoc caused by a number of witches living and practicing their craft in the early part of the 17^th century. John Buchan also wrote about witches frequenting the Scottish Highlands during the early 17^th century in his novel Witchwood. Neither novelist treats the existence of witches and witchcraft as imaginary. That a small minority of women and men were willing to renounce Christ and serve Satan in order to attain some illicit desire or simply to do evil for its own sake was taken as an absolute fact by Ainsworth and Buchan.

I think there are more people doing the work of the devil in our modern age than at any other time in history, but I think there are fewer people who have consciously given themselves to Satan as depicted in the novels of Buchan and Ainsworth because a person needs to have faith in the existence of Christ in order to believe in His demonic opponent. The modern man lacks that faith.

The decadent French author Andre Gide once said, “I don’t believe in the devil, but that is what the devil wants.” Where there is belief in the devil, there is also belief in the God-Man. The witches in Ainsworth’s novel know Christ is the Son of God, but they hate Christ and love evil. Satan probably prefers the non-believing diabolists such as Gide, because where there is belief in Christ’s divinity there is also the chance for repentance. Indeed one witch in Ainsworth’s novel forsakes Satan for Christ, and she, even she, is not denied mercy by the God of mercy.

A world in which a minority of men and women knowingly give themselves over to Satan and the vast majority of people actively oppose Satanism in Christ’s name is an infinitely better world than the world in which we live now. The worst villain in Buchan's and Ainsworth’s novels is in better shape soul-wise than any of our respected citizens of Modernia. If a person knows there is a devil and a Savior, that there is damnation and there is heaven, he is still alive, and life has meaning for him because what happens on earth has an eternal significance.

In contrast the modern man “has supped full of horrors.” His satanic forefathers, the Rosicrucians, alchemists, wizards, and practitioners of the occult sciences won out; they institutionalized Satanism. But when Satanism is institutionalized the initial vision is lost. Abortionists, feminists, and Negro-worshipping clergymen who no longer believe in Satan do more evil in one day than Satan’s most devoted adherents in the ‘good old days’ did in a whole year! But of course it is a much duller evil. No spells, no midnight cavorting on the heath, just regular, everyday evil in the abortuaries, in our schools, and in our churches.

It would seem that the milquetoast Satanists of today would be easy to defeat. But unfortunately that is not the case, because genuine virtue, the virtue that is full of fire and passion, is non-existent in the ranks of the Europeans. The best of them, Yeats tells us, lack conviction, and they lack conviction because they have lost their moral vision. They don’t see with their hearts. Why, for instance, is there even a debate about the existences of mosques in Europe or the United States? No antique European would have allowed any kind of Moslem presence in Christendom. And abortuaries? No man of European blood would allow them to exist on Christian soil. There is no moral clarity in even the best of the modern Europeans because having lost half of their faith in the God-Man, they have given partial assent to the Satanic agenda of the liberals which translates to, “We’ll worship the Negro if you threw the name of Christ somewhere into the service; we’ll permit abortion so long as its done democratically; and we will allow Moslems, Mexicans, and blacks into our nation to defile it in the name of abstractions called religious liberty and toleration.” ‘No moral vision’ is the epitaph for the modern, halfway-house Christian European.

The great temptation for the antique European living in Liberaldom is the halfway-house Christians, who stand on the shores of Liberaldom beckoning the antique European on: “There is Christian fellowship and love here. We are not asking you to abandon the Christian faith, we only ask you to abandon your antiquated notions of the Christian faith.” And a man, because he is a man, is tempted. But as he approaches the shores he sees the ruins of European ships on the rocks. He sees the halfway-house Christians drinking tea with the abortionists, and he sees the images of black men on the same altar as Christ. At the last moment, he turns his ship aside and sets sail for the open sea. Bulkington has it right: better to risk an ocean perishing than be dashed on the rocks of Liberaldom.

It is well and good, in terms of earthly comfort, for the halfway-house Christians to avoid any conflict with institutionalized Satanism by proclaiming Christ to be a liberal. But it just won’t do. The Old Testament prophets and the European poets got it right. Life is passion, life is of the spirit, and life is of the blood. Satan is our sworn enemy, and his friends, knowingly or unknowingly, are our enemies. The antique European cannot and will not compromise or temporize in the face of institutionalized Satanism, even if it assumes a benign, respectable face. We know who is behind the mask.

