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Category: Catholic Church

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Catholic Church Christian art

Mind control of all whites

The multiple appearances of Jesus to his people after the resurrection appear treated by the hand of Duccio di Buoninsegna in his Maestà of the Cathedral of Siena.

When Duccio, who was born in the 13th century, painted The Incredulity of Thomas credulity reigned all over medieval Europe. It was inconceivable to the European mentality that all of the gospel passages that can be seen in the Maestà paintings originated in literary fiction out of the pen of Semitic writers of the late first century. The grip that the Roman Catholic Church had over the European mind was absolute.

Categories
Catholic Church Christian art

Mea culpa

Every moment of the gospels on the Passion has been represented ad infinitum and ad nauseam throughout centuries in Christian iconography, which has obviously induced guilt among the white man. (The hypothetical six million Jews killed by evil Germans are nothing more than the secularised version of the Jew killed by evil Romans.) One of these iconographic moments is the issue of descent from the cross and the contemplation of the dead Jew, as in this representation by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, Glimm Lamentation, an oil-on-panel painting of the year 1500:

Don’t miss the couple of pious little blond children below the figure of dead Jew.

Speaking of inducing guilt, in the Confiteor what bothered me most when I used to go to the masses was the passage mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa (‘through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault’). In the Catholic masses the faithful have to practice three blows to their chests while saying such words, every Sunday and throughout their lives. The Confiteor is so obviously a trick to induce guilt that it is worth quoting:

I confess to god almighty [i.e., the god of the Jews], before the whole company of heaven, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned in thought, word, and deed; in what I have done and in what I have failed to do, by my fault, by my fault, by my most grievous fault; wherefore I pray god almighty [the god of the Jews] to have mercy on me, forgive me all my sins, and bring me to everlasting life. Amen.

You can see how the Judeo-Christian trick is detected when changing capital letters to small letters (‘god almighty’) and adding the proper brackets. If we now compare this religion originated by rabbis for us gentiles with the healthy Aryan religion of the Greco-Romans (see e.g., my other post today) the whole point of this site will be taken.

Categories
Catholic Church Eugenics

Great personalities defend eugenics, 9

by Evropa Soberana

Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), member of the Thule Gesellschaft, National Socialist ideologue, head of the NSDAP Foreign Affairs Service, and head of the Reich Ministry for the occupied Eastern territories, was hanged at the Nuremberg trials of 1946.

The Vatican has once again become known as the bitterest enemy of the improved reproduction of biologically valuable ones, and as the protector of the preservation and propagation of the inferior…

[It] does not represent anything other than the necessary drainage of that racially chaotic system forged by the Syrian-African-Roman dogma.[1]

Therefore, every European who would like to see his people physically and spiritually healthy, and who defends the position that idiots and incurable patients infect his nation, must allow himself to be represented, according to Roman teachings, as anti-Catholic: an enemy of Christian moral doctrine. And he must choose whether he is the antichrist, or if the founder of Christianity really could have conceived—as dogma—the unlimited reproduction of all kinds of lower types.

This is what His representative [refers to the Pope of the time, Pius XI] boldly demands. (The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Book Three, chapter 4).

 

Walther Darré (1895-1953), Minister of Food, Agriculture and Supplies of the Reich, Chief of German Peasants, Director of the SS Office of Race and Resettlement, notorious Nordicist, co-founder of Ahnenerbe and promoter of the racial idea and geopolitics of Blut und Boden (blood and soil), warned about the fallacy of the so-called race of the spirit:

It is unforgivable to want to numb the nascent attention of the public, telling them that it is only the ‘spirit’ that counts and not the body. Where do we find the historical proof that regardless of the body of the race, the spirit can form history? (‘New Nobility of Blood and Soil’, chapter 8).

_____________

[1] Note of the Editor: Few know the connection of Syria and Africa in the formation of Roman Catholic theology. See the chapters on ‘Persia, Armenia and Christianity’ and St. Augustine in Karlheinz Deschner’s Christianity’s Criminal History. Even Catholic historian of Christianity Paul Johnson recognises that Augustine’s theology ‘was Punic’.

Categories
Catholic Church Eugenics Galileo Galilee Neanderthalism

Great personalities defend eugenics, 1

by Evropa Soberana

‘The worst form of inequality
is to try to make unequal things equal’.

—Aristotle

‘Equality is a slogan based on envy’.

