…for the record, what Gaedhal calls ‘Atheistic Hyperchristianity’ is what we have been calling ‘Neo-Christianity’ on this site.
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Tag: Axiology
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Antipodes
Michael Jones and Tom Holland
Almost at the beginning of this interview, Tom Holland said: ‘Christianity has so kind of saturated the meaning of words in English that it was incredibly difficult to use them’ in his books, ‘and get back to a pre-Christian world’. So saturated that ‘even being opposed to Christianity has Christian roots’! We can see this among those racialists who are ostensibly secular but who ultimately subscribe to Christian morality. Holland even claims: ‘Atheism… is very very Christian in its impulse.’
This is why I hate atheists.
Then up to minute 22, Holland says that the notion that anything secular has existed in the West is a delusion: that the secular and the religious have always been two sides of the same coin. Westerners have been unable to see this because they don’t realise that, axiologically, secular values are essentially religious values. (Holland mentions Richard Dawkins, whom he accuses of unconsciously moving within a matrix of Protestant values.)
After 37 minutes, Holland talks about how difficult it was for Anglo-American Christians to tolerate racialised slavery in their colonies. For, according to Christian teaching, all human beings are equal. First, the Quakers began to hammer away at this issue, then Evangelical Episcopalians followed until abolitionism emerged.
‘Slavery is a monstrous sin,’ says Holland rephrasing the Christians of another age. But this is where you see that even contemporary white nationalism is, still, a Judaic creature. I have already mentioned, and it is worth mentioning again, that in a discussion between two of them it seemed very obvious to the ‘secular’ racialist that the Christian racialist’s question was beyond the pale: ‘What’s wrong with slavery?’ referring to Old Dixie.
The sad truth is that the anti-Semites on the WN forums are still servants of the Jews. They obey Judeo-Christian-inspired precepts which, from their origins, were always aimed at demoralising the pagan Roman and convincing him that he had better worship the god of the Jews. From this angle, The West’s Darkest Hour is the only authentically Jew-wise site in existence today. Even the critics of Christianity on the racial right are not authentically Jew-wise because they fail to recognise that any Aryan who subscribes to Christian morality is even worse than a subversive Jew, for the internal traitor is worse than the external enemy.
After 42 minutes, the interviewer asks Holland a central question: What would the world be like if Rome had not succumbed to Christianity? After an historical prologue, by the 47th minute Holland answered: ‘Why do black lives matter? Because historically in the United States, black people were enslaved… Or why there are trans rights roiling countries of Christian heritage in a way that they’re not roiling in countries with other [emphasis in Holland’s voice] heritage?’ Given that values have been inverted throughout the West because of Christianity, Holland adds that it is their victimhood what ‘gives them credit; being a victim becomes a source of privilege.’
Then Holland talks about his forthcoming book on his trilogy on Rome, but he is completely unaware of the work of scholars that we have summarised here challenging the historicity of Jesus. This is a terrible gap in Holland’s intellectual baggage and reminds me that white nationalists also ignore this issue. Immediately afterwards during the interview with Michael Jones, Holland makes the same mistake in discussing the origins of Islam.
The other issue that Holland doesn’t seem to address in the interview or his book Dominion is that the sexual mores and customs of Sparta, Republican Rome and ancient Germans were different from those of Imperial Rome. Holland seems to judge the entire pre-Christian world by the standards of pagan degeneracy, not when they were healthy.
But after 1:08 Holland confesses something vital that makes him our ideological enemy. While it is clear that we can use Dominion to show that liberalism is a direct child of Christianity and that atheists are de facto neo-Christians, we repudiate what he says: ‘I would say I am much more of a Christian than a theist… uhm, I’ve come to recognise that I am pretty much completely Christian in my values and my assumptions. The problem I have is believing that there is a God, ha!’
Holland even confesses that he only feels God—I would say the god of the Jews—during Passover and Christmas, but that the rest of the year he remains sceptical. But even on those remaining 363 days that is the same problem of white nationalists who presume to be secular: the scale of values of these so-called anti-Semites comes directly from a religion of Semitic origin.
For new visitors, my Dominion excerpts can be found here. Just compare Holland’s position in the above interview with my position at the end of that link. We are antipodes!
Like Andrew Anglin I am glad that Paris and other French cities are going up in flames. As Nietzsche and I said in the last two pages of Neo-Christianity, not only the Vatican (the symbol of Christianity) but the Arc de Triomphe, as a symbol of Neo-Christianity, must be razed to the ground. But unlike Anglin, I look not at the present but at the causes that led the French and other whites to believe such idiocies as that humans of all races, Orcs included, can be French citizens.
In the last few days I have been linking to videos by normies that shed light on the POV of this site. But only a couple of hours ago I discovered a Christian, Stephen Meyer, who concedes that we have ‘a secularised hyper form of Christianity that we call wokeness that is eating our culture from inside out…’
Stephen Meyer, Douglas Murray, Tom Holland and Peter Robinson.
But that wasn’t the highlight of that roundtable. Most important was what Murray said next. Responding to Holland he said that—I rephrase—it is a miracle that Christian morality is, at this historical moment, hanging in the air without the support of traditional Christian dogma, like the cartoons I used to watch as a child, where a character would cut the branch of a tree he was sitting on with a saw and not fall down until he realised that the branch and he were no longer supported by anything!
This miracle of being in the air for a couple of seconds without falling (although in historical times it’s not seconds but decades) gives me hope, not the hope of Murray but the hope of seeing the blonde beast redivivus once he falls.
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The Appian way
Christian morality is the seedbed that makes today’s secular West what it is, and for contemporary American racialists the hardest pill to swallow is that their movement has failed because of Christianity. And it will continue to fail unless they become true apostates, not only apostates from Christian dogma but also of the axiological side of Christianity: the so-called secular side. After all, ‘secular’ is just the tricky term St Augustine chose for his theological system, used even in our modern world, when in fact the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’ have always been two sides of the same cultural coin.
Any racialist movement was doomed from the start, is doomed and will be doomed to failure unless it is understood that Christianity, or more specifically Christian morality, has always been the Devil for the white man. This includes the morality of today’s atheists whose worldview we here call Neo-Christian.
Only by telling us the story of the white race as it really happened in the Greco-Roman world (and here we can think of some essays from The Fair Race), together with elementary historical facts such as the non-existence of Jesus that Richard Carrier talks about, and how the New Testament was authored by Jews as David Skrbina believes, will it be possible to modify the collective unconscious of the white man—especially if we add to that a few pages from Karlheinz Deschner’s Criminal History of Christianity and the history of the Holocaust committed by the Allies, so well described in Tom Goodrich’s Hellstorm. The psychohistorical work of Tom Holland, who has lost faith in traditional Christianity is also pivotal even if, as a typical British liberal, he is our ideological enemy. But let’s use him as a useful idiot!
