Faith and Hearth

“I told you I should retake my fireside. It’s done.”

-The Kentuckian by John Fox Jr.

In Marlis Steinert’s biography of Hitler he lists all of Hitler’s hates and then poses the question, “What did he love?” Steinert concludes that Hitler loved the folk, the German Everyman. I disagree. Does a man who procures an abortion for the woman he professes to love truly love her? I say no, the man in question is seeking to destroy that which makes the female uniquely female, her God-given power to bring forth new life.

And so it was with Hitler. He tried to extract from the German people, for his own sinister purposes, that which made them a folk and not a herd of cattle, their Christian faith. What image does the word ‘folk’ conjure up? Do we think of jackbooted storm troopers saluting their Führer? I certainly don’t. I think of Hansel and Gretel, the Elves and the Shoemaker, Sleeping Beauty, and all the folk tales that came from the heart of the Germanic, Christian people. Hitler, like Nietzsche, hated the traditional faith of the European people; he envisioned a future that was a negation of everything European.

Of course Hitler’s Christ-less vision of the future was not unique. The 20^th century was a century overloaded with utopian visions of a future devoid of Christianity. And in every instance – Communism, Nazism, Americanism – the utopians all cite “the people,” as their authority for steering their nation, or the nations, away from the Christian faith and toward a glorious, Christ-free future. But in reality the people were not consulted when the utopians launched their assaults on the traditional faith of the Europeans. There were no Russian peasants clamoring for a new, Godless state. There were no American farmers or workers that demanded a Jeffersonian democracy in which the Christian God was reduced to a meaningless irrelevancy. Nor did the German folk yearn to goose-step into Hitler’s dark night rather than sing Hosannas to the risen Lord. In every revolution in Christendom it is always the people who are most definitely not consulted.

The National Socialists, the Communists, and the Americanists were only following the tactics that the churchmen had been using for years. Can you name one major heresy that has ever come from the ranks of the people? There seems to be a direct correlation between the desire to systematize God, (often with the stated reason that systematizing makes it easier for “the people” to understand) and heresy. All the Christian clergyman through the centuries have claimed to respect tradition, which always turns out to mean the traditional documents of their own denomination, but they have never respected the traditional faith of the Christian folk. The assault of the philosophers and the intellectual something-or-others, over the Christian centuries, has been relentless. It was always the Christian, European people who resisted the intellectuals. The folk stood with Athanasius against Liberius and with Christ against Mohamet. It was only in the 20^th century when the folk became intellectualized that all resistance to satanic, godless universalism ceased.

Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote that he only became fully alive when he married. Likewise, the Europeans only became fully alive when they became wedded to Christ. Everything else in their history was only significant because it prepared them for their union with Christ. The European people and Christ combined their “hearts in one” and their realms in one.

We must cast aside St. Augustine’s characterization of the City of God (the Church) and the City of Man (the folk) as two opposing forces, the Church representing the good and the people representing evil, because we know that the marriage between Christ and the European people was genuine. We see the evidence in the history of the European people. What we need to know is the reason for the divorce. What came between the European and his God?

The obvious answer and the correct answer to the question is that Satan came between the European and God. But what was his methodology? He used the same method to come between God and the European as he used to come between God and Adam and Eve; he pointed to a systematic scheme of the universe that was greater than God. Adam and Eve had only to heed Satan, who claimed he knew the system better than God -- “Ye shall not surely die” -- in order to obtain equality with God. For the European it was always the Roman system that Satan dangled before his eyes. And only the church men who felt themselves to be connected, even though they were clergymen, to the lifeblood of their people, were able to resist Roman universalism. When St. Augustine (not the ‘City of God’ Augustine, but the other one) in 597 demanded that the British bishops conform to the Roman system, they resisted, saying:

"Be it known unto you beyond a doubt, that we are all and each one of us obedient and subject to the Church of God, and the Pope of Rome, and to every other true and pious Christian to the extent of loving each of them in word and deed, as the sons of God; but other obedience than this I do not know to be justly claimed and proved to be due to him whom you call the 'Father of Fathers,' and this obedience we are willing to give and perform to him and to every other Christian continually. But for anything further, we are under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Caerleon upon the Uske, who is, under God, to take the oversight of us and make us pursue a spiritual life."

And what was the rift between the British Catholics and the Roman Catholics all about? It was about the fight for the heroic Christ instead of a satanic system, in which God’s will is subordinate to man’s satanic desire to prove himself the equal of God. The system makers don’t deny God, they simply make Him a servant of the system. In that respect, the American experiment in democracy is the most seductive and demonic system of them all.

The British revolt against Roman universalism was not the last of its kind. Luther revolted against it only to witness his own people create their own Roman systems in which Christ was a subsidiary of the systems. Communism, Nazism, and Americanism are all religiously based systems that stem from the initial conflict between Satan and God.

In the first half of the 20^th century, there was a clash of the satanic systems. And by the end of the 20^th century, the warring systems merged into one unholy democratic system. The American Republic and the Roman Catholic Church of Assisi I and II, etc., represented the triumph of Satanism. The deification of the Negro and the sainted status of the unrepentant Jew are manifestations of the absence of any link between the European and the Christian God. In the absence of a connection to Christ the Europeans have become a people without honor, without love, and without charity.

The system makers always put up a wall between God and man. It has always been the task of the hero, who comes from the folk, to destroy the wall and restore the link between his people and God. It seems as though this time no heroes of the blood have come forth. But the hero knows not seems, and in God’s time, not ours, he will emerge. And it will always be His Sacred Heart that sustains him against the foe.

When the hero emerges who refuses to be part of the system he will turn everyone’s eyes toward the source of his strength, the Son of Man. The hero’s vision will be Pauline because he will be focused on the humanity of God, and it will be Shakespearean because he will be focused on the divinity within man. Like the good thief, the hero will see that the love of Christ trumps all systems and their makers. Divine Charity is not a system, it is a person whose name is Jesus.