—Alexis de Tocqueville

Editor’s note: In the preface below the author says: ‘…before the Earth and Nature react violently to the uncontrolled proliferation of a lower, sick and bloated human kind, which has become a malignant tumour for the planet’.

These words are key to understanding what I have been calling ‘the extermination of the Neanderthals’, and I hope that the abridged translation of this long essay, published six years ago in Spanish and that I will be translating this month, sheds light on the subject.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

What we have here, which extends the previous Introduction to eugenics, is a compilation of great characters defending the eugenic mentality. Therefore, I should not be held responsible for what others said: I only present the quotes and I offer my comments to give an idea of the variety of opinions among the pro-eugenicists.

Some of the concepts by the people mentioned in this essay are certainly outdated, and it is clear that I do not approve of everything that is said here. For example, great advances have been made through genetic engineering: wonders over the most primitive methods advocated here by some authors. But they are worth, in any case, as a curiosities, especially in these times, when the biggest problem on the planet—overpopulation—threatens to unleash tremendous natural and artificial catastrophes that will result in unnecessary deaths of innocent beings.

What is eugenics? It comes from the ancient Greek eu (good) and ygenes (birth): ‘well born’ or ‘the birth of the good’. Wikipedia defines eugenics as ‘applied science or biosocial movement that advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic makeup of a population’.

Eugenics means biological socialism, biopolitics, a new social engineering based on logic, biology, genetics, compliance with the natural laws of life, and the will to grow in harmony with both: the planet and the creatures that populate it. Eugenics is the will of a gardener who tries that the species does not become a field where weeds grow in disorder, but a garden where, thanks to the intervention of a higher intelligence, weeds are ripped and beautiful and fruitful plants cultivated: sharing harmony between them, being kind to the holy ground on which they germinate and grow, and to which they owe their very existence. It is the will to improve man or, preferably, to overcome it, since it is already known that man is an imperfect being whose creation is incomplete.

Eugenics, in short, is the instinct to carry forward the evolution of the species and create the Overman.

There’s nothing new under the Sun. From the Neolithic, man found ways to domesticate animals that were biologically useful for him by providing good milk, meat, eggs, wool, etc., and dedicated himself to raising them with care to improve the quality of their herds generation after generation. The same happened with plant varieties, especially with cereals. In each generation, the old farmer prevented the non-useful varieties of his flock or crop from reproducing, and instead he tried to ensure that the best specimens had a prolific offspring. Thus, their crops and their herds were improving little by little.

If, by such methods, larger bulls, more nutritious wheat or more fertile hens could be obtained, why would they not be able to obtain more intelligent, brave and stronger human beings? Is the body of man not subject to the same laws as those governing wild animals?

Unfortunately, this mentality, which was applied to livestock and crops, was not applied to man, and the conquest of better living conditions, as well as the adoption of unnatural habits and diets, relaxed natural selection triggering the degeneration of civilised man.

Eugenics speaks of the need to prevent (negative eugenics) the multiplication of undesirable mutations in the human genome (as blindness, deformity, varied congenital diseases, mental retardation, the progress of crossbreeding, Down syndrome, etc.) by prohibiting their reproduction before it is too late for the species and before the Earth and Nature react violently to the uncontrolled proliferation of a lower, sick and bloated human kind, which has become a malignant tumour for the planet.

On the other hand, it is necessary to favour (positive eugenics) the propagation of the best-equipped human specimens, to give them the evolutionary advantage. This especially refers to birth, sports training, food, outdoor life, the cultivation of mental and will faculties, general culture and health.

In the eyes of the species, any method is legitimate to achieve such goal, from in-vitro fertilization, pre-natal diagnosis or embryo selection, to advanced engineering, surgery and genetic therapy techniques that are just around the corner. If this is not done, it is precisely because Western Civilisation is governed by people who do not care at all about the destiny of race, civilisation and humanity. What moves them is the immediate economic benefit and short-term success.

The West is dying and what is paramount for us is an authoritarian and socialist System in which the regeneration of race and biological quality will regain strength to balance the planetary unbalance that, currently, is inclined towards the proliferation of a human type of zero quality.
 

Introduction

We might think that Galileo was not the first man of the European post-classical era to rediscover that the Earth revolves around the Sun. There was access before to the classical works, and I sincerely believe that in the Middle Ages many sages knew the truth. But none had the courage to publish it for fear of the Church and the word ‘heretic’, all capable of ruining his career and even ending his life in a bonfire, to the sound of the applause of the common peoples. A clique of Pharisees, representative of an obscurantist idea, exercised control over a ‘God-fearing’ flock, keeping them forever in darkness, stripping them of their old traditions to replace them with the Bible and reign as one-eyed kings in a world of the blind. Galileo, like others, was forced to recant under penalty of being burned as a heretic.