Holland hit the nail on the head when he said that National Socialism has been the most radical movement since Constantine, especially because it rebels against St Paul’s idea that there is no difference between Jews and Greeks (transformed today in the religious belief that there is no difference between blacks and whites): the original mental virus that caused the inversion of values. Holland also points out that the National Socialists repudiated the very essence of the emblem of the Cross: that a crucified victim is more morally worthy than the crucifying Romans. This idea persists in our times during mass hysteria phenomena such as the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots of 2020 surrounding the death of George Floyd when countless whites, even outside the US, bent the knee before primitive negroes in the most humiliating way!
Holland has said in several interviews that the central emblem of Western civilisation, Christ on the Cross (now downtrodden negroes on ‘crosses’) provides a moral framework for understanding the Woke phenomenon. Before reading Dominion, in ‘On empowering carcass-eating birds’ in my book Daybreak I had already said that empowering transgender people was a kind of neo-Franciscanism, in reference to St Francis of Assisi (‘let’s love and kiss the new leper’), and quoted the biblical passage that the last shall be first and the first last. Analogously, speaking about whites bending the knee after the BLM riots, Holland has said that this grotesque self-debasement ultimately goes back to the Gospel narrative of the Passion, ‘to that very, very primal image of a man tortured to death by an oppressive state apparatus: Jesus on the cross.’ Not only at the end of Dominion but in his lectures this London historian has also said that a thoroughgoing rejection of Christianity would allow us to return to the ways of the blond beast. (As axiological enemies of Holland, we would add that the first thing this beast would do will be to drive the millions non-whites out of their lands and punish the recalcitrant as the Romans did in the Appian Way.) In a home interview with a conservative Australian, Holland added:
The modern who has more profoundly and unsettlingly understood just how radical that idea is—how radical the idea that the Cross, of all things, should become the emblem of the new civilisation—, was a man who was not just an atheist but a radical hostile, anti-Christian atheist: Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche said: this is a repellent thing. Nietzsche identified with the power and the glory and the beauty of classical civilisation; and he thought that Christianity, notoriously, was a religion for slaves. And he saw in the emblem of Christ nailed to the Cross a kind of disgusting subversion of the ideals of the classical world: a privileging of those who properly should be ground beneath the heels of the mighty. And he saw it as a kind of sickness that then, it kind of infected the blond beast as he called it: that the primordial figure of the warrior gets corrupted and turned into a monk, a monkish figure who is sick with poverty and sympathy for the poor and the oppressed…
Fascism, I think, was the most radical revolutionary movement that Europe has seen since the age of Constantine because unlike the French Revolution, unlike and the Russian Revolution, it doesn’t even target institutional Christianity: it targets the moral-ethical fundamentals of Christianity. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution are still preaching that idea that the victim should be raised up from the dust and that the oppressor should be humbled into the dust; it’s still preaching the idea that the first should be last and the last should be first just as Christ has done.
The Nazis do not buy into that.
In the post-WWII world westerners culminated the inversion of healthy values that started with Constantine. They enshrined the privileges of the unprivileged and the universality of all human beings—orc immigrants included—because they now live in the shadow of what enshrined the opposite: Hitlerism; and, given their Christian programming, that scares them. As Holland said at the end of another interview, ‘to cling to the idea that, say, racism is the ultimate sin is still for deeply Christian reasons. It’s possible to imagine a different world in which the strong are powerful and in which the world is divided into the civilised and the barbarians because that’s what the Ancient World was like, and that’s what the Nazis enshrined. It’s perfectly possible. The fact that we regard them as abhorrent I think is testimony of how Christian we remain.’
What Angela Merkel did, opening the doors to two million refugees in anti-Nazi Germany, is ultimately an extreme form of following the parable of the Good Samaritan. Always keep in mind that Jesus didn’t exist but that some Jewish rabbis, the mythmakers, wrote the New Testament. No racialist movement that fails to see this can succeed because despite their rabid anti-Semitism racialists continue to, ultimately, obey the Jews who wrote the NT. They are jew-obeyers. They all live, atheists included, under the moral sky bequeathed to us by the mighty archetype of ‘God on the Cross.’ And outside racist forums, the attempt to make not only the dispossessed blacks but poor transexual people the first, and the healthy white man the last, is but the final metastasis of an inversion that began to take root in our collective unconscious as early as the 4th century of the Common Era.
For decades, in my soliloquies I have often said to myself: ‘A fish cannot criticise water.’ We live in a matrix. Without knowing it or recognising it, secular humanists have been swimming in Christian waters since what misleadingly they call the Age of Enlightenment (actually a ‘Dark Enlightenment,’ as some right-wing intellectuals have pointed out). Ultimately this whole issue of ‘human rights’ is nothing more than a transposition to the legal plane of the Pauline ideas that there is no difference between Jew and Greek, woman and man. In the Athenian democracy only the native males of Attica had the right to vote. Neither slaves nor women nor mudblood foreigners could do so. The assumption that we owe modern democracy to the Greeks is false: we owe it to Christian mandates. Furthermore, modern westerners commit what I call, again in my soliloquies, the psychological fallacy of ontological extension. They believe that all cultures share their humanitarian values when not even the ancient Greeks, the Romans or Norsemen did; let alone billions of contemporary Muslims, Chinese or Hindus. In Holland’s words, ‘the conceit of the West is that it has transcended Christianity to become purely universal; purely global, and therefore it can market itself in those terms. But its values, its assumptions, its ethics remain palpably bred of the marrow of Christianity.’
The term catholic derives from the Greek, katholikos. If we translate ‘universal human rights’ into the Greek of the first centuries of our era, we would be talking about ‘catholic human rights’ insofar as catholic means precisely universal in the sense of no longer making distinctions between Jew and Greek, woman and man, slave and free man: all are now equal in the eyes of a Semitic god. Human rights are catholic in this universal sense. Hitler targeted the idea there exists such a thing as universal human dignity, as well as the idea that the first should be last. From his viewpoint, our viewpoint, and I am talking to those who will read Savitri Devi’s Memories and Reflections of an Aryan Woman, or our books Day of Wrath and On Exterminationism, there is no such a thing as rights. Only the moral duty to dispose of the obsolete versions of Homo sapiens. This is the ultimate repudiation of the Christian heritage. And the horror that most westerners feel at the figures of Hitler and Himmler is nothing other than their continued enslavement to the archetype of the Jew on the Cross which they are still unable to exorcize from their psyches, even if this symbolic ‘Jew’ now takes other forms.
If we see Christianity and the French Revolution’s human rights as two sides of the same axiological coin, let us venture to say that the perfect symbol of our counter-revolution would be for thousands of blonde beasts starting to wear T-shirts emblazoned with Himmler’s face while burning churches, crucifying those who tried to destroy their race and wiping their asses with the remains of the pages of the now destroyed Bibles all over the West, but especially in the US. And the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which symbolises the historic inauguration of Neo-Christianity, must be razed to the ground as well.
As Nietzsche would say, Umwertung aller Werte!
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Watch Holland!
It doesn’t matter that Tom Holland is a normie, a liberal like everyone else and even anti-Nazi: he is spot on in this interview!
The Nazis do not buy into that. The Nazis buy into the Nietzschean idea that the weak are weak and should be treated as weak, as contemptable, as something to be crushed.
