The following quotations are taken from the section ‘Brides of Christ’ in the chapter ‘Flesh, 1300 Milan’.
When workmen digging the foundations of a new house uncovered the statue, experts from across Siena flocked to admire the find. It did not take them long to identify the nude woman as Venus, the goddess of love. Buried and forgotten for centuries, she constituted a rare trophy for the city: an authentic masterpiece of ancient sculpture. Few people were better qualified to appreciate it than the Sienese. Renowned across Italy and far beyond for the brilliance of their artists, they knew beauty when they saw it. Everyone agreed that it would be a scandal for such a prize to be hidden away. Instead, the statue was taken to the Campo, the city’s great central piazza, and placed on top of a fountain. ‘And she was paid great honour.’ At once, everything began to go wrong. A financial crash was followed by a rout of the Sienese army. Then, some five years after the discovery of the Venus, horror almost beyond comprehension brought devastation to the city. A plague, arriving from the east, and spreading with such lethal virulence across the whole of Christendom that it came to be known simply as the Great Dying, reached Siena in May 1348…
Leaders in the new governing council, looking from the Palazzo Pubblico to the statue in the Campo outside, knew what to blame. ‘From the moment we found the statue, evils have been ceaseless.’ This paranoia was hardly surprising. Admiration for ancient sculpture could not outweigh the devastating evidence for divine anger. Almost eight hundred years before, during the pontificate of Gregory the Great, it was cries of repentance that had halted the plague. It was told how Saint Michael, standing above the Tiber, had held aloft a blazing sword—and then, accepting the Romans’ prayers, had sheathed it, and at once the plague had stopped. Now, overwhelmed by calamity, the Sienese scrabbled to show repentance. On 7 November 1357, workmen pulled down the statue of Venus. Hauling it away from the piazza, they smashed it into pieces. Chunks of it were buried just beyond the border with Florence.
The insult offered by the honouring of Venus had been very great. Siena was the city of the Virgin… Those who had demanded the destruction of the Venus were right to see in its delectable and unapologetic nudity a challenge to everything that Mary represented. [pages 278-279]
Recently, in discussing The Ring of the Nibelung, I wrote about the differences between Wagner and Nietzsche, and how the latter distanced himself from his old friend when he realised that, despite rescuing Germanic paganism, Wagner was making concessions to Christian morality.
The first opera I saw was Tannhäuser. I was very impressed that in the end the symbol of Mary triumphed over the symbol of Venus in Wagner’s first masterpiece, which is loaded with sexual symbolism. I didn’t expect to find such a message, but one has to understand that Wagner, unlike the young Nietzsche who used to visit him at home, was stuck halfway across the psychological Rubicon.
This is fundamental. So fundamental in fact that it moved me to add footnotes to Savitri Devi’s book which we recently translated because, like Hitler, Savitri was more inclined to Wagner than to Nietzsche. Unlike them, I believe that if we don’t understand Christianity exactly as the German philosopher understood it, the white race will continue to die out until the end.
Tom Holland then discusses Catherine of Siena: a mystic, activist and writer who had a great influence on Italian literature. Canonised after her death, she is considered a Doctor of the Church by the Roman Catholic Church. By 1377, Catherine had become an antithesis of Venus, so to speak: the most celebrated paradigm of chastity in Christendom.
From childhood, she had made a sacrifice of her appetites. She fasted for days at a time; her diet, on those rare occasions when she did eat, would consist exclusively of raw herbs and the eucharist; she wore a chain tightly bound around her waist. Naturally, it was with sexual yearnings that the Devil most tempted her…
Not merely a virgin, she had been a bride. As a young girl pledging herself to Christ, she had defied her parents’ plans to marry her by hacking off all her hair. She was, so she had told them, already betrothed. Their fury and consternation could not make her change her mind. Sure enough, in 1367, when she was twenty years old, and Siena was celebrating the end of carnival, her reward had arrived. In the small room in her parents’ house where she would fast, and meditate, and pray, Christ had come to her. The Virgin and various saints, Paul and Dominic included, had served as witnesses. King David had played his harp. The wedding ring was Christ’s own foreskin, removed when he had been circumcised as a child, and still wet with his holy blood.[1] Invisible though it was to others, Catherine had worn it from that moment on. [pages 280-282]
___________
[1] According to her confessor, the ring was a gold band; but Catherine herself in her letters, states otherwise.
