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Category: Catholic Church

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Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 137

– For the context of these translations click here –

Saint Gregory the Great
by Francisco Goya.

‘The property of the poor’

The same man who prophesied the calamitous end of the world and the impending divine judgment carried out an ecclesiastical property policy as intense as if that divine judgment were never to come.

The pope had a series of well-organised patrimonies, about fifteen at the beginning of his pontificate, and territory of many hundreds of square kilometres, called the patrimony of St. Peter. This meant that all this did not belong to the pope, the clergy or the Church, but actually belonged to the blessed prince of the Apostles. And that property of Peter extended from North Africa, where to Gregory’s great joy the almost depopulated territories were worked by prisoners of war (the cheapest ‘labour’), passing through Italy, the urban territory of Rome (Patrimonium urbanum), to Corsica, Sardinia, Dalmatia, Istria and Provence: a property of enormous extension and certainly the largest in Italy. Much of it came from imperial foundations. Perhaps the last gigantic increase was due to the estates of the Arian Church, which was plundered after the destruction of the Ostrogoth kingdom. And while private property diminished more and more, the riches of the Church were always increasing.

In Sicily, the granary of Rome since ancient times, the patrimony of ‘Saint Peter’ was so great that Gregory divided it into two administrative centres (rectories): Palermo and Syracuse, with about 400 tenants in total (conductores). And he personally was informed that for years ‘many people suffered violence and injustice by the administrators of Roman ecclesiastical property’, from whom he had deprived them by taking away their slaves. In the exploitation of the territories, the pope had the support of some of his closest associates as well as the rectors of different patrimonies (obliged with an oath before the supposed tomb of Peter, covered by him with 100 pounds of gold).

Gregory, who ordered the deacons of Catania to wear sandals (compagi) because it was the only thing allowed to Roman deacons, despite his gloomy penitential sermons and his corrosive expectation of the destruction of the world, still found time, surprisingly long, to take care of the fields, the belly mares, the old oxen, the useless cows and the slaves, who had to be naturally baptised members of the holy Church whenever possible. The methods of the holy father do not seem to have been too scrupulous. The main reason was to increase revenue before the impending doomsday and to present the boss with a perfect balance sheet. It has been written that his slogan was: ‘Prestige, efficiency and discipline’. Today, that could be the creed of any American marketing scholar…

Papal real estate continually provided Gregory with large amounts of merchandise and money, making the Catholic Church the leading economic power in Italy… The miserable peasants who were already being deprived with the taxes on the land (burdatio) that were collected three times a year, in addition to the leases and deliveries to the Holy Catholic Church, saw themselves oppressed… But Gregory called himself ‘treasurer of the poor’, describing the immense pontifical riches as ‘the property of the poor’: one ‘of the most beautiful expressions of him’, sings the Church History Manual.

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 136

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

The altar of Gregory in St. Peter’s Basilica
contains the remains of Pope Gregory.

 
‘Thinking different from most—almost a crime worthy of death’

Soon this pope, like most of his predecessors and especially those who followed him, intervened harshly against those who thought differently, against all non-Catholics. His great goal was propagatio fidei, the planned extension of papal power, at almost any cost.

For this reason he interfered in the affairs of England and in the Frank-Merovingian kingdom, whose kings he vainly sought to win over to ecclesiastical reform. He recommended torture and imprisonment as coercive means, and occasionally also the peaceful transformation of pagan places of worship or Gentile customs, ‘so that people thus confidently go to the usual places’, always following the circumstances. He also advised, on occasion, promising converts a tax cut and ‘converting’ the stubborn with higher taxes. To the Sardinians, who still persisted in their paganism, their bishop had to Christianise them by force, as if they were slaves!

But not only did Gregory propagate the conversion of the ‘pagans’ in Sardinia, Sicily, Corsica, and elsewhere. He also tirelessly fought ‘heresy’ and intervened with great zeal in the war against heretics within the missionary war for the expansion of the faith outward, gladly called ‘defence of the Roman Church’ or ‘the pastoral care of the pope’. Not even those who were simply outsiders or disagreed could remain unmolested. ‘Thinking differently than most, leading a different way of life from that led by people in general, increasingly meant a direct questioning of the doctrines and practices of the common people, already constituting almost a crime worthy of death’ (Herrmann)…

Gregory was a propagandist convinced of the virtue of humility. And humble, of course, it is only he who is where the pope is and obeys him with the greatest submission. Conversely, in Gregory’s mind a ‘heretic’ could in no way be humble. The ‘heresy’ was a priori the opposite, a division of hearts, the ruin of souls, a service to Baal and the devil; it was apostasy, rebellion and pride. ‘The place of heretics is pride itself… the place of the wicked is pride, as conversely humility is the place of good’. Tolerance towards ‘heretics’ was unthinkable from the beginning, from New Testament times. The ‘heretics’ were already fought in the primitive Church as ‘antichrists’, as ‘firstborn of Satan’, ‘animals in human form’, ‘beasts’, ‘devils’, ‘slaughter cattle for hell’ and so on. All of this was, indeed, an old and accepted tradition in the Church, which a worthy predecessor of Gregory, Pope Gelasius I (492-496), had summed up in this sentence: ‘Tolerance towards heretics is more pernicious than the most terrible destructions of the provinces by the barbarians’.

In Africa, where after the total annihilation of the Arian vandals the Catholic imperial house prevailed again, the pope was annoyed by the Manicheans, some remains of the Arians, and to a great extent also the Donatists. Once again, as in Augustine’s time, domination was the champion of the impoverished! But soon Gregory forced the repression of the ‘heretics’. In a letter to the African prefect in 593, he is extremely surprised that the state does not act energetically against the sectarians. He later protested also by sending three bishops as delegates to Constantinople before the emperor, for the violation of the imperial laws in Africa. But the truth is that in the second half of his pontificate there is no longer any talk of the Donatists at all.

The ‘great’ pope hated anything that wasn’t Catholic, otherwise he wouldn’t have been ‘great’…

For Gregory the pagans had neither divine nor human rights. And messing it all up—as has been done in his circles to this day—he presented the pagans as persecutors of the Catholics! It is true that he did not advocate outright violence, lashing, torture and jail at any cost for the Gentiles, who according to him ‘live like wild animals’. Nothing of that! Magnanimous and good-natured as he was, he cordially encouraged to wipe out the pagan tenants from ecclesiastical lands by financial imposition. The stubborn and hard-headed peasant who refused ‘to return to the Lord God’ had to ‘be burdened with so many taxes that this punishment would push him to enter the right path as quickly as possible’.

And if even with the most unbearable tax pressure someone was reluctant to enter ‘the right path’, the Holy Father was a little tougher. He then ordered a rigorous prison and, in the case of slaves, even torture which Augustine, the preacher of the mansuetudo catholica or ecclesial meekness, already allowed. And he allowed it not only with slaves but also with all schismatics (Donatists). The clever Numidian thinker twists the words and calls torture emendatio, as if it were a kind of baptismal cure and preparation, a trifle compared to hell.

Gregory thus Christianised the sad remains of Sardinian paganism in the light of doctor Augustine. In 599 he exhorted by letter ‘with the greatest fervour’ to Archbishop Januarius of Cagliari ‘to pastoral vigilance against idolaters’. He first recommended conversion through ‘a convincing exhortation’ and not without evoking ‘divine judgment’. Then he wrote clearly:

But if you find that they are not willing to change their way of life, we wish that you arrest them with all zeal. If they are slaves, punish them with whipping and torment, seeking their correction. But if they are free people, they must be led to repentance employing severe prison, as it should be, so that those who despise hearing the words of redemption, which save them from the danger of death, may in any case be returned by bodily torments to the desired healthy faith.

Through bodily torments a healthy Catholic mentality is achieved…

At that time, ‘pagans’ still existed in many regions, not only where Archbishop Januarius himself tolerated them among his tenants. There were pagans in Corsica, in Sicily, in Campania, let alone in Gaul and even in Great Britain. Everywhere Gregory pushed for their disappearance.

For this he not only set in motion his clergy but the nobility, the landowners and the civil arm too. He had to strike everywhere in union with the ecclesiastical arm. Thus, in 593 he ordered the praetor of Sicily to render all his assistance to the bishop of Tyndaris in his work of annihilating the ‘pagans’. And in 598 he ordered Agnelo of Terracina to seek out the tree worshipers and punish them so that ‘paganism’ would not be passed on to others. He also required the assistance of Mauro, the local military commander. And of course all of this happened, to put it in the words of John the Deacon, ‘through the application of legitimate authority’.

Pope Gregory accepted and even openly sanctioned the religious war to subdue the Gentiles… They had to submit by force without further ado and then more or less smoothly seek conversion: a rule that the Catholic historian Friedrich Heer defines as ‘the Christian policy of conquest and expansion until the eve of the First World War’. In this regard Gregory worked, as we see in his letter to the emperor, with the old Ambrosian idea that ‘the peace of the res publica depends on the peace of the universal Church’. He consequently kept his military commanders and even his own soldiery, which repeatedly prevailed victorious… In the eyes of the Catholic historian of the popes, all this happened ‘in an absolutely natural way’ as by himself Pope Gregory was ‘the bulwark and leader’, the ‘consul of God’, who took in his hands ‘in an autonomous way the history of Italy, the history of his country’.

Categories
Catholic Church Celsus Inquisition John Stuart Mill Miscegenation Protestantism

A Gedankenexperiment

I would like to add something to what I said in ‘Bloodraven’s cave’. In the comments section of Occidental Dissent the commenter PsychelonB posted a comment of more than 700 words of which I will only quote the following:

Pro white christ cucks insist they can endlessly promote their Jewish cult (from Judea) and spew massive insults towards anyone even silently skeptical and not literally delusionally schizophrenic about the cowardly madness of worshiping the Jewish volcano demon while also framing oneself as a great ‘opposition’ to Jewry.

Hunter Wallace replied:

Not really. Those people are self-marginalizing cranks who have zero political support. My Protestant religious beliefs make me normal.

Wallace doesn’t really understand the issue and the best way to explain it is through a Gedankenexperiment. Since I have lived in Mexico for more than half a century I think I know Latin American culture, including its history, better than monolingual English speakers. New Spain existed from the conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, exactly half a millennium ago, until 1821 when some traitorous Criollos joined the independence cause that, originally, had been led by the Jew Hidalgo and the mulatto Morelos.

Let us experiment with the imagination. Let’s imagine that we are one of those Spaniards who migrated to the Americas. The experiment is somewhat unreal in that there is no biographical record of what I am about to imagine. But imagine that this 17th-century Spaniard is alarmed by the massive miscegenation going on in the Americas, approved by a papal bull since the 1530s.

This man realises that the factors responsible for continental miscegenation are not only the greed that acts as a magnet for adventurers from the Iberian Peninsula, but also the Counter-Reformation that has conquered the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking parts of the continent. This hypothetical Iberian white wants to save his race from genocide through ongoing miscegenation, but he runs against the zeitgeist that once ruled the West.

Con la Iglesia hemos topado (literally ‘We have bumped against into the Church’) is an expression derived from a passage of Don Quixote that has become a colloquial expression in the Spanish-speaking world. It is used to express that old Spaniards should take care when discussing Church matters because they are powerful. The expression denotes helplessness or resignation in the face of a situation. It could be translated as ‘You can’t fight City Hall’ or more exactly ‘We’ve run up against some powerful forces’. In the old regime of Spain the power and influence of the clergy and their institutions were far superior to that of any other social group, and anyone was scared to face them. Criticisms of the Church appear in the Spanish literature of the Golden Age, although it had to be through analogy, metaphor or anonymously.

Let us suppose that this racially conscious Iberian white realises that the ultimate perpetrator of miscegenation is Catholicism (from the POV of this universalistic religion, we are all equal in the eyes of God). Then he has to redpill his co-ethnics who haven’t yet mixed. He anonymously tries to disseminate the surviving fragments of the book of Celsus in order to start a movement that will eventually bring about the general apostasy from Catholicism on the continent.

What chances would he have of starting such a movement in a world where the Spanish crown had already opened a branch of the Inquisition on this side of the Atlantic? Imagine then that this Iberian white tried to transmit his thoughts only with close friends. What would he think if someone who read his private pamphlets said behind his back: ‘That person is a crank who marginalises himself and has no political support. My Catholic religious beliefs make me normal’.

That is the question. Although also aware that miscegenation will stain the Iberian blood on the continent, the fellow who thinks this doesn’t want to see (1) that the Church’s universalism is involved in mass miscegenation and (2) that if the peninsular Spaniards and their Criollo offspring don’t wake up, leaving Christianity behind, their blood will become stained in the New World.

In other words, the crank is not the Iberian white that wanted to translate Celsus as the first mustard seed that grew, over time, in a generalised apostasy to save his own. The crazy people are all the Iberians who came here with an ethno-suicidal cult.

The same can be said of the northern Protestants. What Wallace calls normal is, in reality, a madman. As a commenter put it on this site, ‘Whatever you want to call it, thinking you can aid in saving the white race while, at the same time, bending the knee to Jewish deities (Yahweh and Yeshua) is some kind of combination of insane, dishonest, cowardly, naive, or very stupid. To bottom line it, it won’t and can’t work’. Another commenter, PsychelonB, who has also commented on this site, seems to have been influenced by the masthead of this site.

As a final thought I would like to say that the passage that most impressed me from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty was his assertion that, by confronting an opinion cherished by an entire civilisation, the dissenter has a fifty percent chance of being right. In other words, the Protestantism that Wallace considers normal in the US has half the chance of being wrong compared to our isolated voice.

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 133

Christianity does not belong to the church! It might have once, but certainly not since the American and French Revolutions. Secularisation rarely opened doors to atheism—more often, it made the Jewish creed reborn in fierce anti-Aryan liberalism where the empty idea of money trumps the sacred matter of blood and soil. Only in Germany did Jesus die—and yet, he resurrected in 1945, in the unholy spirit of anti-racism, anti-discrimination, of egalitarian idealism that draws no distinction between the Aryan and the Negro, dead and alive, living and a rock. A faith so crudely nihilistic nobody dares to believe its malice—and yet, it permeates the entire sick body of Europe!—cf. the essay ‘The Red Giant’.

