People who wet their beds at the specter of Nazis and the KKK are just too shallow in their understanding of the forces arrayed against us, and too beholden to the enemy’s moral outlook and status system, to be of any use in our struggle.
Jason,
What does it really mean to have a metaphysical orientation, other than being spacey?
In the most sparse and generic terms, it entails truly and integrally believing in something which transcends self.
The ramifications of that are tremendous. It’s that special sauce distinguishing a woman who purses her lips and concludes “I agree that we definitely need to have more children, but we simply can’t afford to have any more in this economy…” and a woman who actually has more kids. It’s the difference between a man who concludes “White genocide is wrong, and I’m going to blog anonymously about it…” and a man who concludes “White genocide is wrong, and I’m going to speak forcefully against it in church tomorrow…”
On some fine day in the future, being pro-White will be the way to be to bag that good job or make a good impression on that babe in Accounting. One day, I’ll be able to boast that I was pro-White before it was cool. You’ll insist that you were the “Jason Speaks” guy on that blog who argued passionately in support of White Survival. Nobody will believe you, because five other people will be claiming to be that guy.
But seriously, right now being pro-White is indubitably a matter of sacrifice. Only those who value something greater than self, those with a metaphysical orientation of one stripe or another, are willing and able to make those sacrifices.
There are a handful of exceptions, and there are special cases where men have found ways to protect their worldly stations while being pro-White. With the exception of autism-spectrum folks who are congenitally immune to social pressure and outcasts who latch on to racialism and antisemitism as a more provocative alternative to Satanism, nobody with their selfish interests at heart are going to speak out. Only people who have managed to “transcend self” are going to win what Evola calls the inner war necessary to win the outer war.
♣
Source: Comment in “Review of Hyperborean Home”
Trainspotter’s obituary:
This is a terrible, tremendous loss.
One cannot imagine a non-white version of Jonathan Bowden [see previous post]. He is something uniquely ours, he belongs to us. If our people should perish, the world will not know such a type again. Brilliant, quirky, hilarious, inspired, exuding the passion of a thousand suns, but also odd and perhaps sad and troubled as well. Very, very English.
Such was my impression, anyway. I never knew Jonathan personally, but he always reminded me, and strikingly so, of a very close friend of mine. They could have been brothers. My friend made it to 39. When he left, dying unexepectedly and without warning, he took something away that those of us who remain would never get back. And so it is with Bowden.
Perhaps that is the price one pays to mix such passion with brilliance. Trapped in normal life, but with a heart and soul too big for it, or simply attuned to that which others do not see. A fire in a barn, the life force ready to explode – or go away entirely. Perhaps such men aren’t meant to last, but rather to use themselves up with haste, spending themselves in a torrent, living mostly within the rich universe of their own minds. Only the gods know.
It is entirely possible that Bowden, had he the resources and support, could have played an even greater role in creating the vision that we require. Our time as a people is running short, and Bowden, his own time cut tragically short, has left us when we needed him most. We can soldier on, and we will. Let his memory and the work that he leaves behind inspire us to go forward with passion and heart, to win a new world, and in the meantime to support those wonderful, talented misfits as they arise, and while we still have them. They will not last forever. Of course, no man does, but the sort of which I speak seems particularly prone to the candle burning brightly, but briefly.
Many have said that preserving the beauty of the Aryan female is powerful incentive for preserving our people, and frankly, that’s always been quite good enough for me. Still is. But I’ll also derive some comfort from the fact that, when we secure the existence of our people, there will be more Bowdens down the road. Not often, and not many, but some. That will be good too.
Rest in peace, comrade.
______________
Source: Comment at Counter-Currents
Jonathan Bowden was the best orator of white nationalist circles.
Excerpted from a long transcript of 11,000 words, below I reproduce only a few sentences of a relatively recent speech of Bowden in California. It resonates with what another Briton, Kenneth Clark, said in his Civilisation series: that what kills civilisations is, above all, lack of self-confidence.
Before an American nationalist audience, Bowden said:
Since the Second World War, White Europeans have felt guilty about being themselves and have been made to feel guilty and are being encouraged to feel guiltier than they have at any other time in their history. There is no period in our history where we have faced such evident self-hatred.
It’s quite shocking how, since 1960—I was born in 1962—the West has lost its fiber. Fifty years, a blip historically: it’s a click of the fingers. And yet for fifty years we’ve seen nothing but funk, nothing but a failure of nerve.