The Inquisition as a subject belongs more to Karlheinz Deschner’s series, which I will continue in the future. I rather use Tom Holland’s book to show how Christianity inverted the values of the white man. But it is worth picking up other passages from the chapter we started quoting yesterday:
Anxieties in Paris were heightened by the discovery in 1210 of various heretics whose reading of Aristotle had led them to believe that there was no life after death. The reaction of the city’s bishop was swift. Ten of the heretics were burned at the stake. Various commentaries on Aristotle were burned as well. Aristotle’s own books on natural philosophy were formally proscribed. ‘They are not to be read at Paris either publicly or in private.’
One thing that is completely overlooked on the racial right is that it is impossible to heal after Christian infection unless we repudiate the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. No wonder the medieval freethinkers who began to question this dogma ended up at the stake. No fear of hell, no Church power.
But the ban failed to hold. In 1231, Gregory IX issued a decree that guaranteed the university effective independence from the interference of bishops, and by 1255 all of Aristotle’s texts were back on the curriculum. The people best qualified to learn from them, it turned out, were not heretics, but inquisitors. The days of annihilating entire towns on the grounds that God would know his own were over.
The author refers to Caedite eos: Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius! (‘Kill them: the Lord knows those that are his own!’), a phrase reportedly spoken by the commander of the Albigensian Crusade to eliminate Catharism in France.
The responsibility for rooting out heresy had now been entrusted to friars. Taking the lead was an order that had been established by papal decree back in 1216, to provide the Church with a shock force of intellectuals. Its founder, a Spaniard by the name of Dominic, had toured where the good men were to be found, matching them in all their austerities, and harrying them in debate. In 1207, two years before the annihilation of Béziers, he had met with a good man just north of the city, and argued publicly with him for over a week. To friars schooled in this tradition of militant preaching, Aristotle had come as a godsend. [pages 265-266]
The labour of reconciling Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian doctrine did not come easily. Many contributed to it; but none more so than a Dominican called Thomas, a native of Aquino, a small town just south of Rome. The book he worked on between 1265 and his death in 1274, a great compendium of ‘things pertaining to Christianity’, was the most comprehensive attempt ever undertaken to synthesise faith with philosophy.
Thomas Aquinas himself died thinking that he had failed in his efforts, and that, before the radiant unknowability of God, everything he had written was the merest chaff; in Paris, two years after his death, various of his propositions were condemned by the city’s bishop. It did not take long, though, for the sheer scale of his achievement to be recognised and gratefully acknowledged. In 1323, the seal was set on his reputation when the pope proclaimed him a saint. The result was to enshrine as a bedrock of Catholic theology the conviction that revelation might indeed co-exist with reason. A century after the banning in Paris of Aristotle’s books on natural philosophy, no one had to worry that the study of them might risk heresy.
Yet this very sublimity had its shadow. If all of eternity were Christian, then it rendered those who persisted in the ways of heresy, obdurate in their folly, only the more damnable. The slaughter of the Albigensians had set a precedent that was not readily forgotten. [pages 266-267]
Before quoting the book, we should recall the pride shown in the Greco-Roman world for the Aryan nude in the form of public statuary, something that both Jews and Christians abhorred. The so-called Catholic saints only show a monstrous reversal of these values, as can be seen in the hagiographies rephrased by Tom Holland in his chapter ‘Persecution: 1229 Marburg’:
The Lady Elizabeth had been born to greatness. Descended from a cousin of Stephen, Hungary’s first truly Christian king, she had been sent as a child to the court of Thuringia, in central Germany, and groomed there for marriage. At the age of fourteen, she had joined Louis, its twenty-year-old ruler, on the throne. The couple had been very happy. Elizabeth had borne her husband three children; Louis had gloried in his wife’s demonstrable closeness to God. Even when he was woken in the night by a maid tugging on his foot, he had borne it patiently, knowing that the servant had mistaken him for his wife, whose custom it was to get up in the early hours to pray. Elizabeth’s insistence on giving away her jewellery to the poor; her mopping up of mucus and saliva from the faces of the sick; her making of shrouds for paupers out of her finest linen veils: here were gestures that had prefigured her far more spectacular self-abasement in the wake of her husband’s death. Her only regret was that it did not go far enough. ‘If there were a life that was more despised, I would choose it.’ When Count Paviam urged Elizabeth to abandon the rigours and humiliations of her existence in Marburg, and return with him to her father’s court, she refused point blank…
Clerks in the service of the papal bureaucracy and scholars learned in canon law had long been toiling to strengthen the foundations of the Church’s authority. They understood the awful responsibility that weighed upon their shoulders. Their task was to bring the Christian people to God. ‘There is one Catholic Church of the faithful, and outside of it there is absolutely no salvation.’ So it had been formally declared during Elizabeth’s childhood, in 1215, at the fourth of a series of councils convened at the Lateran. To defy this canon, to reject the structures of authority that served to uphold it, to disobey the clergy whose solemn prerogative it was to shepherd souls, was to follow the path to hell. [pages 247-249]
One thing that is completely absent on the intellectual right today is the historical memory of what the doctrine of eternal damnation meant for the mental health of medieval Europeans. I touched on the subject in my books on family tragedy; and more succinctly in ‘On Erasmus’, collected in one of the books of the featured post.