I once infuriated a Roman Catholic Traditionalist priest by stating that I would much rather see a student truly understand Shakespeare’s plays than learn his catechism. From the priest’s standpoint, I was a blasphemer because I was placing Shakespeare above God. And of course the priest was right if, as he asserted, the catechism was an accurate portrait of God. But to me the catechism represented the system of one particular branch of Roman universalism that had no connection whatsoever with the living god. Whereas Shakespeare’s plays laid bare the heart of man which pointed the way to His Sacred Heart.

The good news for the European who feels helpless and hopeless in the face of the cold, heartless rule of the system makers is that he doesn’t need to find or invent a system of his own before his soul can be reclaimed. The European clan, the folk, and the heroes of the folk have shown us the way. They heard and believed, rejecting all systems and relying on the divine charity of Christ, the Son of God.

I’m certainly aware that there is virtually nothing left of the European people who once believed in the true Fairy Tale of the Son of Man. But the modern man’s unbelief in the communion of saints does not change the reality of the communion of saints. Our people once believed in the Midsummer’s Night’s dream called the Christian Faith. When the church men abandoned the hearth fire, when they saw the faith as something to be found only on church scrolls, they lost the folk, who need to see the faith as part of their home. It is never too late to reclaim our home; we need only listen to our blood. +

Cultural Atheists

“Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” – Prov. 4:23

I once attended a small community Bible class. The unusual thing about the class was that all the members were believing Christians; they believed in Adam and Eve and the authenticity of the Old Testament, as well as in the ultimate truth of the New Testament. But the sad aspect of the class was that all the members were Christian-culture atheists. By that I mean that they saw no connection between Christianity and the Europe of the past, and they saw no connection between modern irreligion and the modern secular European culture. To them culture was permanently neutral. It was simply culture; it was just there, like the sun and the moon. To me however, every page of the Bible was reinforced by some verse or story from a European author. For instance, when Abraham wrestled with the problem of believing God’s promises when circumstances gave no indication that divine aid was coming –

And God said unto Abraham, As for Sarai they wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall her name be. And I will bless her, and give thee a son also of her: yea, I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; kings of people shall be of her. Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto him that is a hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?

-- it reminded me of Tirian in The Last Battle:

He thought of other Kings who had lived and died in Narnia in old times and it seemed to him that none of them had ever been so unlucky as himself. He thought of his great-grandfather’s great-grandfather King Rilian who had been stolen away by a Witch when he was only a young prince and kept hidden for years in the dark caves beneath the land of the Northern Giants. But then it had all come right in the end, for two mysterious children had suddenly appeared from the land beyond the world’s end and had rescued him so that he came home to Narnia and had a long and prosperous reign. “It’s not like that with me,” said Tirian to himself. Then he went further back and thought about Rilian’s father, Caspian the Seafarer, whose wicked uncle King Miraz had tried to murder him and how Caspian fled away into the woods and lived among the Dwarfs. But that story too had all come right in the end: for Caspian also had been helped by children—only there were four of them that time—who came from somewhere beyond the world and fought a great battle and set him on his father’s throne. “But it was all long ago,” said Tirian to himself. “That sort of thing doesn’t happen now.” And then he remembered (for he had always been good at history when he was a boy) how those same four children who had helped Caspian had been in Narnia over a thousand years before; and it was then that they had done the most remarkable thing of all. For then they had defeated the terrible White Witch and ended the Hundred Years of Winter, and after that they had reigned (all four of them together) at Cair Paravel, till they were no longer children but great Kings and lovely Queens, and their reign had been the golden age of Narnia. And Aslan had come into that story a lot. He had come into all the other stories too, as
Tirian now remembered. “Aslan—and children from another world,” thought Tirian. “They have always come in when things were at their worst. Oh, if only they could now.”

And in the Bible, when the mysterious stranger, Melchizedek, of no known parentage, suddenly appears to help Abram:

And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God. Genesis 14: 18 .... Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually. Hebrews 7: 3

I can see Melchizedek in Shane, a man of unknown parentage, who helps the Starrett family against the forces of evil:

He was the man who rode into our little valley out of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done rode back whence he had come and he was Shane.

I cannot read a single Shakespeare play without thinking of St. Paul. The two poets are of the same spirit:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal... For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. – I Corinthians 13: 1, 12-13

Compare this to Portia’s speech in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above the sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea,
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.

-- The Merchant of Venice

Every author of note always points to Him as our only hope, like Dickens's Sydney Carton in The Tale of Two Cities:

She kisses his lips; he kisses hers; they solemnly bless each other. The spare hand does not tremble as he releases it; nothing worse than a sweet, bright constancy is in the patient face. She goes next before him—is gone; the knitting-women count Twenty-Two.

“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces, the pressing on of many footsteps in the outskirts of the crowd, so that it swells forward in a mass, like one great heave of water, all flashes away. Twenty-Three.

And from John 11: 25, 26:

And Jesus said unto her, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?

The liberals are being satanically consistent; they should work for the destruction of the white man and his past. That past is the embodiment of Christianity, which they despise. But why is the remnant band of Christians so ready to abandon the European cultural heritage? Well, if you’ll forgive my coming back to the same theme, it’s because the remnant believers are in the Christian halfway house. They cling to the Bible or to a traditional interpretation of the church documents, but they don’t see the importance of maintaining their blood ties to a race of people who took the Bible and the church documents seriously enough to make them a part of their culture.

The words 'fire' and 'heart' appear in the Bible with great frequency, while the words 'rational' and 'mind' never or seldom appear. If we abandon the cultural element, we leave behind the human component of religion that gives us the fire and heart to respond to God’s grace. If God is with and in His people’s culture, then they come in contact with Him in every aspect of their lives. But if He exists only in the minds of the doctors of theology, He becomes a distant God, and then an absent God, and finally a non-existent God. We need to feel that God is truly present with us. As soon as Moses, who made God’s presence known to the Hebrews, left to go up to Mt. Sinai, the people immediately started worshipping the golden calf. They needed to feel that God was amongst them.

