To Whom Shall We Bend the Knee?

“When hope seems nearly gone
God’s relief to us
Is surely won.”

The liberals were not satisfied with just one Obama coronation at the inauguration; they need to have a whole series of coronations in which they can genuflect to their god. The Notre Dame graduation was another Obama coronation. Such spectacles are helpful because a white European Christian, because he is a white European Christian, often tends to worry that he is being too harsh, too judgmental toward liberals. “Perhaps,” he says to himself, “I can win them over with gentle persuasion; it’s not necessary to treat them as enemies who are beyond the ken of humanity.” But when the Christian European sees the bedecked and begowned white liberals spitting on the cross of Christ by applauding a black barbarian baby killer, he knows that he dare not deal with liberals. They are beyond the ken by their own volition.

The liberals, and I include the neo-pagans in the ranks of the liberals, worship and respect only the species; they have no respect for the individual human personality. And this is because they have returned to the worship of impersonal nature. Nature is only concerned with the species, not with individual personalities. Christianity placed man in a world apart from nature, at the center of a universe governed not by nature’s laws but by the law of a God above nature. In Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, we get a glimpse of the spiritual reality behind the physical facade of the natural world. When Alonso sees how Prospero, through the power of his art, has made the entire island fall in line with the divine precept of “charity never faileth,” he declares that, “there is in this business more than nature.” The liberal has formed a different opinion. He feels no divine stirrings in his own heart and sees no spiritual dimension in his fellow man. His declaration is that “there is nothing more than nature.” It is best that we know this about the liberal. He will always side with the generic herd against individual human beings. When Pope John Liberal refused to condemn the murder, by blacks, of individual Christian women, he was being true to the liberal faith. The black herd is more important than a human being. When the liberals applaud a pro-choice politician, they are again being true to their faith. The rights of generic womanhood are more important than individual babies inside the womb.

The liberal doesn’t know why he hates white Christians of the old stock. If asked to explain his hatred, he would probably use such words as racist, fascist, and sexist to describe them. Racist because the white Christian does not worship the Negro, sexist because the white Christian does not revere Lady Macbeth and her feminist counterparts, and fascist because the white Christian does not believe God is a liberal democrat. But the real reason that liberals hate the European Christian is because the intransigent European of the old stock holds the belief that each individual soul is of “eternal moment”; that generic humanity is nothing when weighed in the balance against one distinct personality created in the image of God. “How can mankind progress?” the liberal asks, “if recalcitrant individuals, claiming to have immortal souls and obligations to a creator above nature, get in the way of the onward and upward march of humanity?” Christian eschatology separated from a belief in the risen Christ is a very dangerous force. The liberal’s answer to his own question about recalcitrant Europeans is “death.” The white man must be eliminated.

Melville likens souls in peril to drowning men in his novel Pierre:

“For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.”

Is this our fate? We know we are in peril, but can we do nothing to avoid the inevitable death sentence? No, it is not our fate. Melville went on to write Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land:

Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned --
Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind;
That like the crocus budding through the snow --
That like a swimmer rising from the deep --
That like a burning secret which doth go
Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep;
Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea,
And prove that death but routs life into victory.

The eyes of the existentialist cannot see past an ocean perishing, but what does the Christian European, who sees through the eyes of faith, see? He sees his Lord walking on water and bidding him rise and walk toward Him. Impossible? “We who are about to die demand a miracle.”

The non-liberal European of the 21st century sees a different world than the European of the 1950s. Christianity was no longer the faith of the majority of white people in the 1950s, but the Christian walls of the European fort were still in place because satanic consistency takes a little time. One by one the walls were removed. The first to be dismantled was the outermost wall, the wall of faith. Philosophical speculation made that wall unnecessary. And since philosophical speculation made a wall of faith superfluous, there was no need to keep up a wall between the races. “There is no one true faith distinct from other faiths, so there is no need for a wall between people and cultures.” And finally the innermost wall, the walls of the womb, were violated by the liberals. “Since each human being is not unique, it is the herd we must preserve, not the individual.”

The symbolic leader of the liberal herd is now The Obama. He seems to be a mere caricature of a human being, but then so do all non-Christian, non-Europeans seem. They have no substance; they are merely shadows. But the liberals need a man without substance for a leader because they have rejected the God of substance and His people.

