Hitler Revisited

If made-for-T.V. movies and documentaries are any indication of the public's interest and fascination with a subject, then Adolph Hitler is the subject liberals are most fascinated with. Seldom does a week go by without some special on the Führer. Yet for all their fascination with Hitler, the liberals have no understanding of his life or of what he represents.

It used to strike me as strange that the liberals had so little understanding of Hitler, but then I realized that in order for the liberals to understand him and the Nazi phenomenon, they would have to examine their own metaphysic. This they dare not do, because their metaphysic, although diverging at a fork in the road, emanates from the same city as Hitler's metaphysic.

Hitler was not some alien monster from outer space, nor was he a gangster like Stalin or a barbarian like Idi Amin. Hitler was a pagan, as Julian the Apostate was a pagan. Hitler was raised by a devout Catholic mother and an indifferent Catholic father. His childhood was not an unhappy one, but the Christian vision did not inspire him. In this he was not unlike other Austrian and German youths of the early 1900s – Christianity did not inspire them either.

"If men will not have a religion of Christ," William Blake told us, "they will have a religion of Satan." Hitler chose one of Satan's religions for his own, much like his fellow apostate countrymen. The only difference between the apostate Hitler and his apostate countrymen was that he was totally devoted to his new religion, while most of them were indifferent apostates. Hitler chose, like Nietzsche and Wagner (whom he adored), the religion of the ancient Greeks. Of course I don't mean he literally adopted the entire Greek pantheon of gods as his own, but that he adopted pagan naturalism as his own. He sought a return to the gods of the hunt, the field, and the stream. Hitler believed that Christianity had emasculated the German people, and that he, Adolph Hitler, could bring them back to their former glory. This is a very old heresy; the previously-mentioned Julian the Apostate wanted to do the same thing for the Roman empire, namely, restore the empire to its pre-Christian, glory days.

Is this, then, the reason the liberals hate Hitler? Because he wanted to destroy Christianity? Of course not. The liberals also want to destroy Christianity. Do they hate him because he killed a great number of people? No, they do not hate him for that reason either. Stalin and Mao Tse-tung killed more people than Hitler, and the liberals do not hate them. In addition, the liberals have killed more people than Stalin and Mao by way of legalized abortion. So, a little blood for a great cause does not appall the liberals. What does appall them is an anti-Christian ideology that opposes their own anti-Christian ideology. Hitler and the liberals are fighting cousins. What the liberals object to in Hitler is his preference for the racial myth over the liberals' egalitarian, universalist myth.

I think Hitler failed because he did not understand the European people. You can sway most, if not all, non-white cultures by simply appealing to their lust for power. "Follow me and I'll make our race the dominant race in the world," says the non-white demagogue. But white people need something more to inspire them. The pagan Europeans who conquered Rome had power; they had the world in their hands and they found it lacking in substance. They needed something more. And they found something more in the God-Man.

Hitler couldn’t mobilize enough European support because he failed to frame his heresy in the form that Europeans were used to. The democratic heresy and the Marxist heresy, because they were post-Christian heresies, were more appealing to the bulk of the European people. So the post-Christian democracies joined with the post-Christian communists to defeat Hitler.

Personally, I prefer the manliness of Hitler's victory-or-death paganism to Stalin's and Roosevelt's slimy universalism, but that, for a Christian, is not really the point. A Christian is not permitted to choose the lesser of two evils. The proper Christian response during World War II should have consisted of a two-front war, against Russian communism (and its twin sister, American democracy) on the one front, and against Hitler's paganism on the other front. But two-front wars are difficult; only a resolute Christian warrior can maintain such a war. We all tend to pick the lesser of two evils and join in with the more congenial devil. But Christians should know better. In the pre-war days of Hitler's era, the historical record shows that the upper ranks of the pro-monarchy, Austrian-German nobility did know better. They opposed Hitler and the Marxists. (It seems there is some advantage to having a European cultural education that includes more than the catechism. After all, Hitler knew his catechism.)