My heart goes out to believers like the men and women in the Bible class I attended. They are struggling to hold to the Christian faith at a time when all the powers of this world are arrayed against them. But I also feel like shaking the aforementioned Christians and telling them: “The reason there are only five of us meeting in the basement of the church is because we have abandoned the fire-and-heart Christianity that was so deeply ingrained in the Europeans’ culture.” An intellectual faith only is “as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal”; it is devoid of fire and heart.

A religious culture is not an optional ‘extra’; it is a necessity because divine faith must have a human dwelling. And a culture, if it is to be true one, must be passed on and maintained by a race of people. There cannot be a multi-racial culture; that is a contradiction in terms. The Tower of Babel was not a culture; it was the antithesis of culture.

The majority of liberals do not even claim to be Christians. But there is a significant minority of liberals, represented by such men as Billy Graham and the late John Paul II, who claim that multi-culturalism is the logical outcome of Christ’s teaching. “Are not all men brothers in Christ?” Yes, they are. Christ did not come to save only one race of people, but did He choose to save mankind by race-mixing? The entire canon of Scripture says the opposite. And when the Europeans were Christian, they opposed race-mixing. In order to support multi-culturalism, you must reject Scripture and claim that your European predecessors were not sufficiently Christian. This is precisely what the Christian liberals do.

Christ’s saving grace comes to individuals who have distinct identities within a race of people. The Civil War in this country and the on-going wars of immigration in the European countries were and are being fought over the Greek idea of God, that He is an abstraction who can only be known through the intellect, versus the Hebraic belief that knowledge of God comes to us through spirit and blood. The ongoing racial war is of eternal moment. If the European surrenders, he will lose his soul. If he refuses to surrender, if he keeps faith with his race and the God of his race, he will save his soul. +

Abide with Me

“When the philosophers abandon the metaphysical threshold, it falls to the poet to take upon himself the role of metaphysician: at such times it is poetry, not philosophy, that is revealed as the true ‘Daughter of Wonder’...” -- St.-John Perse

The United States government’s reaction to Mexican Swine Flu was, “We will not close off the borders.” That reaction is the exact opposite reaction of my neighbor: “We should close off the borders.” Why is there such a dichotomy? The dichotomy exists because the United States government is the official voice of Liberaldom. And in Liberaldom the death of individual white human beings is a consummation devoutly to be wished. The survival of the generic earth and generic humanity is the abstract good in which liberals believe. For this reason they will always be at odds with the Christian Everyman, who only respects, like his God, individual human beings.

The late Malcolm Muggeridge called liberalism a death wish. And it is, to a certain extent. The liberals wish for the death of individual white Christian Europeans, but they do not wish for their own deaths. Will the barbarians make the distinction between liberal and non-liberal white people? No, they will not, but the liberals think they will. The murder and torture of whites is taking place throughout liberaldom, and the white hierarchies of liberaldom rejoice at every murder. Nothing that happens to white people touches them.

The liberal’s death wish is a wish for thy death, not his own. In fact, the liberal fears death more than any man has ever feared death before. That is why he has built a world of abstractions where death can be abstracted out of existence. If there is no such thing as a God-Man, then there is no such thing as a divine element within human beings. In such a case then there are no individual personalities with unique individual souls. There is only humanity in the aggregate. And mere humanity, without a soul, can be anesthetized. If one does not fear the extinction of the personality, if one does not long for the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still when a loved one dies, then there is only one reason left to fear death: pain.

And this is why science and the liberal are so inseparable. To a Christian the pain of death is caused by the extinction of a personality. The pain is lessened and then conquered through faith in the redeemer: “Death, where is thy sting?” The liberal has extinguished faith and lost his sense of the uniqueness of individual human beings. All he wants from God is a pain-free death and then oblivion. In return for a painless death, he worships the God called 'Science.' And that scientific God shows signs and wonders, in contrast to the Christian God who refused to show even His own Son one sign or wonder as He was dying on the cross. But the Europeans needed no outward sign or wonder, because He was that sign and wonder. The men of Europe need no scientific magic talisman; we need only His sacred heart.

The antique European is tempest toss’d. He needs a safe harbor, some place to recover from the slings and arrows of Liberaldom. Then, having recovered, he can gird up his loins, shout ‘Claymore,’ and return to the battle. The poets of Europe know where the safe harbor is. It is in the human heart, connected to His heart.

Since “super Gnostic” liberalism has become the reigning philosophy in church and society, the Europeans with hearts that still live have been banished to the hinterlands. And the end result of the triumph of the Gnostics has been the end of charity. The initial wellspring of feeling comes from the heart, and that feeling tells us that the secret of existence is not locked in a secret scroll, but in the sacred heart of the God-Man. If man is cut off from that initial feeling or sentiment, he is cut off from God, the source of his being. No matter what philosophy he espouses or how clever and intelligent a man is, if he has severed his head from his heart his faith will be “as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal” because he has not charity. The desiccated brain alone cannot produce one infinitesimal impulse of charity from the soul of man.

The liberals have replaced the old faith in Christ with a new faith in science and abstract thought. We need to turn to the poets in order to see the old Europe that the liberal’s have forsaken, because in their works we see our true beginning and our end. The storytelling tradition of Europe is rooted in the marriage feast of Cana. At the feast, Christ, against the Gnostics, sanctified marriage and began his public mission by performing a miracle at a private and provincial party. The storytelling tradition of Europe is also joined, in spirit, to St. Paul and 1 Corinthians 13. All the great poets of Europe show us, in their visions, an image of Christ in His divinity and sacred humanity. Let me mention a few.

