Until Liberaldom Is Ashes

“And the LORD was angry with Solomon, because his heart was turned from the LORD God of Israel, which had appeared unto him twice, And had commanded him concerning this thing, that he should not go after other gods: but he kept not that which the LORD commanded.” – I Kings 11: 9-10

Recently while doing my monthly check of the news, I saw a panel of experts discussing the economy. All agreed that the national debt had reached crisis proportions and all agreed that no one in the Republican or Democratic parties was really addressing the problem of the national debt. The experts went on to explain that if really intelligent people (like themselves) were consulted, and if peripheral issues such as illegal immigration and abortion were not allowed to distract the nation from the one big economic issue, all might yet be well.

Let’s give the panel members the benefit of the doubt and assume that when they said intelligence was needed they really meant what was needed was wisdom, which is greater than mere intelligence. Is wisdom enough? Solomon was the wisest of all the kings of Israel, yet he destroyed Israel by marrying heathen princesses and placing images of Ba-al, Ashtoreth, Chemosh and Molech in full view of the Temple of the Lord. All this the wise Solomon did to please his wives. And in order to maintain his wives and himself in luxury he taxed his people beyond their ability to pay. So it seems that even if the wise panelists could be put in charge, we would not reduce our national debt by one dollar. Something besides mere wisdom is needed to rule a country.

Let’s go back to Solomon. What was that wise man's fatal flaw? He did not love God as his father David did. David’s sins were scarlet, but he never ceased loving the Lord and trying to do His will. If we permit legalized murder in the form of abortion, and if we permit national genocide in the form of legal and illegal colored immigration, are we doing the will of God? And if we are not doing the will of God, how can we expect to “turn the economy around”? Solomon was left one tribe out of the twelve for “the sake of your father David.” Will the Europeans even be allowed to rule their own tribe? Do they even want to?

It’s insane to talk about reducing the national debt in our modern Babylonian state. Concern about leaving one’s children with enormous debts is a Christian concern. The post-Christian debauchee views existence much like Louis XV of France: “After me, the deluge.”

The deluge has come, and we would be fools indeed to look to the people who caused it to rescue us from the deluge. Conservative and liberal alike have bid us view issues of sound economics and knowing the will of God as distinct and separate issues. But they are one issue. And in saying that, I do not mean to imply, as some preachers do, that we can get stock tips from the Bible or that faith breeds wealth. What I do maintain is that the right type of economy comes from a people who are concerned with knowing and doing the will of God. Life is a vale of tears no matter what the economic system, but human suffering can be eased by the proper, the Christian, ordering of society. Goldsmith makes this point in his poem “The Deserted Village”:

In all my wanderings through this world of care,
In all my griefs -- and God has given my share --
I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown,
Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down;
To husband out life's taper at the close,
And keep the flame from wasting, by repose:
I still had hopes, for pride attends us still,
Amidst the swains to show my book-learn'd skill,
Around my fire an evening group to draw,
And tell of all I felt, and all I saw;
And, as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,
Pants to the place from whence at first she flew,
I still had hopes, my long vexations past,
Here to return -- and die at home at last.

O blest retirement, friend to life's decline,
Retreats from care, that never must be mine,
How blest is he who crowns, in shades like these,
A youth of labour with an age of ease;
Who quits a world where strong temptations try,
And, since 'tis hard to combat, learns to fly!
For him no wretches, born to work and weep,
Explore the mine, or tempt the dangerous deep;
No surly porter stands, in guilty state,
To spurn imploring famine from the gate;
But on he moves to meet his latter end,
Angels around befriending virtue's friend;
Sinks to the grave with unperceived decay,
While resignation gently slopes the way;
And, all his prospects brightening to the last,
His heaven commences ere the world be past!

Let’s suppose a European such as myself got to sit on that panel of experts. And let’s further suppose I tell the panel of experts that, “We can never wipe out our national debt so long as we ban the master of the revels, Jesus Christ, from the body politic.”

What would be the panelists’ reaction? The reactions would vary from condescending smirks to indignant scowls, but none of the panelists would say, “By George, you’re right! We have left out the Son of God – what an oversight!”