—Adûnâi

Editor’s note: This recent comment by Adûnâi on The Unz Review doesn’t mean that he has earned the privilege of commenting here. It only means that what drives me to continue with these instalments of Karlheinz Deschner’s Christianity’s Criminal History is the red giant, a nova that’s engulfing the West: Christianity in its secular form.

For the context of Deschner’s work see: here.

The Conversion of Reccared I as recreated by
Antonio Muñoz Degrain, Senate Palace, Madrid.

 

CHAPTER 6

The Conversion of the Visigoths to Catholicism

No other country in the Western world experienced such a profound and lasting transformation by Christianity as Spain. —Willliam Culican

After the defeat of Poitiers (507) at the hands of Clovis, the great Toulouse kingdom collapsed completely and the Visigoths, almost entirely expelled from southern France, concentrated in Spain, where they had conquered one province after another. From 473 they were owners of the entire peninsula, except for the small Swabian kingdom in the northwest and the Basque territories of the Bay of Biscay. Its new capital was Toledo, which supplanted Toulouse…

Liuvigild, the last Arian king of the Visigoths, certainly reinforced the power of the crown. He improved the monetary system, and revised the laws, filling in deficiencies and eliminating superfluous aspects. He was the first German prince who founded cities, the most important of which he called Reccopolis, after his son Reccared (in the upper reaches of the Tagus). During his eighteen-year reign he re-unified the Visigothic kingdom, which was crumbling. Even St. Isidore of Seville, who attributes Liuvigild’s successes to the favour of fate and the bravery of his army, admits that the Goths, until then reduced to a small corner in Spain, came to occupy most of the territory. ‘Only the error of heresy obscured the reputation of his bravery’. That was naturally the decisive point: ‘the pernicious poison of that doctrine’, the ‘deadly plague of’ heresy’.

Full of the fury of Arian infidelity, he persecuted the Catholics and exiled most of the bishops. Liuvigild deprived the churches of their income and privileges and through terror he drove many into the Arian pestilence and won many more without persecution with gold and gifts. In addition to other heretical depravities, he even dared to re-baptise Catholics, and not only lay people but also members of the priestly state.

In reality, and in the face of radically intolerant Catholicism, since it had already established itself in the Visigothic kingdom, Liuvigild carried out a proven policy of detente. During his reign many Arian monasteries were founded and many churches were built. The king personally endowed Abbot Nanctus and his monks from Africa with real estate. Moreover, he theologically compromised with the Catholics through certain concessions in Trinitarian doctrine…

Editor’s Note: After five pages of describing fights, Deschner writes about how the tide turned from Arianism to Catholicism, and he concludes:

Finally, the Goths who—Bishop Isidore writes— had drunk so thirsty and so long retained the ‘pernicious poison of heresy’, ‘thought of the salvation of their souls, freed themselves from the deeply ingrained and by the grace of Christ reached the only beatifying faith, which is the Catholic faith. Hallelujah!’

At the III Council of Toledo, held in May 589 (see painting above), and whose worthy preparation was preceded by a three-day fast, ordered by the king, part of the Arians went to the victor’s field. The king declared Catholicism the official state religion and began by uprooting Arianism quickly and completely: destroying its ecclesial organisation, excluding the Arians from all public office, and burning their sacred books…

At the same time that Reccared, together with the bishops, put an end to Arianism in Spain, he also turned the Church into an instrument of oppression as had never happened before in the history of the Goths. All Christian opposition disappeared, the Arians were forbidden from any public office, all Arian ecclesiastical property passed to the Catholic bishoprics and celibacy was imposed on the converted clergy.

Conversions were also reached by force. Some within the Arian episcopate, such as the obstinate prelate of Mérida, Sunna, met their death in exile. Catholicus nunquam ero, it seems that Sunna responded to Reccared’s demands for conversion. ‘I will never become a Catholic, but in the faith in which I have lived I want to live also in the future, and I will gladly die for the faith that I have maintained since my youth!’

Many Arian bishops embraced Catholicism just as in Liuvigild’s time many Catholic clergymen had joined the Arian national Church. Then began the alliance of the State with the Catholic Church, what Bishop John of Biclaro* calls the renovario, the attitude of the christianissimus imperator. According to the old Catholic tradition, Reccared ordered the immediate burning of all Arian Bibles and doctrinal writings in Toledo, in the public square. ‘Not even a single Gothic text was left in Spain’ (Thompson).

___________

(*) John of Biclaro attended council of Toledo where Reccared converted to the Catholic faith, represented in the painting above.

Categories
Catholic Church Catholic religious orders Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s criminal history, 130

– For the context of these translations click here –

 

CHAPTER 3

THE SONS OF CLOVIS

‘The successors of the first great Frankish king also protected the Church and the worship; monasticism developed… The remnants of paganism were fought with increasing energy’. —H. H. Anton

 

The division of the kingdom

The kingdom of Clovis was divided almost aequa lance, almost equally, passing in principle to his four sons: all ‘kings of the Franks’; all heirs with the same rights, according to the German rule of succession; all Catholics, except for Theuderic I, with a saint for his mother. And they all also led a life full of hideous cruelties, wars and military campaigns. In the proven tradition of the father they systematically expanded the kingdom and conquered Thuringia (531), Burgundy (533-534) and Provence (537). The aforementioned annexations were joined by numerous raids in search of loot in an extraordinarily troubled time, one of the darkest and bloodiest times in history, brimming with disorder and brutality, fratricides, wars between brothers and betrayals: a race unleashed ‘for power and wealth’ (Buchner), a ‘foolish desire for loot and slaughter’ (Schulze).

But even critical historians bend the knee before the ‘founding of the kingdom’ of the Merovingians, before the bridge they built ‘between Antiquity and the Middle Ages’, before their contribution to the triumph ‘of Catholic Christianity’ to the alliance ‘between throne and altar’. As if all this had not made the story much more gruesome!

The boundaries of the four partitions of the kingdom are not stated with sufficient precision. The one we know best is the inheritance of Theuderic I (reign 511-533). The presumed Hugdietrich of the saga received the lion’s share with the capital, Reims: a territory which would include what later became Austria with its predominantly Germanic population: the entire east, from Burgundy to the Rhineland, and perhaps even as far as the Fritziar and Kassel region, as well as large territories that had belonged to the Alemanni, which was the case in eastern Aquitaine. But each of the sons obtained a part of the Aquitaine lands south of the Loire, which the father had taken over; three of them were exclaves.

Chlothar I (reign 511-561), the youngest of Clovis’ sons, and perhaps not yet twelve years old, the Salic age to reach legal age, obtained mainly the territory of the Salian Franks with the royal cities of Tournai and Cambrai. For the same reason, it included the old Frankish territory between the coast of the English Channel, the Somme and the Carboniferous Forest, with approximately the same borders that it had before the predatory incursions of his progenitor. As the seat of government Chlothar chose Soissons, in the extreme south. Southern and western France corresponded to Chlodomer and Childebert respectively.

Chlodomer (reign 511-524) was around fifteen when his father died and ruled as king of western Aquitaine, the northernmost territory of the middle Loire, at Orleans. And Childebert I (reign 511-558) controlled the coastal lands from the Somme to Brittany; he resided in Paris, the undisputed capital.
 

A saint and murderer

Shortly after the Auvergne rebellion, the Catholic Frankish kings attacked the Catholic kingdom of Burgundy.

Sigismund (reign 516-523), son of the Burgundian king Gundobad, still ruled there. Since 501 Sigismund was viceroy in Geneva. And what the jealous Avitus had not achieved with the father, he obtained with the son. Around the year 500 Sigismund converted from Arianism to Catholicism. Sigismund later introduced Catholicism throughout Burgundy. He was the first German king to make a pilgrimage to Rome…

Sigismund, the murderer of his own son, makes his way as a saint of the Catholic Church! They ended up thanking him for the conversion of the Burgundians to Catholicism. Soon his cult began in the monastery of St. Moritz founded by him. Those with fever had masses celebrated in honour of Sigismund (who allegedly helped against malaria and tertian fever). In the 7th century he also appears as a saint in the so-called Martyrologium Hieronymianum. At the end of the Middle Ages he will be one of the patron saints of Bohemia and even become a fashionable saint. The Archbishop of Prague declared the feast of Sigismund a feast of the archdiocese.

His statue appears on French and German altars as well as in the Freiburg Cathedral; there are churches dedicated to Sigismund and a brotherhood named after him. His relics were requested, which initially rested at St. Moritz. The head was taken to the church of St. Sigismund, although a fragment of it is found in Plozk of the Vistula; in the 14th century a part of the body was deposited in St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague, and another was taken around the same time to Freising, which eventually became the centre of its veneration in Germany.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s interpolated note: Regardless of the repulsiveness of relic worship—pieces of decomposed corpses —, what is currently happening in France and Germany has very dark and old historical roots that no one in white nationalism sees for the simple reason that none lives under the weirwood but in the inane present.

It should be obvious that, if these Germanics hadn’t been infected with a cult of Semitic origin, they would have regarded Hermann as a hero who fought against the Romans when the latter were already mongrelising.

Instead, after the Christian takeover these Germanics were forced to worship Catholic monsters. Tell me whom you worship and I’ll tell you who you’ll become. Read pages 23-32 of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour: the only article by a Jew in that compilation. Even the Nazis translated it to German in the Czernowitzer Allgemeine Zeitung of September 2, 1933.

Now let’s go back to Deschner’s account of how a female ‘saint’ gives orders to murder her grandchildren:
 

______ 卐 ______

 
On the death of Chlodomer, his three brothers, ‘warriors above all and simple gang leaders’ (Fontal) shared the inheritance, ignoring all the rights of the three minor children of the deceased king and without allowing any regime of tutelary government from their mother.

The pious Childebert got, it seems, the lion’s share. He was a true father of the nation, who promoted ecclesiastical institutions, enjoyed dealing with bishops granting them real estate, war spoils and large sums of money while being in constant communication with the ‘Holy See’. And as Childebert and Chlothar, who had married Guntheuc, the widow of Chlodomer, certainly feared that the hereditary rights of Theuderic and Gunthar, Chlodomer’s minor children, would be asserted, Childebert didn’t doubt in encouraging their murder, of which Chlothar ‘was very glad’.

After all, both sovereigns had a saint for their mother, Saint Clotilde, and furthermore, being already a Catholic princess, she had imposed baptism on the children of Clovis, had ‘raised them with love’ and had certainly given them a good Catholic upbringing. And since Clotilde also took care of the education of the minor children of the late Chlodomer, the kings Childebert and Chlothar, who had taken over her nephews, asked Clotilde if she wanted her grandchildren to ‘continue living with their hair cut off [like monks] or if they had to kill them both’. And ‘the ideal figure of the desire for feminine holiness’, the francorum apostle who felt for the two children ‘a singular affection’ (Fredegar), replied: ‘Rather dead than tonsured, if they are not going to reign’…

Chlothar put the knife to the neck first to one and then to the other of his brother’s sons, who cried out in anguish. ‘After they had also dispatched the boys’ servants and educators’ Chlothar mounted his horse ‘and left there’. One of them was ten years old and the youngest seven… Queen Clotilde led such a life that she was venerated by the whole world… ‘Her conduct was always of the utmost purity and honesty: she granted goods to churches, monasteries everywhere to holy places, willingly and supplying them with whatever they needed…’

The third son of Chlodomer, the youngest, named Clodoald, was saved from the carnage and entered the clergy, after allegedly shearing himself. ‘He renounced the earthly kingdom and dedicated himself to the Lord’, Gregory writes beautifully. And Fredegar adds: ‘And he led a dignified life; the Lord deigns to perform miracles on his grave’. Clodoald was the founder of the monastery of Saint-Cloud in Paris, which bears his name, and died around the year 560… Clotaire, the uncle-murderer and the executioner, obtained Tours and Poitiers, with the sanctuaries of the patron saints of France, Martin and Hilary, together with the treasure.
 

Theudebert I, and killer kings

Theudebert [editor’s note: the son of Theuderic I and the father of Theudebald] was the first Frank to call himself Augustus and who felt he was the successor of the Roman Caesars and liked to adopt imperial attitudes like minting gold coins with his image that could be described as illegal. He ordered circus games to be held in Arles in the manner of the emperors and must have even thought of the conquest of Constantinople, cherishing the hope of seizing imperial dignity and world domination through an incursion against Byzantium, something planned jointly with the Gepids and Lombards. Such a man naturally had to be on good terms with the Church…

King Theudebert was a benefactor of the Church, which he ‘exempted from tax obligations and deliberately favoured’ (Zollner) while he did nothing more than bleed his Frankish subjects with taxes in the Roman manner… Very significant is the fact that his finance minister, Parthenius (grandson of Bishop Ruricius de Limoges, the murderer of his wife and her lover), on the death of Theudebert and despite the episcopal protection, was removed in Trier from a church, spat on, beaten and stoned by the enraged people.

Even more criminal and even more devoted to the Church was the family clan, which outlived Theudebert. Chlothar I also fought almost continuously during the last years of his life, without this fact bothering at all and not even attracting the attention of those who preached peace and love of neighbour and enemy. The king, undoubtedly the weakest of the Frankish princes until after the death of Theudebert I (558), took over the entire kingdom. He had nevertheless criticised the growing ecclesiastical wealth, but per his brother’s constitution of 554, he also tried to uproot whatever was left of the indigenous religions of his subjects.