Now, let’s unpackage this a bit. Communism in the 20th century killed tens of millions. Tens of millions. Mao said, after the laborious translation had intervened, “I’m rather proud of it, actually”; proud of being the worst mass murderer in human history.
♣
It used to be only B-listed Hollywood films that would show a powerful Black executive President ruling in the Oval Office. Almost a psychic preparation for the real thing. And now the real thing has occurred. With the Obama Presidency, you see the future the United States writ large.
So the most powerful Western country is now led by a non-Westerner. Something which would’ve been unthinkable in the 1960s, I would imagine; unthinkable in the 1970s, but is now evidently thinkable and thinkable to such a degree that I think a lot of the anger about it which is manifested in Libertarian currents like the Tea Party movement, seems to have evaporated.
When you give up the control of a state for duration—particularly the control of the most powerful republic the world has ever seen—you’re partly doomed when you’ve done that.
It is true that the United States is in a radical—and from a European perspective, terminal—decline. Partly because the European empires of the past: British, French, Dutch, Spanish, German and elsewhere, can see the writing on the wall. All of the precedents: of indebtedness, of being beholden to China in relation to the manipulation of the debt and its economic management, by having an ally such as Israel that wags the tail of the dog to such a degree that it’s almost in charge of the Middle Eastern policy of the United States of America.
If you allow your culture to be transparently disfigured by forces which are external and internal to it, and which you could have controlled in previous incarnations, you will witness your own death knell. And you will witness it in your own lifetime.
♣
Political correctness is a methodology and a grammar. It is designed to restrict the prospect of a thought before the thought is even enunciated. Chairman Mao had the idea of “magic words.” Magic words. “Racism” is a magic word. Use it, and people fall apart. People begin to disengage even from their own desire to defend themselves. All of the other “–isms”: sexism, disableism, classism, ageism, homophobia, islamaphobia, all the others are pale reflections, in other and slightly less crucial areas, of the original one: “racism.”
“Racism” is a term developed by Leon Trotsky in an article in the Left oppositionist journal in the Soviet Union in 1926 or 1927. It is now universalized from its dissentient communist origins—don’t forget Trotsky was on the way out of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as Stalin engineered his disposal and the disposal the Left opposition that he led—and that word has been extracted now to such a degree that it is a universal. It’s universal, it’s become a moral lexicon of engagement and disengagement. If you wish to condemn somebody in contemporary discourse, you say that they are racist. And there’s a degree to which nobody can refute you’re saying in the present dispensation.
You have a situation now where people have so loaded upon themselves the untrammeled forces of guilt and the absence of self-preservation that almost any healthy instinctual or virile capacity is beyond them, except as a reaction to a prior threat.
Only when we recover the sense of dynamism that we seem to have partly lost will we have a future: here in the United States, here in California, or in the Western World as a whole. Many other groups in this world wonder about what is happening to us; wonder what has happened to our energy. Don’t be surprised if you learn that many of the elites in foreign countries, in India and China and so on, view with bemused amazement the trajectory of the present West, the degree to which the West is so self-hating: about its own music, about its own art, about its own architecture, about its own military history.
♣
Why won’t Caucasian and European people wake up to Eurocentric verities? One of the major halting elements in the re-energization of our own people is the mass media. Then there’s just the effect of “prole-feed” as George Orwell called it in 1984.
Only when you can break through the carapace of the mass media, with all its multiple Gorgon-like heads and its Hydra-like amphitheater—only when you can break through that, using the Internet, have you a chance to embolden the necessary vanguard of our own population.
♣
What is happening here and elsewhere in the West is the biggest test that Western people have faced for a very long period. In the past threats are always perceived as external. All the enemies that we now face are internal. And the biggest enemies that we face are in our own minds. The feeling that we shouldn’t say this, shouldn’t write this, shouldn’t speak this, shouldn’t think this. These are the biggest enemies that we have. We’re too riddled with post-Christian guilt. We’re too riddled with philo-Semitism. We’re too riddled with a sense of failure, funk, and futility in relation to the European, the Classical, and the High Middle Ages. We’re too defensive. We’re not aggressive and assertive enough as a group.
What will it take for the bulk of people who leave Western universities to have the middle or common denominator view of the people in this room? It will take an earthquake. But it’s not that difficult to achieve, once you get people thinking in a dissentient way.