It is something that gives one pause, this very human tendency to make a pact with the lesser devil. I've never seen it work. The Christian Democratic parties in Latin America and Europe are a disgrace, and I needn't mention the slimy, now largely defunct Christian Coalition in our own country. It is much better to go down fighting a large group of anti-Christian enemies arrayed against you than to be stabbed in the back by a coalition member who suddenly, on the day of battle, decides he hates you more than his other enemy. Or better yet, when one's prayers are pure, because they are not soiled by the desire to please unbelievers, perhaps God will give the victory to the few. Who knows? It's happened before.

Are we now too far afield from the late Führer of the Third Reich? I think not. Hitler is a man we dare not make common cause with, but let us not be deceived into thinking his enemies are creatures of light. They reside in the same city as Hitler – the City of Man-without-God. The Marxist and the Americanist are moving toward a secularized Zion; their eschatology is similar to Christianity except (and the exception is everything) for the absence of Christ. And Hitler bids us return to the Sturm und Drang of paganism.

Hitler seems like the lesser of two evils because, after all, at least in paganism there is a reverence for nature and for something outside of man. Yes, but we must realize that Hitler's paganism, was a post-Christian paganism. The ancient pagan was stuck with paganism until the God-Man came to destroy the pagan gods. Hitler chose the pagan gods over Christ. That is a crucial distinction which we should always have before us. Hitler, if he truly knew Christianity, would not have rejected Christ. In addition, if he truly knew paganism, he would have embraced Christ. Why? Because the two greatest lights of pagan culture – Sophocles and Virgil – both told anyone who bothered to read them that life was meaningless without a God that stood above nature, who guaranteed the spiritual continuance of every creature doomed to go the way of pure nature. Sophocles and Virgil bore witness to the eternal qualities of the human personality. If there was no Christ, then there was nothing but the hell of dumb nature without the life-giving spirit.

In both Oedipus at Colonus and The Aenid there are indications that Sophocles and Virgil intuited the coming of the Messiah. If Hitler had really understood pagan antiquity, he would have rejoiced to have lived to see the coming of the Lord, and he would have wielded the sword on behalf of Christian Germany instead of Nietzsche's Übermensch.

Unlike the liberals, I have not had a life-long fascination with Hitler, but a good biography of him by Marlis Steinert (Hitler, W. W. Norton, 1997) has set me thinking about the man, or actually I should say, about the boy. It is the young Hitler, not the Führer, who interests me. He had depth of soul; he was not as far gone (and I mean this sincerely) as many students I have had. Hitler had a great thirst for beauty and for the transcendent. He was neither a sadist nor a sensualist. And a boy with Hitler's thirst for beauty is easier to reach than a modern student who has no such thirst.

The question is, why did Hitler find his vision of the Third Reich more beautiful than the Christian faith? Well, there is free will, and Hitler ultimately bears the responsibility for his rejection of Christianity, but he was not alone in his rejection. Europeans have for the most part followed Hitler in this rejection of Christianity. They have not all followed Hitler's way, but most have pursued their own godless courses. In Hitler's case, I wonder if the case for Christianity was ever presented to him; was he ever exposed to Chateaubriand's "The Faith is true because it is beautiful" form of apologetics? Was he ever taught that what was good in German culture, including the half-pagan, half-Christian Wagner, was a product of Christian culture? I doubt it.

The sad fact is that when the Christian faith is presented in only a catechistical way, it does seem to be a great polluter of life. Many Christians seem to feel that just as poetry had no place in Plato's Republic, it has no place in the Christian churches. But that is throwing the baby out with the bath water, as the saying goes. The poetic of Christianity is the soul of Christianity. If we take out the beautiful and true story of Christ's death and resurrection in favor of a stripped-down, streamlined version more compatible with the bureaucratic-structured man of today, what will be left of Christianity?

Again, Hitler must answer for his own soul as we all must some day, but I, at the risk of being completely misunderstood, must claim that what I see in Hitler's soul, as evil as it was, is not half as frightening as what I see in the souls of so many of our modern "educated" young people. How can it be otherwise – their gods are even more fearsome than Hitler's pagan gods.