William Shakespeare
Shakespeare stands above all the other poets, not because of his rightly and often praised use of language, but because of his little credited and seldom lauded gentleness. At the heart of this magnificent poet is an unparalleled sympathy with human creatures that defies any rational explanation. From whence comes his incredible sympathy?

In one school where I taught, I showed some freshmen the Franco Zeffirelli version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Although the play is not one of my favorite Shakespearean drama, I still felt, as I followed the words and action of the play, as the two apostles had felt when they supped with Christ at the village of Emmaus: “And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us while he talked with us by the way...” My heart burned within me because I felt connected, through the sympathetic art of William Shakespeare, with the Divine Heart. Must not He feel that way toward His creatures? Could such a Heart ever fail to keep the appointment at the hour of our death? Melville asked the question, “Sentry, are you there?” Shakespeare gives us the answer.

Of course, the summit of all Shakespeare’s art, and of all art, is Lear holding Cordelia in his arms. One sees and feels at that moment of the play, with a certainty that transcends the imperfect rational certainty of apologetics, why and how the tragedy of the Crucifixion could be turned into a happy love story. For one blazing moment we see through that dark glass and understand why charity is the greatest of these, and we understand why He and only He gives us the hope that the fell sergeant Death will not have the final word.

Walter Scott
All the institutions of modern Satania are geared to turn man away from the affective, loving approach to God. When faith becomes a mind game, Satan always wins. Walter Scott can put us back on the path, away from the Gnostics, to the Man of Sorrows. He eschews the path of the illuminati poets and theologians who seek to shed external light on man’s existence. Instead, Scott gets to the divine heart through human hearts. And at the heart of Europe, Scott tells us through his heroes and heroines, is Christ’s animating spirit. It is not a little thing to have placed charity at the center of one’s work.

C. S. Lewis
There is much that I find uninspiring in C. S. Lewis’s work. In a good deal of it I see too much of the English don and not enough of the man underneath the don’s mask, but still I admire the man immensely because he was an Oxford don who managed to throw off a good deal of his donnishness. Born with a propensity for the Gnostic heresy, he conquers it in his greatest work, The Chronicles of Narnia. In that work, he, like Shakespeare and Scott, eschews the cosmic approach to God. Building on the ‘least of these thy brethren,’ he brings us into His presence. With the marvelous image of the wardrobe that is the passage to Narnia, Lewis makes us feel as the great saints feel. We feel that there is no great dichotomy between this world and the next; they are both part of eternity which is sustained by a Personality. And our permanent place in that eternity rests on the personal assurances of Him.

Lewis had a mind that could have created a complicated system of esoteric formulas leading to the Promised Land. And he might have even thrown Christ, in a Chardinian fashion, somewhere into the mix. But he chose to stress the personal and the sentimental way, which places a personal God at the center rather than on the periphery of human experience. The religious Gnostic and the secular Gnostic will talk about humanity, but it is always the impersonal and the esoteric that they stress. Lewis walked among those Gnostics without being of them. Therein lies his greatness.

Much has been written of Lewis’s failure to convert to Catholicism. His Ulster, anti-Catholic background is usually cited as the reason. But a man who could conquer his extreme Gnostic tendencies could certainly have overcome the effects of an Ulster upbringing. I would suggest another reason: Lewis intuited a submission to Rome might have caused him to succumb to the Gnosticism against which he had been fighting all his life. The reigning philosophy in the Catholic Church during Lewis’s lifetime was Thomism. Lewis was a very sociable fellow; he naturally, had he become a Catholic, would have sought out the company of other Catholics. Excessive contact with the Thomists could well have plunged him into the despair that plagued Allen Tate and Evelyn Waugh after their conversions. I think Lewis worried more about getting things right with Him than he did about fitting in with one particular branch of the Church.

Walt Disney
I grew up with watered-down, liberal, American Christianity on Sundays and public school filth on weekdays. My only exposure to the essential Europe came from the Walt Disney films I saw at the local theater in the 1960s. My later conversion to genuine Christianity was greatly aided by what I learned about the workings of the human heart from that great storyteller, Mr. Walt Disney.

Let there be no doubt who was the heart and soul of the studio who gave us Snow White, Peter Pan, Fantasia, Dumbo, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Zorro, Swiss Family Robinson, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and so on. Walt Disney was the heart and soul. He was the master storyteller who put it all together. Witness how quickly the studio deteriorated after Walt’s death. The men with the technical abilities were still there, but without Walt, the soul was gone. The Walt Disney Company is now a major force for race-mixing, degeneracy, and Gnosticism.

Walt Disney’s accomplishment was incredible. In an age when genuine human feeling was becoming extinct, Disney placed stories from the heart of the European tradition onto the screen. Which is why the anti-human highbrows in the liberal and the ‘just-the-facts’ conservative and traditionalist camps love to sneer at Disney. Disney knew they were sneering, but he persevered. He kept the faith in the fairy tale alive. And his faith was an organic faith. He didn’t think fairy tales were something to be studied and dissected, he thought they should be loved and lived.

Although I love the image of the pilgrims with lighted candles singing ‘Ave Maria’ and so many other marvelous images that Disney brought to the screen, Mickey Mouse stands out for me as Disney’s supreme creation. He is the ancient medieval knight, sallying forth against the forces of modernity. The outward costume has changed, but the chivalrous heart is still there. As the gallant tailor or as the mail pilot, Mickey goes forth, as Walt Disney did, against the forces of modernity, with only an intrepid heart and his faith in his Dulcinea, to sustain him.

Annette Funicello once told of her astonishment when she received a birthday present from Walt Disney when he was dying of cancer. There was no mention of his own health in the accompanying note, just a ‘Happy Birthday’ greeting for her.