I was involved with a nationalist party in Britain for quite a long time. With a project that has seemed to fail and have come to nothing, even though people were elected to the European Parliament. But at the end of the day people are only changed when their cultural sensibilities shifts. And when there is a release of energy, and a release of power, and a release of self-assertion. That is the change that you seek. Electoral change and advantage results from that, rather than the other way around. Getting a few people elected will not suffice, in my view, at the present time. What will suffice is a counter-current, and a counter-cultural revolution, which reverses the processes of the 1960s.
The Marxians have marched through the institutions of the last 50 years because the doors were swinging open for them. They hardly had to kick them down because they were swinging open for them.
All the doors are shut to us. We must find ways to work our way around these doors and reconnect with the new minds of our upcoming generations.
One of the reasons that this will happen is that people in the Western world at the moment are chronically bored. There’s a boredom that has settled upon our people. You can sense it. There’s a spiritual torpor out there. And the most exciting ideas, the most threatening ideas, the most psychopathological ideas, the ideas which are beyond all other ideas, are the ideas which are in this room. They are the most dangerous ideas and therefore they have a subtle attraction to radical and dissident minds.
But there is a natural tendency to kick; there is a natural tendency to kick against the system which is in place. And politically correct Liberalism is an enormous target to be attacked. And it is fun to attack it. And it is life-affirming to attack it.
And my view is that people will be attracted in the future not by reason. They will read up with their reason once they have decided to emotionally commit. The important thing is to get people emotionally. The power of irrational belief is immensely powerful. Far more powerful than the anything the Left can offer.
If you can tap these forces of—in some respects—codified irrationalism, if you can bring them to the surface, if you can bottle them, you will tap the energies of future generations of majority Americans. And you will do so because it appears to be extraordinarily interesting. More interesting than anything else. More threatening than anything else. More shocking than anything else. And that is something that the Right should actually in my view heighten, in a civilized and persuasive way.
One should never lose sight of the reason that people are opposed to our ideas is because they are thrilled to be frightened by them. They are thrilled to be appalled by them. It is the political equivalent of Satanism to many people. I’m saying nothing that is at all original. And in doing so we actually make ourselves tremendously attractive at certain levels of consciousness—not to some Southern Baptist chapter, admittedly. But you make yourself tremendously psychologically appealing. You may not have a halo over your head but you are transfigured in a sort of dark and sepulchral light, which makes you deeply spiritually ambivalent to people who exist now. And that contains the prospect of growth and the prospect of renewal.
Thank you very much!
From Kenneth Clark’s The Other Half: A Self-Portrait (ellipsis omitted between unquoted excerpts):
The last words of the programme were shot in Saltwood, in my study. As if in sympathy the camera broke down, and a new one had to be sent from London. But at last the final words were spoken, including the prophetic lines by Yeats, which I had heard him read soon after he had written them; I walked in to my library, patted a wooden figure by Henry Moore, as if to imply that there still was hope, and out of shot.
It was all over. The crew came over to the Castle for a drink. We had become a band of brothers and were not far from tears at the thought that we should not meet again. I may be fanciful, but I think something of this feeling of comradeship is perceptible in the film. It seems ridiculous to say that the happiest years of my life took place when I was sixty-eight, but so it was.
♣
The communication with simple people was one of the things about the programmes that particularly annoyed intellectuals of the left, who believed that they had a prescriptive right to speak to the working classes. Academics were furious at the simplification of their labours. In fact my approach to history was unconsciously different from that now in favour in universities, which sees all historical change as the result of economic and communal pressures. I believe in the importance of individuals, and am a natural hero-worshiper. Each programme had its hero—Charlemagne, the Abbot Suger, Alberti, Erasmus, Luther and Montaigne, Mozart, Voltaire, Jefferson, Rousseau, Wordsworth, and finally Brunel. One whole programme is called The Hero as Artist. The majority of people share my taste for heroes, and so were glad of an historical survey that emphasised outstanding individuals rather than economic trends.
When the series was shown in the U.S.A. things got out of hand. The number of letters quadrupled, and some of them were rather dotty.
When I arrived in Georgetown to stay with my old friends David and Margie Finley, Carter Brown, the Director of the Gallery [National Gallery at Washington], rang me to say ‘For God’s sake don’t go in through the front door. You’ll be mobbed’. I went in by the back door and down a long underground corridor to a press conference. After it was over I was led back along the same corridor so that I might walk the whole length of the Gallery upstairs. It was the most terrible experience in my life. All the galleries were crammed full of people who stood up and roared at me, waving their hands and stretching them out towards me.