In 1206, a one-time playboy by the name of Francis, a native of the Italian city of Assisi, had spectacularly renounced his patrimony. Taking off his clothes, he had handed them over to his father. ‘Moreover he did not even keep his drawers, but stripped himself naked before all the bystanders.’ The local bishop, impressed rather than appalled by this display, had tenderly covered him with his own cloak, and sent him on his way with a blessing. Here, with this episode, had been set the pattern of Francis’ career. His genius for taking Christ’s teachings literally, for dramatising their paradoxes and complexities, for combining simplicity and profundity in a single memorable gesture, would never leave him. [page 251]
Above, St Francis’ renunciation of worldy goods by Giotto.
He served lepers; preached to birds; rescued lambs from butchers. Rare were those immune to his charisma. Admiration for his mission reached to the very summit of the Church. Innocent III, the pope who in 1215 had convened the Fourth Lateran Council, was not a man easily impressed. Imperious, daring and brilliant, he gave way to no one, overthrowing emperors, excommunicating kings. Unsurprisingly, then, when Francis, at the head of twelve ragged ‘brothers’, or ‘friars’, first arrived in Rome, Innocent had refused to see him. The whiff of heresy, not to mention blasphemy, had seemed altogether too rank. Francis, though, unlike Waldes, never stinted in his respect for the Church, in his obedience to its authority. Innocent’s doubts were eased. Imaginative as well as domineering, he had come to see in Francis and his followers not a danger, but an opportunity. Rather than treating them as his predecessors had treated the Waldensians, he ordained them a legally constituted order of the Church. ‘Go, and the Lord be with you, brethren, and as He shall deign to inspire you, preach repentance to all.’ [pages 251-252]
By 1217, less than a decade after this proclamation, a Franciscan mission had reached Germany. Elizabeth would grow up profoundly inspired by its example. By dressing in secret as a beggar, she had been paying tribute to Francis. Other demonstrations of her enthusiasm for his teachings were more public. In 1225, she provided the Franciscans with a base at the foot of the Wartburg, in the town of Eisenach. Three years later, following the death of her husband, she made her way there and formally renounced her ties to the world. Yet no matter how desperately she longed to do so, she did not then go begging from door to door. Elizabeth had properly absorbed the lessons of Francis’ example. She understood that to embrace poverty without obedience was to risk the fate of Waldes. [page-252]
While Waldes was very similar to Elizabeth and Francis in terms of mortifications of the flesh (which today would be considered a mental disorder, self-harm), in the eyes of the Church he was reprehensible because, unlike Elizabeth and Francis, he didn’t faithfully obey his ecclesiastical superiors: enough for him to be considered a heretic.