Again, what did St. Paul say about charity: “Beareth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” Disney’s vision came from his great heart. It is a vision in line with Lewis, Scott, Shakespeare, St. Paul, and Him. I love the man.

Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky’s vision is so wonderfully anti-Gnostic. He is centered on man’s heart and its connecting link to the divine Heart. His life-long battle against the cosmic and materialist ideologies that reduce individual men and women to insignificant atoms comes to a final conclusion in a classic confrontation between Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov.

“Rebellion? I wish you hadn’t used that word,” Ivan said feelingly. “I don’t believe it’s possible to live in rebellion, and I want to live! Tell me yourself—I challenge you: let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it? Tell me and don’t lie!”

“No, I would not,” Alyosha said softly.

The Swine Flu may or may not be a serious problem. If it is not there will be other plagues, in the form of viruses or of invading barbarians. White Europeans can expect no help from liberals against plagues or barbarians. I never recommend surrender, but while we are doing what we can against the slings and arrows of the liberals, it is comforting to be in union with antique Europeans such as the Rev. Henry Francis Lyte who believed in someone of this world, and above this world.

Abide with Me
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide!
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me!

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me!

Not a brief glance I beg, a passing word,
But as Thou dwell’st with Thy disciples, Lord--
Familiar, condescending, patient, free--
Come not to sojourn, but abide with me!

Come not in terrors, as the King of kings,
But kind and good, with healing on Thy wings,
Tears for all woes, a heart for every plea;
Come, Friend of sinners, thus abide with me!

Thou on my head in early youth didst smile;
And, though rebellious and perverse meanwhile,
Thou hast not left me, oft as I left Thee,
On to the close, O Lord, abide with me!

I need Thy presence every passing hour;
What but Thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?
Who, like Thyself, my guide and stay can be?
Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me!

I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless;
Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.
Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me!

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes,
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies;
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me. +

The European Woods

“Warrior! thou, whose dauntless heart
Gives us from our ward to part.
Be as strong in future trial,
Where resistance is denial.”

The most striking thing to me about the liberal Protestant, the fundamentalist Protestant, the Novus Ordo Catholic, the traditionalist Catholic, and the white neo-pagan groups is the one common faith they all share. This belief transcends their differences and keeps them from ever really diverging too far from modernity. Their commonly held faith is a belief in experts.

What has disappeared from all three camps, Protestant, Catholic, and neo-pagan, is a very European way of facing the numinous. It is true Europeans of old had their scholarly experts, their theologians, men who lived apart and studied the sacred books, but those experts did not determine what belief should be, nor did they mistake their own expert commentary (at least the non-heretical ones did not) on the Deposit of the Faith to be the Faith itself. The scholars of yore were kept in place by a religious peasantry, from whose ranks the scholars themselves often came, that placed a greater priority on the journey itself than on travelogues about the journey.

With the demise of the European peasantry, the reign of the experts began. The Christian Faith became a second-hand thing. It now only exists to the extent and in the way the experts say it does. And the modern European, lacking a blood faith, is at the mercy of the experts without any means of escape.

When I speak of the faith of a peasant I do not mean to suggest that only those who till the soil can possess such a faith. I am referring to all Europeans who experience the Faith firsthand. They have never come to believe, as Quentin’s father in The Sound and the Fury believes, that all tragedy is secondhand. The peasant journeys into the dark woods of existence with the intuitive knowledge that he will most certainly meet with witches, goblins, and other fiendish creatures. But he also knows, in his blood, that if he perseveres, he will see a light in the forest that will lead him to The Light; therefore, journey through the dark woods he must.

The modern European is a reed for every speculative philosophic wind that blows past the window of his brain. Because he no longer journeys through the dark woods, he is dependent on the experts. If he wants to receive knowledge of the light he must find an expert on the subject of “The Dark Woods.” But the experts have never gone through the woods themselves; they have second-hand knowledge of the woods based on their speculative theories about the nature of the woods. The modern Christian everyman takes the findings of his special, denominational expert and declares his tentative faith, pending further research by his experts, in the light that shineth in the dark woods.

And what killed the peasant faith (the only type of faith worth having) of Western man? It was the serpent of philosophical speculation:

“The vain pride of attempting to improve Christianity in the external exhibition of it in the churches, that it might vie in splendor with the pompous exhibition of the Jewish and pagan religions, and the presumptuous folly of explaining its mysteries according to the notions of the heathen philosophy, and, finally, of reducing the whole subject of Divine revelation into the form of a rational, systematic science, an attempt this, which rendered it as unfit for its primary purpose, the salvation of mankind, as the chemical process of distillation does our vegetable productions for the sustentation of animal life. The sublime productions of Aquinas, Maestrich, and Turrentine, are exquisite monuments of this egregious folly. As well might we attempt to imbibe vital heat by embracing a corpse, as to derive spiritual life, light, or comfort, from the perusal of those voluminous works.

– from “Christianity is Neither a Theory Nor a Philosophy” by Father Campbell

The pagan peasant climbed the cosmic tree that connected heaven to earth. But his connection was only to something cosmic and impersonal, to some Star Wars-type of ‘force.’ It was Christ who personalized the pagan cosmic tree by submitting to a crucifixion upon that tree. After Christ, faith is always personal; it is never cosmic or derivative. It is always down the ‘mean streets’ or through the dark woods that a man must go. He must imitate in some fashion the example of his Lord.