It is true that in a winter campaign (555) against the Saxons he bore the worst of it, but the following year he imposed himself on the association of Saxons and Thuringians and even sent troops against the Ostrogoths of Italy. In 557 he fought again against the Saxons, apparently reluctantly, but ‘he was beaten with such enormous bloodshed, and with such a great multitude of casualties on both sides that no one can calculate or evaluate’ (Gregory). But he managed to beat the Danes and Eutenians…

A year later Clotaire also died, and with him the last of Clovis’ four sons, all of whom—like their father—had lived for robbery, murder and war. Everywhere they had gone in search of relics of martyrs, had taken care of relocating them and had promoted the veneration of the saints. They founded many monasteries and endowed them generously. They awarded large real estate to the clergy and made donations to them. The old annals abound in their praises…

Clotaire I, in whose territory the Church was poorly organised and the victim of special relaxation, perhaps didn’t care about Christianity at all. Anyway, he too became a Christian and a faithful Catholic, who waged war after war and had his closest relatives murdered, including young children, maidens, and even his own son, while personally bankrupting himself with countless concubines and at least six marriages ‘and not always successive’ (Schultze). Despite this, the ecclesiastical author of the 7th century compares this king with a priest, showering him with praise. And it is that, indeed, he worried about the transfer of the remains of martyrs, promoted the veneration of Medard, the patron saint of the royal house and supported the founding of churches and monasteries…

Childebert I showed a very special fervour and devotion to the clergy. The usurper and incestuous erected the Holy Cross and the Spanish proto-martyr Vicente de Zaragoza—whose martyrdom was adorned with great propagandistic displays—a basilica in Paris, which would later become the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He made a pilgrimage to the cell of Saint Euspicius, in whose honour he also built a church. He made donations of land and large sums of money, including the spoils of his wars for Catholic churches and monasteries, in which he ordered to pray for the salvation of his soul and the prosperity of the Frankish kingdom.

Thus he distributed among the Frankish churches dozens of chalices and numerous patens and gospels, all made of gold and precious stones, and all material that he had stolen in his Spanish war. Childebert made Orleans the ecclesiastical capital of his kingdom. There four national synods met (in the years 533, 538, 541 and 549). All Frankish kings sent their bishops to them (exception made for the one celebrated in 538). In 552 Childebert summoned another national council in Paris. He promulgated a decree against ‘paganism’ that was still alive, mostly in northern and eastern France. He harshly persecuted anyone who erected ‘idols’ in the fields or prevented their destruction by the priests. He forbade even pagan banquets, songs, and dances, though certainly without demanding conversion by force…

Vigil, the murderous pope, described Childebert in 546, as ‘our most glorious son’ and praised his ‘Christian will, pleasing to God’… Pope Pelagius died in 561, the same year that Clotaire I, the last son of Clovis, did. In that same decade, and together with the Franks and the Visigoths, another Germanic people began to play an increasingly important role: the Lombards.

Categories
Catholic Church Catholic religious orders Destruction of Germanic paganism Franks Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s criminal history, 128

– For the context of these translations see here –

 

VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 1

THE CHRISTIANISATION OF THE GERMANS

‘The introduction of Christianity among the Germans was the most precious gift from heaven’. —Pastoral letter from the German episcopate, June 7, 1934

 

The spread of Christianity in the West

At the end of Antiquity and during the succeeding centuries, Christianity conquered the Germanic world. By armies and merchants it had spread beyond northern Gaul to the Rhine. In the old Rhineland provinces probably there were Christian communities as early as the end of the 3rd century; churches were erected from Constantinian times in Bonn, Xanten, Cologne and, especially, in Trier: the official residence of Caesar since 293. At the end of the 4th century, Christianity was already the dominant religion in some Rhineland areas because ‘the laws of Theodosius, Gratian and Valentinian II imposed its entry into those lands…’

In the late 5th century evangelisation of the Franks began; at the end of the 6th century that of the Anglo-Saxons and the Lombards; in the 9th century the Christianisation of northern Europe was undertaken and, at the end of the millennium, that of the Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians. Since Christianity was no longer a despised religion as it had been in pre-Constantinian times, but the official religion of an empire, the popes no longer trapped some individuals but entire peoples in their net. They also annihilated entire towns ‘leaving neither green nor withered’, as the father of the Church, Isidore, boasts. Such was the case, for example, with the Ostrogoths and the Vandals, of whom the Marseillaise monk Prosperus Tironis provided an insightful picture of the Middle Ages, and who were often the subject of ‘cruel propaganda’ (Diesner).

Conversion methods

The Christianisation of the Germanic peoples—designated in the sources as nationes, gentes, populi, civitates, etc.—not only took place at very different times but also in very different ways. Two typical Christian activities converged in the Germanic mission: preaching and destruction. In Merovingian times, preaching was not the primary instrument of mission. There was a more eloquent method to demonstrate to the pagans the impotence of their Gods and the supreme power of the Christian god: the destruction of the Gentile sanctuaries… Of course it was not only destroyed; often, the so-called Christianisations were ‘simply’ arrived at. In other words, Gentile temples were transformed into Christian churches, expelling evil spirits through rites of exorcism and re-consecrating the buildings. The church transformed and incorporated everything that seemed useful, destroying everything else as a nefarious work of the devil.

An important motive in the conversion of the pagans, and also in the mentoring of those already converted, was without a doubt the constant infiltration of scruples and fears in an alarmist attitude that sowed fear for centuries. Fear, in effect, was ‘the characteristic state of the common man in the Middle Ages: fear of the plague, fear of invasion by foreign armies, fear of the tax collector, fear of witchcraft and magic and, above all, fear of the unknown’ (Richards). The priests of many religions feed on the fear of those whom they lead, and especially Christian priests. It is very significant that St. Caesarius of Arles (died in 542), an archbishop absolutely faithful to Rome, in almost all his propaganda interventions, which number more than two hundred, scares the readers with ‘the final judgment’. Whatever the occasion of his homiletical effusions, he rarely fails to insistently evoke the ‘court of Christ’, the ‘eternal judge’, his ‘harsh and irrevocable sentence’, etc.

The conversions of pagan Germans to Christianity were frequently due to purely material motives, already acting for ‘reasons of prestige’, especially when they came under the tutelage of Christian neighbours. Illustrious Gentiles could be chased ‘like dogs’ from the banquets of their princely courts, because Christians were forbidden to sit at the same table with pagans. It is symptomatic that also among Bavarians, Thuringians and Saxons, the nobility was the first to immediately prostrate themselves before the cross…

Jesus becomes the Germanic broadsword

With its acceptance by the Germans, Christianity was also nationalised and Germanised from the beginning. And not only in epic poems did Christ appear to German eyes as a kind of popular and cantonal king. The Franks were immediately seen as his special courtship, his chosen and preferred people. Warriors clustered around him, just as they clustered around princes. The saint is also now felt as the herald of Christ and god. Traditional Christian concepts are filled ‘with totally new content: Germanic, aristocratic and warrior content’ (Zwolfer). ‘From the religion of patience and suffering, from the flight and denial of the world, the medieval Germans made a warlike religion; and of the Man of Sorrows a Germanic king of the armies, who with his heroes travels and conquers the lands and who must be served through struggle. The German Christian fights for his Lord Christ, as he fights for the landlord he follows; even the monk in his cell feels like a member of the militia Christi’ (Dannenbauer). And naturally the clergy knew how to make the Germans proud of having converted to the Roman cross. In the prologue to the Salic law, the oldest hereditary right of the Franks, the fact of conversion is thus exalted:

Unclean people of the Franks, created by God himself, brave with arms, firm in the covenant of peace, profound in counsel, of great corporal nobility, of uncontaminated purity and superior complexion, bold, prompt and fiery—become to the Catholic faith, free from heresy.

Indeed, according to Christian doctrine, all peoples have been created by god; but flattery is always greatest where it is most needed. In this way the Franks appear here occupying the place of the chosen people of the Bible, of the people of Israel. And in a more recent prologue to the aforementioned Salic law, Christ also appears as the legitimate sovereign of the gens Francorum. He appears ‘personally before the Franks’. He loves those who are far superior to the old world power, ‘the chosen people of a new alliance’. ‘They have defeated the Romans and they have broken the Roman yoke’…

Undoubtedly, many German princes converted for purely political reasons. They worshiped in Christ the ‘strong God’, and especially the superior captain, to whom he granted victory. Thus the Frankish Clovis, Edwin of Northumbria and the Vikings converted—all of whom were baptised after having cast a vow and carried out a slaughter. And just as old Odin was considered a ‘God and lord of victory’ and Wotan (Odin’s name in the south) was considered a warrior God, so Christ is now seen as the same. He occupies the place of the ancient Gods of battle, he is politicised and mythologised, presenting him ‘almost as a national God’ (Heinsius). And from now on it will be a matter of honour for each Christian king to fight ‘the barbarians, who by their very condition as pagans are out of the order of the world’.

The Franks, educated in believing fanaticism, considered it their duty and right to ‘fight for Christ’ (Zollner). And still in the 7th and 8th centuries the Frankish Christians had themselves buried with their weapons, under the old pagan belief of survival after death. On a tombstone found in the Frankish cemetery of Niederdollendorf, near Bonn there is even a risen Christ holding in his right hand the spear, the Germanic sign of sovereignty, instead of the staff of the cross.

It is understandable that the Old Testament, often so bloody, was in tune with the men of the Middle Ages better than the partly pacifist New Testament; and it is understood that the Old Testament kings were exalted by proposing them as models of the Frankish princes, who liked to compare themselves with them. For the historian Ewig, this constitutes a new stage ‘in the Christianisation of the idea of the king’…

Among the Carolingians, decisive victories were frequently attributed to the attendance of St. Peter. ‘But now rest assured’, declares Pepin to the papal legate Serge in the battle against the Bavarians, ‘because due to the intervention of St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, by divine decree Bavaria and the Bavarians belong to the sovereignty of the Franks’. Even minor achievements, such as the conquest of a fortress or even the discovery of a fountain during the war against the Saxons in 772 are presented as great divine miracles. But when misfortune befell—and it happened so often!—the priests were never troubled. Then the misfortune, the catastrophe, was a punishment from god for little faith and the overflow of vices. With this theology the Church has been deceiving itself until today through vicissitudes of all kinds…
The weed of the past

As a rule the Germans did not convert individually, but rather in a cooperative and tribal way. And that because, unlike the Greeks and educated Romans, the ‘barbarians’ easily accepted the Church’s tutoring without the cultural and historical-religious depth with which their Christian ‘converters’ presented the stories… In a not excessively laborious way, a great many ‘barbarians’ were subdued, who soon revered respectfully all the ‘holy’ priests and monks and were deeply impressed by exorcisms, ceremonies and miracles. With faith they welcomed such strange mysteries, dogmas and with fearful devotion put themselves at the service of that arrogant southern shamanism, seemingly animated only by the desire to make the Church rich and powerful, for the salvation of their souls, out of the horror of fire from hell and longing for paradise.

______ 卐 ______

Editor’s interpolated note: For a clip within a movie
depicting the baptism of an ancient Germanic see: here.

______ 卐 ______

Evangelism took place unevenly, outside the cities at a slower pace, for although the pagan Franks did not usually put up much resistance, from time to time, and especially in the countryside, they stubbornly indulged in the destruction of their town idols. In the religious field, man is especially conservative. And just as the peasants still do today—the inhabitants of the towns remain more firmly in Christianity—, so also at the end of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages it was the peasants who persisted the longest in paganism. The Germans were mostly peasants, and in Austria the pagan Franks and Germans were more numerous than the native Christians. This religion was an urban religion and since it became a state religion it was also the religion of the feudal and ruling circles, who sought above all their own benefit. For a long time the peasants persisted in their traditional beliefs, in their divinities, and above all in their Gallic triad: the cult of Jupiter, Mercury and Apollo. And even after they had ‘converted’ they returned again and again to the veneration—undoubtedly much more beautiful and coherent—of trees, stones and fountains.

For centuries synods lashed out at pagan customs, from the Council of Valence (374) until well into the 9th century. Only between the synod of Orleans (511) and that of Paris (829) did the canons of at least nineteen episcopal assemblies launched diatribes against the beliefs and practices of peasant paganism, which preserved the tradition with much greater tenacity than the accommodative nobility. The Germans had a natural piety, so to speak, not camouflaged or imposed, but identical to their lifestyle. They had a natural religion with clearly pantheistic features, marked by the worship of the Gods of the forest, the mountain, the fountains, the rivers and the sea, the veneration of the Sun, light, water, trees and springs; deep down, as it has been known today, a thousand times more coherent veneration than the Christian faith in spirits, at whose dictates a technocratic and hypertrophic civilisation has brought nature almost to ruin…
‘Demonstrative destruction’

During the Merovingian period certain problems of the power of the Christian god often came to the fore in evangelisation: on the one hand, ‘miracles’; on the other, the destruction of pagan places of worship. The images of the Gods—through unpunished annihilation—were easily demonstrated as the powerless work of man, while the ‘spiritual’ Christian god reigned untouchable over the clouds of heaven. Besides, the pagan Franks were generally tolerant and did not have a priestly caste as they faced a fanatical ecclesiastical organisation, which did not back down from forced baptisms, although it is true that at least in the beginning it was fair enough for the church that a formal condemnation of the old beliefs was uttered with a confession from the lips of the new faithful. R. W. Southern accurately describes medieval Europe as a coercive society, in which each person triumphed by baptism. But that was not all; soon the demolition of pagan temples and altars began as well…

St. Gal, an uncle of Saint Gregory of Tours and later Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, being a priest and ‘companion’ of Theuderic I, the eldest son of Clovis, reduced to ashes in Cologne a pagan temple with all the ‘idols’, and only with great difficulty could the king save him from the fury of the peasants… Around 550 Deacon Wulflaicus induced the peasants of the city of Trier to demolish an imposing statue of Diana (originally no doubt of Ar-duinna, the Celtic Goddess), whom the people adored. As he was too weak the peasants did it for him, after he had ceaselessly weakened the will of ordinary people. ‘Well, the other images, which were smaller, he had already smashed them personally’. Without a doubt, miracles also happened there.