Atheists of today [like Richard Dawkins et al]… they are basically Christians. Nietzsche saw humanists, communists, liberals—people who may define themselves against Christianity—as being absolutely in the fundamentals Christian, and I think he is right about that because I think that in a sense atheism doesn’t repudiate the kind of ethics and the morals and the values of Christianity.
Just transvalue Holland’s neo-Christian axiology and we arrive at the POV of this site!
Update of June 7
In the full interview, after the half-hour mark, Holland touches on a topic he didn’t get to touch on in Dominion because this book was published the year before the BLM 2020 riots. Holland says that in America blacks have been last and whites first.
‘Why is that inherently wrong?’ Holland asks his interlocutor with emphasis. He elaborates for a few minutes on George Floyd and says that this collective hysteria that whites suffered had its origins in the great inversion of values that was initiated by the figure of a helpless victim on the Cross.
From the 38th minute, the anti-Nazi Holland returns to Nazism and then discusses the genesis of the ultimately religious idea of ‘human rights’ after the French Revolution. Holland says that believing in such rights is as theological as believing that Jesus rose from the dead.
Near the 42nd minute, Holland says that Hitler saw in St Paul the Jew whose ideas destroyed Greece and Rome.
After minute 53 Holland says something very interesting. Christian ethics (which is the same as the neo-Christian ethics of atheists) constantly destroys its structures and reinvents itself. This is clear from the Middle Ages to the present day: all those funny anecdotes Holland tells in his book that I didn’t quote on this site because it would have meant quoting his whole book.
In the final minutes Holland hits the nail of all nails: just what we said recently about Richard Spencer’s ‘doughnut’ metaphor (the black hole of anti-Hitlerism) and the ‘Foundation Myth’ article, quoted in red at the top of this site. Holland said that Westerners today ask what Hitler did and they are doing exactly the opposite of that!
‘And by doing the opposite they are doing it for Christian reasons’.
Bingo (see also this moment from a Holland lecture in Romania).
Postscript of 8 June:
And in this lecture from his town, half a year ago, Holland even talks about how ridding ourselves of Christian morality permits us to become exterminationists, and even quotes Himmler (a step which, incidentally, Holland dares not take!).
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Dominion, 37
by Tom Tolland
‘Why do they hate us?’
The president of the United States, in his address to a joint session of Congress, knew that he was speaking for Americans across the country when he asked this question. Nine days earlier, on 11 September, an Islamic group named al-Qaeda had launched a series of devastating attacks against targets in New York and Washington. Planes had been hijacked and then crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Thousands had died. George W. Bush, answering his own question, had no doubt as to the motives of the terrorists. They hated America’s freedoms. Her freedom of religion, her freedom of speech. Yet these were not exclusively American. Rather, they were universal rights. They were as much the patrimony of Muslims as of Christians, of Afghans as of Americans. This was why the hatred felt for Bush and his country across much of the Islamic world was based on misunderstanding. ‘Like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.’ If American values were universal, shared by humans across the planet, regardless of creed or culture, then it stood to reason that Muslims shared them too. Bush, sitting in judgement on the terrorists who had attacked his country, condemned them not just for hijacking planes, but for hijacking Islam itself. ‘We respect the faith. We honor its traditions. Our enemy does not.’ It was in this spirit that the President, even as he ordered the American war machine to inflict a terrible vengeance on al-Qaeda, aimed to bring to the Muslim world freedoms that he believed in all devoutness to be no less Islamic than they were Western. First in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, murderous tyrannies were overthrown. Arriving in Baghdad in April 2003, US forces pulled down statues of the deposed dictator. As they waited to be given sweets and flowers by a grateful people, they waited as well to deliver to Iraq the dues of freedom that Bush, a year earlier, had described as applying fully to the entire Islamic world. ‘When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations.’
Except that sweets and flowers were notable by their absence on the streets of Iraq. Instead, the Americans were greeted with mortar attacks, and car bombs, and improvised explosive devices. The country began to dissolve into anarchy. In Europe, where opposition to the invasion of Iraq had been loud and vocal, the insurgency was viewed with often ill-disguised satisfaction. Even before 9/11, there were many who had felt that ‘the United States had it coming’. By 2003, with US troops occupying two Muslim countries, the accusation that Afghanistan and Iraq were the victims of naked imperialism was becoming ever more insistent. What was all the President’s fine talk of freedom if not a smokescreen? As to what it might be hiding, the possibilities were multiple: oil, geopolitics, the interests of Israel. Yet Bush, although a hard-boiled businessman, was not just about the bottom line. He had never thought to hide his truest inspiration. Asked while still a candidate for the presidency to name his favourite thinker, he had answered unhesitatingly: ‘Christ, because he changed my heart.’ Here, unmistakably, was an Evangelical. Bush, in his assumption that the concept of human rights was a universal one, was perfectly sincere. Just as the Evangelicals who fought to abolish the slave trade had done, he took for granted that his own values—confirmed to him in his heart by the Spirit— were values fit for all the world. He no more intended to bring Iraq to Christianity than British Foreign Secretaries, back in the heyday of the Royal Navy’s campaign against slavery, had aimed to convert the Ottoman Empire. His ambition instead was to awaken Muslims to the values within their own religion that would enable them to see everything they had in common with America. ‘Islam, as practised by the vast majority of people, is a peaceful religion, a religion that respects others.’ Bush, asked to describe his own faith, might well have couched it in similar terms. What bigger compliment, then, could he possibly have paid to Muslims?
But Iraqis did not have their hearts opened to the similarity of Islam to American values. Their country continued to burn. To Bush’s critics, his talk of a war against evil appeared grotesquely misapplied. If anyone had done evil, then it was surely the leader of the world’s greatest military power, a man who had used all the stupefying resources at his command to visit death and mayhem on the powerless. In 2004 alone, US forces in Iraq variously bombed a wedding party, flattened an entire city, and were photographed torturing prisoners. [pages 505-507]
A Qur’an manuscript resting on a rehal.
Three pages further on, Holland continues:
Most menacing of all was the United Nations. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, its delegates had proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To be a Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God. Muslim countries, by joining the United Nations, had signed up to a host of commitments that derived, not from the Qur’an or the Sunna, but from law codes devised in Christian countries: that there should be equality between men and women; equality between Muslims and non-Muslims; a ban on slavery; a ban on offensive warfare. Such doctrines, al-aqdisi sternly ruled, had no place in Islam. To accept them was to become an apostate. Al-Zarqawi, released from prison in 1999, did not forget al-Maqdisi’s warnings. In 2003, launching his campaign in Iraq, he went for a soft and telling target. On 19 August, a car bomb blew up the United Nations headquarters in the country. The UN’s special representative was crushed to death in his office. Twenty-two others were also killed. Over a hundred were left maimed and wounded. Shortly afterwards, the United Nations withdrew from Iraq.