No mortification, no gesture of abasement, could possibly be undertaken unless at the command of a superior. Here, for a princess, the mistress of many servants, was a realisation that was itself a form of submission. So Elizabeth, even as she sat enthroned by her husband’s side, had employed a magister disciplinae spiritualis: a ‘master of spiritual discipline’. Not just any master, either. ‘I could have sworn obedience to a bishop or an abbot who had possessions, but I thought it better to swear obedience to one who has nothing and relies totally on begging. And so I submitted to Master Conrad’…
Even before Louis’ death, he had punished her for missing one of his sermons with a beating so violent that the stripes were still visible three weeks later… To suffer was to gain redemption. In 1231, when Elizabeth died of her austerities at the tender age of twenty-four, Conrad did not hesitate to hail her as a saint. As gold is purified by fire, so had she been purged of sin. The same strictness that had brought her to an early grave had brought her to heaven. [pages 252-253]
Elizabeth of Hungary submits to her master of spiritual discipline. This image appears in Holland’s book. Conrad was tireless in his defence of the Church and its authority:
In 1231, there came a fresh refinement. A new pope, Gregory IX, authorised Conrad not merely to preach against heresy, but to devote himself to the search for it—the inquisitio. No longer was it the responsibility of a bishop to bring heretics to trial, and sit in judgement on them, but rather that of a cleric especially appointed to the task. Even though, as a priest, Conrad could not himself ‘decree or pronounce a sentence involving the shedding of blood’, he was licensed by Gregory to compel the secular authorities to impose it. Never before had power of this order been given to a campaigner against heresy. Now, when Conrad rode on his mule from village to village, summoning the locals to answer his interrogation of their beliefs, he did so not merely as a preacher, but as a whole new breed of official: an inquisitor.
‘In all things he broke her will, to ensure that the merit of her obedience to him would increase.’ So Conrad had justified his handling of Elizabeth. Now, with all of Germany his to discipline, he could not afford to soften. The truest kindness was cruelty; the truest mercy harshness. The swarm of heretics that confronted Conrad were not readily to be redeemed from damnation. Only fire could smoke them out. Pyres needed to be stoked as they had never been stoked before. The burning of heretics—hitherto a rare and sporadic expedient, only ever reluctantly licensed, if at all—was the very mark of Conrad’s inquisition. In towns and villages along the Rhine, the stench of blackened flesh hung in the air. ‘So many heretics were burned throughout Germany that their number could not be comprehended.’ Conrad’s critics, unsurprisingly, accused him of a killing spree. They charged him with believing every accusation that was brought before him; of rushing the process of law; of sentencing the innocent to the flames. No one, though, was innocent. All were fallen. Better to suffer as Christ had suffered, tortured in a place of public execution for a crime that he had not committed, than to suffer eternal damnation. Better to suffer for a few fleeting moments than to burn for all eternity.
With Master Conrad, the yearning to cleanse the world of sin, to heal it of its leprosy, had turned murderous. That made it no less revolutionary. The suspicion of the worldly order that had brought Gregory VII to humble an anointed king before the gates of Canossa was one that Conrad more than shared. As Elizabeth’s master, he had forbidden her to eat food ‘about which she did not have a clear conscience’. Anything on her husband’s table that might have derived from exploitation of the poor, that might have been extracted from peasants as a tribute or a tax, she had dutifully spurned. ‘As a result, she often suffered great penury, eating nothing but rolls spread with honey.’ The Lady Elizabeth had been a saint. Her peers were not. In the summer of 1233, Conrad dared to accuse one of them, the Count of Sayn, of heresy. A frantically convened synod of bishops, in the presence of the German king himself, threw out the case. Conrad, nothing daunted, began to prepare charges against further noblemen.
Then, on 30 July, as he was returning from the Rhine to Marburg, he was ambushed by a group of knights and cut down. The news of his death was greeted with rejoicing throughout Germany. In the Lateran, though, there was indignation. As Conrad was laid to rest in Marburg, by the side of the Lady Elizabeth, Gregory mourned him in sombre terms. The murderers, so the Pope warned, were harbingers of a rising darkness. All of heaven and earth had shuddered at their crime. Their patron was literally hellish: none other than the Devil himself. [pages 254-256]
Something that bothers me about my blogging career is that the more philosophically mature I get, the fewer visits I receive. And this is even more pronounced on my Spanish blog, which I have decided to abandon after a recent post on Evropa Soberana because no Spanish speaker wants to argue with me.