I know that the case will be made that religious faith must be kept separate from economics because men fight over religion. Yes, men do fight over religion, but then they fight over economics as well. A man is dead without a poetic vision of life that stems from his faith. How can he make good decisions about anything important if he deliberately narrows his vision in order to exclude the silken, poetic thread of life, faith.

In the one great religious poem of the 20th century, C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis emphasizes that Aslan, the Christ figure, is not a tame Lion. The religious impulse is pure fire and desire; it can lead a man to heaven or, if diverted from its true source, to hell. Rev. Dimmesdale in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter allows his passion for God to become a passion for another man’s wife, but ultimately his passion finds its true home, at the foot of the Cross.

The poetic impulse, our passionate desire for something more than nature, for the transcendent, has always been considered dangerous by the managerial philosophers and theologians. Plato wanted to ban the poets from his Republic, Martha wanted Mary to stop her dreaming and help with the dishes, Aquinas wanted to keep God within the confines of his syllogisms, the born-againers want to confine religious passion to their single-room apartment, and on it goes; religious formalism has always been at war with religious faith. There were and are good reasons for leaving Christ out of the pictures; He is, after all, not a tame lion, and men who follow Him tend to be rather unpredictable and hard to handle. But what is the alternative? The alternative is the soul-dead ant heap of humanity called 'modern Europeans'.

The Europeans died when, like Solomon, they separated religious passion from wisdom. Solomon was the wisest of the wise, but he became a fool because his passion was for heathen women and heathen gods. The Europeans’ love for the Negro and the gods of the colored people made Christendom into Satandom, and no economic policy can succeed that does not confront this blasphemy.

The Christian Platos who so thoroughly banished passion from their Christian republics did not know what they were spawning. Man needs to be passionate about his faith. If he can’t be passionate about Christianity because the Christian Platos forbid it, then he will become passionate about some other god, or many other gods. The modern Christians bring blacks into their churches because they can’t be passionate about the Son of God, but they can be passionate about the black man. We should not seek to end Negro worship by abandoning Christ, as the neo-pagans so aggressively demand; we should abandon the abstract, passionless Christianity of the dried-up religious experts of the Western world.

In my freshman year at college, my assigned roommate was a chess enthusiast. He subscribed to several chess magazines and belonged to the college chess club. I had never played chess before in my life, yet when I played the chess enthusiast in a game, I won. I didn’t win because I was a natural-born chess genius, I won because my unorthodox play confused my very logical roommate who was used to a more traditional, logical game. My victory, quite understandably, irritated my roommate. I hadn’t technically violated any of the rules, but I didn’t, in his judgment, “play the game correctly.” I think the managerial-type theologians have, over the Christian centuries, been irritated with Christ. “You’re not playing the game correctly,” they tell Him, but then they had no reason to expect Him to be a tame Lion. And they have no right to demand that His followers be tame lions either.

Dostoyevsky wrote so eloquently in “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov about the conflict between the clerical formalists who can’t abide what, in their eyes, is the whimsical and irresponsible behavior of Christ who plays the part of the passionate Pied Piper, imploring His people to respond in kind to His passionate love song:

“'So that, in truth, Thou didst Thyself lay the foundation for the destruction of Thy kingdom, and no one is more to blame for it. Yet what was offered Thee? There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness--those forces are miracle, mystery and authority. Thou hast rejected all three and hast set the example for doing so. When the wise and dread spirit set Thee on the pinnacle of the temple and said to Thee, "If Thou wouldst know whether Thou art the Son of God then cast Thyself down, for it is written: the angels shall hold him up lest he fall and bruise himself, and Thou shalt know then whether Thou art the Son of God and shalt prove then how great is Thy faith in Thy Father." But Thou didst refuse and wouldst not cast Thyself down. Oh, of course, Thou didst proudly and well, like God; but the weak, unruly race of men, are they gods? Oh, Thou didst know then that in taking one step, in making one movement to cast Thyself down, Thou wouldst be tempting God and have lost all Thy faith in Him, and wouldst have been dashed to pieces against that earth which Thou didst come to save. And the wise spirit that tempted Thee would have rejoiced. But I ask again, are there many like Thee? And couldst Thou believe for one moment that men, too, could face such a temptation? Is the nature of men such, that they can reject miracle, and at the great moments of their life, the moments of their deepest, most agonising spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the heart?”