Quite possibly Satan feels a little nostalgic for the days when he had fewer people doing his will but a greater number of people passionately devoted to him. Ever the pragmatist, however, he sticks to modernity because he knows that he dare not stir up the passions of the European. Satan knows that passion can be turned against him; instead of loving Satan, the European might turn to Christ. It is passion that is wanting in the European, not intellectual acumen or esoteric knowledge. In the depths of the soul, where the battle between God and devil rageth, is where the European needs to live.

From my own puppet show of memory I recall the statement of a burned-out, drug-soaked hippie in a literature class with me. I was struggling toward the light at that time of my life and growing increasingly indignant with professors of literature who loved Christian poets such as Spenser and Shakespeare but openly mocked the faith that inspired those Christian poets. In a heated exchange I told my professor that I had no desire to believe anything different than my European ancestors; their lights and my meager light all pointed to one magnificent truth: Christ was the Son of the living God. Of course, my little outburst was considered quite amusing and everyone went back to the structural, anthropological, psychological study of the great works of Western literature. A few days later the burned out hippie came up to me in the library. “What you said in class about that Christ guy – it’s true. I know it’s true because there is a devil.” In the depths that our heroic European ancestors plumbed is the truth about God and the devil. It’s what Melville was saying when he wrote, in reference to Shakespeare, “All that we seek and shun is there, Man’s final lore.”

The old hag in Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Kidnapped said that blood built the house of Shaw and blood will bring it down. Satan built his kingdom on the watered-down, illicit passions of his devotees. The licit passion to worship the living God in spirit and truth will bring down Liberaldom. +

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When thou art come into the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.

Deuteronomy 18: 9 - 12

Let Be

Since no man has aught of what he
leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? [Let be.] – Hamlet

The conservatives place great store by the U. S. Constitution. It has been perverted, they claim. Is there any truth to the conservatives’ assertion? Possibly. Jefferson, Franklin and Madison might be slightly surprised at some of the modern interpretations of their work, but in the main I think today’s liberals are in line with the authors of the U. S. Constitution. They are all from the same liberal pea pod.

The essential question is not whether our written Constitution has been perverted; the paramount issue is whether the unwritten law of the European people, which is infinitely more important than any paper-and-ink law, has been changed. And the answer to that question is, “Yes, the unwritten law of our people, the white European people, has changed, and it has changed for the worse.”

Prior to the 20th century, the unwritten law of the white man, the law that took precedence over every written law, was that His heavenly law, the law of divine charity, was the law above all other laws. From that law the European derived his love for his own people and the civilization that his people created as a result of their incorporate union with Christ. Isaiah prophetically describes such a union between a particular people, their culture and their God:

Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the LORD delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married. For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee: and as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee. I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, which shall never hold their peace day nor night: ye that make mention of the LORD, keep not silence, And give him no rest, till he establish, and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth.

By the 21st century, the European had a new unwritten law that ruled his heart: “The white man must hate his own people and his own culture.” That new unwritten law will be much harder to change than a written law because an unwritten law is never questioned; it has become part of the people’s soul.

How did the hatred of the white man become the unwritten law of the white man? The question is answered for us in a passage from Uncle Silas by J. S. LeFanu:

Of my wretched uncle's religion what am I to say? Was it utter hypocrisy, or had it at any time a vein of sincerity in it? I cannot say. I don't believe that he had any heart left for religion, which is the highest form of affection, to take hold of. Perhaps he was a sceptic with misgivings about the future, but past the time for finding anything reliable in it. The devil approached the citadel of his heart by stealth, with many zigzags and parallels.

By stealth, by zigzags and parallels, the devil persuaded the guardians of the Faith to present Christianity as a rational system of salvation in which one could bypass the wellspring of genuine faith, all those sentimental intuitions that come from the human heart. The Reformation was an attempt to recapture the wellspring of Faith, but the effort quickly became a rationalist carbon copy of the Catholic Church’s method of inoculating the faithful with a virulent virus which destroys the heart. I saw, in a recent pastoral letter of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, one of the best of the splinter branches of the Church, an example of the fatal flaw that led to the death of Christian Europe.

Another way the Gospel can be obscured is when too much emphasis is put on an emotional response to the Gospel. Some Christians believe that unless they have some sort of ecstatic, charismatic experience, or feel some sort of “spiritual high,” they are not really Christians. It is truly sad that some people look into their own hearts for the security that they are children of God, instead of putting their hope and trust in the objective work of Christ for them, and in the means God uses to come to them—His Word and Sacraments.