‘Ours is a war not against a religion, not against the Muslim faith.’ President Bush’s reassurance, offered before the invasion of Iraq, was not one that al-Zarqawi was remotely prepared to accept. What most people in the West meant by Islam and what scholars like al-Maqdisi meant by it were not at all the same thing. What to Bush appeared the markers of its compatibility with Western values appeared to al-Maqdisi a fast-metastasising cancer…
To al-Maqdisi, the spectacle of Muslim governments legislating to uphold equality between men and women, or between Islam and other religions, was a monstrous blasphemy. The whole future of the world was at stake. God’s final revelation, the last chance that humanity had of redeeming itself from damnation, was directly threatened… His [al-Maqdisi’s] incineration by a US jet strike in 2006 did not serve to kill the hydra…
All that counted was the example of the Salaf. When al-Zarqawi’s disciples smashed the statues of pagan gods, they were following the example of Muhammad; when they proclaimed themselves the shock troops of a would-be global empire, they were following the example of the warriors who had humbled Heraclius; when they beheaded enemy combatants, and reintroduced the jizya, and took the women of defeated opponents as slaves, they were doing nothing that the first Muslims had not gloried in. The only road to an uncontaminated future was the road that led back to an unspoilt past. Nothing of the Evangelicals, who had erupted into the Muslim world with their gunboats and their talk of crimes against humanity, was to remain. [pages 510-512]
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Dominion, 34
Or:
How the Woke monster originated
The section ‘In the Darkness Bind Them’ of Tom Holland’s chapter ‘Shadow’ opens with a few pages describing the life and work of J.R.R. Tolkien; and mentions the fascinating anecdote that, in the muddy trenches of the Somme in the First World War, soldiers Tolkien and Hitler were on opposite sides. Otto Dix, mentioned in my entry of the day before yesterday, was also on the side fighting against Tolkien. After those pages, Holland writes:
In 1938, a German editor wishing to publish him had written to ask if he were of Jewish origin. ‘I regret,’ Tolkien had replied, ‘that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.’ That the Nazis’ racism lacked any scientific basis he took for granted; but his truest objection to it was as a Christian. Of course, steeped in the literature of the Middle Ages as he was, he knew full well the role played by his own Church in the stereotyping and persecution of the Jews. In his imaginings, however, he saw them not as the hook-nosed vampires of medieval calumny, but rather as ‘a holy race of valiant men, the people of Israel the lawful children of God’.
These lines, from an Anglo-Saxon poem on the crossing of the Red Sea, were precious to Tolkien, for he had translated them himself. There was in them the same sense of identification with Exodus as had inspired Bede. Moses, in the poem, was represented as a mighty king, ‘a prince of men with a marching company’. Tolkien, writing The Lord of the Rings even as the Nazis were expanding their empire from the Atlantic to Russia, draw freely on such poetry for his own epic. Central to the plot was the return of a king: an heir to a long-abandoned throne named Aragorn. If the armies of Mordor were satanic like those of Pharaoh, then Aragorn—emerging from exile to deliver his people from slavery—had more than a touch of Moses. As in Bede’s monastery, so in Tolkien’s study: a hero might be imagined as simultaneously Christian and Jewish.
This was no isolated, donnish eccentricity. Across Europe, the readiness of Christians to identify themselves with the Jews had become the measure of their response to the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history. Tolkien—ever the devout Catholic—was doing nothing that popes had not also done. In September 1938, the ailing Pius XI had declared himself spiritually a Jew. One year later, with Poland defeated and subjected by German forces to an unspeakably brutal occupation, his successor had issued his first public letter to the faithful.
Pius XII, lamenting the ploughing of blood-drenched furrows with swords, pointedly cited Paul: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek.’ Always, from the earliest days of the Church, this was a phrase that had particularly served to distinguish Christianismos from Ioudaismos: Christianity from Judaism. Between Christians, who celebrated the Church as the mother of all nations, and Jews, appalled at any prospect of having their distinctiveness melt away into the great mass of humanity, the dividing line had long been stark. But that was not how it seemed to the Nazis. When Pius XII quoted Genesis to rebuke those who would forget that humanity had a common origin, and that all the peoples of the world had a duty of charity to one another, the response from Nazi theorists was vituperative. To them, it appeared self-evident that universal morality was a fraud perpetrated by Jews. [pages 480-481]
But it isn’t self-evident to racialist anti-Semites that the New Testament is toxic to white people.
‘Can we still tolerate our children being obliged to learn that Jews and Negroes, just like Germans or Romans, are descended from Adam and Eve, simply because a Jewish myth says so?’ Not merely pernicious, the doctrine that all were one in Christ ranked as an outrage against the fundamentals of science. For centuries, the Nordic race had been infected by it. The consequence was a mutilation of what should properly have been left whole: a circumcision of the mind. ‘It is the Jew Paul who must be considered as the father of all this, as he, in a very significant way, established the principles of the destruction of a worldview based on blood.’
Christians, confronted by a regime committed to the repudiation of the most fundamental tenets of their faith—the oneness of the human race, the obligation of care for the weak and the suffering—had a choice to make. Did the Church, as a pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer had put it as early as 1933, have ‘an unconditional obligation towards the victims of any social order, even where those victims do not belong to the Christian community’—or did it not? Bonhoeffer’s own answer to that question would see him conspire against Hitler’s life, and end up being hanged in a concentration camp.
There were many other Christians too who passed the test. Some spoke out publicly. Others, more clandestinely, did what they could to shelter their Jewish neighbours, in cellars and attics, in the full awareness that to do so was to risk their own lives. Church leaders, torn between speaking with the voice of prophecy against crimes almost beyond their comprehension and a dread that to do so might risk the very future of Christianity, walked an impossible tightrope. ‘They deplore the fact that the Pope does not speak,’ Pius had lamented privately in December 1942. ‘But the pope cannot speak. If he spoke, things would be worse.’
Perhaps, as his critics would later charge, he should have spoken anyway. But Pius understood the limits of his power. By pushing things too far he might risk such measures as he was able to take. Jews themselves understood this well enough. In the pope’s summer residence, five hundred were given shelter. In Hungary, priests frantically issued baptismal certificates, knowing that they might be shot for doing so. In Romania, papal diplomats pressed the government not to deport their country’s Jews—and the trains were duly halted by ‘bad weather’. Among the SS, the pope was derided as a rabbi. [pages 481-482]
Keep in mind that this happened before the Second Vatican Council. Catholic white nationalists are either ignorant or dishonest in facing the fact that the Christian mind was already infected before such a Council. A couple of pages later Holland adds:
Otto Dix, far from admiring the Nazis for turning the world on its head, was revolted by them. They in turn dismissed him as a degenerate. Sacked from his teaching post in Dresden, forbidden to exhibit his paintings, he had turned to the Bible as his surest source of inspiration. In 1939, he had painted the destruction of Sodom. Fire was shown consuming a city that was unmistakably Dresden. The image had proven prophetic.