Yes, “the free verdict of the heart” is what is missing from modern Christianity. When the European of the old stock, the European with a heart that still loves, returns from exile, the liberal world will hear the sound of the same hosannas that made Satan tremble and gave life to the European people. It is useless to proscribe passion; it will out. In the counter-revolution, we will oppose the liberals’ passion for their heathen gods of color with our passion for the Son of God. The passionate European, the European who loves and hates with all his heart, is the Trojan horse within the walls of Liberaldom, and he will not sheath his sword until Liberaldom is ashes. +

Shakespeare

How little fades from earth when sink to rest
The hours and cares that move a great man’s breast!
Though naught of all we saw the grave may spare,
His life pervades the world’s impregnate air;
Though Shakespeare’s dust beneath our footsteps lies,
His spirit breathes amid his native skies;
With meaning won from him forever glows
Each air that England feels, and star it knows;
His whispered words from many a mother’s voice
Can make her sleeping child in dreams rejoice,
And gleams from spheres he first conjoined to earth
Are blent with rays of each new morning’s birth.
Amid the sights and tales of common things,
Leaf, flower, and bird, and wars, and deaths of kings,--
Of shore, and sea, and nature’s daily round,
Of life that tills, and tombs that load the ground,
His visions mingle, swell, command, pace by,
And haunt with living presence heart and eye;
And tones from him by other bosoms caught
Awaken flush and stir of mounting thought,
And the long sigh, and deep impassioned thrill,
Rouse custom’s trance, and spur the faltering will.
Above the goodly land, more his than ours
He sits supreme enthroned in skyey towers,
And sees the heroic brood of his creation
Teach larger life to his ennobled nation.
O shaping brain! O flashing fancy’s hues!
O boundless heart kept fresh by pity’s dews!
O wit humane and blithe! O sense sublime!
For each dim oracle of mantled time!
Transcendant form of man! in whom we read
Mankind’s whole tale of impulse, thought, and deed!
Amid the expanse of years, beholding thee,
We know how vast our world of life may be;
Wherein, perchance, with aims as pure as thine,
Small tasks and strength may be no less divine.

by John Sterling

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. +

So Ancient and So New

“The water which has been refused to the cry of the weary and dying, is unholy, though it had been blessed by every saint in heaven; and the water which is found in the vessel of mercy is holy, though it had been defiled with corpses.” – The King of the Golden River

There are things we understand organically, things that are inside of us, and other things we can only comprehend from the outside, by observation. Let me use the example of homosexuality. When I was a young man, thankfully homosexual men were still in the closet. In fact, I don’t think in my teen years I could have given an accurate definition of a homosexual. By the time I entered my college years, however, homosexuals were being encouraged to come out of their closets, and I was then forced to acknowledge that, strange as it might seem to me, there were men who desired to be with men in the way I desired to be with women. But as a heterosexual I was not a minority of one, so I don’t recall being particularly upset that some men were not heterosexual.

It was a different case with my religious orientation. I lost and regained my childhood faith while in the belly of the beast called academia. My “teachers” undermined Christianity, but in the Library there were antique books that existed side by side with those of the despoilers. Men like Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, and Le Fanu told a different story than the philosophical speculators. My nihilism then gave way to the very elemental faith -- let’s call it the ‘Little Town of Bethlehem’ faith -- of my European ancestors. (1)

Man is a very social animal. Having come to believe in that faith which is “so ancient and so new,” I sought fellowship, not only in church but in society. And in both church and society I had to confront the fact that what I believed about God and the European culture, which showed me the face of Christ, was not the organic belief of any of my fellow Europeans.