On the other hand, the Argentinian Agustín Laje, whom I have already mentioned on this site and whom the press slanders as an ultra-right-winger receives such an immense number of visits that he has been invited countless times to many Spanish-speaking countries to give lectures.
I would like to translate some passages I have already written in Spanish about Laje:
Agustín Laje’s books
First, to use my metaphor of crossing the psychological Rubicon, Laje is still in Normieland. A normie could be defined as one who doesn’t rebel against the egalitarian dogma of racial, gender and sexual preference: today’s holy trinity in the West.
Take Norberto Bobbio’s excellent definition of what exactly is right and left on page 378 of Laje’s La batalla cultural. It all revolves around egalitarianism. ‘In effect’, Laje comments, ‘that which embraces increasing doses of equality is placed on the left, and the opposite on the right’ (my translation). Laje constantly claims to be right-wing. But from this angle he is left-wing. Not as crazy left as Woke but left at the end of the day because he believes in racial equality, gender equality and sometimes sort of fails to condemn some sexual aberrations (Laje wouldn’t be considered right-wing in, say, Franco’s Spain.) His failure to embrace Bobbio’s definition of what exactly is left and right is due to his fear of validating racial hierarchy (for example, whites as well as some Asians and Jews, have higher IQs than blacks).
Like YouTubber Matt Walsh, Laje only rebels at gender ideology and the trans movement: the most psychotic phase of Wokism that has now involved even children. Here I also refer to Laje’s previous bestseller, which he wrote together with another Argentinian, Nicolás Márquez: El libro negro de la nueva izquierda, published in 2016. In 2022, a book I bought in a common bookstore as La batalla cultural has by necessity to be the book of someone who doesn’t blaspheme against the new trinity. Books by real dissidents have been banned from bookshops!
In other words, since Laje and his mentor Márquez simply reject third-wave feminism, that marks them out as liberals, not true traditionalists. Compare this pair with what we say about feminism in On Beth’s Cute Tits: one of the books that the printer that printed it for me has refused to republish, and is now only available as a PDF (see ‘Our Books’).
Laje never touches the Jewish question. Nor does he mention white nationalists, who do analyse the JQ. Nor does Laje mention the most privileged minds who rebelled after 1945: the European Savitri Devi (1905-1982) and the American William Pierce (1933-2002).
If we compare the young Laje with the old critic of the Latin American left, Octavio Paz (1914-1998), the latter stated that he disliked the term political scientist; that his classical training made him approach human reality from the point of view of history. It is precisely history that ‘political scientists’ like Laje ignore. Think not only of the real history of Christianity, but also of the Hellstorm holocaust committed by the Allies after the Second World War; although, to be fair to Laje, Paz and his ilk also ignored these histories. Precisely because they ignore history, Laje, Márquez and all those of the Latin American new right—and the old right like that of the late Paz—have also ignored the fact that this is the second time the West has fallen into a state of mass psychosis, not the first. The first occurred in the 4th century, with Constantine.
The good thing about Laje is that he makes feminists freak out in a lot of YouTube videos. For that, he is very good, as well as for winning debates with progressives. But progressivism has reached such levels of delirium that a little common sense looks good to an audience whose mother tongue is the language of Cervantes.
Laje could not respond, on the other hand, to academics who reject not only the third feminist wave, but the second. Remember Roger Devlin’s seminal essays published years ago in Counter-Currents. Unlike Laje, Devlin is a true conservative; and we are more radical than Devlin, in that we reject even the first wave of feminism.
Laje has just published another book, Generación idiota (Generation Idiot). If nothing else, such books could serve as stepping stones for Spanish-speaking normies who don’t want to get their feet wet to start crossing the psychological Rubicon. The problem, as we have said several times before, is that hardly anyone wants to go beyond their first baby steps to the other side of the river. That’s why the more mature I get, the fewer visits I receive…
The following passages are taken from the section ‘Laying Down the Law’ of chapter ‘Revolution, 1076 Cambrai’ of Dominion:
[Pope] Urban’s speech had reverberated to miraculous effect. A great host of warriors drawn from across the Latin West had taken a familiar road. As pilgrims had been doing since the time of the millennium, they had journeyed across Hungary to Constantinople; and then from Constantinople to the Holy Land. Every attempt by the Saracens to halt them had been defeated. Finally, in the summer of 1099, the great army of warrior pilgrims had arrived before Jerusalem. On 15 July, they stormed its walls. The city was theirs. Then, once the slaughter was done, and they had dried their dripping swords, they headed for the tomb of Christ. There, in joy and disbelief, they offered up praises to God. Jerusalem—after centuries of Saracen rule—was Christian once again.