As I mentioned in a previous article, "The Poetic Core of Western Civilization," the shift from a fairy-tale appreciation of the Faith as a concrete, personal, earth-shattering experience, to a derivative, philosophical system is subtle and slow but devastating in its effects when it takes hold. Only a small remnant of the ancient Jews recognized Christ as the Savior because only a small remnant had a blood connection with their own Jewish faith which He could develop into a burning flame. The Pharisees were not atheists. In fact, they were ‘experts’ on God. Should not that give us pause when we hand ourselves over so willingly to the “religious” experts of today? (1)

I come back to my original assertion that all the neo-pagan, and Christian organizations, liberal, conservative, and traditionalist, have abandoned the integral European response to existence. “Since truth is a given,” they say, “we do not have to look for it. The journey through the dark woods is unnecessary.” Literature is no longer a shared journey with a fellow traveler through the dark woods; it is simply a poetic rendering of truths already known. And psychology, moral theology, and scholastic philosophy have removed the necessity of a more affective study of the human heart.” This is a complete reversal! There has never been anything like it before in the history of Western culture.

In healthy Christian times, the peasant hero often consults with a wise magician before entering the woods, but he knows that ultimately it is he and not the magician who must face the witch, the ogre, or the dragon. All the wisdom of the wise magician cannot equal the wisdom gained by the Young Drummers and Amadans of the Dough, who venture into the dark woods and down the ‘mean streets.’ The truths of revelation must be put to the test. Are they true or mere abstractions? We will never know for sure if we don’t break free of the experts and start the journey through the woods. Yes, they are often dark and foreboding, but the peasant senses that the darkness leads to a light that provides a warmth never felt or even hinted at by the experts.

Flannery O’Connor once made a statement that speaks to this ‘peasant vs. expert’ issue. She said that it was professors of literature who most often failed to understand her stories. I have noticed this phenomenon myself. It is professors of literature, for instance, who most consistently misunderstand Shakespeare. Even some of those who appreciate him, like Allan Bloom, Harold Bloom, Bernard Levin and Goddard, generally do not understand his works.

And I would add a corollary (which Flannery O’Connor should have taken note of, because it might have kept her from a misplaced admiration for Teilhard de Chardin). The corollary is that professors of theology (the experts), both clerical and lay, are generally the people who least understand religion. Why is this? Because religion, like literature, is a complete worldview. It cannot be studied in a compartmentalized way. One cannot approach the religious experience with only the analytical burner turned on in one’s brain. One must approach it with one’s whole heart, mind, and soul. (Who once said something about loving with one’s whole heart and mind and soul?) But the religious experts, like the literary ones, do not approach their subject with the integrality necessary to give an accurate depiction of the religious experience. We receive from them a distorted view of religious faith. And we desperately need to see the Faith whole and unperverted.

Norman Cantor, in his book Medieval History, points out that the modern world begins in the medieval age. He thinks that fact is a credit to the much-maligned medieval age. I think it is a damning indictment. But Cantor is right; the modern world does begin in the medieval ages for it is in the medieval ages that the reign of the expert begins.

Three radical changes were necessary to prepare the way for the expert. First, reason had to be freed from original sin so that a reasoning class of men could rule. Theoretically all were still infected with original sin, but in practice the thinkers, the reasoners, were free of it because they used their minds – in contrast to the peasants, who were full of all sorts of emotions and passions that rendered them incapable of knowing God without the aid of the reasoning men.

Once freed from original sin, the reasoning men needed something to analyze, which brings us to the second part of the modernist revolution – the separation of reason from revelation. No longer is revelation something that is seen in its entirety, inspiring love and awe. It now must be filtered through the analytical lens of the reasoning men, who will point out the rational, practical, and necessary parts of it to the peasants.

And what then occurs, when the reasoning men take over, is a Christianity that rejects Christ. Dostoyevsky depicts this type of Christianity in the ‘Grand Inquisitor’ chapter in The Brothers Karamazov. The Inquisitor’s essential complaint against Christ is that His religion of freely given love is too impractical, too irrational. He, the Grand Inquisitor, has improved Christianity – he has made it rational and practical. But the rational, practical quid pro quo religion of the Grand Inquisitor is not His religion and it is not ultimately satisfying to men and women with souls. The Inquisitor’s religion is a good solid religion for the practical everyday necessities of life, but it leaves the soul without the white moments that it needs for survival.

Now, I know the response of the Javerts in the various Christian churches: “Our Lord set up a hierarchical structure of reasoning men to hand revelation down to the faithful.” A hierarchical structure, yes, but was it meant to be a hierarchical structure of Pharisees and technocrats? I don’t think so. Our Lord founded His Church on third dumb brothers. He knew the Pharisees were too “educated” and too practical to accept Him. St. Paul, the greatest of the apostles and a highly educated one as well, was a great persecutor of Christians until Christ’s revelation turned him into a third dumb brother. There has been a satanic reversal in the Church. Pure intellect alone will always focus on Satan and turn men’s eyes away from the Redeemer.

The third change that completed the medieval revolt (it would be more accurate to say the Thomistic revolt) was the separation of grace and nature. When men were seen as having separate spiritual and physical natures, the door was opened to study men as mere biological specimens only. Man’s physical nature could now be studied as if it had no animating spiritual principle. True, the Thomists didn’t deny God, but by denying a divine link between God and man’s human nature, they sowed the seeds of modern man’s isolation from God. The existentialist revolt of the 20th century was a necessary revolt against the disembodied, computerized God of the scholastics. Where the existentialists erred was in rejecting the Christ, who alone can save us from the inhumanity of the computer god.

There can be no faith in men without faith in God. And there can be no faith in God unless one views existence as a fairy tale journey through the mysterious dark woods rather than as a classroom filled with experts on God dispensing information about His nature. One can find the devil as well as God in the woods, but that is the chance one takes if he wants to see the living God. In the expert-dominated classroom, there is never a genuine encounter with God. And in the 21st century, the great mass of people exists without any contact with God. In earlier centuries it was only some isolated intellectuals who lived, like Malvolio, in prisons of their own minds, but now the great mass of people have become intellectualized (which is entirely different from becoming wise) and live enslaved by “mind-forged manacles.”