The Hitler movies will keep coming. The liberals need him. They need him to continually prove to the world that they, the liberals, are necessary. Without them, the liberals tell us, we will all either become Nazis or be killed by Nazis.

But the dirty little secret that the liberals hide even from themselves is that Hitler is their child. He does not live in the sanctuaries of the right-wing Christians; he lives with the liberals. And they remain fascinated and appalled by Hitler because he is their own wayward child. They are like the free-love advocate who is appalled when his daughter actually practices what he teaches. "Christ is not risen," scream the liberals.

"Then I will resurrect the old German gods," Hitler replies.

"Why wasn't he able to settle for wine-and-cheese parties?" the liberals lament.

The legions of Satan are diverse; once you have rejected Christ, there is no rule that you must choose the politically-correct version of Satanism. Hitler's great sin was that he chose Apollo over Christ, and his minor virtue was that he was not politically correct.

The Young Drummer At Bay

“Why do the Old and New Testaments read like fairy tale books and why does our
Lord speak in parables if we were meant to theorize about God in the manner and
style of the heathen Greeks?”

The late Victor Herman subtitled his autobiography, An Unexpected Life. And indeed to go from an American home to the Russian Gulag is certainly unexpected, but I think most of us would probably tack on Herman’s subtitle to the book of our own lives. I know I would.

The most unexpected aspect of my life involves the Catholic Church. I never, having once entered the Church, would have thought that I could feel such an intense loathing for it some thirty years later. A day never passes in which I fail to ponder the difference between what I imagined the Catholic Church to be and what it turned out to be in reality. The imponderables and the perplexities of the dichotomy whirl through my head day and night. And unfortunately (or fortunately?), I cannot take refuge in the traditional refuge from Catholicism, namely fundamentalist Protestantism.

I once said that Catholicism and Protestantism needed each other because neither was complete without the other. Well, yes, they do need each other because neither is complete without the other, but even if fused together, they still would lack something. Both lack a poetic vision; both have adopted different systems to block out the poetic vision, but both lack that essential element. Let me define what I mean by poetic vision.

The poetic vision is the integral way human beings see reality, a kitchen sink full of passions, intuitions, sentiments, and ratiocinations. It is messy; it seems unnecessary, arduous, and imprecise compared to pure reason, but it is the way we human beings perceive reality.

When organized religion circumvents the poetic process in order (we are told) to clear a path that leads directly to God, we end up losing God. We lose God because we can no longer see Him.

Human beings are wedded to the poetic. We cannot see reality through abstractions. We can see a distorted reality through abstractions, but we cannot see true reality. It is no tragedy when non-Christian religions adopt distorted, abstracted versions of reality and worship their inhuman and debauched abstractions, but it is a tragedy when the true religion of the God-Man becomes an abstracted false religion of debauchery and inhumanity.

The Catholic Church keeps the poetic or the fairy tale mode of perception at bay by encircling its parishioners with Greco/Roman/Babylonian walls. Theoretically there are gates in the walls leading to the God-Man, but at each gate there is a sentinel. The parishioner wishing to pass through the gate is ‘searched’ before he is allowed to pass through the gate. If anything that suggests the poetic is found, it is confiscated. Without the poetic vision, the pilgrim parishioner is blind and unable to see God.

The fundamentalist Protestant seems, at first glance, to have solved the Greco/ Roman/Babylonian problem. He has eliminated the Catholic-Pagan walls and sentinels, but there is still a wall and there are still sentinels that keep the poetic vision at bay.