Some of the Christian saints known in the fight against paganism became arsonists and robbers. In Tyrol St. Vigilius, Bishop of Trent, worked ‘with fervent zeal for the spread of Christianity’ (Sparber) until one day he destroyed in Rendenatal a highly revered one, which stood on a steep rock, a statue of Saturn. About four-hundred irritated peasants, ‘heathen, stubborn and ferocious’ stoned him. In Italy many dozen churches are dedicated to him. In Monte Cassino St. Benedict (died 543), the ‘father of the western monasticism’, and whose severity caused several assassination attempts against him by his first monks and a Florentine priest, went on rage against the ancient temple of Apollo, the last temple of that God that history remembers. Benedict still found pagans there, cut down their sacred groves and destroyed the sculpture and the altar; but still in 1964 Pope Paul VI named him patron of Europe…

One of the fiercest fighters against paganism in Western Europe was Martin of Tours (died 397). Despite the stubborn resistance sometimes manifested by the peasants, with the help of his henchmen of his monastic horde he razed the temples, tore down the stones of the Druids and cut down sacred oaks, often viciously defended. ‘He trampled on altars and idols’ according to Sulpicius Severus. And yet the saint was ‘a man of admirable meekness and patience; from his eyes radiated a gentle serenity and an imperturbable peace…’ (Walterscheid, with imprimatur). This champion of faith undoubtedly had the best requirements for the annihilation of paganism. He had crowned a storming career in the Roman army (Julian being the emperor) and had started his Christian career as an ejector of demons. Significantly, he believed he saw the devil in the figure of Jupiter, Mercury and even Venus and Minerva, having otherwise the firm conviction that Satan was hiding in the ‘idols’.

Due to his ‘resurrections of the dead’ Martin of Tours became a bishop, later becoming the saint of the Merovingian kings and Carolingian emperors, to end up being the patron saint of the French. Even today 425 villages in France bear his name. The name of an arsonist, a thief, who ruined what was holiest and destroyed all the temples, became the ‘symbol of the Frankish imperial church’ and, even more, ‘an integral part of the imperial culture of the Franks’ (Bosi).

His international fame was owed to the murderous king Clovis, who had enormous veneration for Martin; for his cause he beat a soldier of his own to death, who had caught some hay in the fields of the man of god: ‘Where are our prospects of victory if we offend Saint Martin?’ On their military expeditions the Merovingian princes wore this man’s legendary cloak as a holy relic. Oaths were formulated on it and alliances were made. The place in which the cloak was kept was called capella (diminutive of cape), and the clerical who watched over it capellanus. Such is the origin of the words ‘chapel’ and ‘chaplain’, that with small variations have entered all modern languages… And, as in all the places where Martin of Tours had razed pagan centres of worship he immediately had Christian buildings built on the ruins, including the first Gallic monastery (Ligugé), still considered today as ‘the precursor of Western monasticism’ (Viller Rahner). The destruction of Gentile temples is certified by many ecclesiastical sources.

The monasteries were preferably built on the ruins of destroyed pagan temples. Thus arose, for example, Saint Bavo Church in Ghent, Saint Médard in Cambrai, the monastery of Wulfilaic in Eposium or Fleury-sur-Loire, which occupied the place of an ancient Druid sanctuary of the Gauls. The Martyrium of St. Vincent de Agen, erected as early as the 4th century, evidently stood on a pagan plot of consecrated ground. In Cologne, where perhaps Irenaeus of Lyons preached Christianity, a vast pagan necropolis has been found under the church of Saint Ursula.

Although in the West many temples and many altars were simply removed, among Franks, Saxons and Friesians the Church burned or completely destroyed the pagan sanctuaries, turned the places of sacrifice into cattle gullies and cut down sacred trees… Together, State and Church promoted the spread of the new faith and the annihilation of the old beliefs. Thus King Childebert I states, in a constitution of the year 554 ‘in agreement, no doubt, with the bishops’ (A. Hauck): ‘The pagan idols of the fields and the images dedicated to the demons must be removed immediately, and no one can prevent bishops from destroying them’.

In the following century Pope Boniface V (619-625) spread Christianity throughout England and wrote to Edwin, King of the Angles, in these terms: ‘You should destroy those whom you have hitherto considered Gods, being made of earthly material, with all zeal they must be smashed and shattered to pieces’. And so, shortly thereafter, in 627, Coifi, converted archpriest of Northumbria, broke a spear in a temple.

(Left, the high priest Coifi profanes ‘the Temple of the Idols’, from James William Edmund Doyle’s A Chronicle of England.)

The Concilium Germanicum, the first council convened in 742-743 in the Germanic territory of the Frankish empire, also provided that ‘the people of God should not promote anything pagan, but reject and abhor all filthiness of the Gentiles’.

Categories
Catholic Church Charlemagne Constantinople Destruction of Germanic paganism Eastern Orthodox Church Franks Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Merovingian dynasty

Christianity’s Criminal History, 126

For the context of this translation see
the previous instalment of this series.

Volume 4. Early Middle Ages

From King Clovis (ca. 500) to the
death of Charles ‘the Great’ (814)

‘For a long time Christ had already taken a look at the Germanic peoples… A new spring dawned on the sky of the Church’. —Leo Rüger, Catholic theologian

‘The life of medieval Christianity is impregnated, and even completely saturated, in its relations by religious conceptions. There is no thing or action that is not constantly related to Christ and the faith. Everything is built on a religious conception of reality, and we find ourselves before an incredible development of inner faith’. —Johan Huizinga

 

PANORAMIC VIEW

The divisions in historical times are not fixed in advance. They were not decreed in a ‘higher’ place, to be carried out later by humanity. Rather, the history of man is an unheard-of chaos of stories, and later he tries to put a certain order in the zigzagging course of events and the bewildering diversity of tendencies, reducing everything to perfectly clear schemes. It introduces structures and caesuras, and thus the whole appears as an expression of forces that act coherently, and in this way everything is presented as if it had to be that way and could not have been otherwise; as if, for example, the Roman Empire would only have occurred so that Europe could inherit it. That is a vision that favours our taste for periodisation, and that can undoubtedly also encourage it. In reality, all this delimitation and temporal ordering, all these supposed fixed points, indicative data and evolution lines are nothing more than the result of certain—or, better to say, very uncertain—points of view, of precarious attempts at orientation: pure constructions to which people have accommodated, either by giving them meaning or not.

The ‘High Middle Ages’, a period that runs from approximately the 6th to the 10th centuries, is a period of violent change and transformation. But it is also a time of compromises or, to put it more elegantly, of assimilation, of continuity, a period of decadence and transition, of old heritage and a new beginning: in it the constitution of the West, of Europe, takes place, and of Germany, the intertwining of ancient Christian and Germanic traditions, the separation of Byzantium, the Eastern Church, and the arrival of Islam. And it is an age in which politics and religion are inseparable.

The alliances of the popes with the states also change. But, as always when they turn and change direction with time, Rome continually seeks to cling to the strongest power: Byzantium, the Ostrogoths, the Lombards, the Franks, and it takes advantage of them…
 
From convinced subjects to convinced lords

In Rome the temples collapsed, the imperial palace collapsed, in the theatres and the gigantic baths the ruins piled up and the weeds and ivy grew. And the priests took advantage. The old bath chairs became Episcopal chairs, the sumptuous alabaster and porphyry bathtubs became baptismal fonts and dubious urns of martyrs. Marble wall coverings, precious mosaic floors, beautiful columns, and stones were removed from ancient villas to enrich Christian temples. The pagan temples became Christian churches and the Rome of the Caesars became a clerical city, in which the religious (or what was considered as such) prevailed; and in which all civil festivals disappeared in favour of ecclesiastical festivities. The belief in the imminent end of the world was generalised to such an extent, and such proportions acquired the privileges of the priests, that Emperor Maurice forbade in 592 the entry of soldiers into monasteries and civil servants into the clerical state.

The civil power of the popes—which was the basis of the future pontifical state or the Church—sprouted from ruins: from the rubble of the Western Roman Empire, thanks to the impotence of Byzantium and an ever-growing curial ambition for dominance. Already in the 5th century the bishops of Rome, supposed successors of Jesus who did not want any kingdom of this world or that his disciples carry money in the bag, were the largest landowners of the Roman Empire. And the collapse of that empire only accelerated the rise of the bishops of Rome inheriting entirely the decadent imperial structure.

Under the Merovingians, in the early days of the Byzantine Empire, bishops gained power and influence also in ‘worldly’ or civil affairs, throughout the communal sphere. They control state jobs and trades, urban fortifications, the supply of troops; moreover, they intervene in the appointment of provincial governors.

All disgrace and decay are transformed by the Roman bishops into their prosperity, each failure is turned into a personal advantage, whether it is a disaster in the kingdom of Caesar or the kingdom of God. And even from the misery of the Longobard invasion they know how to make a fortune. First they distance themselves from Byzantium with the help of the Longobard swords—and Byzantium was weakened by the multiple pressure of the ‘barbarians’—; later they will destroy the Lombards thanks to the Franks… always on the side of the robbers, with a parasitic strategy, such as the world had never known.

It is true that even up to 787 the popes date their letters by the years of the reign of the Byzantine emperors, but already under Gregory II (715-731) the Byzantine governor was expelled from Rome on the occasion of the ‘Roman revolution’, just as the Byzantine army of Benevento and Spoleto was expelled with the help of course of the Lombard troops. After the Lombards had contributed to the excessive power of the popes, they used the Franks to annihilate them. From then on they collaborated and prospered with the Frankish emperors. And when they felt strong enough, they wanted to be the lords of the empire too.

Until 753 the Roman pope was a devoted subject (to a greater or lesser degree) of Constantinople. But soon in Rome time is no longer counted for the emperor’s years, imperial coins are no longer minted, imperial images are removed from churches, and the emperor’s name is no longer mentioned in liturgical service. The pope, on the contrary, allies himself with the Germanic king against those who had hitherto been his sovereigns. And to the Germanic king the pope confers imperial privileges, among which there are some completely new ones, and even offers him the imperial crown. It is a policy that benefits the pope above all, since it almost makes him the ‘father of the ruling family’.

The imperial coronation of Charles in 800 in Rome by Pope Leo III was an unlawful act, a provocation to the Byzantine emperor, until then the only legal supreme head of the Christian world, and in Constantinople it could only be interpreted as a rebellion. In fact, the turn of the popes towards the Franks caused the definitive break with Byzantium.

And although in 812 Emperor Michael I Rhangabe recognised Charles ‘the Great’ as imperator of the West and as a peer sovereign, deep down Byzantium always considered the Western empire as a usurpation. At Lothair’s coronation in 823, the pope gave him the sword for the defence and protection of the Church: and gradually Rome brought the Roman-Germanic kings under his influence. Indeed, after the fall of the western Roman monarchs, new symbioses were introduced with the new rulers, with Theodoric, Clovis, Pepin, and Charles. But also the future great Germanic empires of Alfred (871-899), Otto I (936- 973) and Olaf the Saint (1015-1028), who promoted the spread of Christianity with barbaric methods, could only be established on a Christian basis, not to mention the medieval Germanic empire.

That Holy Roman Empire certainly had hardly anything Roman and absolutely nothing sacred and holy, unless (with good reason) like Helvétius, Nietzsche and others the compendium of the criminal is seen in the sacred. Be that as it may, by liquidating the relative achievements of Arians and pagans and by obtaining a state of its own, the papacy achieved the constant enlargement of both its power and its possessions.

Especially at the beginning of the Middle Ages the chaining of State and Church was very close. Not only did civil and canon law have the same basis, but clerical wishes and demands also found expression in civil law. The decrees of the ‘mixed council’ were valid for the State and the Church alike.

The bishops also came from the aristocracy and were related to it as brothers, nephews and children of the civic nobility. And with it they shared the same political and economic interests. Consequently, throughout the Middle Ages they were also drawn into the struggle of the lords, they fought with the kings against the emperor and with the emperor against the pope, and with one pope against the other for 171 years. They fought with the diocesan clergy against the monks and also against their colleagues, giving them battle in the field, in the streets and the churches with the dagger and with the poison and in every imaginable way. High treason and rebellion were for the clergy, according to the Catholic theologian Kober, ‘a completely common phenomenon’.

Faced with the States and the so-called authorities, the great Christian Church had in practice no other principle than this: it always pacts with the most profitable power. In all its state contacts the Church was only guided by taking advantage of the situation (in her language, guided by ‘God’). Opportunism was always the supreme principle. Only when that Church achieved what it wanted was it also willing to give something and naturally as little as possible, even if it promised a lot. ‘You annihilate the heretics with me, and I will annihilate the Persians with you’, the patriarch Nestorius invited the emperor in his inauguration speech in 428 without imagining that he himself would soon be condemned as a ‘heretic’…

And with their sights set on their own power, the fought Catholic emperors and princes also kept Church and State closely united, despite tensions, conflicts and confrontations of all kinds, from the end of the Old Age to the time of the Protestant Reformation. Throughout more than a millennium the history of the two institutions could not be separated. Furthermore, ‘At the epicentre of all interests, whether they were spiritual or political, was the Church; to her belonged the action and omission, politics and legislative power, all the driving forces of the world were at her service and from her they derived their prerogatives. The culture and history of the Middle Ages are confused with the Church’.

With its powerful material protection, its organisational strength and participation in the legal and political-state life, its influence grew continuously. The pre-Constantinian Catholic Church strictly forbade clergymen to accept public office; but already in late antiquity a bishop of Gaul was entrusted with certain military options, such as building a fortress. And what was lost in the south to the Arabs, the ‘infidels’, was offset by the spread of Christianity northward.

Under the Merovingians, Christianity became the ideological deciding power. There were almost formal dynasties of bishops, to the point that Chilperic I famously uttered the phrase: ‘No one governs more than the bishops; that is our glory’.

Also among the Arian Ostrogoths the episcopate assumed state functions. In early Middle Ages England, ecclesiastical prelates are members of the diets, statesmen, and field marshals. Together with the regent they define the law, they are his first advisers; they elect the kings, overthrow them and raise them. Also in Italy bishops and abbots acted, along with the counts, as administration officials and, together with the lords of the civil aristocracy, acted as legislators. It is evident that from the middle of the 6th century to the end of the 7th century, public life there was totally marked and dominated by the Church.

Also later, if we look beyond the period to which we are referring, the Church survived its allies and overcame all the collapses. One power was sinking, and she was already rising with the next; or at least she was prepared for it. It was indeed only a state together with other states, but her ‘metaphysics’ was ahead of all of them. And while she always pretended the religious, the spiritual visions while proclaiming to the whole world, she aspired to the political dominion of the world.