Of what does the glory of the West consist? Is it really the rationalist heritage of Greece and St. Thomas? No, that heritage seems too similar to the ‘you shall be as gods’ heritage of the old Adam. The Old Testament prophets, the apostles, and the European poets all point to a different heritage, the heritage of the third dumb brothers, the fools for God.

I once had a professor in college, a lapsed Jew, who was always lamenting the fact that he, and all of us, had lost our sense of the sacred. “But what can we do about it,” he would always add; “We are all Hegelian rationalists now.” But are we? I certainly acknowledge that we live in a world that is imprisoned by Thomistic-Hegelian rationalism. But there is the poetic revolt. Existence contradicts the religious rationalists such as St. Thomas and the secularized rationalists such as Hegel. If the trip through the dark woods reveals that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their rational systems, are we not then entitled to assume that the rational schemes are mere fictions and the fairy tales are the reality?

At least my Jewish professor lamented the loss of the sacred. The current breed of post-Christian, modern pagan, and Christian rationalists, who have replaced Christ with a rational system (even if He figures somewhere in the system) are worse than my former professor. And they have taken on all of the secularized Jews’ instinctive hatred for the culture of the European who still has a fairy tale connection to Christ. This is why you see creatures such as Thomas Fleming reserving his venom for Kinist-type Christians. His faith is in a rational system, so he hates all those who view God in poetic rather than in rational terms. To an antique European, Christ is Hero, Liege Lord, Blood Brother, and King. He is not an emaciated accountant who merely rubber-stamps his approval on a series of documents drawn up by the experts.

The “problem” of the modern European is one of vision. He needs to see that the fairy tale mode of existence is true. Then he will start to behave like the heroes of old Europe behaved, before the Europeans became too intelligent to believe in fairy stories about enchanted cottages in the woods and a God-Man who sanctified the woods with His blood.
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1) Heresies always come from the academy. It is a delusion of the various religious bodies that they can create their own academies that are devoid of heresy. Whether they be Protestant or Catholic, they always end in heresy, because they start out with the false assumption that wisdom can indeed be put in a silver rod.

“Only My Blood Speaks”

I saw a series of articles on the Internet recently that were of great interest to me. A group of Protestants who were united on the issue of white kinship were discussing the “by what authority?” question. They came up with no answers, but they asked the right questions. They agreed that the Bible alone could not be the sole authority nor could Luther and Calvin. It has always struck me as absurd that Protestants reject Papal infallibility only to adopt Calvinistic infallibility. But these Protestants rejected that absurdity. And they also, God bless them, rejected the pretenses of Rome. I think what a sincere Protestant is rejecting when he rejects Rome is the medieval accoutrements, not the Gospel story as told by such men as St. Patrick and Geoffrey of Monmouth. A genuine renewal in the Church will come from the ranks of those white, kinship-based Protestants, for they have two things that the so-called Catholics – let’s call them institutional Catholics – lack. And those two things are a sincere desire to know Jesus Christ and a determination to stand, alone if need be, with Europe.

A simple story is not of necessity silly and superficial. A simple story can have depth. All of Shakespeare’s tragedies, for instance, are based on rather simple stories. And the deepest story of all, the Christ story, is a simple one. And yet what depths are to be found in that simple story!

It has been Satan’s task to convince mankind that the complicated golden edifice of philosophical speculation from Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Freud, Darwin, Marx, and de Chardin is the real truth while the simple lead casket containing the Christ story is just dross. Some dross! It is the dross that ennobles all who come in contact with it and it is the dross that maketh the dead to rise.

The European peoples did not abandon their bardic cultures when they embraced Christianity. They simply realized that Thor and Odin were precursors of the True Hero. But their cultures remained bardic. The entire thrust of the speculators of the West has been to turn Western culture into a philosophical one instead of a bardic one. But it is only in the cultures that revere the bard that Christ can find a home. The Christian bard celebrates the hearth, the village, and the humble church. He celebrates the warrior only when the warrior goes forth in support of those sacred sanctuaries.

Faith, in the bardic cultures, is simple and concrete, as depicted by H. V. Morton in his book, In Search of England. While traveling through England in 1926, he comes upon a church where the people still believe as their bardic ancestors believed:

“It is, perhaps, difficult for you, a stranger, to understand. You see, we are, in this little hamlet, untouched by modern ideas, in spite of the wireless and the charabanc. We use words long since abandoned—why only to-day I heard a little girl use the word ‘boughten’ for ‘bought’. My parishioners believe firmly in a physical resurrection! They believe that a trumpet will herald the end of the world, and that the bones in this churchyard will join together. So you see they like to be buried on top of their fathers and grand-fathers, because they will rise together as a family. It is, to them, more friendly. Clannish in life and clannish in death. It is a very old and primitive idea. I know other country clergy who are in the same, as it were, box.”

It comes down to, for European man, the call of the blood. We should not hesitate to answer that call. The philosophical speculators will tell us that such things belong to our caveman past and that we must evolve beyond it. Not so, at least not for European man. His blood has been linked to Christ’s through the blood of his ancestors. It is not some siren or some inhuman creature that calls the European. It is the bard of bards that calls.

If you put a gun to my head and ordered me to say which Church, the Protestant or the Catholic, was the more anti-Christian, I would say the Catholic Church. But it is really not a question of either/or. The Protestants responded to the Thomistic manure heap of philosophical speculation with their own brand of Calvinistic manure. Neither church has preserved the bardic or poetic core of the Christian Faith.

Christ is the sacred harpist of Western Civilization. The European people once danced, cried, lived and died to the sounds of His sacred harp. Why can we no longer hear it? We can no longer hear it because we have left the bardic forest and settled in the philosophic city. If we leave that city of desolation and enter the forest, we will hear, ever so slightly, the sound of a harp. And if we follow that sound, with a heart emptied of all other emotions save the desire to trace that sound to its source, we will proceed through the forest and come upon a cottage by a brook. And then what visions we shall see!