The new wall is the mystical ‘Born-Again’ wall. Unless one can show evidence of having had a ‘blessed assurance’ experience with the living God, one is not allowed through the gates by the new sentinels. This is certainly a bit of a contradiction because if one has had the ‘Blessed Assurance’ experience, why is it necessary to pass through the gates? Nevertheless, those who wish to pass through the gates are still, as in the Catholic-Pagan system, searched for evidence of the poetic. The pilgrim found with poetic contraband is not allowed through the gate. By insisting on the direct infusion of divine grace, the Protestant eliminates the myriad human encounters that authors like Thomas Hughes[i] have written about, which constitute the real divine grace that allows us to be born again. Even St. Paul, who had a genuine born again experience of the kind fundamentalists tell us we all must have to be saved, had other preparatory moments of grace before his road-to-Damascus experience. How do I know that? I know that because St. Paul tells us so in his letter to the Corinthians. Implicit in his “and have not charity” letter is an understanding of the divine-human connection. He reveals in 2nd Corinthians that he understands how the love of one human being for another can lead to a moment of grace in which the lover “can see His blood upon the rose.”

If there are good Christians in the Catholic Church, which most certainly there are, and if there are good Christians in the Protestant churches, which most certainly there are, why make all this fuss about their respective systems? I make the fuss because both systems seem designed to eliminate Christianity. While theoretically holding to the Christian creed, they encourage one to abandon one’s humanity, one’s vision, and thus one’s faith. Without a poetic understanding of the creed, faith becomes a problem in geometry instead of a living, vital faith. Some Catholics manage to smuggle contraband bits and pieces of the poetic past the sentinels and thus manage to get a glimpse of the living God. And an even greater number of Protestants, because their system is not as efficient as the Catholic system, manage to smuggle elements of the poetic past the sentinels. But the systems are designed (and the Catholic one maniacally so) to kill the poetic vision of man and hence, kill his faith in the God-Man.

In the stories of her poets and in the faces of her people, the old Europe reflects the true Christianity. Heart responds to heart and vision to vision. How does a Catholic Christian know that a Feeneyite’s doctrine is straight from hell even though he can back it up with quotes from 17 different church councils? Because the Catholic Christian’s heart rebels against it. He has seen the face of Christ in Christians outside the Church, and no narrow sectarian Catholic heathen can convince him otherwise. And how does a Christian know that he is born again despite the fact that he has not had the proscribed formulaic born-again experience? Because he has had his white moments when he sees, in the many facets of the human experience, the face of Jesus Christ.

The cultural back door is the front door. The European cultural heritage represents the attempt of the faithful to wrest Christ from the sentinels and to hold His pure image aloft for all the world to see. The image of Christ has not disappeared from the world because the Christian churches have failed; it has disappeared because the churches have succeeded: they have succeeded in killing the poetic vision of European man.

The fight for the old Europe is the fight for the faith. Anthony Burgess advised college students to forget relevance and find out who Nausikaa[ii] was. That’s not good enough. We must forget relevance and find out who Maud Ruthyn[iii] was.

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[i] Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Puffin: UK, 1984), p. 288: “And let us not be hard on him, if at that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there, than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship, to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes. For it is only through our mysterious human relationships, through the love and tenderness and purity of mothers, and sisters, and wives, through the strength and courage and wisdom of fathers, and brothers, and teachers, that we can come to the knowledge of Him, in whom alone the love, and the tenderness, and the purity, and the strength, and the courage, and the wisdom of all these dwell for ever and ever in perfect fulness.”

[ii] Nausikaa: a Greek maiden who aids Odysseus in his travels

[iii] The Christian heroine of J. S. LeFanu’s novel, Uncle Silas

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.”

Arnold Lunn thought it was the truth and the way; Alan Tate thought it was a curse and a blessing; and my college religion professor thought that, love it or hate it, it was the Western tradition. All three men were referring to rationalism.

I concede that rationalism is part of the Western tradition, but I would dispute that it is at the core of the Western tradition. Philosophical speculation has ever been with us, but it is only the philosophical speculators who tell us their speculations are the Western tradition.

Excluding the philosophical speculators who put their speculations into poetic form, such as Dante and Dryden, I would claim that it is the poets who represent the core of the Western tradition. As Walter Scott says: “The marvels and miracles, which the poet blends with his song, do not exceed in number or extravagance the figments of the historians of the same period of society; and, indeed, the difference betwixt poetry and prose as the vehicles of historical truth is always of late introduction. Poets under various denominations of Bards, Scalds, Chroniclers, and so forth, are the first historians of all nations.”