In my late teens, I went to one of Satan’s universities. One course in particular stands out in my mind, a course in philosophy taught by a rather aggressive, secularized Jew. All the philosophers on the required reading list were militant atheists. Bertrand Russell was particularly loathsome, and I remember reacting strongly against him. He was so sure that no force of will, no sentimental invocation of a fairy tale god, could change the fact that man was alone in the universe and would turn to dust when his physical life on earth came to a close. I was a reluctant agnostic at the time, but Russell’s confident, conceited assertions stirred my blood. If I were mere dust, then why the divine longings? And why did I see something more than dust in friends and family? And what about Him? We can’t just dismiss Him.

My final push from agnosticism to the cross of Christ came when my philosophy teacher conducted a very aggressive assault on the “anthropomorphic” God of the Christians. If he had confined his criticisms to Christianity as an abstract system, or had he criticized Thomism or Calvinism or any of the other theological explanations of the Christ story, I might have remained in a religious limbo, but he went after Jesus. And that I could not abide. His attack on the divine personality of Christ put steel in my heart and killed my religious lethargy.

The great benefit of the Notre Dame coronation, in which Father Obama gave his blessing to his people, is that such a blasphemous attack on Christ can put steel into one’s heart. Such a people who would denounce Him for Obama must be resisted, must be fought with, must not be allowed to prevail.

When God speaks to Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, He does not say to him, “I am Christianity,” or “I am the force.” He says, “I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest.” The person of Christ! That is who the liberals want to keep out of their brave new world. And to insure that He stays out of their world, they must kill the memory of Christian Europe where His image shown so brightly. Because if the great unwashed, who have embraced liberalism because they know nothing else, could see the face of Christ they would turn from liberalism to Him.

There has been a great change in the liberals since the Obama coronation. They have taken off their masks. They no longer think it necessary to put a more pleasant face on Satanism. Is such confidence in the triumph of Satan warranted? Who rose from the dead? I don’t think it was Satan. Ah, but liberals don’t believe that Christ rose from the dead. But just as Christ burst from that dark tomb into the light, so will we, when hope seems nearly gone, witness the triumph of the cross. It’s the little internal battles we fight in His name that will make the difference. So long as the battle is fought, and the prayer is uttered, “In Jesus’ name,” the European will prevail over what seems to be an all-triumphant legion. The true European knows not seems.

To Whom Shall We Go?

“Man must & will have Some Religion: if he has not the Religion of Jesus he will have the Religion of Satan, & will erect the Synagogue of Satan, calling the Prince of this World ‘God,’ and destroying all who do not worship Satan under the Name of God.”

– William Blake

In the old detective movies, there is a basic scenario that must unfold if the movie is to proceed and not end in the first five minutes. There must be a murder, and the police must assume (wrongly) that it is an open-and-shut case. Then the private detective steps in and notices one little detail the police have overlooked. From that detail comes other details, and eventually, after being knocked on the head a few times and shot at, the private detective solves the case and proves that the police were wrong.

Let me cast my college professor, whom I mentioned in “Galahad,” in the role of the police and myself in the position of the private eye. Dr. ___ presented, in two semesters worth of lectures, the case against Christianity. He had once been a Lutheran pastor, but his studies in antique religions, which was the title of his course, made him realize that there was “nothing unique about Christianity, it was just one more manifestation of man’s attempt to deal with his ongoing cosmic complaint.”

But strange to say, I read all the books on the book list and attended all the lectures and came up with a conclusion diametrically opposed to my professor’s conclusion. It seemed to me that the evidence showed Christianity was uniquely true and not just a manifestation of man’s “cosmic complaint.” Before mentioning the detail which led to the other details and which my professor had missed, let me present the case against Christianity that was presented to me.

When I was growing up in the dark days before VCR and DVD players, the slide projector was used as an educational tool and a torture device (Uncle Harry: “Let me show you my slides of our trip to Coney Island”). So in the form of a slide show, let’s look at Dr. ____’s and the Western rationalist’s case against Christianity.

In the first set of slides, we see the ancient Greek religion start out as a ‘god of the bush, god of the stream’ religion and then develop into that marvelous pantheon of nature gods composed of Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hermes, etc. But before the first set of slides is over, we see the coming of the philosophers. They deride the gods of the Greek pantheon and attempt to replace them with philosophy and ethics. Their efforts are largely successful. The gods of Olympus remain, but they have been drastically altered. Now they are civic gods who symbolize the various virtues enunciated by the philosopher. No one reveres them any longer as vital, living gods.

The second set of slides is the Roman era. The Romans take the Greek civic gods as their own and formalize the rituals concerning them to an extent that makes the Hebrew Pharisees look informal and casual about their laws. In essence Rome, the system, is now god. But that system was very permissive; so long as the Roman state was honored, one could seek out other gods in addition to the state gods. That permissiveness was necessary, because the Roman gods did not satisfy man’s longing for a personal god who guaranteed immortality.