Relatively early, popes and bishops had already tried to make the state their bailiff, submitting it to themselves. Some Church Fathers, such as Ambrose or John Chrysostom make it clear that way. But it is Pope Gelasius I (492-496) who only a few generations later proclaims with the greatest arrogance his ‘doctrine of the two powers’, which was to have such relevance in world history. Shortly after, the royal power will have to ‘piously submit the neck’ to the sacred authority of the bishops.

Augustine, however, does not yet know the doctrine of subordination of the State. At a time when the Church lived in harmony with it, the saint was able to assure—heaven knows how many times—that the Christian faith reinforced the loyalty of citizens to the state and that it created obedient and willing subjects. It was totally indifferent about who the ruler was. ‘What does it matter which government man lives under, who must die anyway? The only thing that matters is that the rulers do not induce him to impiety and injustice!’ It is true that if ‘justice’ was lacking, and that means here the Church, the bishop, for Augustine governments were hardly anything other than ‘great gangs of robbers’.

But in the Middle Ages the ambition of the clergy to dominate grew along with their power… If at the beginning the papacy defended the doctrine of the two powers or authorities, the auctoritas sacra pontificum and the regalis potestas which complemented each other, then the doctrine of the ‘two swords’ was later introduced (duo gladii). According to the Roman affirmation, Christ would have granted to the papacy the two swords, the spiritual and civil power; in a word, it would have given her hegemony. For when the Roman pontiffs seized power and became sovereigns of a State, they no longer needed a strong hereditary Germanic monarchy, nor did they need the monarchical unity of Italy, which for the same reason they fought with all means to its scope, even by force of arms.

The objective of the papacy was then the political domination of the world under spiritual slogans. While it exercised a spiritual guardianship over the masses and while it referred the whole of life to a future kingdom of God and the obtaining of eternal happiness, it did not stop pursuing more and more material interests. The papacy emancipated itself from the western empire and in a secular struggle it made the Hohenstaufen bite the dust to become sovereign of everyone and everything. A true parasite, who after having drunk the blood of others, after having perched on high with lies and falsehoods and after having been eliciting more and more rights and powers, stripped them and even took up arms, and with celestial speeches continued to worry about its earthly power in an extremely brutal way.

In theory, the Pauline doctrine of the divine institution of authority and the duty of general submission became fundamental for relations with the State. The obedience that is preached there, the absolute docility of the subjects, contrasts openly with the hatred against the State so widespread among the first Christians, but it has continued to be decisive to this day. In this way the Church wins over the respective rulers, with whom it has to collaborate to keep itself in power.

With Gregory VII (author of the Dictatus papae), who in 1076 began the fight against the emperor, who claimed rights over Corsica and Sardinia, over the Norman kingdom of southern Italy, over France, Hungary, Dalmatia, Denmark and Russia, there are already perceived certain resonances of a theory, according to which the pope has all power, including the right to dispose of the States. Gregory and his successors claim at least one indirect potestas indirecta in temporalice that the bull Unam sanctam (1302) of Boniface VIII raises to a potestas directa in temporalia on which the Lateran Council of 1517 still insists, and from which only in 1885 will Leo XIII officially distance himself.

According to Gregory VII and his successors in the late Middle Ages, and always in connection with Augustine’s thought, imperial power has its origin in the devil. It is a ‘carnal’ power as are generally all worldly principalities. But the diabolical power can be turned into blessing through the forgiving, healing and saving power of the papacy, through subordination to the Priest-King. Furthermore, the founding of every new state in this world tyrannised by the devil is only legitimised by papal recognition. The pope appears there as the sole supporter of truth and justice, as the sovereign lord and judge of the world. Everything must render obedience to the successor of Peter. This is how the pope wrote:

Whoever is separated from Peter cannot obtain any victory in the struggle or any happiness in the world, for with rigour as hard as the steel he destroys and smashes everything that comes his way. Nobody and nothing escapes its power.

Categories
Catholic Church Charlemagne Christian art Constantinople Destruction of Greco-Roman world Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Goths Individualism Judea v. Rome Kevin MacDonald Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Martin Luther Miscegenation Old Testament Painting Portugal Racial right Reconquista Reformation Richard Carrier Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Kevin MacDonald’s apologetics

Update of September 16, 2020: This essay has been edited for inclusion in my book Daybreak. I would suggest reading the much-corrected text instead of the text below (see ‘Two essential books’, which contains a link to the Daybreak PDF).
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Kevin MacDonald’s Preface to Giles Corey’s
The Sword of Christ (originally published: here)

Slightly edited, this entry copies and pastes the previous entries from the first to facilitate the visitor to read them in due order.
 

§ 1

In this first entry about such book-review I just want to comment on a couple of subjects: the painting that appears in MacDonald’s book-review (see above) and what a commenter said on Counter-Currents.

As we can see in the comments section, several Counter-Currents commenters are either Christians or sympathetic to Judeo-Christianity, so they liked McDonald’s pro-Christian essay-review and some of them even have requested Corey’s book. One exception was commenter Asdk:

If we were to apply Kevin Macdonald’s perspective on the culture of critique to modern ideologies, Christianity would be very easily understood. Christianity is an ideology created by Jews to benefit the Jewish people, to break the feeling of tribal union of the peoples who are rivals to Jewish hegemony…

We can already imagine how different white nationalism would be if the webzine admins of Counter-Currents and The Occidental Observer were like Asdk!

Regarding Giovanni Gasparro’s painting, The Martyrdom of St. Simon of Trento reproduced at the beginning of this entry, it was painted this very year in old baroque style. The idea to create such painting reminds me of one of my favourite paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, reproduced below. The idea is the same: the bad guys—Jews—surround the child to be sacrificed or the divine rabbi to be crucified!

Gasparro’s 2020 painting at the top of this article measures seven by five feet, and references a blood libel that led to the execution of several Jews in 1475. The scandal (some would call it moral panic) started around the disappearance and death of a Christian boy in Trento named Simonino. He was later made a saint and the day of his death, March 24, was included in the Roman martyrology—hence the cherubs in Gasparro’s painting—until its removal in 1965.

In his article MacDonald tells us ‘This [blood libel] is a topic that I have never written about… However, we should not be surprised to find that such practices occurred’.

I am not going to take issue with him because what I want is to answer his Christian apologetics, not this new approach to the JQ. I will limit myself to point out that on the subject of blood libel I had already written in 2013 commenting on a brainwashing, politically-correct and philo-Semitic Spanish TV series, Isabel (Isabella I of Castile): times when MacDonald was apparently more sceptical about libel claims.
 

§ 2

MacDonald starts his review with these words:

Giles Corey has written a book that should be read by all Christians as well as white advocates of all theoretical perspectives including especially those who are seeking a spiritual foundation that is deeply embedded in the history and culture of Europeans.

White advocates of all theoretical perspectives? What would Revilo Oliver and William Pierce, geniuses so critical of Christianity, have opined about Corey’s book? What would Alex Linder opine today? Spiritual foundation embedded in European culture? MacDonald ignores the difference between Western Christian Civilisation and European civilisation, as explained in an article so old in this site (‘The Red Giant’) that it already appeared in the previous incarnation of it (in Blogspot, in the previous decade).

MacDonald also says about Corey’s book: ‘This is excellent scholarship’. If the scholarship is excellent, blood libel had to be historical. But as I said in my previous post I don’t want to discuss the Jewish Question but the Christian Question. MacDonald wrote: ‘Corey is well aware that contemporary Christianity has been massively corrupted’.

Completely false. Christianity today is as legitimate a form of Christianity as the others. Previous Christianisms were based on St. Augustine, and in the case of the Catholic Church, also on St. Thomas Aquinas. The Christianity of Pope Francis today, like the Christianity of the medieval St. Francis of Assisi, is based more on the direct message of the gospel. There is no true Christianity and an heretic Christianity: only Christians use anathemas and excommunicate each other, always claiming that their faction is the true Christianity. For non-Christians like us, St. Francis was as authentic Christian as St. Augustine, however different they were in their politics.

On the Counter-Currents thread, commenter Asdk added the following:

It sounds ridiculous, but in the middle of the Christian era, the Pope did it with the pre-Columbian natives; today the descendants of such an aberration populate most of Latin America and soon they will be the new majority of North America.

What happened in Latin America is relevant: something that I have said so many times in the racialist forums that I gave up because nobody was listening.

And they don’t listen for the simple reason that the miscegenation on a colossal scale in this American continent, perpetrated by the Spanish and Portuguese since the 16th century, just when they persecuted the Jews and the crypto-Jews, is such a demonstration that there is a Christian problem that it doesn’t even have to be argued: only to point out the events that occurred in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking parts of the continent.

Last month I reproduced this image of a Spaniard
marrying an Indian with the approval of the Church.

MacDonald says the corruption is recent. How does he explain the greatest genetic catastrophe that occurred in his continent, when Jewry was being persecuted by the Inquisition? The trick MacDonald and white nationalists do has been to ignore history south of the Rio Grande—and history north of the Rio Grande I should say insofar New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California and Texas, before the 1840s war, belonged to Mexico and previously to New Spain!

For MacDonald to say that Christianity has been ‘massively corrupted’ he must be ignoring, of necessity, the history of those states that now belong to his country, since the New Spaniards never forbade interbreeding. Why doesn’t MacDonald see that more than half a billion mestizos in Latin America are the direct result of marriages between Iberian whites, Indians and blacks—marriages that both the Spanish crown and the Church approved?

The answer is clear: if he dared to see the history of New Spain his paradigm would collapse immediately, since it would be obvious that alongside a Jewish problem there has existed a huge Christian problem.

In the 1530s a Pope bull allowed the bachelor Iberians in the continent to marry Amerind women. This happened only a decade after the conquest of the Aztec Empire. As Asdk says, Christianity is blind to racial matters. And the Church did not give a damn about the biological havoc that such bull would cause. Incidentally, the Catholic Church was so powerful in New Spain that by the end of the 17th century it owned more than half of its territories. Like today’s elites, it was in the Church’s interest to rule over low-breed mestizos rather than high-IQ Aryans.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. This epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in 1849 means ‘The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing’. Yes, there is no such a thing as ‘contemporary Christianity has been massively corrupted’ as MacDonald wrote. Only an ignorant of history in the American continent can say such a thing.
 

§ 3

Comment by Robert Morgan

C.T.: ‘I would be very interested to know what you think of that article (KMD’s review of Corey’s book)’.

The first thing that stands out is that MacDonald appears to have changed his opinion. I recall him writing at one point something to the effect of “Christianity isn’t necessarily the way forward”. Now he enthusiastically endorses a Christian revival, writing “I agree entirely with Corey’s conclusions and recommendations for a revival centered around the adaptive aspects of Christianity…”

C.T.: What strikes me as incredible is that Tom Sunic and others have told MacDonald that it is time to look at the role Christianity played in white decline. But KMD doesn’t seem to have the slightest intention of responding to these criticisms. He just ignores them’.

Yes, that’s true. His monomaniacal focus on Jews leads him astray, and he has always been loathe to examine the weakness of his philosophical underpinnings. Reading him, I get no sense that anything except what the Jews are doing is important. White people seem to exist for him only to be victims of the Jews.

I’ve already written about the inherent weakness of the Christian worldview, which is essentially a psychotic view of reality. Corpses come back to life, people aren’t really their bodies, but instead are “souls” trapped inside those bodies, demons not only exist but can somehow possess or take over those souls and bodies, things are conjured out of thin air, etc. Yet this is the worldview that MacDonald thinks is unequivocally good and “adaptive” because, after collapsing Western civilization once, and after a thousand years, it led historically to, among other things, the Enlightenment, the Age of Exploration, colonization of the New World, and science and high technology.

But these developments contained within themselves racially destructive consequences. Colonization of the New World caused race mixing, and out of control technology is causing mass extinctions of plant and animal species, perhaps irreversibly damaging the climate and ecosystem. This is supposed to be adaptive? Or again, consider the cultural consequences of scientific birth control technologies and abortion, which have done more to bring about the destruction of the nuclear family than any amount of Jewish animus. How was that adaptive?

From a philosophical point of view, MacDonald is being exceedingly naive, if not disingenuous. Whatever he approves of is adaptive. Anything he disapproves of isn’t. It’s the same approach he uses to Christianity. If Kevin MacDonald personally approves of it, it’s “good” Christianity (e.g., Luther’s disparaging comments about Jews, or Chrysostom’s), whereas if it’s a Christian ideology he doesn’t find it to his taste (e.g. the Scofield Bible, Christian Zionism, Christian churches sponsoring immigration, etc.) it’s been “corrupted”. These verdicts are absolute and eternal, too.

There’s no sense here that conditions may change, and behavior that was once adaptive may later be maladaptive; no sense that some of the “bad” things may have benefits, just as the supposedly “good” things contained racially destructive consequences. Christianity itself, notably, may be the most prominent of the things that were “bad” but had benefits; something that once was of use, but now is only an impediment. MacDonald’s view of it is static, not dynamic, and that’s a weakness.

No one can tell what is adaptive or maladaptive in advance. One can only pass judgement on that in retrospect, and even that judgement will unavoidably be from a particular point of view containing various assumptions and moral values. It’s not too surprising then that MacDonald, with his Christian moral values, praises Christianity as the way forward.
 

§ 4

MacDonald wrote:

Until the twentieth century, Christianity served the West well. One need only think of the long history of Christians battling to prevent Muslims from establishing a caliphate throughout the West—Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, the Spanish Reconquista, the defeat of the Turks at the gates of Vienna. The era of Western expansion was accomplished by Christian explorers and colonists. Until quite recently, the flourishing of science, technology, and art occurred entirely within a Christian context.

In recent posts I have been talking about the need to rewrite history. This paragraph was only made possible by centuries of misinformation when it comes to historical facts.

I have read the only two stories that in English have been written from the point of view of racial preservation, that of William Pierce and that of Arthur Kemp. Since Pierce died before I woke up, I was only able to visit Kemp when he lived in a beautiful little town in England.