All civilizations start with a poetic core. In the ancient Greek civilization, for instance, the spirit and ethos of their civilization was articulated by Homer. Gradually, over time, philosophical speculators such as Socrates and Plato chipped away at that poetic core until the core was no longer at the center of Greek civilization. The poetic core was pushed to the periphery, and philosophical speculation moved to the core.

When speculative philosophy or rationalism is at the center of your civilization, your civilization has ceased to be a civilization. Many of the external forms might remain, but at heart your society has died. Sexual excess replaces pietas, and an obsession with legalese or bureaucratic minutia replaces gen-uine concern for truth and justice. In short, you have “a ghastly mess,” and your civilization is ready to be absorbed by a civilization that does have a poetic core. Such was the case with Greece when it was absorbed by Rome, and such was the case with Rome when it was absorbed by the Europeans. Which brings us to the people and the civilization that was (and is) the subject of these wars.

The modern right-wingers, such as Kevin Strom and Charles Maurras, err when they seek to return to the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. Those civilizations were sick with rationalism at the time of their demise. It is the integral, full-blooded Christianity of the early Europeans that needs to be restored. It seems that rationalism works like cancer cells. A healthy body always has a few, but so long as they are few in number, they don’t destroy the body. When the cancer cells start to multiple, and the body treats them as normal and the non-cancerous cells as outcasts, the body dies.

The fairy tales of our civilization always include evil wizards and witches who seek to interact with demons and bend the natural world to their will in order to compete on an equal level with God. These men and women were seen, in the old fairy tales, for what they were: evil men and women. Such is not the case today. We are a whole society of wizards and witches. The integral European, be he king, yeoman, or peasant, would react with horror at the thought of a kingdom dominated by witches and wizards. But now the witches and demons rule, and none dare call them evil.

It matters not whether they profess to be born again or to be members of the Roman Catholic Church; if they smile at or participate in the anti-European invasion, they are not Christians. In the novel, Count Robert of Paris, which is set in Greece, Walter Scott depicts a Greek philosopher who desires to subvert the Christian Byzantine empire and reestablish it under sounder philosophical principles. Midway through the novel, Agelastes, the philosopher, gives his apologia for the primacy of philosophy over religious superstition. He derides the Greek gods as childish and unrefined and the Christian God as barbaric and juvenile. Pure, unadulterated reason is the only antidote, he maintains, for such blatant lies and superstitions. And Agelaste’s beliefs, put less bluntly now but essentially the same, are the beliefs of modern Europeans. They treat the ancient Christian faith as a childish fairy tale and expound a newer, philosophical Christianity that suites the improved rational man of today.

Both Lunn and Chesterton speak lovingly of the rationalist revolution ushered in by St. Thomas Aquinas. Why? We should be happy because we are now allowed to replace the God-man with rational discourse and demonology? At the poetic core of old Europe was Christ. At the core of the new civilization is Satan, for he always takes center stage when rationalism reigns.

It is no coincidence that black and Aztec civilizations are now highly esteemed by the West and older white civilizations are despised. Since the West has become demonic, it worships other demon civilizations and hates its Christian past. Satan never had to worry about controlling Aztec and voodoo cultures; they were always his; it was the European culture that scared him. Now he has conquered that one, not by a direct frontal attack, but through the old slight of hand game called philosophical speculation.

In keeping with their new satanic religion, the European people have opened their countries up to the devilish cultures of color. It’s as if they couldn’t quite manage the demolition job alone and needed the help of some sturdy, stout lads of color. And that type of help will always be available. Of course, there might be some weeping when the men and women of the West find out that the material comforts they have enjoyed cannot be indefinitely sustained when the culture that produced those comforts is destroyed.

There is very little Christianity left in the Europeans. We can accurately gauge just how little is left by finding out how individual Europeans feel about the wholesale destruction of the old European culture. If they are completely in favor of the new multiracial world order, then they have no Christianity left in them. It matters not whether they profess to be born again or to be members of the Roman Catholic Church; if they smile at or participate in the anti-European invasion, they are not Christians. For Christianity is a religion of pietas and of depth; it is not a religion for the superficial, “give the world a Coke” crowd.