As the tide of war turned against Germany, so British and American planes had begun to visit ruin on the country’s cities. In July 1943, in an operation code-named Gomorrah, a great sea of fire had engulfed much of Hamburg. Back in Britain, a bishop named George Bell—a close friend of Bonhoeffer’s—spoke out in public protest. ‘If it is permissible to drive inhabitants to desire peace by making them suffer, why not admit pillage, burning, torture, murder, violation?’ The objection was brushed aside. There was no place, the bishop was sternly informed, in a war against an enemy as terrible as Hitler, for humanitarian or sentimental scruples. In February 1945, it was the turn of Dresden to burn. The most beautiful city in Germany was reduced to ashes. So too was much else. By the time the country was at last brought to unconditional surrender in May 1945, most of it lay in ruins. [pages 484-485]
The mention of Otto Dix is fascinating. Despite the bust he had made of Nietzsche, his readings of the philosopher, and his having fought on Hitler’s side at the Somme, he suffered a psychogenic regression towards Tolkien’s side. In the following decades, as we shall see in the final chapters of Dominion, Christian morality would exacerbate and triumph in the collective unconscious of every white man, atheists included.
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Dominion, 30
For centuries, in the Christian world, it had been the great project of natural philosophy to identify the laws that animated God’s creation, and thereby to arrive at a closer understanding of God himself. Now, with The Origin of Species, a law had been formulated that—even as it unified the realm of life with that of time—seemed to have no need of God at all. Not merely a theory, it was itself a startling display of evolution.
But was it right? By 1876, the most impressive evidence for Darwin’s theory had been uncovered in what was fast proving to be the world’s premier site for fossil beds: the American West. Cope was not the only palaeontologist to have made spectacular discoveries there…
Nervousness at the idea that humanity might have evolved from another species was not bred merely of a snobbery towards monkeys. Something much more was at stake. To believe that God had become man and suffered the death of a slave was to believe that there might be strength in weakness, and victory in defeat. Darwin’s theory, more radically than anything that previously had emerged from Christian civilisation, challenged that assumption. Weakness was nothing to be valued. Jesus, by commending the meek and the poor over those better suited to the great struggle for survival that was existence, had set Homo sapiens upon the downward path towards degeneration.
For eighteen long centuries, the Christian conviction that all human life was sacred had been underpinned by one doctrine more than any other: that man and woman were created in God’s image. The divine was to be found as much in the pauper, the convict or the prostitute as it was in the gentleman with his private income and book-lined study.
Nowadays, the spiritual heirs of the Christians, which I call neochristians, find the divine in the most grotesque mental illnesses: like those men who believe they are women, or vice versa.
Darwin’s house, despite its gardens, private wood and greenhouse filled with orchids, stood on the margins of an unprecedented agglomeration of brick and smoke. Beyond the fields where he would lovingly inspect the workings of worms there stretched what Rome had been in Augustus’ day: the capital of the largest empire in the world. Just as Rome had once done, London sheltered disorienting extremes of privilege and squalor. The Britain of Darwin’s day, though, could boast what no one in Augustus’ Rome had ever thought to sponsor: campaigns to redeem the poor, the exploited, the diseased.
Darwin himself, the grandson of two prominent abolitionists, knew full well the impulse from which these sprang. The great cause of social reform was Christian through and through. ‘We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment.’ And yet the verdict delivered by Darwin on these displays of philanthropy was a fretful one. Much as the Spartans had done, when they flung sickly babies down a ravine, he dreaded the consequences for the strong of permitting the weak to propagate themselves. ‘No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.’
Here, for any Quaker, was a peculiarly distressing assertion. Cope knew the traditions to which he was heir. It was Quakers who had first lit the fire which, in the recent civil war, had come to consume the institution of American slavery; it was Quakers who, in America as in Britain, had taken the lead in campaigning for prison reform. Whatever they did for the least of their Saviour’s brothers and sisters, they did for Christ himself. How, then, could this conviction possibly be squared with what Cope, in mingled scorn and dread, termed ‘the Darwinian law of the “survival of the fittest”’?
The question was one that had perturbed Darwin himself. He remained sufficiently a Christian to define any proposal to abandon the weak and the poor to their fate as ‘evil’. The instincts that had fostered a concern for the disadvantaged must themselves, he noted, have been the product of natural selection. Presumably, then, they had to be reckoned to serve some evolutionary purpose. Yet Darwin havered. In private conversations he would confess that, because ‘in our modern civilisation natural selection had no play’, he feared for the future. Christian notions of charity—however much he might empathise with them personally—were misplaced. Only continue to give them free rein, and the peoples who clung to them were bound to degenerate.
And this, were it to happen, would be to the detriment of the entire human race. Here, at any rate, Cope was in perfect accord with Darwin. He had taken the railroad across the vast expanses of the Great Plains, and he had sent telegrams from forts planted in the lands of the Sioux, and he had seen their hunting grounds littered for miles around with the bleached bones of bison, felled by the very latest in repeating rifles.
He knew that Custer’s defeat had been only a temporary aberration. The native tribes of America were doomed. The advance of the white race was inexorable. It was their manifest destiny. This was evident around the world. In Africa, where a variety of European powers were scheming to carve up the continent; in Australia, and New Zealand, and Hawaii, where there was no resisting the influx of white colonists; in Tasmania, where an entire native people had already been driven to extinction. ‘The grade of their civilisation,’ as Darwin put it, ‘seems to be a most important element in the success of competing nations.’
How were these differences, between a white and a native American, between a European and a Tasmanian, most plausibly to be explained? The traditional response of a Christian would have been to assert that between two human beings of separate races there was no fundamental difference: both had equally been created in the image of God. To Darwin, however, his theory of natural selection suggested a rather different answer. As a young man, he had sailed the seas of the world, and he had noted how, ‘wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal’. His feelings of compassion for native peoples, and his matching distaste for white settlers, had not prevented him from arriving at a stark conclusion: that there had come to exist over the course of human existence a natural hierarchy of races.
What Darwin said between the lines, Gobineau, who died the same year Darwin died, set out in a whole book.
Joseph Arthur, Count de Gobineau (1816-1882) was the one who elaborated the theory of Aryan racial superiority in Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. He is considered the father of racial demography. Count Gobineau’s works were seminal to demonstrate that the race factor is central to the understanding of human history.
The progress of Europeans had enabled them, generation by generation, to outstrip ‘the intellectual and social faculties’ of more savage peoples. Cope—despite his refusal to accept Darwin’s explanation for how and why this might have happened—conceded that he had a point. Clearly, in humanity as in any other species, the operations of evolution were perpetually at work. ‘We all admit the existence of higher and lower races,’ Cope acknowledged, ‘the latter being those which we now find to present greater or less approximation to the apes.’
So it was that an attempt by a devout Quaker to reconcile the workings of God with those of nature brought him to an understanding of humanity that would have appalled Benjamin Lay. Cope’s conviction that a species could will itself towards perfection enabled him to believe as well that different forms of the same species could co-exist. Whites, he argued, had elevated themselves to a new degree of consciousness. Other races had not. In 1877, a year after he had lain amid the fossil beds of Montana, oppressed by terrible dreams, Edward Drinker Cope formally resigned from the Society of Friends. [pages 439-444]
Or:
How the Woke monster originated
So far, I have only quoted a few paragraphs from the chapters of Tom Holland’s book. But the ‘Woe to You Who Are Rich’ section of the ‘Enlightenment’ chapter is so important that I will quote it in full.