The only two stories that have been written under the POV of white advocacy run under one premise: Western civilisations have fallen due to the imperial phase that inevitably leads to miscegenation. (Of the two stories, only Pierce recommends extermination or expulsion of non-whites after having learned the tough lessons of history.)

One of my huge surprises when reading those two stories, Who We Are and March of the Titans, is that starting with a pro-white POV inverts many values that we had taken for granted in the more academic and conventional stories.

For example, it is striking to learn that the Greeks of the Dorian period were pure Nordids who came to the peninsula from the North. And something similar could be said of the first tribes that created the Roman Republic in the other European peninsula: they also were unmiscegenated Nordids. (He who wants to learn about the Nordic component of the founders of Greece and Rome in a single article could read a piece originally published in an American Renaissance periodical that I reposted: here.)

All of this had been kept from me by conventional historians simply because most of them have been Christians. And concerning more recent secular historians, they live under the sky of the ideas that led to the French Revolution regarding the equality of men: a doctrine breathed even in the American Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator…’

Only when the reader of history repudiates this egalitarian premise he is ready to understand history. Otherwise he might be a scholar but his historical knowledge will be contaminated with such a false worldview that distortion is unavoidable. And conventional books of history are so replete of distortions that after the Nazi period and the two preliminary stories referred to above we must, like them, start from scratch.

I don’t think MacDonald has read the Pierce or Kemp books. If he had read any of them, he would have realised that what he says in the paragraph above cannot be sustained from this scratching point of view.

The following is what MacDonald seems to ignore:

The Christian era began with a hostile takeover of classical culture—that is, white culture—by a sect of Levantine origin. In the 4th and 5th centuries of the common era, in a destructive outburst like the one ISIS has perpetrated in more recent times, the temples of the white gods and sculptures displaying Aryan beauty, were destroyed by Judeo-Christian fanatics along with entire libraries of ancient wisdom. Karlheinz Deschner devoted his entire life to studying the true history of Judeo-Christianity and I translated several passages from his ten-volume Christianity’s Criminal History (here). If someone does not have the time to read this translated book, let him read a single article that summarises the white apocalypse that the ancient world suffered at the hands of this Semitic cult (here).

I must say something about Charles Martel mentioned by MacDonald and the Spanish Reconquista. Given my Hispanic origins, the history of Spain as told by Pierce and Kemp powerfully caught my attention several years ago, when I read their books. Both mention something that left me cold: the Iberian Visigoths—pure whites of the Nordid type—were deceived by Christians to commit miscegenation: a little piece of information that won’t be easy to find in conventional histories.

Remember that the Goths were a Germanic people who played a major role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In the first centuries of our era the Iberian Goths burned at the stake their fellow whites that dared to mix their precious blood with mudbloods. But the king of Hispania Recceswinth committed the greatest blunder in Iberian history: a blunder still unrecognised by normie intellectuals and normie historians as a blunder: but a gigantic blunder nonetheless. By converting to Christianity Recceswinth abolished the long ban on miscegenation (which reminds me of the rigorous Spartan ban against miscegenation), which resulted in the immediate mongrelisation of the Visigoths. The king of Hispania’s decision allowed any person of any racial origin, as long as he professed Christianity, to intermarry with the Germanic Goths. Such rupture of the ancestral prohibition against miscegenation and worship of the enemy god (the god of the Jews) occurred just a few decades before their territories… were invaded by the Moors!

If you worship thine enemy’s god, thou art defeated;
Adopt the religion of his fathers, thou wilt be enslaved;
And if thou propagate with his daughters, thou art destroyed

This crucial page in the history of Spain would have to be studied in far greater depth than the preliminary ‘stories’ of Pierce and Kemp. But I suspect that the Visigoths would have been invincible if, with the benefit of hindsight, they had expelled or exterminated the mudbloods—mainly peoples of Hispania of Semitic origin (non-Jewish Semites had begun to invade the Iberian peninsula since the times of the Carthaginians!).

Hispania aside, if the Roman Empire had not decayed, and let us remember that Gibbon blames the Christians for it, Islam wouldn’t even have had a chance of its spectacular conquests that only the gates of Vienna stopped, that MacDonald mentions. By subscribing to the official story, MacDonald is viewing Christianity as our saviour before Islam, not as the cause of the power gap that occurred after the Christians destroyed the classical world (or tricked the Visigoths), leaving the remaining whites at the mercy of a primitive Arabic tribe.

On the Western achievements that MacDonald mentions in the quote above, he is framing them as achievements of the Christian spirit. Nothing farther from the truth!

The white man had to fight for centuries against the prohibitions of the Church to regain his right to scientific research, technology, and art uncontaminated with biblical passages or the lives of the saints. Now my history teacher comes to mind, whose brothers were blond, at Colegio Madrid. She told us that in New Spain they used the trick of putting covers of lives of saints on secular books imported from Europe so they could pass through customs. And this happened until the beginning of the 19th century! Again, MacDonald is ignorant about history down the south of Rio Grande.

Above I linked a PDF with my translations of some passages from Christianity’s Criminal History. Below I would like to quote pages 291-293 of that book to counter MacDonald’s naïve vision:

The Western world darkens more and more

Culture was highly esteemed in the 4th and 5th centuries. It was one of the legacies of antiquity and enjoyed an ‘almost religious veneration’ (Dannenbauer). Still in the year 360 a law of the emperor Constantius could declare that education was the supreme virtue. And really many noble families of that time, Gallic and Roman, were consecrated to it and particularly in the bosom of the Senatorial proceedings. But they were already simple custodians of the culture, to which they did not enrich. And everywhere there were circles and social forces of a very different kind, even in the highest positions. The Christian king Theodoric the Great was no longer able to write his own name on the documents: neither could most of the Christian princes. Theodoric wrote the four letters LEGI (‘I read it’) by means of an aureus mold expressly forged for him. The instruction of the Goth children was practically forbidden by him, since, as he seems to have said, he who trembled before the master’s blows would never know how to despise the cuts and rushes of the sword in battle.

In Gaul, apparently, where the school system had flourished from the beginning of the 2nd century until the end of the 4th century, public schools are disappearing over the course of the next century, no matter how much here and there, in Lyon, Vienne, Bordeaux and Clermont there still are schools of grammar and rhetoric in addition to, naturally, the private ones. But all the teachings, at least the literary, served exclusively for the collection of material for sermons and treatises, to deal with the Bible and for the consolidation of the faith. Scientific inquiry was already a thing of the past: it no longer counted or was appreciated. The knowledge of Greek, which for centuries was the requirement of every authentic culture, became a rarity. Even the Roman classics, such as Horace, Ovid and Catullus, were cited less and less.

Libanius, the champion of Hellenistic culture, the most famous professor of rhetoric of the century, complains about the aversion aroused by that profession. ‘They see’, he says, referring to his students, ‘that this cause is despised and thrown on the floor; that does not bring fame, power or wealth but a painful servitude under many lords, parents, mothers, pedagogues and other students, who put things upside down and believe that it is the teacher who needs them. When they see all this they avoid this depreciated profession like a boat the pitfalls’.

In the time of Augustine there are hardly any schools of philosophy in the West. Philosophy is frowned upon, it is a thing of the devil, the original father of all ‘heresy’, and it causes fear to the pious. Even in a centre of culture as important as Bordeaux philosophy is no longer taught. And even in the East, the largest and most important of the universities of the Roman Empire, that of Constantinople, has only one chair of philosophy out of a total of 31. The knowledge of something that had existed for a long time was lost in almost all areas. The spiritual horizon became increasingly narrower. Ancient culture languished from Gaul to Africa, while in Italy it practically disappeared. The interest in natural science vanished. Also jurisprudence, at least in the West, suffers ‘havoc’, an ‘astonishing demolition’ (Wieacker).

The bishop Paulinus of Nola, who died in 431, never read a historian: a typical attitude of the moment. Whole eras fall in the oblivion, for example, the time of the Roman emperors. The only renowned historian in the late 4th century is Ammianus Marcellinus, a non-Christian. Entire synods forbid the bishops to read ‘pagan’ books. In short: scientific research ceases; experimental testing stops; people think increasingly with less autonomy. A few decades later no doctor could heal Bishop Gregory de Tours, a man with a mind full of superstitions, but he could miraculously be healed through a drink of water with some dust taken from the tomb of St. Martin.

Only clerics will still read.
 

§ 5

St. John Chrysostom exhorting Aelia Eudoxia. Note how the Empress—the spouse of the Roman Emperor Arcadius—, in this painting by Jean-Paul Laurens, has people in her Byzantine entourage who are not whites.

Kevin MacDonald wrote:

Such individualism was not disastrously self-destructive. As Corey notes, “Christian universalism historically posed little to no danger to white survival because it was preached by whites living in a world ruled by whites; it was only in the multicultural Egalitarian Regime inseminated in the mid-twentieth century that Christian sacrifice was transformed into a call for racial suicide.”

Precisely because MacDonald, like most white nationalists who do not follow Pierce and Kemp, knows little of true history, he is unable to see that healthy religions promote the good of a tribe, and unhealthy religions, a phenomenon that appears in the imperial phase of a civilisation, forget what’s good for the tribe and start to speak solely and exclusively in individualistic terms, of ‘individual salvation’. Richard Carrier, whose book appears on the sidebar, has studied this phenomenon in several Mediterranean religions at the time of the decline of the Roman Empire, and MacDonald and those who believe that any form of universalism was not ‘disastrously self-destructive’ should become familiar with his work.

That religious individualism was toxic from the beginning is evident in the fact that in shifting from the good of the group to individualism (the Christian must think above all about the salvation of his soul), the foundations for miscegenation are laid. Once Constantine changed the name of the old Byzantium to Constantinople, the new capital of the Empire became a melting pot for all the races of the Mediterranean, in which the pure Nordid blood of the patrician Romans was forever lost.

MacDonald wrote:

Instead, Corey advocates a revitalization of Medieval Germanic Christianity based on, in the words of Samuel Francis, “social hierarchy, loyalty to tribe and place (blood and soil), world-acceptance rather than world-rejection, and an ethic that values heroism and military sacrifice.” This medieval Christianity preserved the aristocratic, fundamentally Indo-European culture of the Germanic tribes. This was an adaptive Christianity…

Adaptive Christianity, really? Some historians say Medieval Germanic Christianity started with Charlemagne, right? Kemp told me that he would rate Charlemagne well up in the top five most evil characters of European history. I recommend Thomas Hodgkin’s The Life of Charlemagne to those who have swallowed the Christian version of this evil man. If we keep in mind Deschner’s Christianity’s Criminal History we will see that even after the Aryan apocalypse of the 4th and 5th centuries, there were still many Germanic tribes in the 6th and 7th centuries who refused to worship the god of the Jews. Charlemagne forced these uncontaminated Nordids to worship the enemy god: a historical milestone related to that tardive metastasis, the philo-Semitic stage that the US is currently suffering.

MacDonald wrote:

My view, developed in Chapter 3 of Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism is that traditional Christian theology was fundamentally anti-Jewish and was developed as a weapon which was used to lessen Jewish economic and political power in the Roman Empire. Here Corey describes the writings of the fourth-century figure, St. John Chrysostom [see painting at the top of this § 5], who has a chapel dedicated to him inside St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome as well as a statue outside the building. His writings on Jews are nothing less than scathing and reflect long-term tensions between Jews and Greeks in Antioch. And Chrysostom was far from alone in his hatred… The traditional Church was certainly far from friendly toward Jews.

Despite the fact that the Muslim Jihadists are anti-Jewish, many contemporary Jews promote the Islamisation of Europe for the simple fact that the best goyim (whites) must be destroyed according to them. Jews are willing to have some of their own fall in order to win their ultimate battle against the Aryans.

Something similar happened with the hostile takeover of the classical world by Judeo-Christians, many of whom had Semitic blood. Their anger was directed against the white world. They didn’t care that those fanatics MacDonald talks about committed anti-Jewish acts. What mattered was to overthrow the classical world at all costs.

MacDonald ignores that what was ultimately at stake, as explained in the climax of ‘Rome against Judea; Judea against Rome’ in The Fair Race, was this: ‘435 CE: In this year occurs the most significant action on the part of Emperor Theodosius II: He openly proclaims that the only legal religion in Rome apart from Christianity is Judaism! Through a bizarre, subterranean and astonishing struggle, Judaism has not only persecuted the old culture, and Rome, its mortal archenemy, adopts a Jewish creed—but the Jewish religion itself, so despised and insulted by the old Romans, is now elevated as the only official religion of Rome along with Christianity!’ That diabolical political game of different kinds of Semites is what MacDonald has failed to see.

MacDonald speaks highly of St. John Chrysostom, as if this ‘anti-Semite’ was a champion for the Aryan cause. What did this saint, so revered among clueless white nationalists do? Do nationalists know what happened to the immense Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World?

It was built near Ephesus in the 6th century BCE over an area considered sacred since, at least, the Bronze Age. Its construction took 120 years and it could be said that it was comparable to a cathedral.

St. John Chrysostom and his henchmen flattened it in 401 following a Christian emperor’s edict—the year after Chrysostom had instigated the massacre of 7,000 blond Goths in Constantinople! The stones were used for a tomb and a bath-house and a cross was raised on the spot where Diana’s statue had stood. What remains today of the temple can be seen: here.

It was the religion of the pure white that had to be flattened at all costs, not the Judaism that survived the Aryan apocalypse of the ancient world.

It is clear that history must be rewritten from the POV of the priest of the 14 words, and that stupid books like Corey’s must be vehemently repudiated if we want to save the race from extinction. Not only books of this type are bad history: they are as toxic reading of history as that which we could read from a Jew. But Christians are artificial Jews, right?
 

§ 6

MacDonald wrote:

And although Protestantism was generally far more amenable to Jewish interests even before its current malaise, there certainly are exceptions. Here Corey emphasizes Martin Luther’s writings on Jews. Luther emphasizes Jewish hatred toward Christianity and their sense of superiority vis-à-vis Christians, seeing the latter as “not human; in fact, we hardly deserve to be considered poor worms by them.”