So extraordinary was the feat as to be barely believable—and the news redounded gloriously to the credit of the papacy. Urban himself died a fortnight after the city’s capture, too soon for news of the great victory that he had inspired to reach him; but the programme of reform to which he had devoted his life was much burnished by the winning of the Holy City. Emperors since the time of Charlemagne had fought wars of conquest beneath the banner of Christ; but none had ever sent an entire army on pilgrimage. Warriors present at the capture of Jerusalem reported having seen ‘a beautiful person sitting atop a white horse’—and there were some prepared to wonder if it might not have been Christ himself. Whatever the truth of the mysterious horseman’s identity, one thing was clear: the Holy City had been won, not in the name of any king or emperor, but in that of a much more universal cause.
But what name to give this cause? Back in the Latin West, the word starting to be used was one that, until the capture of Jerusalem, had barely been heard. The warrior pilgrims, so it came to be said, had fought under the banner of Christianitas: Christendom. Such a categorisation—divorced as it was from the dynasties of earthly kings and the holdings of feudal lords—was one well suited to the ambitions of the papacy. Who better to stand at the head of Christendom than the heir of Saint Peter? Less than a century after Henry III had deposed three popes in a single year, the Roman Church had carved out a role of leadership for itself so powerful that Henry’s grandson, the son of Henry IV, was brought in 1122 to sue for peace. In that year, in Worms, where his father had once commanded Gregory VII to abdicate, Henry V agreed to a momentous concordat. By its terms, the fifty-year-old quarrel over the investiture of imperial bishops was finally brought to an end. Although ostensibly a compromise, time would demonstrate that victory was decisively the papacy’s. Decisive too was the increasing acceptance of another key demand of the reformers: that the clergy distinguish themselves from the great mass of the Christian people— the laicus, or ‘laity’—by embracing celibacy. By 1148, when yet another papal decree banning priests from having wives or concubines was promulgated, the response of many was to roll their eyes. ‘Futile and ludicrous—for who does not know already that it is unlawful?’
Increasingly, then, the separation of church from state was an upheaval manifest across the whole of Christendom. Wherever a priest was called upon to minister to the laity, even in the humblest, the most isolated village, there the impact of reformatio could be felt. The establishment of the Roman Church as something more than merely a first among equals, as ‘the general forum of all clergy and all churches’, gave clerics across the Latin West a common identity that they had not previously possessed. In the various kingdoms, fiefdoms and cities that constituted the great patchwork of Christendom, something unprecedented had come into being: an entire class that owed its loyalty, not to local lords, but to a hierarchy that exulted in being ‘universal, and spread throughout the world’.
Emperors and kings, although they might try to take a stand against it, would repeatedly find themselves left bruised by the attempt. Not since the age of Constantine and his heirs had any one man exercised an authority over so wide a sweep of Europe as did the bishop of the ancient capital of the world. His open claim was to the ‘rights of heavenly and earthly empire’; his legates travelled to barbarous lands and expected to be heard; his court, in an echo of the building where the Roman Senate had once met, was known as the ‘Curia’. Yet the pope was no Caesar. His assertion of supremacy was not founded on force of arms, nor the rank of his ministers on their lineage or their wealth. The Church that had emerged from the Gregorian reformatio was instead an institution of a kind never before witnessed: one that had not merely come to think of itself as sovereign, but had willed itself into becoming so. ‘The Pope,’ Gregory VII had affirmed, ‘may be judged by no one.’ All Christian people, even kings, even emperors, were subject to his rulings. The Curia provided Christendom with its final court of appeal. A supreme paradox: that the Church, by rending itself free of the secular, had itself become a state. [pages 233-235]
Once the papal state was formed, Tom Holland mentions the formation of the first university and, very relevant to our research, the formation of so-called canon law. He then writes:
[St] Paul’s authority on this score was definitive. ‘The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’ Here, for Gratian, was the foundation-stone of justice. So important to him was the command that he opened the Decretum by citing it. Echoing the Stoics much as Paul had done, he opted to define it as natural law—and the key to fashioning a properly Christian legal system. All souls were equal in the eyes of God[bold by Ed.]. Only if it were founded on this assumption could justice truly be done. Anything obstructing it had to go. ‘Enactments, whether ecclesiastical or secular, if they are proved to be contrary to natural law, must be totally excluded.’