Well, today we have:

• A new Church: the pro-globalist system.

• New unquestionable dogmas: the ‘politically correct’, ‘equality’ at all costs, feminism, globalisation, multiculturalism, rebellion against anything that is well constituted, hatred of the superior, individualism and the desire not to offend bloodsucking and whining parasites.

• A new Inquisition: the media, NGOs and globalist lobbies, Jews, homosexuals, feminists, pro-third-worlders and democrats, among others.

• We have new heretics: revisionists, ‘ultra-rightists’ and dissenting scientists.

• New untouchable taboos: genetic engineering, the ‘holocaust’, racism, Nazism, fascism, anti-Semitism, male chauvinism, homophobia… and eugenics.

• New witch hunts: scandals and trials against notable dissidents or any suspect of ‘racism’ or patriotism.

• New repentant pioneers in the style of Galileo, such as the scientist and gifted Englishman James Watson, who retracted his ‘racist’ phrase in 2007, under penalty of being burned at the stake in the media. As in the case of Galileo, time will demonstrate the truthfulness of his words, and posterity will honour as true those words he muttered under his breath: And yet it moves.

• We have new bonfires: ostracism, defamation, conviction, imprisonment, boycott and even direct physical aggression.

• We have the usual Pharisees: great magnates of finance and the media, progressives and ambitious politicians who would sell their brother for money and notoriety.

• And a new Satan, Antichrist or Lucifer: Hitler.

So we can affirm, without any fear of exaggeration, that exactly the same thing is happening today as in the Middle Ages with the Church. If history teaches us anything, it is that history repeats itself and that, in times of taboos, science just cannot advance. Modern society, in full biological regression, and poisoned by junk genes, criticises the taboos of the remote past: but it seems to forget that these taboos have been replaced by new taboos. The only objective of this sinister levelling, anti-evolutionary and egalitarian front remains the same for millennia: to frustrate man on his way to reach deity.

Even stripping the issue of passion and idealism, eugenics seems an issue from the logical and objective point of view—so logical that we can only wonder what kind of person could oppose it. Why, then, is there so much opposition to an issue as extremely urgent and necessary as eugenics? We can attribute it to two reasons:

1.- Two millennia of cultural Judeo-Christianity and its derivatives.

2.- The ignorance and the very low physical, mental and moral quality of a good part of the modern population thanks to the annulment, for centuries, of natural selection, the persecution of freethinkers, the depletion of the best blood in wars, the mania to help the worst rather than the best and, thanks to a deliberate praise of vulgarity and mediocrity in the media—which is nothing more than a new form of Christianity—, the glorification of the miserable, the mediocre and the downtrodden.

In contrast to this anti-evolution, no one can deny that the vast majority of men who today are considered to be great personalities supported eugenics. The intention of this essay is to ‘cheer up’ a bit those who would defend pro-eugenic measures and to see that millennia of history support them. Also, that people are more aware of the world of science, because progress and interesting debates are taking place which show that there are very prepared people who realise what is happening.

Unfortunately, modern science is heavily intervened by the official System. Funds are granted to investigate only matters that can result in a direct economic benefit in the short term, which clearly cuts off hopes of research paths, perhaps more arduous, but that in the long term produce more important benefits. Humanity has to get tired of being ruled by greedy clowns, simple and vulgar desert merchants who only think of seeking new twisted financial deals and new markets to sell useless goodies.

But there will come a day when scientists will stop investigating various creams and silicones to patch the disgusting worn-out bodies of old paranoid women, and will direct their efforts to improve the genetic inheritance of the human being so that in the future he will never need ‘amending’ it again. The day will come when doctors will stop striving in the search for medicines and prolonging, through aberrant methods, the lives of terminal patients with a broken body, instead dedicating their energies to the creation of a human type who doesn’t need any medicine.

The so-called ‘scientific community’—made up of scientists who are servile to the official system, crying lackeys of the ‘politically correct’, possessed by dubious ambitions and eager to climb the ladder—attacks those who speak out dissident ideas about the mainstream dogma even if that someone is their best ‘colleague’.