The new Europeans had broken with the past that was the source of my new found faith. The Europeans of the older times looked on the Christian faith as an epic poem with Christ as the Hero. Through His incarnation, crucifixion, death, and resurrection, He revealed to men the humanity of God and the divine element of humanity. Man was the centerpiece of God’s creation, a personality of infinite value. But in the new Christianity, which cut across all denominational lines, Christ was the great Illuminator; He came not to set hearts on fire, but to enlighten men’s minds. The new Christianity was a mathematical system, and the elect were the men who could figure that system out.

I’ve never been able to understand, from inside, why mathematical, cosmic Christianity is more appealing to modern Europeans than the poetic, fairy tale Christianity of the Europeans of the past. But I have to acknowledge that it is because that is the faith they preach and practice.

Let’s place the faith of our European ancestors up against the faith of the modern Europeans. Our ancestors believed that heaven visited earth in the form of Jesus Christ, and through a divine act of charity He bound our hearts to His heart. All that we know of God and our fellow man comes from our hearts which He set on fire. This is why the folktales of the European people always stress the miraculous powers of a human heart that is connected to the divine heart: “Charity never faileth.”

In contrast to the way of charity, the way of the Third Dumb Brother of the European fairy tale, is a religion that exalts the superior intellect. God does not impart to human hearts, He enlightens human minds, or at least some human minds. “You too can become one of the illuminated” is the call to which modern Christians respond. And in such a religion there is no need to stay connected to a particular people’s past. In fact there is no such thing as a people, either as a group or as individuals; there is only illuminated minds connected to other illuminated minds. The white man is not committing suicide because he has lost his mind; he is committing suicide because he has lost his heart. It is in the coffin he built for the fairy tale faith of his European ancestors.

I found the folklorists of Europe left a trail of bread crumbs that led back to the cottage of the Son of God. Their apologetics of the hearth and the heart was the same as the one He used when He walked the earth. His apologetics consisted of a story about a hero (our Lord was the hero of His story) woven around dogmas illustrated by stories.

Why does the use of stories and parables mark a work as inferior apologetics and lacking in serious moral purpose? In illuminated circles such a work is labeled “natural” and thus inferior to the supernatural works of the Doctors of Theology, but by such a standard the Gospels would be considered inferior apologetics, and Christ a second-rate theologian.

The false assumption of the illuminated apologist is that reason alone stands unpolluted by original sin. This is false. Our reason is not meant to be separated from the rest of our being; it is only when we seek Christ with our heart, soul, and mind, that we can attain a vision (through a glass darkly) of the true God.

Genuine apologetics must be like the old apologetics of our Lord, showing us a vision of the true God through the use of parable, story, and the image of the Hero. When the central dogma of Christ incarnate, Christ crucified, Christ risen is still strongly present in the consciousness of the reader, the story of the Christ-like hero (such as Zorro or the Scarlet Pimpernel) is sufficient without the dogma. But when the central dogma of Western civilization has receded from the consciousness of men, the dogma must be more explicit. C. S. Lewis, in his Chronicles of Narnia, gives us the new-old apologetics for the 21st century. He makes explicit what writers such as Kenneth Grahame, Walter Scott, and Joseph Le Fanu were saying implicitly.

There will be many who will quarrel over the artistic merits of a work of literature that makes such an explicit case for the Christian Faith. But such individuals do not understand that all art is religious. There is no such thing as a work of art without a religious vision. The vision is the work of art. What makes a work of art didactic in the pejorative sense is the nature of the religious vision conveyed. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel, The Secret Garden, is not offensive because she writes about God; her novel is offensive because her god is a pantheistic, Buddha-type of God.

Many Catholics are particularly hostile to fairy tale apologetics. The reason Tolkien thought Narnia childish and vulgar was because he was raised in the “old” Catholic school (which was of course really a very modern school), which taught that art and religion were in separate categories, the one in the natural order, and the other in the supernatural order. But that is a false division. God does not just exist on the Mt. Sinai of the theologians, nor should apologetics be left to the professionals.

C. S. Lewis’s regress was a regress to fairy tale Christianity. After discovering the limitations of the more traditional apologetics, which he did quite well, he wrote the great work of Christian apologetics in Narnia. He broke through the Thomistic separation of the natural and the supernatural and told us a really true fairy tale of how we can learn to love God in this world and live happily ever after with Him in the next. He kept it simple for the peasants like myself, without compromising the dogma.