Now we go to the third set of slides which reveals the mystery religions. They advanced from rather barbaric rituals to a more ethereal plane that rivaled the ethical systems of the Greek and Roman sages. And they had the added element of a personal God who insured the immortality of his or her adherents. And that closed the case as far as my professor was concerned. An ethical system presided over by a personal God, who guaranteed immortality, was the essence of Christianity, he argued, and that essence could be seen in the mystery religions of the ancient Roman empire.

The fact that the police have got it wrong starts out as an intuition: “I can’t put my finger on it, but something doesn’t feel right about this setup. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to believe my client, Mr. Christianity, is guilty, but still something seems wrong here.” Then one detail that tends to cast doubt on the police’s case against Mr. Christianity becomes clear to the detective. And while he is still pondering the first detail, another one comes to the surface, and then another, and soon the whole case against Mr. Christianity comes tumbling down.

The first important difference one notices between the mystery religions and Christianity is that the Christian God does His work of redemption within historical time. There is an actual empty tomb from which Christ emerges. The mystery gods are outside of historical time; they perform their feats of death and rebirth in cosmic time. Those ahistorical gods seem like fantastic dreams, not realities. But why does the fact that those fantasies of the devotees of the mystery religions have some resemblance to the Christ story make Christianity false? Could not we view those fantasies as one indication that God was preparing human hearts to accept the true fulfillment of the dreams and hopes of those who believed in the mysteries?

A second detail that emerges is the ethical one. Even though we can see a development in the mystery religions away from barbarism and toward mercy, they are still very much religions in which the devotee needs to propitiate the god through sacrifice rather than develop the virtues of faith, hope, and charity from within through a mystical connection with Christ. And then we must also note that Christ does not change from a cruel God to a more ethical, kind God; He is always the same: the God of mercy.

The third detail is the most decisive detail, but it is the detail that is not subject to empirical proof. Do you remember the murder trial in the Brothers Karamazov? Dmitri Karamazov is on trial for the murder of his father. All the “facts’ seem to indicate his guilt. Only his saintly brother Alyosha believes he is innocent, which of course he is. When the prosecutor asks Alyosha why, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he thinks Dmitri is innocent, Alyosha replies, “I looked at his face.” Yes, that is what it comes down to. There are solid rational reasons for belief in Christianity, and they should be stressed, but ultimately the case rests on what happens when we look at Christ.

Do our hearts burn within us when we listen to the story of Attis or Cybele? Do we look at the faith of the devotees of the mystery religions acting in their lives and say, “their faith must be the true faith”? I don’t, and I don’t think any European prior to the 20th century ever did. It was always Him, and no other. And the devotees of the mystery religions felt the same way. They forsook their gods for Christ. Only the Athenian intellectuals remained obdurate. The case is closed; Christianity is not guilty. It is the one, true faith.

There are many striking parallels, as the historians of religion have noted, between our modern democratic civilization and ancient pagan Rome. We have, like the Romans, a state religion (democracy) that has absorbed the old religion (Christianity), and made what was once a vital faith into a civic religion that serves the state. While our citizenry gives public obeisance to the state religion, they seek other gods, with the exception of those such as Chris Matthews who find the state religion sufficient, to satisfy their need for a vital faith. But there the parallel ends. The gods which modern man seeks are not up to the level of the mystery religions, at least not the higher level. There is no concept of immortality in the modern barbaric faiths. There is no rudimentary stirrings of mercy and compassion; there is only sex and blood. Which is why faith in the Negro trumps all the other faiths; it is the faith most devoid of a spiritual dimension.

Even if the Christian churches did start preaching genuine Christianity again, it is difficult to believe that the current breed of post-Christians would respond to it. But there is such a thing as grace, and European man does have Christianity in his blood. If we could establish some link again with the Europeans who had a vital spirit and blood faith… there are such possibilities.

My conviction that my Athenian professor was wrong came from my exposure, through the literary tradition of Europe, to the person of Christ. Every line Shakespeare wrote, every novel penned by Scott, pointed to Him. Which is why I believe that what is scornfully referred to by the rational apologists as the ‘cultural backdoor’ is the golden door to His Kingdom. But it is the European culture and only the European culture that holds the keys to the golden door. Spirit, blood, and faith are woven together in the European culture. There is no other culture like it. How can we live outside of it? As the disciple said to our Lord, “To whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.”