It is quite true that an excessively emotional response to the Gospel can be harmful, but we ultimately must look into our own hearts for the passion to respond to God’s word and for the desire to receive the sacraments. If you kill the heart, the Word of God becomes a legal document and the sacraments become magic talismans. Richard Weaver addresses this point in his book Visions of Order:

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

Nothing but collapse. Hasn’t that happened? The liberals hate the white man because they hate Christian Europe, but why are professed Christians so eager to denounce the white European? They denounce him in the name of a false rationalization of the faith. The Christian guardians at the gate see, when they look at the labyrinth of the human heart, all sorts of dangers lying in wait for the Christian everyman. There is the dark lady of sensuality, the demon of emotional excess, and countless other goblins and succubae that can destroy the soul. “Far better,” the guardians of the dialectic tell us, “to follow our rational, safe church documents, or our sensible Biblical exegesis, all the way to heaven.” But in their blindness they have failed to take note of the greatest of all obstacles to the faith, the dragon of intellectual pride, which resides in the dialectical corners of the mind, not in the human heart. Compared to him all the dangers lurking in the labyrinth of the human heart are nothing. And it is at the center of the human heart that we can find the only means to defeat the dragon of intellectual pride: His sympathetic, divine heart.

A timid man who loves his children will fight, with a ferocity that surpasses the pagan warrior, when his children are threatened. The Christian European once fought with the strength of ten thousand pagan warriors when his Europe, which was the fruit of his marriage to Christ, was threatened. But now that the dialectic of rationalist Christianity has triumphed, the swords of Christendom have rusted in their sheaths, and the golden harp lies as mute on Europe’s walls as the Harp that once through Tara’s halls... The swords will shine brightly, and the harp shall make music when the heart of the European is once again engaged in existence. Kipling was half-right when he said, “When the Saxon begins to hate.” When the European begins to love Christ’s Europe again, instead of studying scholarly words that tell him there is no such thing as a Christian civilization. And when he hates the devil and all of his works instead of ‘white racists,’ then we shall see miracles once more. The old minstrel got it right: “The heart that truly loves never forgets.” Awake, fellow Europeans, your God and your nation are calling you to rise and ride.

The liberals delight in every outrage committed against white people and every attack on the older European culture because they are satanic. And white Christians refuse to protect and defend white people and European culture because a dialectical shroud has descended over their hearts. The European whose heart still indignant breaks at the colorization and the ruination of Europe must not only face the liberal dragon alone, but he must also be prepared to be attacked from behind by white Christians. So be it. Better to fight on alone than to fall victim to the dialectic or to allow the liberals to hold the field uncontested. “Let be.” +

The Scholastic Heresy

I made the mistake recently of reading the introductory foreword to a newly released edition of H. Rider Haggard’s book, The Brethren, which is about the Crusades. In the Introduction by the Protestant editor we are told that it is all right to read about the Christian Crusaders of old because their spirit, although misguided, was to bring forth the glorious Protestant Reformation, after which all things were right in the Church. I find such drivel offensive. But it should not surprise me; I have read and heard similar drivel on the Catholic side. In both camps, the question of “By what authority,” has been settled, but in my mind it has not been settled; it is still an open question.

The Catholic answer to the question, ‘by what authority,’ is the organized Roman Catholic Church with the Pope at its head. Ultimately then, the will of God, the word of God, is known through the Pope, the vicar of Christ.

The ultimate authority in the Protestant church is the Bible. Just as a Catholic would be justified in claiming someone who denied the Pope’s authority to be no longer Catholic, so would a Protestant be justified in claiming that anyone deviating from the ‘inerrancy of Scripture’ doctrine is no longer a believing Protestant. That doctrine is more essential to Protestantism than any subsequent interpretation of Scripture. Hence one could not claim a Protestant ceased to be a Protestant Christian because he no longer followed Luther or Calvin; he would only cease to be Protestant if he denied the inerrancy of the Scriptures.

In theory, the Roman Catholic solution to the ‘by what authority’ problem makes more sense to me than the Protestant one does. But in practice the Protestant solution seems better. It seems better because I think a sincere struggling pilgrim would get a clearer picture of Christ from an unaided reading of the Gospels than he would from an immersion in the Catholic whirl of Novus Ordo vs. traditionalism, and infallible vs. fallible arguments.

When reality proves your theories wrong, you must go back to the drawing board and make an effort to find out where you went wrong. I believe that I went wrong when I saw a straight path from Protestantism to the Enlightenment to modernity. In reality, the path of modernity runs like this: the very modern medieval scholastics, the Protestant rebellion against them, the scholastic inspired Enlightenment, and then modernity. The Protestant world finally caved in to modernity not because Protestants were in rebellion against medieval scholasticism but because the intellectual upper crust of the Protestantism abandoned fundamentalism for the pagan inspired scholasticism of the Catholics. I really see that this was the pivotal turning point of western Christendom. Scholasticism, smooth it over how you will, was the revolt of man against God. Man’s reason was placed on a summit above revelation. The scholastics maintained more of the traditional God language than the Enlightenment philosophers, but the Enlightenment thinkers were the natural heirs of the medieval scholastics.