I then went downstairs and retired to the ‘gents’, where I burst into tears. I sobbed and howled for a quarter of an hour. I suppose politicians quite enjoy this kind of experience, and don’t get it often enough. The Saints certainly enjoyed it, but saints are very tough eggs. To me it was utterly humiliating. It simply made me feel a hoax. I came up to lunch with red eyes, and tried to put the experience out of my mind. But, as the reader will have realised, it would not let go, and has not gone. And I record it because I must be one of the few ordinary, normal men on whom this kind of experience has been inflicted. The Finleys drove me home in silence. They felt as embarrassed as I did.
Speech on receiving the National Gallery of Art medal
When I tried to read the great German philosophers, I turned over the pages of Kant and Hegel, and I couldn’t make head or tail of them. I felt absolutely frustrated and humiliated, but I had to go until I thought I understood something, and at least acquired a new mental process.
Now although I believe that this part of education is the most important part, it has a great defect. One may achieve intellectual discipline, but one doesn’t remember a single thing that one learnt in that way, because one doesn’t absorb it. I can’t translate the simplest Latin inscription, and if you ask me what Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is about I couldn’t tell you.
Education has another aspect—what you learn through delight. It is by falling in love with a subject, a period, a style, an individual hero, that one absorbs something so that it becomes a part of one’s living tissue, and one never forgets it. ‘Give all to love,’ your great underrated poet said. It’s true of education as well of life. And the first advice I would give to any young person is, when you fall in love with Roman baroque or with the essays of Montaigne or with whatever it may be, give up everything to study that one, all-absorbing theme of the moment, because your mind is in a plastic condition. A plastic period usually takes place between the ages of about fifteen to the age of twenty-two; and anyone who is learning at that moment will never forget what he has learnt. Read and read, look and look; you will never be able to do it so intensely again. I often wonder if in the last fifty years of grubbing away and reading in galleries and libraries I’ve learned anything compared to what came to me in those plastic moments.
My goodness, if people really began to be sceptical and use their minds, in order to see through cant and humbug and after self-serving lies, advertisers and public relations men and a number of politicians, and even a few favourable philosophers, would be out of business. And the way that education does this is not only by training people to use their minds, but by teaching them history. When you read history you learn that people in the past were just as clever as we are, in fact at some periods they were a good deal cleverer.
I would like to think that these programmes have done two things: they have made people feel that they are part of a great human achievement, and be proud of it, and they have made them feel humble in thinking of the great men of the past.
“In the long history of mankind there have not been so very many democratic republics, yet people lived for centuries without them and were not always worse off. They even experienced that ‘happiness’ we are forever hearing about, which was sometimes called pastoral or patriarchal… They preserved the physical health of the nation… They preserved its moral health, too, which has left its imprint at least on folklore and proverbs—a level of moral health incomparably higher than that expressed today in simian radio music, pop songs and insulting advertisements. Could a listener from outer space imagine that our planet had already known and left behind it Bach, Rembrandt and Dante?”
—Solzhenitsyn (From Under the Rubble)
Kenneth Clark may have been clueless about the fact that race matters. Yet, that our rot goes much deeper than what white nationalists realize is all too obvious once we leave, for a while, the ghetto of nationalism and take a look at the classics, just as Clark showed us through his 1969 TV series Civilisation.
Compared to the other famous series, Clark’s was unsurpassed in the sense that, as I have implied elsewhere, only genuine art—not science—has a chance to fulfill David Lane’s fourteen words.
By “art” I mean an evolved sense of beauty which is almost completely absent in today’s nationalists. Most of them are quite a product of Jewish modernity whether with their music, lifestyles or Hollywood tastes, to a much greater degree than what they think. For nationalism to succeed an evolved sense of female beauty has to be the starting point to see the divine nature of the white race. In Clark’s own words, “For all these reasons I think it is permissible to associate the cult of ideal love with the ravishing beauty and delicacy that one finds in the madonnas of the thirteenth century. Were there ever more delicate creatures than the ladies on Gothic ivories? How gross, compared to them, are the great beauties of other woman-worshiping epochs.”
Below, links to excerpts of most of the chapters of the 1969 series, where Clark followed the ups and downs of our civilisation historically:
For an introduction to these series, see here.
Below, some excerpts of “The Light of Experience,” the eight chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark.
Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:
I am in Holland not only because Dutch painting is a visible expression of this change of mind [the revolution that replaced divine authority by experience, experiment and observation], but because Holland—economically and intellectually—was the first country to profit from the change. When one begins to ask the question, ‘does it work?’ instead of ‘is it God’s will?’ one gets a new set of answers, and one of the first of them is this: that to try to suppress opinions which one doesn’t share is much less profitable than to tolerate them.