Satan always comes as the philosophical speculator, the great dialectician. “Why not eat the apple – you won’t die. That’s just silly, superstitious nonsense.” But Satan never penetrated to the core of Christendom until St. Thomas provided him with an entrance pass. Then, starting on the periphery, he wormed his way to the very center.

I think the most overt signs that Satan was gradually gaining ascendancy over Christendom showed up in the nineteenth century. It was in that century that capitalism, Darwinism, Freudianism, and Marxism, all logical outgrowths of the Thomistic revolution, became something more than just fringe movements. But it must also be said that the Christians of that century fought back heroically, interiorizing and deepening the Christian faith as in no other century. It wasn’t until the latter half of the 20th century that the Christian counterattack ceased.

All the countries of Europe have been and are currently participating in the great betrayal of sacred Europe. But the United States is the beacon light of the antichrist:

Send me your Aztecs and your blacks,
Your hate-filled masses yearning to murder and destroy,
We’ll shine our light upon the Wal-Mart cluttered shores,
And spew hatred upon all that once was held so dear.

There is one sentiment that the blood-gutted pagan cultures have never known and the philosophical speculating Satanic culture now disdains, and that is the emotion, which only a Christian of blood feels, that rises up in a soul when he sees his child being threatened. It is a sentiment that includes the desire to protect one’s own, but it goes deeper still. It is a heavenly fury.

And it is the Christ Child Himself who is now threatened. He lies helpless in the manger with ravenous wolves all around him. Yes, He is the Lord, but that part of his divinity that depends on our humanity is in mortal danger. The incarnate Christ Child is being ripped to shreds every time the culture of the Christian hearth and the Christian manger are assaulted. That emotion, the feeling of pietas, but yet deeper than pietas, is the emotion at the poetic core of Europe. It is something on which we can build.

Could every time-worn Heart but see Thee once again,
A happy human child, among the homes of men,
The age of doubt would pass,--the vision of Thy face
Would silently restore the childhood of the race.

--Henry Van Dyke

Out of the Depths Have I Cried to Thee

Some years ago I had a relative who, almost overnight, went from a healthy, vigorous woman to a bedridden, sickly one. She remained that way for two years with no hope of recovery. But at the two-year mark of her illness, her doctor discovered that he had misdiagnosed her illness and subsequently changed his treatment to something more fitting for the disease which he now believed she had. And, miracle of miracles, my relative made a complete recovery.

It is apparent to me that the seemingly sick-beyond-recovery West has also been misdiagnosed. The patient is supposed to be sick from a lack of rationality, when in reality, he is sick from an excess of rationality. And it is to the neglected poetic voice of the West that we must turn, not to that of the philosophers, scientists, and theologians, if we ever want to see a healthy, vigorous West again.

The disembodied-brain heresy of the Greeks can best be described as the Olympian heresy. The Greek philosophers placed reason on Mt. Olympus in place of the old gods and studied, probed and dissected man from their Olympian height. Plato saw man as a walking universal, as part of the spiritual force of life from whence we all come. But Plato’s universal is not a personal force; it is not a God to whom we can speak to, as the Hebrews spoke to the living God:

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications. If thou, Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in His word do I hope. My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning. Let Israel hope in the Lord: for with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him is plenteous redemption. And He shall redeem Israel from all its iniquities.

Aristotle, unlike Plato, looked at the particular man, but not in a Christian, personal way. He looked at man as a specimen to be dissected and studied, not as a whole, unique personality.

The greatest poet of antiquity, Sophocles, stated that it was better never to have been born than to exist in the closed, meaningless world of the philosophers. And the folk of the Roman Empire rejected the Olympian religion of the philosophers for the more personal mystery religions. Yet it was to the Olympian religion that the Church fathers and the medievals turned when they chose to present the one true God to the folk. Yet the folk have always resisted the Greco-Roman paradigms. In every Christian age, save the latter 20th century, the folk have steadfastly resisted the Churchmen’s attempts to make Christ’s Church into Mt. Olympus.