There is nothing written in stone that says apologetics must be dull, mathematical, unmetaphorical, unimaginative, and unintelligible. The use of parables and stories in one’s apologetics should not disqualify a work from the ranks of “serious” apologetics. In fact, it is my contention that a really effective apologia for the Faith should incorporate the heroic fairy tale traditions of Europe and the Gospels. And because our current anti-civilization does not consciously recognize the central dogma of our old civilization, the new apologetics will make it clear for whom the cross on the knight’s breastplate stands. It stands for the Christ, who was and is the source of the blood faith of the non-illuminated European people. +
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(1) There are two types of faith that I can honestly say entered my blood. The first was the fairy tale Christianity of my childhood and my adulthood, and the second was nihilism, which is more an absence of faith, of my late teens and early twenties. All other modes of thought and feeling I understand as an outside observer.

Rationalist Christianity does not move me in the slightest. Nor do the various nature religions. And neo-paganism? If man is merely a biological specimen as the neo-pagans maintain, then why should I care whether white or black vegetable matter predominates over the other? A person’s skin color matters only if his racial identity is part of his soul, which is a thing divine and which belongs to God. “Nearer My Genes to Me” is not a very inspiring hymn.

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.

Catholic vs. Protestant

“The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

—King Lear

Once, while working as a police officer, I consulted a lawyer about what strategy to adopt against a low-life, criminal type who was accusing me of brutality. It is a little game the bad guys play: by charging the arresting officer with brutality, they hope to get reduced charges or even an acquittal and then civil suit damages.

After the business end of the discussion, there was a brief human encounter (very rare) between police officer and the lawyer. Off the record I told the lawyer, “The problem with this whole business is that you can’t tell the whole truth. You can’t say, ‘Yeah, I gave the blankety-blank so-and-so a few extra shots after I had the handcuffs on because the blankety-blank so-and-so tried to stick me while I was trying to cuff him, and our lives wouldn’t be worth a nickel if there wasn’t some kind of immediate retaliation for that type of thing.’ But if you say that in court, the opposing lawyer will jump all over you and move for the immediate dismissal of the charges against his sweet angelic client. So you stick to the old formula: ‘I used the minimum amount of force necessary to facilitate an arrest.’”

The lawyer agreed with my assessment and, with rare candor for a lawyer, said, “We are all whores.”

I have seen the same courtroom dynamic at work in the Catholic-Protestant debate. No concessions can be made because each side must win the dialectic argument or be faced with loss of case, loss of face, loss of job. But unfortunately, the dialectic is not the highest form of discourse nor is it the discourse most conducive to the truth. So I would like to move beyond the dialectic and actually say something about the Catholic and Protestant versions of Christianity.

The Catholic Church has the X’s and O’s; they have the ‘smart ones’ on their side. Indeed, I recently heard one convert state that he became a Catholic because Catholics were “so smart.” But the Church’s smartness is its weakness as well. Catholics have everything that Protestants lack: sacraments, Mariology, prestigious theologians, Church fathers dating back to the beginning of Christianity, and an infallible pope. But they don’t have Christ because they have preferred the ‘smart’ Plato and Aristotle to the Son of Man.

Dietrich von Hildebrand once criticized Thomas Molnar for making some mild criticisms of Plato. It was von Hildebrand’s contention that Plato was the vessel from which God had ordained we should receive Christ’s revelation. Hmm… I thought the Jewish people were that divinely appointed vessel. I wonder if von Hildebrand really had ever read Plato with an objective eye. Plato, the birth control advocate, despiser of the poets, and advocate of the Socratic dialectic as the highest form of wisdom, is not a worthy vessel for Christ’s revelation. Nor is the atheistic, bug-collecting, materialist named Aristotle.

It bears repeating that the greatest poet of the Greek culture, Sophocles, said it was better not be born than to live in the closed, rationalist universe of the philosophers. The “folk” of Asia Minor preferred the mystery religions to that of Greece and Rome. And the people of God, the true vessel of Christ’s revelation, spoke of God in these non-Platonic and non-Aristotelian terms: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.” That is the language one uses when addressing a personal God. That is the language of St. Paul, of Shakespeare, and of all Christians who have not succumbed to the Greek heresy.