I’ve been saying that people like MacDonald don’t know the stories of the white race written not by charlatans like Giles Corey, but by genuine racialists. Let’s read what William Pierce says in Who We Are about Luther:

The Reformation. Another factor which undoubtedly made the West more susceptible to the Jews was the Reformation, the lasting effects of which were confined largely to Europe’s northwestern regions, in fact, to the Germanic-speaking regions: Germany, Scandinavia, England and Scotland, Switzerland. The Church of Rome and its Eastern Orthodox offshoot had always been ambivalent in their attitudes toward the Jews. On the one hand, they fully acknowledged the Jewish roots of Christianity, and Jesus’ Jewishness was taken for granted. On the other hand, the Jews had rejected Jesus’ doctrine and killed him, saying, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27:25), and the medieval Church was inclined to take them at their word. In addition to the stigma of deicide the Jews also bore the suspicion which naturally fell on heretics of any sort. During the Middle Ages people took Christianity quite seriously, and anyone professing an unorthodox religious belief, whether he actively sought converts or not, was considered a danger to the good order of the community and to the immortal soul of any Christian exposed to him.

What the Protestant reformers did for the Jews was give the Hebrew Scriptures a much more important role in the life of the peoples of Europe than they had enjoyed previously. Among Catholics it was not the Bible but the Church which was important. The clergy read the Bible; the people did not. The people looked to the clergy for spiritual guidance, not to the Bible. Among Protestants that order was reversed. The Bible became an authority unto itself, which could be consulted by any man. Its Jewish characters—Abraham, Moses, Solomon, David, and the rest—became heroic figures, suffused with an aura of sanctity. Their doings and sayings became household bywords. It is ironic that the father of the Reformation, Martin Luther, who inadvertently helped the Jews fasten their grip on the West, detested them and vigorously warned his Christian followers against them. His book Von den Jueden und ihren Luegen (On the Jews and their Lies), published in 1543, is a masterpiece. Luther’s antipathy to the Jews came after he learned Hebrew and began reading the Talmud. He was shocked and horrified to find that the Hebrew religious writings were dripping with hatred and contempt for all non-Jews…

Alas, Luther could not have it both ways. He had already sanctified the Jews by elevating the status of their history, their legends, and their religion to that of Holy Writ. His translation of the Old Testament into German and his dissemination of the Jewish scriptures among his followers vitiated all his later warnings against the Jews. Today the church he founded studiously ignores those warnings…

The great tragedy of Luther is that he failed to… recognize that no religion of Jewish origin is a proper religion for men and women of European race. When he cut himself and the majority of the Germanic peoples off from Rome, he failed at the same time to cut away all the baggage of Jewish mythology which had been imposed on Europe by Rome. Instead he made of that baggage a greater spiritual burden for his people than it already was. The consequence was that within a century of Luther’s death much of Northern Europe was firmly in the grip of a new superstition as malignant as the old one, and it was one in which the Jews played a much more explicit role. Before, the emphasis had been on the New Testament: that is, on Christianity as a breakaway sect from Judaism, in which the differences between the two religions were stressed. The role models held up to the peoples of Europe were the Church’s saints and martyrs, most of whom were non-Jewish. The parables taught to children were often of European origin. Among the Protestants the Old Testament gained a new importance, and with it so did the Hebrew patriarchs as role models, while Israel’s folklore became the new source of moral inspiration for Europe. Perhaps nothing so clearly demonstrates the change, and the damage to the European sense of identity which accompanied it, as the sudden enthusiasm for bestowing Hebrew names on Christian children.

The Reformation did more for the Jews than merely sanctifying the Old Testament. It shattered the established order of things and brought chaos in political as well as spiritual affairs—chaos eagerly welcomed by the Jews. Germany was so devastated by a series of bloody religious wars that it took her a century and a half to recover. In some German principalities two-thirds of the population was annihilated during the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in the period 1618-1648, commonly known as the “Thirty Years War.” Everywhere during the 17th century the Jews took advantage of the turmoil, moving back into countries from which they had been banned (such as England), moving to take over professions from which they had been excluded, insinuating themselves into confidential relationships with influential leaders in literary and political circles, profiting from the sufferings of their hosts and strengthening their hold, burrowing deep into the rubble and wreckage of medieval society so that they could more easily undermine whatever rose in its stead. / End of Pierce’s quote

Pierce fell short. Nietzsche saw beyond what Pierce saw: Luther revitalised Christianity when it had begun to die in Rome itself! Had Cesare Borgia reached the papacy in a world without Luther, the transvaluation of values—the salvation of whites!—could’ve started from the Renaissance in Rome. But exactly the opposite happened: the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation vindicated Christianity. One thing is clear: MacDonald is not a reader of Nietzsche. If there is a quote that I have quoted more than once, it is what Nietzsche says about Luther (skip until you see § 61: here).

MacDonald wrote:

Mainstream Christianity from traditional Catholicism to mainstream Protestantism was fundamentally adaptive in terms of creating a healthy family life.

Here MacDonald is not only ignoring the subject mentioned in §2: that a cohesive family is useless to our cause if marriages in Catholic Latin America have been, for half a millennia, between white and non-white. And regarding Europe MacDonald is also ignoring the catastrophe that occurred in Portugal. After their forays into Africa the Portuguese not only imported blacks to the Iberian Peninsula, but unlike the Anglo-Germans in North America who originally did not marry them, the Portuguese immediately proceeded to stain their blood forever, courtesy of an Iberian, Recceswinth-like Christianity that didn’t care about racial preservation.

MacDonald writes about the traditional family in Christendom ignoring what happened in immense territories where Catholicism had a grip on the white psyche. And even in the US where miscegenation was not perpetrated for quite some time, the havoc that Puritans caused for their infatuation with the sacred book of the Jews can be seen in the names they gave their white children. Pierce is worth quoting again. He wrote:

Even before the Reformation a few Jewish names had been adopted by Europeans, but they were in most cases variations of the names of Christian saints of Jewish race: John (Heb. Johanan), Matthew (Heb. Mattathiah), Mary (Heb. Miriam), Ann (Heb. Hannah, supposedly the name of the maternal grandmother of Jesus). In addition, a few other purely Hebrew names had come into fairly common usage in parts of Christian Europe prior to Luther’s time: Adam, Daniel, David, Michael, Elizabeth, and Sarah are examples. During the l7th century, however, practically every name from the Old Testament came into general use. The madness reached its height among the Puritans, who scorned the names of their own ancestors and christened their offspring with such atrociously alien appellations as Israel, Amos, Ezekiel, Lemuel, Deborah, Reuben, Esther, Abner, Samuel, Nathan, Noah, Ephraim, Gideon, Jesse, Rachel, Susannah, Leah, Elihu, Abigail, Benjamin, and Abraham. The Puritans brought this pernicious habit with them to America, and Hebrew names were more common in the New World than European names during the Colonial period. / End of William Pierce’s quote

Don’t be surprised, professor MacDonald, that the US became the #1 philo-Semitic country of the world! So what’s the primary cause of white decline, Judaism or Christianity? What’s worse: the external enemy—the Jew—or the traitor—the Christian?
 

§ 7

Comment by Vig

Reading the comments here it shows how quickly attention steers away from the core topic and gets into the distraction of details.

As I have understood the issue here is that a reputed academic scholar has made significant statements as a result of a serious psychological research into the causes of the downfall of the culture and influence of the white Europeans. All this clearly under the banner of a conservative and right wing oriented view, which led him to the conclusion that Jewdom is the ultimate culprit of the (our) downfall.

Then the question arises, as Cesar has put forward on many occasions, that a man of such academic reputation as KMD has not dared to make the next logical step in his research and expose the phenomenal similarity between Judaism and Christianity?

Lack of courage, unwillingness or just lack of depth? Respectable as he may be he did not have the guts to be like a Nietzsche and dig till rock bottom, and criticize his own paradigms.

If you ask me the whole thing of academic debate especially in the field of the “alpha sciences” like psychology, is very often sheer sophistry. To see what the words really stand for you have to meet the author in person. Then why is this Christianity again and again creeping around the corner?

Because it is so deeply ingrained in our value system that it has become sub conscious. Then the question arises how much suffering will be needed to bring this festering wound to the surface?

If the more representative figures of the white nationalist movement fail to open up to the issue of the corrupting influence of Christianity, that means they did not have the existential experience that allowed you and me to understand the human psyche on a deeper level than the level that they are mentally operating on.

On that basis indeed white nationalism is a flawed initiative.

What I mean here is that traumatic experiences can initiate an emotional maturity that is beyond the retarded state that western humanity is in at the moment.

I think it is not negation but simple incapacity from their side.

The fact that there will come no answer from that side is because their whole social life has been narrowed down to the verbal, intellectual Hegelian discourse and exchange of ideas, while the answer to our crisis cannot be addressed on this level at all.

It is an ego problem. The ego blocks the expression of certain inner states that, if expressed, would indicate that one is emotionally and instinctively degenerated if at all recognized as such.

To have an authentic knowledge of one’s emotional and instinctive nature that makes the use of intellectual projections absolutely unnecessary, has become very rare for western man. Eine Kulturkrankheit.
 

§ 8

Kevin MacDonald wrote:

As I write this in the summer of 2020, we are experiencing what feels like the end game in the Jewish conquest of white America.

End game of the Jewish conquest or of the Christian conquest of the Aryan soul? Has MacDonald read the words of Joseph Walsh on the sidebar?: The deep-seated death-wish that seems to have taken hold of the collective subconscious psyche of the Aryan race after Hitler’s death is I believe a consequence of centuries of Jewish brainwashing via Christianity and its secular offshoots.

Once the majority of Aryans had rejected Hitler they embraced what remained of Christianity, Christian ethics, with a vengeance. Aryans are aware of what our race is capable of becoming from the photos and films of NS Germany and many of them hate and fear their own race’s potential for greatness due to attachment to an irrational morality and so our race is in a sort of self-destruct mode.

If the National Socialists had won the Second World War our race would not have entered into this intense struggle to overcome the oldest and most effective weapon of the Jews, Christianity. So this post-1945 struggle with the mental disease of Christianity does serve a purpose in that it will either destroy us for good or make us even stronger.

Before Aryans can annihilate the biological Jew on the physical level they must destroy the alien Jewish mind virus on the mental level by overcoming Christian morality. /End of Walsh’s quote

But MacDonald wrote:

I agree entirely with Corey’s conclusions and recommendations for a revival centered around the adaptive aspects of Christianity…

And what are Giles Corey’s conclusions and recommendations? Corey wrote, as quoted by MacDonald:

We must not tolerate subversion. Liberalism must go; we cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the Enlightenment. We cannot afford to countenance any further anti-American, anti-family, anti-white speech, and this should be reflected in a new Constitution. Just as conservatism was not enough, the United States Constitution was not enough, with gaps that left it gaping wide for judicial “interpretation.” For another thing, we must circle the wagons and inculcate the Männerbund, restraining our individualism at least for the time being. For another, we must return to (((our Lord and Savior))).

I have added the triple parentheses to MacDonald’s quote of Corey. What these guys don’t know is that, as a commenter put it, thinking you can aid in saving the white race while, at the same time, bending the knee to Jewish deities—Yahweh and Yeshua—is some kind of combination of insane, dishonest, cowardly, naive, or very stupid. To bottom line it, it won’t and can’t work (see Ferdinand Bardamu’s complete essay that MacDonald rejected for his webzine: here).

This demolition that I have made of such a respected figure in white nationalism moves me to leave this site with these last entries for a period of time without adding new entries, although I will be answering the comments that don’t get off the subject of MacDonald and the Christian question.

Finally, even though I left the essay by a Spaniard, ‘Rome against Judea; Judea against Rome’ linked in a sticky post for a long time, it doesn’t seem that many visitors have noticed that that essay appears in Part I of The Fair Race, the PDF of which can be accessed on the sidebar. So I have no choice but to publish it in PDF separately and put it back in a sticky post. It is a shame that people like MacDonald have not read an essay that I consider central to understanding this site.

Especially the ‘Judea against Rome’ section of that essay explains the Jewish question better than any article MacDonald has published on The Occidental Observer, as the Spanish writer goes to the historical roots of the darkest hour in the West.

Categories
Catholic Church Film

West and Morgan

I just found out that Donald J. West, whose book Eleven Lourdes Miracles* helped me so much in debunking Lourdes’ miracles, died this year at 95. Rest in peace and thanks for that book, Donald!

On other subject, I think I already know where commenter ‘Dr. Robert Morgan’ got his pen name: from the 1964 film The Last Man on Earth. Morgan used to comment here and on Unz Review and by the way, the movie can be watched on YouTube. The actor Vincent Price who played Dr. Robert Morgan was well known when I was much younger. My father loved him. I wonder if young racialists have ever seen a movie with him?

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(*) A sceptical work mentioned in one of my books that can be seen in my previous post. Our Lady of Lourdes was venerated by my extremely pious ancestors.

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 124

‘The Catholic clergy has a good part of the responsibility for unleashing the wars of extermination of the time. The influence of the Church reached the last village’.

—Berthold Rubin, Das Zeitalter Iustinians (1960).

Editors’ note: Here I reproduce some translated excerpts from a chapter about the extermination of two Germanic peoples in the 6th century: one of the unheard of crimes of Christianity because, until now, almost all church historians had been Christians (like the Jews, Christians lie by omission). To contextualise this entry see instalments 121, 122 and 123 of the same series.
 