Much flowed from this formulation that earlier ages would have struggled to comprehend. Age-old presumptions were being decisively overturned: that custom was the ultimate authority; that the great were owed a different justice from the humble; that inequality was something natural, to be taken for granted. Clerks trained in Bologna were agents of revolution as well as of order. Legally constituted, university-trained, they constituted a new breed of professional. Gratian, by providing them with both a criterion and a sanction for weeding out objectionable customs, had transfigured the very understanding of law. No longer did it exist to uphold the differences in status that Roman jurists and Frankish kings alike had always taken for granted. [Remember: for the Merovingian and Frankish kings it was not the same to kill a blond-haired, blue-eyed man as it was to kill a Mediterranean mudblood—Ed.] Instead, its purpose was to provide equal justice to every individual, regardless of rank, or wealth, or lineage—for every individual was equally a child of God…
Image of pages from the Decretum of Burchard of Worms, an 11th-century book of canon law.
How, for instance, were the Christian people to square the rampant inequality between rich and poor with the insistence of numerous Church Fathers that ‘the use of all things should be common to all’? The problem was one that, for decades, demanded the attention of the most distinguished scholars in Bologna. By 1200, half a century after the completion of the Decretum, a solution had finally been arrived at—and it was one fertile with implications for the future. A starving pauper who stole from a rich man did so, according to a growing number of legal scholars, iure naturali—‘in accordance with natural law’. As such, they argued, he could not be reckoned guilty of a crime. Instead, he was merely taking what was properly owed him. It was the wealthy miser, not the starving thief, who was the object of divine disapproval. Any bishop confronted by such a case, so canon lawyers concluded, had a duty to ensure that the wealthy pay their due of alms. Charity, no longer voluntary, was being rendered a legal obligation.
That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, though, was a matching principle: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was—in a formulation increasingly deployed by canon lawyers—a human ‘right’.
Law, in the Latin West, had become an essential tool of its ongoing revolution. [pages 238-239]
Countless times I have said that white nationalists, who are generally sympathetic to Christianity even though they are not all Christians, are ignorant of the history of the West in general and of the Church in particular. It is amusing to see them anathematise the current pope, as if his liberalism were a phenomenon of our century. They constantly complain in their forums: ‘Alas, the Jews have subverted Christianity!’ In fact the first, baby steps to equalise men by law, based on St Paul the Jew, had already been taken a millennium earlier.
These days I have sent the first copies of Savitri Devi’s book to two buyers.
Unfortunately, as these leather bindings are made by a professional bookbinder, they are costing me a lot of money together with the shipping either to the USA or to the UK.
As soon as I have the financial means to get a workshop to bind them myself, it will be a pleasure to print & bind the Savitri copies and other books in ‘Our Books’ except for Hellstorm and Letter to mom Medusa, which are already available without traditional binding.
The chapter ‘Revolution, 1076 Cambrai’ begins by explaining how the Catholic Church decided to expand the vow of celibacy, which already existed for alienated monks, to all priests.
This, from my point of view, was a step that led to the abuse of children and pubescents in the Church throughout the next millennium, as now even the clergy could not marry, burning themselves in celibacy and masturbation. Such an aberrant step has to do with the Christian view of the human soul, which assumes that lust doesn’t exist in a pure soul, but that we simply indulge in impure thoughts, concupiscence.