Nearly all the great books which revolutionised thought were first printed in Holland. What sort of society was it that allowed these intellectual time-bombs to be set off in its midst? Inside the old almshouse of Haarlem, which is now a picture gallery, there is plenty of evidence. We know more about what the seventeenth-century Dutch looked like than we do about any other society, except perhaps the first-century Romans. Each individual wanted posterity to know exactly what he was like.
One can’t imagine groups like this [Rembrandt’s Syndics] being produced in Spain or seventeenth-century Italy, even in Venice. They are the first visual evidence of bourgeois democracy. Dreadful words—so debased by propaganda that I hesitate to use them. Yet in the context of civilisation they really have a meaning. They mean that a group of individuals can come together and take corporate responsibility; that they can afford to do so because they have some leisure; and that they have some leisure because they have money in the bank.
Amsterdam was the first centre of bourgeois capitalism, the chief banking centre of Europe. I don’t say much about economics in this book chiefly because I don’t understand them—and perhaps for that reason believe that their importance has been overrated by post-Marxist historians. But, of course, there is no doubt that at a certain stage in social development fluid capital is one of the chief causes of civilisation because it ensures three essential ingredients: leisure, movement and independence.
♣
In studying the history of civilisation one must try to keep a balance between individual genius and the moral or spiritual condition of a society. However irrational it may seem, I believe in genius. I believe that almost everything of value which has happened in the world has been due to individuals.
Nevertheless, one can’t help feeling that the supremely great figures in history—Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Newton, Goethe—must be to some extent a kind of summation of their times. They are too large, too all-embracing, to have developed in isolation.
Rembrandt is a crucial instance of this conundrum. It is very easy—indeed rather more convenient for the historian—to imagine Dutch art without him; and there was no one else in Holland remotely comparable to him—nothing like the group of poets and dramatists who preceded and accompanied Shakespeare. Yet the very fact that Rembrandt was so immediately and overwhelmingly successful, and went on being successful—his etchings and drawings never went out of fashion—and that for twenty years almost every Dutch painter was his pupil, shows that the spiritual life of Holland needed him and so had, to some extent, created him.
However, any attempt to relate art to society gets one into a false position. The greatest of all pictures based on the facts of vision wasn’t painted in the scientific atmosphere of Holland, but in the superstitious, convention-ridden court of Philip IV of Spain: Las Meninas, ‘The Ladies in Waiting’, which was painted by Velasquez about five years before Vermeer’s finest interiors.
The enlightened tidiness of Hooch and Vermeer and the rich imaginative experience of Rembrandt reached their zenith about 1660. During that decade the leadership of intellectual life passed from Holland to England. Towering above all these remarkable scientists [Boyle, Hooke, Halley, Wren] was Newton, one of the three or four Englishmen whose fame has transcended all national boundaries. I can’t pretend that I have read the Principia, and if I did I wouldn’t understand it any more that Samuel Pepys did when, as President of The Royal Society, it was handed to him for his approval. One must take on trust that it gave a mathematical account of the structure of the universe which for three hundred years seemed irrefutable. It was both the climax of the age of observation and the sacred book of the next century.
♣
What is civilisation? A state of mind where it is thought desirable for a naval hospital to look like this and for the inmates to dine in a splendid decorated hall.
Painted Hall
Royal Hospital
Greenwich, London
The strange thing is that none of the nineteenth-century writers (except Carlyle and Ruskin) seemed to notice that the triumph of rational philosophy had resulted in a new form of barbarism. If, from the balcony of the Greenwich Observatory, I look beyond the order of Wren’s hospital I see, stretching as far as the eye can reach, the squalid disorder of industrial society. It has grown up as a result of the same conditions that allowed the Dutch to build their beautiful towns and support their painters and print their works of philosophers: fluid capital, a free economy, a flow of exports and imports, a dislike of interference.
Every civilisation seems to have its nemesis, not only because the first bright impulses become tarnished by greed and laziness, but because of unpredictables—and in this case the unpredictable was the growth of population.
One must mention the name of Harold A. Covington, a postmodern novelist whose works represent a good Bildungsroman for any White nationalist. Over several thousand pages, Covington uses the classic approach in the description of postmodern heroes who always try to surpass themselves—in the face of cosmic vagaries.
However, the plots of his best-known war novels are not situated in ancient Greece or Rome, but in a balkanized and dying America. Covington is also an author of several historical novels whose plots revolve around 15th- and 16th-century Europe. His war novels, therefore, may be the reason why his message may be closer and more comprehensible to a modern reader than Homer and the ancient classics.