But the truth, Pharisees, is not changed because the truth is forever. Like the Phoenix, that great truth that is the law of human inequality and the need to cultivate the best and place reproductive limits on the worst will emerge again. In fact, it is an open secret in the minds of many doctors and scientists of what in the future will be the most important science of all: the science of man and of life. A day will come when these heralds of truth will come to light proclaiming their teaching and warning:

Civilisation has made human beings degenerate, and it is necessary to undertake radical emergency measures to reverse this sinister process, or we will become a weak, involved, inferior, pathetic, vulnerable, sickly, effeminate and, above all, harmful to the planet and unable to overcome adversities. We will be a filthy and gelatinous species that will crawl between machines. And that is when Nature will go for us. On the other hand, ‘race’ is much more than ethnic-anthropological features. It is the biological quality of the lineage. It must be strong and bright to withstand the tension to which life subjects it.

Just as the paradigm revolution from geocentric to heliocentric worldview, in future times the truths defended by the dissidents will be considered obvious certainties, and those who once stupidly tried to rebut them will be ashamed for having done it: as the Church is ashamed for having denied that the Earth revolves around the Sun. And in the same way that Christian obscurantism was finally overwhelmed by a Renaissance that the Church was unable to contain, we too, even in this most decadent age, are headed towards the definitive Renaissance of the ancient Indo-European spirit.

Thus, the old Nazi approach of 1933 has not been refuted or satisfactorily answered by the System, which has limited itself to pouring demagogic defamations on National Socialism but never trying to refute its arguments.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: To the list above in bold-type I would add:

A new God or Divine Trinity: the ideology of the equality of Race, Gender and Sexual orientation.

The new god of whites reminds me of a film located in the 5th century in Britannia, in which the island’s natives spoke of ‘the new god of the Romans’, referring to the Christian trinity.

Categories
Catholic Church Christian art Deranged altruism Universalism

Veritas odium parit, 7

According to the theologians’ interpretation, the Church is born from the open side of Christ. It is the Church that congregates next to the cross of the Saviour in this painting of a Navarrese-French teacher at the Lázaro Galdiano Museum in Madrid.

The Imperial Church of Constantine and his successors always was a catholic, i.e. universal church. It is the institution that sanctioned universalism in the West. In ‘The Saxon Savior: Converting Northern Europe’ Ash Donaldson said:
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Universalism’s pyrrhic victory

It took centuries of relentless indoctrination to get the peoples of Northern Europe to extend the in-group boundaries outward to embrace, first, all those who said the words and bent the knee before the cross, and eventually all of humanity, whose encompassing by the true Faith is a Christ-given goal.

But at the moment of its greatest success, with European missionaries dispatched to the remotest corners of Africa and Asia, Christianity found itself assailed by the very universalism that had provided its appeal in the first centuries. The same weapons it had wielded to discredit the pre-Christian myths and folkways were now turned against it by the advocates of a universalism that had no need for something as quaint as deity. If, today, the notion of God seems less and less of a possibility to the rootless inhabitants of our soulless cities, it is partly because Christian universalism paved the way by making our tribal identities, ancient customs, and cherished myths ultimately irrelevant.

Today, with that thousand-year resistance behind us, we can see how the triumph of universalism, set in motion by a very different sort of savior in the fourth century BC, has gradually left us without a folk, without a polis, and without the means to even comprehend how fully life was once lived. All that remains, it seems, is to double down on Christian universalism, throw oneself instead into a substitute universalism such as Marxism, or chuck it all for an unabashed individualism.

Yet as the past century-and-a-half shows, ethnic identity has a habit of returning with a vengeance. Those who rediscover such myths, folkways, and traditions as have come down to us often find that these things strike a chord within them. They simply fit, without all the caveats and yes-but’s of syncretic universalism.

Ultimately, however, a folkish way of life must have a folk community, and not the virtual communities that exist only on social media. We must have a polis again, in all that the Greeks understood by that term: small, self-governing communities bound by common language, ethnicity, customs, and religious traditions. Such a thing, far from being utopian, would spring from our nature, life as it was lived across thousands of generations.

What is artificial is our divorce from the land, our crowding into cities to live alongside strangers for the purpose of endless consumption, and our insistence on universalism even when we ourselves—those of European descent—lose the most by it. In the long view, all this is fairly recent, and in the North, quite recent indeed. That should give us confidence, for though the line is frayed, it is far from broken.

____________

Bibliographical references appear in the original article.