The struggle has been a dramatic one. And the drama must continue. It is not time to bring down the curtain on Europe. The poets, speaking for the folk, have spoken with one voice about the sickness of the West. Their diagnosis is quite different from that of the philosophers, the scientists and the theologians. Let us hear their voices.

Shakespeare. Most of the poetic depictions of the disembodied mind come from the 19th century and early 20th century poets because they were the first to face it directly and unabated. But Shakespeare, with a remarkable prescience, was the first poet to square off against the heresy of the disembodied brain when he pitted Hamlet against Claudius. Both men are geniuses, but one, Claudius, put his intellect at the service of his satanic desire for power while keeping those virtues of the heart, such as faith, hope, and charity, isolated from and subordinate to his intellect.

At the beginning of the play, Hamlet is in an abstracted state of mind that could lead him to become, like Claudius, a disembodied brain at the service of Satan. But Hamlet has that within which passeth show; he resists the temptation to become a purely intellectual being. Instead he begins a quest toward integrality. All around him are abstracted caricatures of human beings, trying to make him view life as they view it, a game in which one must manipulate human beings as one would chess pieces. Hamlet perseveres. And it is at Ophelia’s grave when he realizes he loves, that the real Hamlet, the integral, heroic Hamlet, comes to the forefront: “It is I, Hamlet, the Dane.” He never looks back nor fails in his duty after that.

The most overlooked scene (overlooked by Christians) in all of literature is Hamlet’s defiance of augury. It doesn’t matter if we, by use of our intellectual powers divorced from their proper subservience to the virtues of the heart, can alter our material future for the better or avert death. It is to those wellsprings of humanity in our hearts, connected to His sacred heart, that our loyalty must be directed in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword. “We defy augury.” With those words, Hamlet speaks for European man and gives us the cure for all the West’s ills.

Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne, among others, is one writer who has placed opposition to the modernist-Gnostic heresy at the heart of his work. His single-mindedness on that topic – it is the central theme of most of his short stories and his major novels – has earned him many sneers from literary critics who suffer from the disease he criticizes. Hawthorne’s insights are so profound that one suspects he had many a personal struggle against the disembodied-brain temptation himself.

In much of the 19th century criticism of the disembodied brain, we start out in a scientist’s laboratory. Not satisfied with the ordinary Wind in the Willows type of life, the simple life of the plowed field and the evening lingerings, the scientific man of the laboratory must create a whole new world of which he, the man of science, is in control. The new world is always supposed to be for the good of the simple moles who are imprisoned in their ordinary, plowed fields, but the simple moles invariably end up annihilated.

Hawthorne’s story, “The Birthmark,” begins with an introduction to a man of science:

In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual affinity more attractive than any chemical one. He had left his laboratory to the care of an assistant, cleared his fine countenance from the furnace smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a beautiful woman to become his wife. In those days when the comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle, it was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman in its depth and absorbing energy. The higher intellect, the imagination, the spirit, and even the heart might all find their congenial aliment in pursuits which, as some of their ardent votaries believed, would ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force and perhaps make new worlds for himself. We know not whether Aylmer possessed this degree of faith in man's ultimate control over Nature. He had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weaned from them by any second passion. His love for his young wife might prove the stronger of the two; but it could only be by intertwining itself with his love of science, and uniting the strength of the latter to his own.

Such a union accordingly took place, and was attended with truly remarkable consequences and a deeply impressive moral. One day, very soon after their marriage, Aylmer sat gazing at his wife with a trouble in his countenance that grew stronger until he spoke.

The trouble was that the man of science’s beautiful wife had a birthmark which Aylmer believed tainted her whole face with the mark of “earthly imperfection.” In order to cure this imperfection, Aylmer… I think you can guess the rest. Of course, his wife dies, a victim of the Utopian aspirations of Aylmer’s disembodied brain:

Yet, had Alymer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness which would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame texture with the celestial. The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.