The Catholic party line, which I have often used myself in the past, is that the Catholic Church does not change its doctrine, it simply makes explicit that which was implicit. But that explanation is not tenable. The Catholic Church, at least since Aquinas, has been an evolutionary and a revolutionary Church. No doctrine is safe from possible revision, not even the bodily resurrection of Christ. The fundamentalists remain the last static, the last non-evolutionary, branch of Christendom. But they have no intellectual support. The Protestant intelligentsia is with the Catholics as are the secularists. The secularists often quarrel with the Catholics over sexual matters (the Catholic hierarchy is squeamish about facing the logical conclusions of their modernism), but both groups are united against the fundamentalists, who desperately need some intellectual support.

N.B. One example (among thousands) of the Catholic Church’s desire to be in step with the times and against the fundamentalists was Cardinal Paul Poupard’s recent support of the evolutionists against the fundamentalists on the ‘intelligent design’ issue.

I certainly can’t prove my next assertion, but I’ll make it nonetheless – the first century Christians were Catholic fundamentalists. Their beliefs about God were in line with the modern fundamentalists and their worship services were similar to those of modern Catholics. There should be a fusion of Catholicism and fundamentalism, but so long as the Catholic Church remains wedded to the Enlightenment the fundamentalists are right to regard the Catholic Church as a vessel of evil.

The medieval scholastics wanted to throw more light on God by freeing reason from the passions. What stops reason from serving our passions? Nothing. An evil passion cannot be overcome by reason because reason is ethically neuter. It will serve whatever passion predominates. It is passion that rules us all. Only a stronger noble passion can defeat an evil passion. Our passion must be grounded in His passion.

There is something incredibly repulsive about the fundamentalists and something incredibly noble. They repulse one when they articulate and expound, and they inspire love, the love one has for steadfast courage in behalf of a noble cause, when they defend the inerrancy of Scripture against all comers. I find, in the ranks of Catholicism, that only converts have some understanding of the fundamentalists. A convert knows that belief in Him is greater than the system. A cradle Catholic who has been brought up to believe that incorporation into the Catholic system is the whole of Christianity is completely unsympathetic to the fundamentalists. (The argument between the Novus Ordo Catholics and the traditionalists is not doctrinal – both believe that the system is all – their argument is simply a difference over systems.)

The Catholics (one hopes not irretrievably) have gone completely wrong, because they have eliminated that essential personal component of religion: man, poor unaccommodated man, standing before the abyss with only a single divine thread and a divine promise keeping him from total annihilation, is the stuff that our dreams are made of. If you take away that dream and replace it with a system derived from the stuff of this world only, you have consigned man to satanic oblivion.

The fundamentalists at least place man where he belongs, in front of the living God. They err when they attempt to reason because they have but poorly learned the art of reasoning, for they believe it to be the art of the devil. No, it is the art of the devil to use reason in order to serve his regime. But to reason in the service of His reign is no sin. Reason unfettered, as practiced by the scholastics, always becomes demonic. But reason willingly placed at the service of the living God is one of the rungs on Jacob’s ladder.

The medieval scholastics wanted to throw more light on God by freeing reason from the passions. What stops reason from serving our passions? Nothing. An evil passion cannot be overcome by reason because reason is ethically neuter. It will serve whatever passion predominates. It is passion that rules us all. Only a stronger noble passion can defeat an evil passion. Our passion must be grounded in His passion. We always come back to the Shakespearean solution – strip off the layers. He is not up there – He is not contained in a golden bowl on top of a tower built with the bricks of philosophy. “Oh no, He is there,” says the pilgrim shade, pounding his chest, “He is at the center of the human heart which is all too often surrounded by briars and thickets too dense to be cut down.” But when we get close, the briars and the thickets fade away, just as they did for the faithful prince in “Sleeping Beauty.”

In the coal town where my father grew up, there was a town character named Bup-Bup Schupp, who always said, “Space is no place.” Some fifty years later, the American astronauts confirmed what the town character knew, that space was indeed no place. And light is not light when it merely lights up a vast empty space that is no place. The light must illuminate the human heart, thus revealing His heart, before it can be said to be the true light that leads us to a place that is the complete antithesis of no place.