Categories
Catholic Church Charles V Protestantism Third Reich

Holy wrath, 10

by Evropa Soberana

Sprouts of sacred fury

It cannot be said that the fire of the Nordic blood disappeared. The same century that the berserkers disappeared began the rise of the cavalry orders: the new männerbunden of Europe. The great moments of glory enjoyed by Europe during the Middle Ages are due to them. Think of the Holy Empire, the Eastern Crusades, the Occitan civilization, the Spanish Reconquest, the Templars and the legends of the Grail. It can be said, however, that the most visible and obvious example of pagan fury had disappeared.

What happened to the traditional religious leadership in Europe? It did not disappear, but submerged in the dominant culture. And from the dormant collective unconscious in European blood it managed numerous groups that were about to overthrow the power of the Church (remember the Catharism, the Templars and the Ghibellines).

The Holy Germanic-Roman Empire (the I Reich) was a great depository of the ancestral tradition. Their emperors (like the famous Frederick Barbarossa, or his grandson Frederick II), many of them educated from their childhood by orders of cavalry, were considered heretics, antipopes and antichrists by the Church, since the majority were directly involved in unchristian activities including looting of the Vatican, pacts with orders of cavalry on the margins of the Church and dealings with Islam.

The Emperor Charles V (King of Spain and the Holy Roman-Germanic Empire, and lord of half Europe, as well as vast territories overseas) also plundered the Vatican like his Visigoth ancestors more than a thousand years before, terrorizing the Pope as if he was a vulgar outlaw. So perhaps we should ask ourselves how these men understood the Christian religion and the loyalty that they supposedly owed to the Church.

After the disastrous Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) the Holy Empire fell definitively, being replaced by small and ridiculous bourgeois states that were plagued by the Black Death and Protestantism, and that were dedicated to the virulent persecution of heretics, burning and hanging the largest number of ‘witches’ in all of Europe, while the Turks overwhelmed the Balkans at will. Entire regions of Germany were depopulated by this paranoia. From this time also come the legends of werewolves, and in Germany many men were accused of being lycanthropes. Thousands were tortured and executed for it.

The fall of the Templars and the Holy Roman Empire marked a milestone: the mystical Middle Ages of castles and knights fell, and was replaced by the dirty era of famines, plagues, witch hunts, Puritanism, the Bible and religious fundamentalism. Also, the Infantry relieved the Cavalry as the dominant body in the battlefields, as is evident in the conquests of the Tercios (so similar in their organisation and mentality to the legions of Rome).

Of the orders of chivalry, of medieval mysticism, of the feeling of dharma and of the traditional social order, there remained the Rosicrucians and the Masons. And both ended, in turn, infiltrated by the rise of the new commercial-financial caste, the bourgeoisie, as is especially clear in modern masonry.

In the 19th century, the religiosity of Germanism began to awaken again. Europe had discovered the wisdom of the East and many sacred texts had been translated, especially from Iran and India. German archaeologists unearthed Greek cities, temples and statues. Prussia appeared, bearer of a new imperialist idea. The Second Reich appeared. Paganizing mystic groups emerged.

(Wolfsangels, emblems of the werwolf from Germanic paganism.)

And in the middle of the 20th century, the Renaissance exploded and manifested itself in the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler, whose very name means ‘noble wolf’, played in Europe a role similar to that of Lycurgus (whose name means ‘conductor of wolves’) played in Sparta. In the last days of the Third Reich, fanatical units of young guerrilla insurgents called werwolf (wolfmen) staged the last sacrifice to resist the occupation of Germany after the Second World War.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: Here is precisely where visitors don’t get why I recently mentioned so many times Game of Thrones. As much as Jewish producers tried to hide the Aryan part within the author’s novels, and even invert it through feminism, a residue of the mystical Middle Ages of castles and knights leaked through the television series. In the finale all the main houses of the kingdom fell except House Stark, symbolised by the wolf: the house to which King Bran the Broken belongs, a noble wolf.

Categories
Catholic Church

Black Wolf Radio

Talking with Joseph Walsh in today’s episode of Black Wolf Radio, Chris White said after 4:26 that the Roman Catholic Church was the very last vestige of the Roman Empire. He even subscribes the doctrine of the priest who baptised me (*): that the present occupier of the Holy See is not a true pope.

I wonder if White has read the masthead of this site, because the historical fact is exactly the opposite: the Church murdered the Greco-Roman culture and destroyed ninety-nine percent of its literature in Latin (see also the quotations of Catherine Nixey’s book on this site).