In Hawthorne's works, a disembodied mind is always the focus of evil, such as Rappacini in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Chillingsworth in The Scarlet Letter, or Ethan Brand in the story of the same name. And Hawthorne is right. What was a small but growing minority in his time has become 'The People' in our own time. The folk have become intellectualized; they are all disembodied brains. No matter where one turns, he meets an Aylmer or a Rappaccini.

P. C. Wren. I think P. C. Wren is one of the great authors of the West, and yet I’m sure he would not appear on any of the literary critics “top ten” lists. That is because literary critics tend to be Gnostics, and P. C. Wren’s works are decidedly anti-Gnostic.

In The Disappearance of General Jason, P. C. Wren is at his anti-Gnostic best. The hero, Colonel Carthew, goes in search of his old friend, General Jason, who has been missing for a long while. The search ends on a small island country inhabited by a people of Portuguese descent but who are independent from Portugal. They guard their isolation jealously, and it was the misfortune of General Jason that he inadvertently violated their privacy.

The island-nation has a queen, but the real ruler is a scientist named Dom Perez de Norhona. De Norhona has developed the ability to isolate a man’s brain from his body; by controlling a certain section of the brain, through hypnosis and surgery, he can make the body of the man do what he, de Norhona, commands. And he has turned General Jason into a dog. Carthew, quite justifiably, accuses de Norhona of murdering General Jason.

“You don’t regard it as a form of murder? The most terrible form of all – soul-murder.”

“No, why should I? Where’s the murder? The whole point is that I did not kill the patient in attempting to perform the experiment. You cannot have a murder without a corpse, can you? And as to murdering souls, I am not scientifically interested in souls. I’m only concerned with minds and bodies.”

Do we not see in de Norhona’s cerebral operation the end result of the Aristotleian-Thomistic separation of reason from grace? I do. For me, de Norhona is St. Thomas. Just as St. Thomas dissects man for the greater good (or so he thought), so does de Norhona.

It seemed to Carthew that de Norhona was a living intelligence, an intelligence almost freed from the hampering restriction and misguidance of emotion; a man whose mind was neither cruel nor kind, but almost purely scientific.

And yet he was human enough in his fanatical patriotism.

Carthew entertained for him curious and contradictory feelings of murderous hatred, fear, considerable respect and almost unwilling liking. So inevitably fair and just himself, Carthew had to admit that de Norhona had done nothing to Jason as Jason, an honest and honourable gentleman who had come to make certain right and proper proposals and suggestions of a commercial nature. Quite obviously de Norhona had used for his great experiment a man whom he believed to be a deadly enemy of his country, inasmuch as he was the first of an invading army, insupportable, detestable and loathsome in the eyes of people to whom independence was the very breath of life and the very religion of their soul.

One feels like screaming with Carthew, “What about the soul?” The Greek-Catholic-disembodied-brain heresy leaves a man without the essence of his humanity, his soul, for the soul is part of the body, not separate from it. A disembodied brain has no soul.

John Buchan. Written in 1916, the novel The Power-House pits a perennial Buchan everyman hero, Leithen, against Mr. Andrew Lumley, a capitalist powerhouse, a brain detached from everything human. At first meeting, Leithen dislikes Lumley. When he tries to find a reason for his dislike, he decides that Lumley is just too “Olympian.” And as he comes to know him better, he realizes that Lumley also is satanic: “Do you know what it is to deal with pure intelligence, a brain stripped of every shred of humanity? It is like being in the company of a snake.”

Lumley’s credo, which he delivers near the end of the novel, is the modern credo, spawned by Satan and nurtured by the Greek philosophers and their Catholic lackeys:

“I am a sceptic about most things,” he said, “but, believe me, I have my own worship. I venerate the intellect of man. I believe in its undreamed-of possibilities, when it grows free like an oak in the forest and is not dwarfed in a flower-pot. From that allegiance I have never wavered. That is the God I have never forsworn.”

It is time for Western man to forswear that false God. The drama is not over. The disembodied brains must wait till the last scene of the last act is played out. For it is always, as St. Paul assures us, in the last scene or at the last trump, if you will, that the Hero turns the tables on the villain.