I’m not saying there were never any Christians in the Catholic Church, but I do think the Church has, over time, become a most unChristian institution. One gets used to hearing our Church leaders support every radical and vile cause that comes along, but shouldn’t that tell us something about the Church?

There is nothing good that one can say about modern Protestantism. It is every bit as anti-Christian as modern Catholicism. And I don’t want to go over the Reformation debate again. Neither side is guiltless. What I want to focus on is a surviving remnant of Christians in the Protestant ranks who have no counterpart in the Catholic ranks.

The fringe elements in the Protestant Church, those Fundamentalists to the right of Jerry Falwell, do not have the Faith in its entirety. But they are more Catholic than any Catholics because they have chosen to stay with the Christ of the Gospels instead of the Platonic Christ or the Aristotelian Christ. And the great struggle of Christians in every century, the one which the visible Catholic Church gave up in the 20th century, is the struggle to retain a vision of the one true God rather than a blueprint of the attributes of God. And therein lies the reason for the greater Catholicism of the Fundamentalists: they have maintained, in an imperfect form, a vision of the true God.

Adhering only to one’s personal interpretation of Scripture and to the personal vision of Christ derived from that personal perusal of the Gospels is fraught with danger. One has only to look at the devastation in the Protestant churches to see the consequences of the “Scripture alone” approach to Christianity, but the Catholic Church has committed an even graver error than the Protestant churches. The Catholic Church has forgotten that Christianity does start with a personal relationship with the Christ of the Gospels. The sacraments, the wisdom of the clergy, and an infallible pope all exist to nurture and refine that initial, personal vision of Christ. They do not exist to replace that vision with a pagan philosophical system. It was personal contact with Christ that raised Jairus’s daughter, not the vaunted wisdom of the Greek sages.

I do not see how one can accept the Catholic Church’s claim to be the one true Church so long as that fundamental personal encounter with the Christ of the Gospels is set at naught. The Church needs an infusion of Fundamentalists’ blood if she is to live. Theoretically, Christ’s blood flows in the Church, but it seems that the blood cannot, or will not, flow in the unholy vessels of the Greek philosophers.

Having experienced the Catholic and Protestant versions of Christianity, I can say that I find neither version to be complete by itself. I see a shore called Christianity. We are given a sailboat with which to reach that shore.

The Catholic sages tell us we don’t need the body of the boat or the sail; all we need, they say, is the rudder. Of course with no boat, no sail, and only a rudder, we can never get to the shore.

The Protestants, on the other hand, tell us we don’t need a rudder. All we need, they say, is a boat and a sail. Without a rudder to steer, nine boats out of ten do not make it safely to shore. But one out of ten does.

So, it is not a perfect equality. The Catholic Church, to whom everything was given, has nothing. The Protestant Church has, in its despised lunatic fringe, something that the Catholic Church needs if it is ever to reach the shore.

The anti-Christian nature of modern Catholicism has been brought home to me in so many ways. The works of Flannery O’Connor provide just one example: In all of her major novels and in all but one of her short stories, the hero, when there is a hero, is always a Protestant Fundamentalist. When Flannery O’Connor was asked why this was so, she said it was because when a Protestant heard voices, he thought it was God speaking to him, and when a Catholic heard voices, he thought it was the devil speaking to him; thus a Protestant character had more freedom of movement, upward and downward, in -which to act out the drama of salvation.

But should this be so? Does a commitment to the Catholic sacramental system mean that our intuitive facilities that hear those inner voices must always be suppressed in deference to the rational faculties of the Catholic clergy? No, it should not. Such a system kills the romance of the Faith. It kills love, honor, and bravery. In short, it kills the soul. Is there no room in Catholicism for that old quaint notion that what the heart prompts is the echo of the soul? Apparently not. But the Church should make room for such antiquarian notions because now she sits, so cold, so still, on a throne of ice, inaccessible to human beings with hearts that still live.