(*) The photo of the priest that appears in this Wikipedia page, also reproduced above, was taken on 12 March 1966, during my First Communion. As I said, he was one of the founding fathers of ‘sedevacantism’, and put forward his ideas in The New Montinian Church (1971) and Sede Vacante (1973): books that I saw on the shelf of my father’s study in the 1970s. The very month I met White at London I also met the traditionalist community that Jez Turner used to visit, who praised Joaquín Sáenz (1899-1976) when I told them that he had been my family’s priest.

Categories
Catholic Church Catholic religious orders Christendom Darkening Age (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian Free speech / association Libanius Ovid

Darkening Age, 21

Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Story of Saint Paul: The Burning of the
Books at Ephesus, designed ca. 1529, woven before 1546 (medium:
wool and silk, woven under the direction of Jan van der Vyst).

Editor’s note.Bold-typed emphasis in the last paragraph is mine. In chapter eleven of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:

In Egypt, a fearsome monk and saint named Shenoute entered the house of a man suspected of being a pagan and removed all his books. The Christian habit of book-burning went on to enjoy a long history. A millennium later, the Italian preacher Savonarola wanted the works of the Latin love poets Catullus, Tibullus and Ovid to be banned while another preacher said that all of these ‘shameful books’ should be let go, because if you are Christians you are obliged to burn them’…

* * *

Before there had been competing philosophical schools, all equally valid, all equally arguable. Now, for the first time, there was right—and there was wrong. Now, there was what the Bible said—and there was everything else. And from now on any belief that was ‘wrong’ could, in the right circumstances, put you in grave danger.

As Dirk Rohmann has highlighted, Augustine said that works that opposed Christian doctrine had no place in Christian society and had scant time for much of Greek philosophy. The Greeks, Augustine said dismissively, ‘have no ground for boasting of their wisdom’. The Church’s authors were greater, and more ancient. John Chrysostom went far further. He described pagan philosophy as a madness, the mother of evils and a disease.

Classical literature was filled with the incorrect and demonic and it came under repeated and vicious attack from the Church Fathers. Atheism, science and philosophy were all targeted. The very idea that mankind could explain everything through science was, as Rohmann has shown, disparaged as folly. ‘Stay clear of all pagan books!’ the Apostolic Constitutions advised Christians bluntly. ‘For what do you have to do with such foreign discourses, or laws, or false prophets, which subvert the faith of the unstable?’ If you wish to read about history, it continued, ‘you have the Books of Kings; if philosophy and poetry, you have the Prophets, the Book of Job and the Proverbs, in which you will find greater depth of sagacity than in all of the pagan poets and philosophers because this is the voice of the Lord… Do therefore always stay clear of all such strange and diabolical books!’…

An accusation of ‘magic’ was frequently the prelude to a spate of burnings. In Beirut, at the turn of the sixth century, a bishop ordered Christians, in the company of civil servants, to examine the books of those suspected of this. Searches were made, books were seized from suspects and then brought to the centre of the city and placed in a pyre. A crowd was ordered to come and watch as the Christians lit this bonfire in front of the church of the Virgin Mary. The demonic deceptions and ‘barbarous and atheistic arrogance’ of these books were condemned as ‘everybody’ watched ‘the magic books and the demonic signs burn’. As with the destruction of temples, there was no shame in this…

What did the books burned on such occasions really contain? Doubtless some did contain ‘magic’—such practices were popular prior to Christianity and certainly didn’t disappear with its arrival. But they were not all. The list given in the life of St Simeon clearly refers to the destruction of books of Epicureanism, the philosophy that advocated the theory of atomism. ‘Paganism’ appears to have been a charge in itself—and while it could mean outlawed practices it could, at a stretch, refer to almost any antique text that contained the gods. Christians were rarely good chroniclers of what they burned.

Sometimes, clues to the texts remain. In Beirut, just before the bonfire of the books, pious Christians had gone to the house of a man suspected of owning books that were ‘hateful to God’. The Christians told him that they ‘wanted the salvation and recovery of his soul’; they wanted ‘liberation’. These Christians then entered his home, inspected his books and searched each room. Nothing was found—until the man was betrayed by his slave. Forbidden books were discovered in a secret compartment in a chair. The man whose house it was—clearly well aware of what such ‘liberation’ might involve—‘fell to the ground and begged us, in tears, not to hand him over to the law’. He was spared the law but forced to burn his books. As our chronicler Zachariah records with pleasure, ‘when the fire was lit he threw the books of magic into it with his own hands, and said that he thanked God who had granted him with his visit and liberated him from the slavery and error of demons’. One of the books removed from the house in Beirut is mentioned: it is very possible it was not magic but a history by a disapproved-of Egyptian historian.