A millennium later such a view of the human soul would become, in secularised form, in the trans movement that assumes that we are not sexualised animals but that we can simply ‘choose’ our sexes. In the following pages, Tom Holland mentions a milestone in the mentality of Europeans regarding the increasing power of the Church:
‘The Pope is permitted to depose emperors.’ This proposition, one of a number of theses on papal authority drawn up for Gregory’s private use in March 1075, had shown him more than braced for the inevitable blow-back. No pope before had ever claimed such a licence; but neither, of course, had any pope dared to challenge imperial authority with such unapologetic directness. Gregory, by laying claim to the sole leadership of the Christian people, and trampling down long-standing royal prerogatives, was offending Henry IV grievously. Heir to a long line of emperors who had never hesitated to depose troublesome popes, the young king acted with the self-assurance of a man supremely confident that both right and tradition were on his side. Early in 1076, when he summoned a conference of imperial bishops to the German city of Worms, the assembled clerics knew exactly what was expected of them. The election of Hildebrand, so they ruled, had been invalid. No sooner had this decision been reached than Henry’s scribes were reaching for their quills. ‘Let another sit upon Saint Peter’s throne.’ The message to Gregory in Rome could not have been blunter. ‘Step down, step down!’
But Gregory also had a talent for bluntness. Brought the command to abdicate, he not only refused, but promptly raised the stakes. Speaking from the Lateran, he declared that Henry was ‘bound with the chain of anathema’ and excommunicated from the Church. His subjects were absolved of all their oaths of loyalty to him. Henry himself, as a tyrant and an enemy of God, was deposed. The impact of this pronouncement proved devastating. Henry’s authority went into meltdown. Numerous of his princely vassals, hungry for the opportunity that his excommunication had given them, set to dismembering his kingdom. By the end of the year, Henry found himself cornered. To such straits was his authority reduced that he settled on a desperate gambit. Crossing the Alps in the dead of winter, he headed for Canossa, a castle in the northern Apennines where he knew that Gregory was staying. For three days, ‘barefoot, and clad in wool’, the heir of Constantine and Charlemagne stood shivering before the gates of the castle’s innermost wall. Finally, ordering the gates unbarred, and summoning Henry into his presence, Gregory absolved the penitent with a kiss. ‘The King of Rome, rather than being honoured as a universal monarch, had been treated instead as merely a human being—a creature moulded out of clay.’
Henry IV, King of Germany from 1054 to 1105, King of Italy and Burgundy from 1056 to 1105, and Duke of Bavaria begging forgiveness of Pope Gregory VII at Canossa, the castle of the Countess Matilda, 1077.
The shock was seismic. That Henry had soon reneged on his promises, capturing Rome in 1084 and forcing his great enemy to flee the city, had done nothing to lessen the impact of Gregory’s papacy on the mass of the Christian people. For the first time, public affairs in the Latin West had an audience that spanned every region, and every social class. ‘What else is talked about even in the women’s spinning-rooms and the artisans’ workshops?’…
The humiliation of Henry IV had made visible a great and awesome prize. The dream of Gregory and his fellow reformers—of a Church rendered decisively distinct from the dimension of the earthly, from top to bottom, from palace to meanest village—no longer appeared a fantasy, but eminently realisable. A celibate clergy, once disentangled from the snares and meshes of the fallen world, would then be better fitted to serve the Christian people as a model of purity, and bring them to God…
Nevertheless, deep though the roots of Gregory’s reformatio lay in the soil of Christian teaching, the flower was indeed something new. The concept of the ‘secular’, first planted by Augustine, and tended by Columbanus, had attained a spectacular bloom. Gregory and his fellow reformers did not invent the distinction between religio and the saeculum, between the sacred and the profane; but they did render it something fundamental to the future of the West, ‘for the first time and permanently’. A decisive moment…
It was no longer enough for Gregory and his fellow reformers that individual sinners, or even great monasteries, be consecrated to the dimension of religio. The entire sweep of the Christian world required an identical consecration. That sins should be washed away; the mighty put down from their seats; the entire world reordered in obedience to a conception of purity as militant as it was demanding: here was a manifesto that had resulted in a Caesar humbling himself before a pope. ‘Any custom, no matter how venerable, no matter how commonplace, must yield utterly to truth—and, if it is contrary to truth, be abolished.’ So Gregory had written. Nova consilia, he had called his teachings—‘new counsels’.
A model of reformatio had triumphed that, reverberating down the centuries, would come to shake many a monarchy, and prompt many a visionary to dream that society might be born anew. The earthquake would reach very far, and the aftershocks be many. The Latin West had been given its primal taste of revolution. [pages 227-231]