That section shows no more and no less how Christianity metamorphosed into neochristianity: the mental virus that has been infecting the white man since the American Revolution and the French Revolution: two sides of the same coin, as we shall see in this post.
Although the boldface is mine, the colour image of the Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen de 1789 appears in Holland’s book, as does the footnote to that image. The words that I put in bold and in red reflect this entry in a nutshell:
It took effort to strip bare a basilica as vast as the one that housed Saint Martin. For a millennium and more after the great victory won by Charles Martel over the Saracens, it had continued to thrive as a centre of pilgrimage. A succession of disasters—attacks by Vikings, fires—had repeatedly seen it rebuilt. So sprawling had the complex of buildings around the basilica grown that it had come to be known as Martinopolis. But revolutionaries, by their nature, relished a challenge. In the autumn of 1793, when bands of them armed with sledgehammers and pickaxes occupied the basilica, they set to work with gusto. There were statues of saints to topple, vestments to burn, tombs to smash. Lead had to be stripped from the roof, and bells removed from towers. ‘A sanctuary can do without a grille, but the defence of the Fatherland cannot do without pikes.’ So efficiently was Martinopolis stripped of its treasures that within only a few weeks it was bare. Even so—the state of crisis being what it was—the gaunt shell of the basilica could not be permitted to go to waste. West of Tours, in the Vendée, the Revolution was in peril. Bands of traitors, massed behind images of the Virgin, had risen in revolt. Patriots recruited to the cavalry, when they arrived in Tours, needed somewhere to keep their horses. The solution was obvious. The basilica of Saint Martin was converted into a stable.
Horse shit steaming in what had once been one of the holiest shrines in Christendom gave to Voltaire’s contempt for l’infâme a far more pungent expression than anything that might have been read in a salon. The ambition of France’s new rulers was to mould an entire ‘people of philosophes’. The old order had been weighed and found wanting. The monarchy itself had been abolished. The erstwhile king of France—who at his coronation had been anointed with oil brought from heaven for the baptism of Clovis, and girded with the sword of Charlemagne—had been executed as a common criminal. His decapitation, staged before a cheering crowd, had come courtesy of the guillotine, a machine of death specifically designed by its inventor to be as enlightened as it was egalitarian. Just as the king’s corpse, buried in a rough wooden coffin, had then been covered in quicklime, so had every division of rank in the country, every marker of aristocracy, been dissolved into a common citizenship. It was not enough, though, merely to set society on new foundations. The shadow of superstition reached everywhere. Time itself had to be recalibrated. That October, a new calendar was introduced. Sundays were swept away. So too was the practice of dating years from the incarnation of Christ. Henceforward, in France, it was the proclamation of the Republic that would serve to divide the sweep of time.
Even with this innovation in place, there still remained much to be done. For fifteen centuries, priests had been leaving their grubby fingerprints on the way that the past was comprehended. All that time, they had been carrying ‘pride and barbarism in their feudal souls’. And before that? A grim warning of what might happen should the Revolution fail was to be found in the history of Greece and Rome. The radiance that lately had begun to dawn over Europe was not the continent’s first experience of enlightenment. The battle between reason and unreason, between civilisation and barbarism, between philosophy and religion, was one that had been fought in ancient times as well. ‘In the pagan world, a spirit of toleration and gentleness had ruled.’ It was this that the sinister triumph of Christianity had blotted out. Fanaticism had prevailed. Now, though, all the dreams of the philosophes were coming true. L’infâme was being crushed. For the first time since the age of Constantine, Christianity was being targeted by a government for eradication. Its baleful reign, banished on the blaze of revolution, stood revealed as a nightmare that for too long had been permitted to separate twin ages of progress: a middle age.
This was an understanding of the past that, precisely because so flattering to sensibilities across Europe, was destined to prove infinitely more enduring than the makeshift calendar of the Revolution. Nevertheless, just like many other hallmarks of the Enlightenment, it did not derive from the philosophes. The understanding of Europe’s history as a succession of three distinct ages had originally been popularised by the Reformation. To Protestants, it was Luther who had banished shadow from the world, and the early centuries of the Church, prior to its corruption by popery, that had constituted the primal age of light. By 1753, when the term ‘Middle Ages’ first appeared in English, Protestants had come to take for granted the existence of a distinct period of history: one that ran from the dying years of the Roman Empire to the Reformation. The revolutionaries, when they tore down the monastic buildings of Saint-Denis, when they expelled the monks from Cluny and left its buildings to collapse, when they reconsecrated Notre Dame as a ‘Temple of Reason’ and installed beneath its vaulting a singer dressed as Liberty, were paying unwitting tribute to an earlier period of upheaval. In Tours as well, the desecration visited on the basilica was not the first such vandalism that it had suffered. Back in 1562, when armed conflict between Catholics and Protestants had erupted across France, a band of Huguenots had torched the shrine of Saint Martin and tossed the relics of the saint onto the fire. Only a single bone and a fragment of his skull had survived. It was hardly unsurprising, then, in the first throes of the Revolution, that many Catholics, in their bewilderment and disorientation, should initially have suspected that it was all a Protestant plot.
In truth, though, the origins of the great earthquake that had seen the heir of Clovis consigned to a pauper’s grave extended much further back than the Reformation. ‘Woe to you who are rich.’ Christ’s words might almost have been the manifesto of those who could afford only ragged trousers, and so were categorised as men ‘without knee-breeches’: sans-culottes. They were certainly not the first to call for the poor to inherit the earth. So too had the radicals among the Pelagians, who had dreamed of a world in which every man and woman would be equal; so too had the Taborites, who had built a town on communist principles, and mockingly crowned the corpse of a king with straw; so too had the Diggers, who had denounced property as an offence against God. Nor, in the ancient city of Tours, were the sans-culottes who ransacked the city’s basilica the first to be outraged by the wealth of the Church, and by the palaces of its bishops. In Marmoutier, where Alcuin had once promoted scripture as the inheritance of all the Christian people, a monk in the twelfth century had drawn up a lineage for Martin that cast him as the heir of kings and emperors—and yet Martin had been no aristocrat. The silken landowners of Gaul, offended by the roughness of his manners and his dress, had detested him much as their heirs detested the militants of revolutionary France. Like the radicals who had stripped bare his shrine, Martin had been a destroyer of idols, a scorner of privilege, a scourge of the mighty. Even amid all the splendours of Martinopolis, the most common depiction of the saint had shown him sharing his cloak with a beggar. Martin had been a sans-culotte.