Divination and prophecy were often used as pretexts to attack a city’s elite. One of the most infamous assaults on books and thinkers took place in Antioch. Here, at the end of the fourth century, an accusation of treasonous divination led to a full-scale purge that targeted the city’s intellectuals. By sheer chance, Ammianus Marcellinus, a non-Christian and one of the finest historians of the era, happened to be in the city; a wonderful piece of luck for later historians and wretched luck for the man himself, who was horrified. As Ammianus describes it,

the racks were set up, and leaden weights, cords, and scourges put in readiness. The air was filled with the appalling yells of savage voices mixed with the clanking of chains, as the torturers in the execution of their grim task shouted: ‘Hold, bind, tighten, more yet.’

A noble of ‘remarkable literary attainments’ was one of the first to be arrested and tortured; he was followed by a clutch of philosophers who were variously tortured, burned alive and beheaded. Educated men in the city who had considered themselves fortunate now, Damocles-like, realized the fragility of their fortune. Looking up, it was as if they saw ‘swords hung over their heads suspended by horse-hairs from the ceiling’.

And, once again, there was the burning of books as bonfires of volumes were used as post-hoc justification for the slaughter. Ammianus Marcellinus writes with distaste that

innumerable books and whole heaps of documents, which had been routed out from various houses, were piled up and burnt under the eyes of the judges. They were treated as forbidden texts to allay the indignation caused by the executions, though most of them were treatises on various liberal arts and on jurisprudence. 

Many intellectuals started to pre-empt the persecutors and set light to their own books. The destruction was extensive and ‘throughout the eastern provinces whole libraries were burnt by their owners for fear of a similar fate; such was the terror which seized all hearts’. Ammianus wasn’t the only intellectual to be scared in these decades. The orator Libanius burned a huge number of his own works…

* * *

The Great Library of Alexandria might have attempted to collect books on every topic, but Christianity was going to be considerably more selective…

One surviving Byzantine manuscript of Ovid has been scarred by a series of ridiculous redactions—even the word ‘girl’ seems to have been considered too racy to remain. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuits were still censoring and bowdlerizing their editions of the classics. Individual abbots, far from Umberto Eco’s avenging intellectual ideal, sometimes censored their own libraries. At some point in the fifteenth century, a note was left in a mutilated manuscript in Vienna. ‘At this point in the book,’ it records, ‘there were thirteen leaves containing works by the apostate Julian; the abbot of the monastery… read them and realised that they were dangerous, so he threw them into the sea.’

Much classical literature was preserved by Christians. Far more was not. To survive, manuscripts needed to be cared for, recopied. Classical ones were not. Medieval monks, at a time when parchment was expensive and classical learning held cheap, simply took pumice stones and scrubbed the last copies of classical works from the page. Rohmann has pointed out that there is even evidence to suggest that in some cases ‘whole groups of classical works were deliberately selected to be deleted and overwritten in around AD 700, often with texts authored by [the fathers of the Church or by] legal texts that criticised or banned pagan literature’. Pliny, Plautus, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Livy and many, many more: all were scrubbed away by the hands of believers…

The texts that suffer in this period are the texts of the wicked and sinful pagans. From the entirety of the sixth century only ‘scraps’ of two manuscripts by the satirical Roman poet Juvenal survive and mere ‘remnants’ of two others, one by the Elder and one by the Younger Pliny.

From the next century there survives nothing save a single fragment of the poet Lucan.

From the start of the next century: nothing at all.

Far from mourning the loss, Christians delighted in it. As John Chrysostom crowed, the writings ‘of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated’. He warmed to the theme in another sermon: ‘Where is Plato? Nowhere! Where Paul? In the mouths of all!’

The fifth-century writer Theodoret of Cyrrhus observed the decline of Greek literature with similar enthusiasm. ‘Those elaborately decorated fables have been utterly banned,’ he gloated. ‘Who is today’s head of the Stoic heresy? Who is safeguarding the teachings of the Peripatetics?’ No one, evidently, for Theodoret concludes this homily with the observation that ‘the whole earth under the sun has been filled with sermons’.