A man, if he is going to be a man, will come to a crossroads in his life. At that time he will hear the din of philosophical speculation which will appeal to his pride. And he will also hear the sound of the harp which will appeal to his blood. If he follows the music of the speculators, the music of the harp will fade and become, in the mind of the man, a fantasy, a dream, something that has no basis in reality. But if the man answers the call of the blood, he will gradually become so imbued with the sound of the harp that he will be immune to any other claim upon him. He will, like Hamlet, (“It is I, Hamlet the Dane”) finally know who he is and to whom he belongs.

All peoples except the European people listen to the call of the blood. But the non-European people have not been Christianized. When they answer the call of the blood, it is a call to shed blood. And now that there are not white men of blood to oppose them, the Mexicans have returned to their Aztec roots, committing hideous barbaric murders, and the Africans have returned to their voodoo roots, committing hideous and atrocious murders. And yet the modern European approves of the blood faiths of the heathens (Aztec art is all the rage in academia), while disapproving of any manifestation of the blood faith of the Europeans. The popular play Equus, for instance, depicted the plight of a pathetic, gutted psychiatrist who wondered about the wisdom of “curing” a boy who had a pagan, religious belief in horses. “The boy felt something genuine,” the psychiatrist lamented, which was more than he had ever felt. The play was seen as quite wonderful by all the play-going white people. But what if the boy had wanted to return to the Christian faith of his fathers, the faith that was bred in the bone? Would a play with such a theme have found an audience with the post-Christian theater-goers? Of course not.

The entire mound of philosophical speculation that Western man has heaped up and his current obsession with the cultures of color are related. Philosophic speculation has brought a sickness unto death into the soul of Western man. And he thinks the barbarians have the cure, even if that cure brings about Western man’s death. The end result of philosophical speculation, whether it is done in the name of religion or in the name of atheism, is suicide. Nothing seems real, and man seems unnecessary. But when one sees the faith through the eyes of the bard, when one gets to the poetic core of Europe, one can see that man is needed. He is needed by God. Certainly God creates us and sustains us, but His humanity, especially His infant humanity, must be defended. And He does have needs. He needs our love. We are tied to Him by ties of blood. If the European could see that, and every European is capable of seeing Christ walking in the sacred woods, he could once again claim his birthright, he would once again be a European.

In a marvelous series of stories for children and the childlike, Kipling places Puck of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in England. England as seen in the eyes of Puck and his young English companions is an enchanted fairy land. And so it was and is. The fairies have been driven underground and to the furthermost crags and crannies of Europe, but they are still there. Western man has been asleep, having a nightmare. In that nightmare he constantly tries to touch people and objects, but every time he reaches out to do so the people and objects turn to ideas and they fade away. If the European man awakes, he will see the fairies once again, and they will teach him what he already knows deep in his blood. They will teach him that the sacred woods of Europe come from the wood of the cross and the great King of Fairy Land is the selfsame carpenter who died on a cross at Calvary.

European culture is separate now, and was separate in the past as well, from all other cultures. She is separate now because she alone is rationalist while all other cultures are blood cultures. She was separate in the past because her blood culture was soaked in the blood of the lamb while all other cultures were soaked in the blood of their enemies. Surely a state of grace does not just consist of refraining from the more graphic mortal sins. It must also mean that one has overcome the obstacles that block the path to the living God. The rationalist culture must die and the bardic culture be restored before Christ can be seen on Blake’s English green.

I think Walter Scott demonstrates the way individual European men and women should go and the way European culture should go. He got his law degree and could have become a successful lawyer, but the fairy stories of Europe and the history of the European people were burned deeply into his soul. He answered the call of the blood and followed bardic Europe instead of rationalist Europe. And so should we all, but therein lies a great mystery. What can rekindle the fire of a love that has turned to ashes? From a strict scientific standpoint, the answer is nothing. You can’t rekindle ashes. But then the nonscientific Bard of Europe has told us all things are possible for those… But first we must see Him clearly. And then we shall love again and see ashes turned into a “chariot of fire.”

There are two European traditions, one of breadth and one of depth. The philosophical tradition is the tradition of breadth. It includes Plato’s unholy republic, Aquinas’s attempt to naturalize God, and Darwin’s attempt to turn man into an ape. The devotees of the tradition of breadth claim the glory of European man consists of his insatiable desire to expand his knowledge through the contemplation and the study of the natural world. Ever-onward means ever-upward to the man of breadth.

The bardic or poetic tradition, which I believe is the true Western tradition, is the tradition of depth. It is not knowledge of the natural world that activates the bardic tradition. It is the human heart. For those who follow the bardic tradition, the human heart, not nature, holds the secrets of the universe.

In the Aquinas-Darwinian tradition of breadth, the call of the blood must be suppressed because it is unclean and a deterrent to the pursuit of true knowledge, which always amounts to an accumulation of facts and observations about the natural world. This type of thinking is currently called ‘scientific’. In the bardic-poetic tradition of depth, man’s wisdom is viewed as imperfect but not unclean. It can be purified and perfected in the fiery furnace of the human heart. And when purified it becomes the true source of wisdom. It allows us to know God as a personality rather than as a derivative by-product of nature.

To me it seems obvious that the tradition of breadth is the golden casket that Bassania so wisely rejected:

“Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf
Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word
The seeming truth which cunning times put on
T’ entrap the wisest. Therefore, then thou gaudy gold,
Hard food for Midas, I will none of thee;…”

Bravo! Neither the golden tradition of the philosophers and scientists or the silver one of the hard-eyed capitalists is the European tradition. Our tradition, from which we have strayed, is the bardic tradition of the simple lead casket. In that casket are the elves, the fairies, the knights, the ladies, and the Great King of all human hearts.

: but thou, thou meager lead,
Which rather threat’nest than does promise aught,
Thy plainness moves me more than eloquence;
And here choose I. Joy be the consequence!