There were many Catholics, in the first flush of the Revolution, who had recognised this. Just as English radicals, in the wake of Charles I’s defeat, had hailed Christ as the first Leveller, so were there enthusiasts for the Revolution who saluted him as ‘the first sans-culotte’. Was not the liberty proclaimed by the Revolution the same as that proclaimed by Paul? ‘You, my brothers, were called to be free.’ This, in August 1789, had been the text at the funeral service for the men who, a month earlier, had perished while storming the Bastille, the great fortress in Paris that had provided the French monarchy with its most intimidating prison. Even the Jacobins, the Revolution’s dominant and most radical faction, had initially been welcoming to the clergy. For a while, indeed, priests were more disproportionately represented in their ranks than any other profession. As late as November 1791, the president elected by the Paris Jacobins had been a bishop. It seemed fitting, then, that their name should have derived from the Dominicans, whose former headquarters they had made their base. Certainly, to begin with, there had been little evidence to suggest that a revolution might precipitate an assault on religion.
And much from across the Atlantic to suggest the opposite. There, thirteen years before the storming of the Bastille, Britain’s colonies in North America had declared their independence. A British attempt to crush the revolution had failed. In France—where the monarchy’s financial backing of the rebels had ultimately contributed to its own collapse—the debt of the American revolution to the ideals of the philosophes appeared clear. There were many in the upper echelons of the infant republic who agreed. In 1783, six years before becoming their first president, the general who had led the colonists to independence hailed the United States of America as a monument to enlightenment. ‘The foundation of our Empire,’ George Washington had declared, ‘was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined than at any former period.’ This vaunt, however, had implied no contempt for Christianity. Quite the opposite. Far more than anything written by Spinoza or Voltaire, it was New England that had provided the American republic with its model of democracy, and Pennsylvania with its model of toleration. That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-evident truths. That most Americans believed they were owed less to philosophy than to the Bible: to the assurance given equally to Christians and Jews, to Protestants and Catholics, to Calvinists and Quakers, that every human being was created in God’s image. The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American republic—no matter what some of those who had composed its founding documents might have cared to think—was the book of Genesis.
The genius of the authors of the United States constitution was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radical Protestantism that was the prime religious inheritance of their fledgling nation. When, in 1791, an amendment was adopted which forbade the government from preferring one Church over another, this was no more a repudiation of Christianity than Cromwell’s enthusiasm for religious liberty had been. Hostility to imposing tests on Americans as a means of measuring their orthodoxy owed far more to the meeting houses of Philadelphia than to the salons of Paris. ‘If Christian Preachers had continued to teach as Christ & his Apostles did, without Salaries, and as the Quakers now do, I imagine Tests would never have existed.’ So wrote the polymath who, as renowned for his invention of the lightning rod as he was for his tireless role in the campaign for his country’s independence, had come to be hailed as the ‘first American’. Benjamin Franklin served as a living harmonisation of New England and Pennsylvania. Born in Boston, he had run away as a young man to Philadelphia; a lifelong admirer of Puritan egalitarianism, he had published Benjamin Lay; a strong believer in divine providence, he had been shamed by the example of the Quakers into freeing his slaves. If, like the philosophes who much admired him as an embodiment of rugged colonial virtue, he dismissed as idle dogma anything that smacked of superstition, and doubted the divinity of Christ, then he was no less the heir of his country’s Protestant traditions for that. Voltaire, meeting him in Paris, and asked to bless his grandson, had pronounced in English what he declared to be the only appropriate benediction: ‘God and liberty.’ Franklin, like the revolution for which he was such an effective spokesman, illustrated a truth pregnant with implications for the future: that the surest way to promote Christian teachings as universal was to portray them as deriving from anything other than Christianity.
In France, this was a lesson with many students. There, too, they spoke of rights. The founding document of the country’s revolution, the sonorously titled ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, had been issued barely a month after the fall of the Bastille. Part-written as it was by the American ambassador to France, it drew heavily on the example of the United States. The histories of the two countries, though, were very different. France was not a Protestant nation. There existed in the country a rival claimant to the language of human rights. These, so it was claimed by revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, existed naturally within the fabric of things, and had always done so, transcending time and space. Yet this, of course, was quite as fantastical a belief as anything to be found in the Bible. The evolution of the concept of human rights, mediated as it had been since the Reformation by Protestant jurists and philosophes, had come to obscure its original authors. It derived, not from ancient Greece or Rome, but from the period of history condemned by all right-thinking revolutionaries as a lost millennium, in which any hint of enlightenment had at once been snuffed out by monkish, book-burning fanatics. It was an inheritance from the canon lawyers of the Middle Ages.
Nor had the Catholic Church—much diminished though it might be from its heyday—abandoned its claim to a universal sovereignty. This, to revolutionaries who insisted that ‘the principle of any sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation’, could hardly help but render it a roadblock. No source of legitimacy could possibly be permitted that distracted from that of the state. Accordingly, in 1791—even as legislators in the United States were agreeing that there should be ‘no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’—the Church in France had been nationalised. The legacy of Gregory VII appeared decisively revoked. Only the obduracy of Catholics who refused to pledge their loyalty to the new order had necessitated the escalation of measures against Christianity itself. Even those among the revolutionary leadership who questioned the wisdom of attempting to eradicate religion from France never doubted that the pretensions of the Catholic Church were insupportable. By 1793, priests were no longer welcome in the Jacobins. That anything of value might have sprung from the mulch of medieval superstition was a possibility too grotesque even to contemplate. Human rights owed nothing to the flux of Christian history. They were eternal and universal—and the Revolution was their guardian. ‘The Declaration of Rights is the Constitution of all peoples, all other laws being variable by nature, and subordinated to this one.’
The Declaration of the Rights of Man
portrayed as though delivered on
tablets of stone from Mount Sinai.So declared Maximilien Robespierre, most formidable and implacable of the Jacobin leaders. Few men were more icily contemptuous of the claims on the future of the past. Long an opponent of the death penalty, he had worked fervently for the execution of the king; shocked by the vandalising of churches, he believed that virtue without terror was impotent. There could be no mercy shown the enemies of the Revolution. They bore the taint of leprosy. Only once they had been amputated, and their evil excised from the state, would the triumph of the people be assured. Only then would France be fully born again. Yet there hung over this a familiar irony. The ambition of eliminating hereditary crimes and absurdities, of purifying humanity, of bringing them from vice to virtue, was redolent not just of Luther, but of Gregory VII. The vision of a universal sovereignty, one founded amid the humbling of kings and the marshalling of lawyers, stood recognisably in a line of descent from that of Europe’s primal revolutionaries. So too their efforts to patrol dissidence. Voltaire, in his attempt to win a pardon for Calas, had compared the legal system in Toulouse to the crusade against the Albigensians. Three decades on, the mandate given to troops marching on the Vendée, issued by self-professed admirers of Voltaire, echoed the crusaders with a far more brutal precision. ‘Kill them all. God knows his own.’ Such was the order that the papal legate was reputed to have given before the walls of Béziers. ‘Spear with your bayonets all the inhabitants you encounter along the way. I know there may be a few patriots in this region—it matters not, we must sacrifice all.’ So the general sent to pacify the Vendée in early 1794 instructed his troops. One-third of the population would end up dead: as many as a quarter of a million civilians. [see, e.g., this Wikipedia article—Ed.]