Augustine contentedly observed the rapid decline of the atomist philosophy in the first century of Christian rule. By his time, he recorded, Epicurean and Stoic philosophy had been ‘suppressed’—the word is his. The opinions of such philosophers ‘have been so completely eradicated and suppressed… that if any school of error now emerged against the truth, that is, against the Church of Christ, it would not dare to step forth for battle if it were not covered under the Christian name’…

Much was preserved. Much, much more was destroyed. It has been estimated that less than ten per cent of all classical literature has survived into the modern era. For Latin, the figure is even worse: it is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains. If this was ‘preservation’—as it is often claimed to be—then it was astonishingly incompetent. If it was censorship, it was brilliantly effective. The ebullient, argumentative classical world was, quite literally, being erased.

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Catholic Church

A message for Catholics

A few days ago some Santería practitioners ritually sacrificed a poor chicken and they came to throw the decapitated corpse at the corner of my house in Mexico City.

I want you to know that I blame the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation, brought here by the Spanish and Portuguese, of these cruelties with animals.

If the Iberians had practiced ethnic cleansing in Latin America as the English did in the northern countries, there would be no reminiscence of ritual sacrifices in this part of the continent. Remember that, before the Conquest, the Amerindians practiced the sacrifice of children, as I explain in Day of Wrath. When the Spaniards banned such sacrifices, the Amerindians simply transferred their cruelty towards these poor animals.

Christian love for the Other is not only murdering the white race: it is contributing to a kind of cruelty to animals that is easier to outlaw in those nations that were Aryan. The Catholicism that the Europeans brought to the Americas—Thou shalt not ethnically cleanse; just marry the Indian women!—is a damn shit, recognise it.

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Catholic Church Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 113


 Editors’ note:To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translationof Volume I.

The Catholic ‘children emperors’

‘These sovereigns followed the examples of the great Theodosius’. —Cardinal Hergenrother, Church Historian

‘The emperors were also pious Catholics’. —Peter Brown

‘The world is sinking’. —St Jerome

 
The division of the Empire: two forced Catholic states emerge

The year in which Augustine was named bishop (395), Emperor Theodosius I died in Milan. Clerical leaders had repeatedly incited him against the ‘pagans’, Jews and ‘heretics’, and saints Ambrose and Augustine had glorified him. Already in the 5th century, ecclesiastical circles gave the nickname of ‘the Great’ to this man who could pour blood like water. After his death, the Roman Empire was divided between his two sons. The Empire of the West disappeared in 476, while that of the East, as the Byzantine Empire, lasted until 1453.

From the times of this division, no other monarch ever brought the Empire under his command. In Constantinople, Arcadius (395-408), of seventeen years of age, ruled over the East, which remained a gigantic territory: all that would later be Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor with the Crimean peninsula, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Lower Libya and Pentapolis. In Milan, Honorius (395-423), eleven years of age, ruled over the West, which was even larger and richer but politically not as important as the East.

Both ‘emperors’, taught by the Church and famous for their piety, continued the religious policies of their father. If Theodosius had fought alone against ‘heresy’—one of the main targets of his attacks—with more than twenty provisions, his sons and successors supported Catholicism with a multitude of new laws. They favoured the Catholic Church legally and financially; increased their possessions, dispensed the clergy from certain jobs, some taxes and military service. Thus the State of Catholic confession terrorised more and more those who had a different faith, although the adepts of Greco-Roman culture would continue to exist, even in high positions.

It is true that in primitive Christianity hatred of the mundane was widespread; that in the New Testament the State is called ‘great whore’ and ‘horror of the Earth’, and that the emperor was considered a servant of the devil. However, since Paul there was also a sector prone to the State, a sector that consciously adapted to the circumstances and that imposed itself, little by little.

In the East and in the West, the Christian government centres presented the same image: ceaseless palace intrigues, struggles for power, crises of ministers and murders. The Catholic ‘children emperors’—Arcadius, Honorius, later also Valentinian III and Theodosius II—lacked independence. They were crowned nullities unable to make decisions, surrounded by a swarm of greedy courtiers, high dignitaries, Germanic generals and, also, eunuchs.

And as often happens in times of ‘decadence’, we cannot overlook some of the women of the imperial house; behind them was an intriguing clergy. The bishops also continued to mingle in the affairs of the officials; already during the 4th century and still more in the 5th, they usurped their faculties. They managed above all to extend the scope of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the episcopalis audientia, the episcopale iudicium, the ‘arbitral functions’ of the bishops.