♣
Let us leave aside the political plausibility or post-historical veracity of Covington’s novels dealing with the war of White independence at the beginning of the 21st century in the Pacific Northwest. What needs to be singled out in Covington’s prose is his language, his ability to construct both real and surreal plots, and above all his skill to administer a good dose of empathy with his diverse characters.
And indeed there is a whole gallery of diverse characters in his novels—from disfranchised poor Whites from the South who were once victims of positive discrimination and who have now landed in the embattled Northwest, to ritzy and sold-out WASP politicians in DC, vying to be more Jewish than the Jews themselves. Each of his numerous characters is carefully situated in his own timeframe, each carrying his own clusters of conflicting memories, often haunting him for the rest of his life.
Covington, as much as he dissects the mindset of his warring heroes does not just examine their self-proclaimed racial awareness, but focuses instead on their historical consciousness. The reader won’t find characters blaring “White power!” or sporting swastikas, or endlessly debating about the ominous Jews. The frequent monologues by his characters bear witness that their individual memories are seldom sweet. Even in a pristine environment of the Northwest Republic, residents are immersed in their own Shakespearean dilemmas of being vs. not being.
In most cases the racial awareness of Covington’s characters is coupled with their reminiscences of the haunting times of bygone eras. Thus, in his latest novel Freedom’s Sons depicting the nascent Northwest Republic, we come across a man who serves as one of the chiefs of the Northwest secret police. But this man has also a past; he is not just an empty White slate. His grandparents, back in the mid-20th century had fled communist Czechoslovakia and settled in the city of Chicago—only to discover another form of paleo-communist aka liberal insanity. Their progeny, the future settlers in the Northwest, realized that in the land of the free and the home of the brave, they were not just subjects to the terror of affirmative action, but also victims of serial burglaries and rampant Black crime. Finally, after much procrastination they decided to move to the Northwest, encountering on their way both physical and psychological roadblocks which in many ways reflected the predicaments they had once encountered in communist Europe.
__________________________
For an introduction to these series, see here.
Below, some indented excerpts of “Grandeur and Obedience,” the seventh chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, and my brief comment.
Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:
In my previous post criticizing Erasmus I mentioned how the modern mind is too coward to approach the main psychosis of Christendom, the doctrine of hell. Unlike the previous entries on Civilisation, of the episode about the Counter-Reformation I’ll barely quote the essentials to annotate what I have just said in that post. Clark said:
The first thing that strikes one is that those who say that the Renaissance had exhausted the Italian genius are wide off the mark. After 1527 there was a failure of confidence; and no wonder. Historians may say that the Sack of Rome was more a symbol than a historically significant event: well, symbols sometimes feed the imagination more than facts—anyway the Sack was real enough to anyone who witnessed it.
If you compare the lower part of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, which was commissioned by Clement VII as a kind of atonement for the Sack, with a group in Raphael’s Disputa or with the Creation of Adam, you can see that something very drastic has happened to the imagination of Christendom.
Michelangelo had been reluctant to undertake the Last Judgement; under Clement’s successor, Pope Paul II, he was persuaded to continue it although with a rather different purpose. It ceased to be an act of atonement, or an attempt to externalise a bad dream, and became the first and greatest assertion of the Church’s power, and of the fate that would befall heretics and schismatics. It belongs to a period of severity, when the Catholic Church was approaching its problems in rather the same puritanical spirit as the Protestants.
Paul III took the two decisions that were successfully to counter the Reformation: he sanctioned the Jesuit order and instituted the Council of Trent. [The Counter-Reformation] was also a period of austerity and restraint, typified by the leading spirit of the period, St Carlo Borromeo, whose legendary asceticism is commemorated in this picture.
How had that victory been achieved? In England most of us were brought up to believe that it depended on The Inquisition, the Index, and the Society of Jesus. I don’t believe that a great outburst of creative energy such as took place in Rome between 1620 and 1660 can be the result of negative factors, but I admit that the civilization of these years depended on certain assumptions that are out of favour in England and America today. The first of these, of course, was belief in authority, the absolute authority of the Catholic Church. This belief was extended to sections of society which we now assume to be naturally rebellious. It comes as something of a shock to find that, with a single exception (Caravaggio), the great artists of the time were all sincere, conforming Christians.
And so what most repulsed Nietzsche, the restoration of Christianity after the Italian Renaissance, was consolidated.