Meanwhile, back in the capital, the execution of those condemned as enemies of the people was painted by enthusiasts for revolutionary terror in recognisably scriptural colours. Good and evil locked in a climactic battle, the entire world at stake; the damned compelled to drink the wine of wrath; a new age replacing the old: here were the familiar contours of apocalypse. When, demonstrating that its justice might reach even into the grave, the revolutionary government ordered the exhumation of the royal necropolis at Saint-Denis, the dumping of royal corpses into lime pits was dubbed by those who had commissioned it the Last Judgement.
The Jacobins, though, were not Dominicans. It was precisely the Christian conviction that ultimate judgement was the prerogative of God, and that life for every sinner was a journey towards either heaven or hell, that was the object of their enlightened scorn. Even Robespierre, who believed in the eternity of the soul, did not on that count imagine that justice should be left to the chill and distant deity that he termed the Supreme Being. It was the responsibility of all who cherished virtue to work for its triumph in the here and now. The Republic had to be made pure. To imagine that a deity might ever perform this duty was the rankest superstition. In the Gospels, it was foretold that those who had oppressed the poor would only receive their due at the end of days, when Christ would return in glory, and separate ‘the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats’. But this would never happen. A people of philosophes could recognise it to be a fairy tale. So it was that the charge of sorting the goats from the sheep, and of delivering them to punishment, had been shouldered—selflessly, grimly, implacably—by the Jacobins.
This was why, in the Vendée, there was no attempt to do as the friars had done in the wake of the Albigensian crusade and apply to a diseased region a scalpel rather than a sword. It was why as well, in Paris, the guillotine seemed never to take a break from its work. As the spring of 1794 turned to summer, so its blade came to hiss ever more relentlessly, and the puddles of blood to spill ever more widely across the cobblestones. It was not individuals who stood condemned, but entire classes. Aristocrats, moderates, counter-revolutionaries of every stripe: all were enemies of the people.
Holland fails to mention something vital: the revolutionaries took it upon themselves to guillotine blond Frenchmen in particular. See the chapters on the French Revolution in the histories of the white race from the pens of William Pierce and Arthur Kemp.
To show them mercy was a crime. Indulgence was an atrocity; clemency parricide. Even when Robespierre, succumbing to the same kind of factional battle in which he had so often triumphed, was himself sent to the guillotine, his conviction that ‘the French Revolution is the first that will have been founded on the rights of humanity’ did not fade. There needed no celestial court, no deity sat on his throne, to deliver justice. ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’ So Christ, at the day of judgement, was destined to tell those who had failed to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to visit the sick in prison. There was no requirement, in an age of enlightenment, to take such nonsense seriously. The only heaven was the heaven fashioned by revolutionaries on earth. Human rights needed no God to define them. Virtue was its own reward. [pages 395-405]
Categories
Dominion, 15
Or:
How the Woke monster originated
Giovanni di Paolo, The Mystic
Marriage of St Catherine of Siena.
On one occasion, when Christ appeared to Catherine of Siena, he did so accompanied by Mary Magdalene. Catherine, weeping with an excess of love, remembered how Mary, kneeling before the feet of her Lord, had once wet his feet with her own tears, and then wiped them with her hair, and kissed them, and anointed them with perfume. ‘Sweetest daughter,’ Christ told her, ‘for your comfort I give you Mary Magdalene for your mother.’ Gratefully, Catherine accepted the offer. ‘And from that moment on,’ so her confessor reported, ‘she felt entirely at one with the Magdalene.’
To be paired with the woman who had first beheld the risen Christ was, of course, a rare mark of divine favour. From childhood, Catherine had taken the Magdalene as a particular role model. Far from betraying complacency, though, this had borne witness to the opposite: Catherine’s own gnawing sense of sin. As reported by Luke, the woman who wept before Jesus, and anointed his feet, had ‘lived a sinful life’. Although she was never named, the identification of her with the Magdalene was one that had enjoyed wide currency ever since Gregory the Great, back in 591, had first made it in a sermon. Over time—and despite the lack of any actual evidence for it in the gospels—the precise character of her ‘sinful life’ had become part of the fabric of common knowledge. Kneeling before Jesus, seeking his forgiveness, she had done so as a penitent whore. Catherine, by accepting the Magdalene as her mother, was embracing the full startling radicalism of a warning given by Christ: that prostitutes would enter the kingdom of God before priests. [pages 285-286]
My book Daybreak (pages 132-135) contains an article with a splendid quote from Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, where a wise Franciscan tells his pupil that the radicalism of St Francis was about empowering all sorts of ‘lepers’—the radical message of the gospel—as opposed to giving them simple alms. Those who haven’t read that article, which I entitled ‘On empowering carcass-eating birds’, should read it now. Using an article of The Occidental Observer it illuminates our understanding of how, in the secular phase of Christianity, the metastasis of gospel ethics has reached our day with the transgender movement: the new ‘leper’ to be empowered just as prostitutes would enter the Kingdom before priests! However, Christians, even medieval Christians, have always been contradicting themselves. Tom Holland continues:
In Paris, as the great cathedral of Notre Dame was being built, the offer from a collective of prostitutes to pay for one of its windows, and dedicate it to the Virgin, had been rejected by a committee of the university’s leading theologians. Two decades later, in 1213, one of the same scholars, following his appointment as papal legate, had ordered that all woman convicted of prostitution be expelled from the city—just as though they were lepers…
Yet always, lurking at the back of even the sternest preacher’s mind, was the example of Christ himself. In John’s gospel, it was recorded that a woman taken in adultery had been brought before him by the Pharisees. Looking to trap him, they had asked if, in accordance with the Law of Moses, she should be stoned. Jesus had responded by bending down and writing in the dust with his finger; but then, when the Pharisees persisted in questioning him, he had straightened up again. ‘If any of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ The crowd, shamed by these words, had hesitated—and then melted away. Finally, only the woman had been left. ‘Has no one condemned you?’ Jesus had asked. ‘No one, Sir,’ she had answered. ‘Then neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.’ [pages 286-287]
In the video I embedded on Thursday St Francis, dressed in rags, in front of the pope on his throne with the cardinals, bishops and abbots of the papal court, recites some of the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount praising ultimate poverty as a protest that the teachings of Christ are totally opposed to Rome’s obsession with wealth. The struggle between the purist monks that follow the gospel message and the more practical Roman curia has always existed. But it is something the American racial right is unwilling to acknowledge: obsessed as they are with blaming only contemporary Jewry for the subversion of the Church when the revolutionary message of the last being first came directly from the New Testament—a NT written by Jews!
Innocent III, that most formidable of heresy’s foes, never forgot that his Saviour had kept company with the lowest of the low: tax-collectors and whores. Endowing a hospital in Rome, he specified that it offer a refuge to sex-workers from walking the streets. To marry one, he preached, was a work of the sublimest piety… Prostitutes themselves, perfectly aware of the example offered them by the Magdalene, veered between tearful displays of repentance and the conviction that God loved them just as much as any other sinner. Catherine, certainly, whenever she met with a sex-worker, would never fail to assure her of Christ’s mercy. ‘Turn to the Virgin. She will lead you straight into the presence of her son.’