______ 卐 ______

 

The Catholic clergy in favour of a crusade against the Vandals

In June 533, a fleet of 500 transport ships and 92 warships were brought to the sea by order of Emperor Justinian carrying 15,000 to 20,000 combatants on board. Huns were also part of them. The patriarch of Constantinople, Epiphanius, had impregnated in the same port the blessing of heaven for a company so pleasing to God. He blessed the troops himself and pronounced ‘the habitual prayers’ (Procopius) of the farewells. The general in chief was Belisarius, a good Catholic, a good soldier, ‘a gentlemanly Christian, in whom the teachings of his Saviour had penetrated not only in his head, but in his blood’ (Thiess). […] The troops disembarked at the beginning of September of 533, two hundred kilometres south of Carthage. […]

After the victory, most of the Vandal men lost their lives. Women and children were made slaves. The [Germanic] king was taken to [the mud capital] Constantinople and presented in the summer of 534 at the racecourse during the triumph held there. Stripped of the purple he had to kiss the dust before the imperial throne. He ended his days as a vassal in a large property in Galatia. The king declined the conversion to Catholicism, despite all the honours that made it more appetising. His captive companions were framed in the Roman army and went mostly to the Persian border. Five regiments were formed, the so-called Vandali justiniani. One regiment, however, fled back to Africa after reducing the crew of the ship that was to transport them from the island of Lesbos. […]

The pope congratulated the emperor for his zeal in the expansion of the Kingdom of God. In spite of all the throat-cutting, Arianism was still far from its eradication in Africa, much less since it could penetrate the troops of Belisarius thanks to the Arian Goths. But also they (who were deceived in the distribution of the lots of lands and subjugated from the religious point of view, together with the surviving Arian vandals) had to bite the dust after hard and long struggles. Even the Vandal women who had married them were deported. ‘Of the Vandals, what remained in their homeland’, writes Procopius, ‘there remained no trace of my time. Being few, they were crushed by the border barbarians or voluntarily mixed with them so that they disappeared to their very name’. ‘In this way’, the archbishop Isidore of Seville writes triumphantly, ‘it was exterminated, in 534, the Vandal kingdom until the last sprout, a kingdom that lasted 113 years from Gunderic until the fall of Gelimer’.

But the times that took control of Africa, also in its political and religious aspect, were everything but peace. The Byzantine administration was largely corrupted, the fiscal oppression was such that the population sadly longed for the liberality of the Vandals. The settlers were now much worse treated than under the domain of the ‘barbarians’. […]

In the meantime Vitiges had already, until March 538, a long year attacking Rome with his Goths, with rolling towers, assault scales and battering rams. Again and again he restarted his rush, and again and again the Hungarian and Moorish riders made dangerous outings. The surroundings of the city, farms, villas and sumptuous buildings were totally razed. In Rome, the most beautiful Greco-Roman creations, irreplaceable masterpieces, were demolished to kill the Goth raiders with their stones. To this were added the ravages of asphyxiating heat, hunger and epidemics. Senators paid disgusting meat sausages of dead mules with gold. A relief army from Constantinople reinforced the besieged. But 2,000 horsemen, under the command of Chief John ‘The Bloodthirsty’ (epithet of the chroniclers), were merciless in Piceno against the Gothic women and children, whose husbands and fathers stood before the walls of Rome. After almost seventy rejected assaults Vitiges withdrew in the middle of terrible losses caused by Belisarius who, with tactical and technical superiority, came on his heels and occupied almost the entire country to the plain of the Po.

In the winter of 538 to 539, when the Byzantines expelled all the Goths of Emilia and Vitiges repaired the walls of Ravenna, a severe famine ravaged the northern part of central Italy, with thousands and thousands of people succumbing. Procopius, an eyewitness, reports the death of approximately fifty thousand people in the Piceno alone and even more in the northern regions.

What people looked like and how they died is something I want to tell in more detail for having seen it with my own eyes. They were all skinny and pale because their flesh, according to the old proverb, ate itself for lack of nutrition and the gall, which because of its excessive weight now had power over all bodies, produced in them a greenish paleness. And it progressed, human bodies lost all their moods so that their skin, completely dry, resembled leather, presenting the appearance of being firmly attached to the bones. Their pale colour was blackening so that they looked like teas that had burned too much. Their faces had an expression of horror, their gaze resembled the insane who are contemplating something awful… Some among them, totally dominated by hunger, came to commit atrocities against others. In a small village in Ariminus, it seems, the only two women left devoured seventeen men. Well, the strangers who came their way used to spend the night in their homes, then they killed them while they slept and ate their flesh… Driven by hunger, many threw themselves on the grass and tried to tear it off on their knees. But in general they were too weak, and when they were totally lacking in strength they fell exhaling the last breath. Nobody buried them, because nobody was interested in burying. However, not a single bird came to the bodies, although there are many species that would devour them with pleasure, as there was nothing to bite in them. Well, as already said, all the meat was totally dried out by hunger.

Around the same time Milan was also going through a horrible hardship. Dacius, the archbishop of the city—which according to Procopius was, after Rome, the first city in the West due to its size and number of inhabitants and prosperity—, went to Rome in the third year of war, informed Belisarius about the anti-Goth uprisings throughout Liguria and the Byzantine re-conquest of the territory, urging him to occupy Milan. An occupation was carried out although it supposed to break the armistice with Vitiges in April of 535. Very soon, however, the nephew of Vitiges, Uriah, surrounded Milan with a strong army supported by 10,000 Bergonds sent by the king of Theudebert’s Francs. He wanted above all to probe the situation to his advantage. From there, little by little, the famine ravaged the city frightfully. The inhabitants eat dogs, rats and human corpses. At the end of March 539 the Roman garrison capitulated obtaining a security retreat.

As far as the city is concerned, Procopius writes, ‘the Goths left no stone upon stone. They killed all men, from teenagers to the elderly in a number not less than three hundred thousand. They turned women into slaves and gave them to the Bergonds as a reward for their alliance. J.B. Bury describes the Milan massacre as one of the worst in the long series of premeditated atrocities in the annals of mankind: ‘Attila’s life path does not register such an abominable war action’. All the churches were also destroyed: the Catholic churches at the hands of the Arian Vandals; the Arian churches at the hands of the Bergond Catholics. A truly progressive ecumenical cooperation: they call it a history of redemption… The personalities of the high social hierarchy, including the prefect, brother of the pope, were torn to serve as food for the dogs. Bishop Dacius, the real cause of that hell, had set foot in dusty time.

As soon as the Bergonds returned to their land, well loaded with loot, Theudebert himself fell on Liguria, in the spring of 539, at the head of an army. Already at the beginning of the conflict, Justinian had summoned the Franks to the ‘great fight against the Goths’, as the Catholic Daniel-Rops says in the 20th century. […]

But when it seemed to him that the Goths were getting too strong he fell on them in the back, in the spring of 539, with some 100,000 francs that crossed the Alps from the south of Gaul. He devastated with his hosts Liguria and Emilia and when crossing the Po, Procopius writes, ‘they tore apart how many Goth children and women on whom they could put their hands on, and as an offering they threw their bodies into the river as first fruits of war’. The Goth warriors fled like an exhalation to Ravenna to ran into Roman swords. However, hunger and epidemics decimated Theudebert’s army in such a way that he had to leave Italy after losing a good part of it. Surrounded by sea and land, Ravenna fell in May 540 by the work of a traitor. This one burned at the request of Belisarius the barns of the city so that Vitiges had to surrender. […]

Rome itself, from which the entire Arian clergy is expelled, and in which an atrocious hunger reigns, falls twice in 546 and 550. All the walls of the squares are demolished so that no enemy can get on it and that their inhabitants will be forever free from the torture of the siege. The Romans themselves recognise after the fall of the city in 546 that Totila lived among them as a father with his children. Even the Byzantine soldiers themselves, whose pay had been subtracted, are passed on to him, and, in greater numbers still, the tenant peasants are expelled from their lands. All this enabled the hatred of the great landowners, the Catholic Church, which, like it once did in Africa with the Vandals, now spreads frightening stories about the cruelty of the Goths. […]

The year 552, in a decisive battle next to Busta Gallorum, in the vicinity of Taginae, Via Flaminia, north of Spoleto, with the support of by 3,000 Heruli and 5,500 Lombards the Goth army is completely destroyed. King Totila is killed in the flight and also the victors show off his head by shaking it at the tip of a spear. And in October of 553 the last Goth king, Teia, also falls with his army’s core after a desperate sixty-day fight at the foot of Vesuvius. And in 554, in Volturnus, next to Capua, Narses liquidates in a bloodthirsty battle other considerable troops of Franks and Alemannen who wanted to take advantage of the Goth debacle by conquering Italy. They were stabbed like cattle. The rest must have died in the waters of the river. It is assumed that only five men of seventy thousand returned alive. The castrated Narses, received by the clergy with songs of glory in the stands of St. Peter, knelt to pray on the supposed tomb of St. Peter and urged his unbridled soldiery to cultivate piety and the continued exercise of weapons. The last Goth stronghold resisted in the Apennines until 555. In the north it was not possible to take Verona and Brescia until 562 (with Merovingian help). From now in Ravenna would reside an imperial governor. The Ostrogoths would disappear from history too.

In the final phase of his extermination, Justinian took advantage of a dynastic complaint in the Visigothic kingdom to initiate a new invasion with troops led by the patrician Liberius, militarily inexperienced and more than octogenarian. In Spain, where the powerful and rich Catholic bishops reluctantly admitted their subordination to the ‘heretics’, the noble Athanagild had risen against King Agila. And as in Africa and Italy, Catholics now welcomed the intervention of the Catholic sovereign, which began a war between Byzantium and the Visigoths, a war that would last more than seventy years. In any case, Justinian did not achieve total extermination here, but his weak contingent managed to conquer the Balearic Islands, and the main port cities and strongholds in the southeast of the country.
 

Cui bono? The great beneficiary of all that hell: The Roman Church

The Gothic wars, with their twenty years of duration, turned Italy into a smoking ruin, a desert. According to L. M. Hartmann, who is still probably the foremost German connoisseur of that time, the injuries caused by that conflict to the country were worse than those suffered by Germany in the Thirty Years’ War. The blood tribute presumably rises to millions of victims. Entire shires were depopulated, almost all cities suffered one or more sieges and their inhabitants were more than once killed in their entirety. Many women and children were captured as slaves by the Byzantines and the men on both sides died at the edge of the sword as enemies and ‘heretics’. Rome, the millionaire city, conquered and devastated five times, ravaged by the sword, hunger and plague, had only 40,000 inhabitants. The big cities of Milan and Naples became depopulated.

Concurrently with depopulation, a horrific impoverishment spread everywhere, caused mainly by the desertification of the fields but also by the frequent slaughter of the herds. Aqueducts and damaged hot springs fell into total abandonment. Many works of art and culture of unrecoverable value were ruined. Everywhere could be seen the same spectacle of corpses and ruins, of epidemics and famines that caused the death of hundreds of thousands. Only in the Piceno region, writes Procopius, an eyewitness, about fifty thousand people died of hunger in a single year, in 539, whose bodies were so dry that not even the vultures themselves deigned to approach them. The ‘good hope’ of the emperor had been fulfilled, that ‘God, well in his grace, may grant that we recover again what the ancient Romans possessed of their borders of both oceans and lost because of later neglect’. In the year 534 Justinian could give himself the ostentatious nicknames of ‘Victor of the Vandals’ and ‘Conqueror of the Goths’.

Even the Jesuit Hartmann Grisar acknowledges that ‘what the Byzantines established in substitution of the Gothic regime was not freedom but the image of it in negative […] that amounted to subjugate the free development of personality, a system of servitude’, while ‘among the Goths authentic freedom had its own homeland there’. […]

The Arian ‘heresy’ was eradicated from Africa. Italy also disappeared as an independent kingdom while, in that general chaos, the ‘State of the Church’ was growing as an immense parasite. The ancient privileges of Rome were restored and Justinian increased the power and prestige of the Roman bishop. […]

The one especially benefited by the war was the Ravenna church, whose regular income was estimated at that time at some twelve thousand solidi (pieces of gold). Its territorial possessions, that reached Sicily, continuously increased through the donations and the inheritance legation. Wealthy bankers built and equipped many, let’s call them, houses of God. But, above all, the Bishop of Ravenna benefited especially from the appropriation of the churches and Arian goods whose number was particularly increased in the surroundings of the ancient Goth capital. […]

But while it is true that the emperor did not precisely wage his wars, lasting more than twenty years ‘for the freedom of the subjects’, he did it for the ‘right faith’. For the sake of this, as it is firmly stated, he had sacrificed and erased two peoples from the Earth. For the recuperatio imperii, so amazing for many contemporaries and for Justinian himself, consisted essentially of the bloody re-conquest of northern Africa and Italy in favour of Catholicism. The despot thus became ‘champion of the Roman Church’ (Rubin). […]

The chronicler of the time, Procopius, a model of Byzantine historiography, incessantly accuses the emperor of murder and robbery of his subjects. Procopius’s accusations culminate in the 18th chapter, which presumably adheres to the truth essentially in spite of some exaggerations, especially as regards the figures, or when using hyperbole like this: ‘It would be easier to count all the grains of sand than the victims sacrificed by this emperor’.

Of Libya, of such extensive dimensions, he plunged it into such a ruin that even a long walk would hardly give one the surprise of meeting a person. And if there were at first 80,000 vandals in arms, who could estimate the number of women, children and servants? How could anyone enumerate the multitude of all Libyans (Romans) who previously lived in cities or engaged in agriculture, navigation or fishing as I myself could see far and wide with my own eyes? And all of the Numidia population, even more numerous, perished with women and children. And finally the land housed many Roman soldiers and their companions of Byzantium. So whoever indicated for Africa the figure of five million dead would fall somewhat short of reality [emphasis by Ed.].

Italy, at least three times larger than (the province of) Africa, is, in large regions, even more depopulated than this one so that it will not be very difficult to guess the number of those who perished there. […] Before that war, Gothic power extended from Gaul to the borders of Dacia, where the city of Sirmium is located. The Germans (the Franks!) seized many territories in Gaul and Venice, when the Roman army arrived in Italy. Sirmium and its surroundings were occupied by the Gepids, but everything, said briefly, is now depopulated. […]

Such were, therefore, the consequences of the war in Africa and Europe.

When the tyrant died the people were not free and the Empire was economically exhausted, on the verge of bankruptcy. For the papacy, on the other hand, the Justinian era—due to the re-conquest, the extermination of two powerful Arian towns, and the dissolution of the autonomous kingdom of Italy—proved to be extremely advantageous in material and legal terms.