The translation of Alain de Benoist’s important essay on Christianity is now available in PDF (here), and I have just included it in the reading list for the featured article, ‘The Wall’.
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Category: Christendom
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Christianity:
The communism of antiquity, 5
by Alain de Benoist
Christian doctrine was a social revolution. It did not affirm for the first time that the soul existed (which would not have made it original), but that everyone had one identical at birth. The men of ancient culture, who were born into a religion because they were born into a fatherland, tended instead to think that by adopting a behaviour characterised by rigour and self-control they might succeed in forging a soul, but that this was a fate reserved undoubtedly for the best. The idea that all men could be gratified with it indifferently and simply by the fact of existing was shocking to them. On the contrary, Christianity maintained that everyone was born with a soul, which was equivalent to saying that men were born equal before God.
On the other hand, in its rejection of the world, Christianity presented itself as the heir of an old biblical tradition of hatred of the powerful, of the systematic exaltation of the ‘humble and the poor’ (anavim ébionim), whose triumph and revenge over wicked and proud civilizations had been announced by prophets and psalmists. In the Book of Enoch, widely disseminated in the first century in Christian circles (cited in the epistles of Jude XV, 4, and of Barnabas: XV), we read: ‘The Son of Man will raise kings and the powerful from their beds and the strong from their seats; he will break their strength… He will overthrow kings from their thrones and their power. He will make the mighty turn their faces away, and cover them with shame…’ (Enoch XLVI, 4-6).
Jeremiah takes pleasure in imagining the future victims in the form of animals for the slaughter: ‘Separate them, O Yahweh, like sheep for the slaughter, and reserve them for the day of slaughter’ (Jeremiah XII, 3). To the women of the powerful, whom he calls ‘cows of Bashan’ (Amos IV, I), Amos predicts: ‘Yahweh has sworn by his holiness: The days will come upon you when you will be lifted with hooks, and your descendants with fishing spears’ (IV, 2). The psalms outline the beginning of the class struggle, and the same spirit will inspire ‘the first groups of Christians and later the monastic orders’ (A. Causse, op. cit.). ‘In the end, there is only one theme in the Psalms,’ says Isidore Loeb, ‘which is the struggle of the poor against the wicked, and his final triumph thanks to the protection of God, who loves the one and hates the other’ (Littérature des pauvres dans la Bible).
The poor are always the victims of injustice. They are called the Humble, the Holy, the Just and the Pious. They are unfortunate, prey to all evils; they are sick, invalid, alone, abandoned, relegated to a valley of tears, they water their bread with tears, etc. But they bear their pain; they even seek it out because they know that such trials are necessary for their salvation, that the more they are humiliated, the more they will triumph, the more they suffer, the more they will one day see others suffer. As for the wicked, they are rich, and their wealth is always culpable.
They are happy, build cities, perform pre-eminent social functions, and command armies, but they will one day be punished in proportion as they dominate. ‘Such is the social ideal of Jewish prophecy,’ says Gerard Walter, ‘a kind of general levelling which will make all class distinctions disappear and lead to the creation of a uniform society from which all privileges of any kind will be banished. This egalitarian sentiment, carried to its ultimate limits, is linked to an irreducible animosity against the rich and the powerful, who will not be admitted into the future kingdom. The ideal humanity of the announced times will include all the just without distinction of creed or nationality’ (Les origines du communisme, Payot, 1931).
The second book of the Sibylline Oracles paints a picture of humankind regenerating in a new Jerusalem under a strictly communist regime: ‘And the land will be common to all; there will be no more walls or frontiers. All will live in common and wealth will be useless. Then there will be no more poor or rich, no tyrants or slaves, no great or small, no kings or lords, but all will be equal’ (Or. Sib. II, 320-326).
Given this, it is easier to understand why Christianity initially seemed to the ancients to be a religion of slaves and heimatlos, a vehicle for a kind of ‘counterculture’ that only achieved success among the dissatisfied, the declassed, the envious and the revolutionaries avant la lettre: slaves, artisans, fullers, carders, shoemakers, single women, etc. Celsus describes the first Christian communities as ‘a mass of ignorant people and gullible women, recruited from the dregs of the people,’ and his adversaries hardly try to disabuse him on this point. Lactantius preaches equality in social conditions: ‘There is no equity where there is no equality’ (Inst. VII, 2). Under Heliogabalus, Calixtus, bishop of Rome, recommends that converts marry slaves.
For this reason, there is no idea more odious to the Christian than that of the fatherland: how can one serve both the land of one’s fathers and the Father who is in heaven? Salvation does not depend on birth, belonging to a city, or the seniority of one’s lineage but exclusively on respect for dogmas. From then on, it is enough to distinguish believers from unbelievers, and all other boundaries must disappear. Paul insists on this: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither male nor female…’ Hermas, who enjoyed great authority in Rome, condemns the converts to perpetual exile: ‘You servants of God live in a foreign land. Your city is very far from this one’ (Sim. I, I).
Such a disposition of spirit explains the Roman reaction. Celsus, a patriot concerned about the health of the State, who sensed the weakening of the Imperium and the decline of civic feeling that the triumph of Christian egalitarianism could provoke, begins his True Discourse with these words: ‘A new race of men born yesterday, without homeland or traditions, united against all religious and civil institutions, persecuted by justice, accused of infamy by all and who glory in this common execration: that is what Christians are. Factious men who pretend to make a separate ranch and separate themselves from common society.’ And Tacitus, who says that they were detested for their ‘abominations’ (flagitia), accuses them of the crime of ‘hatred of the human race.’ ‘As soon as it was suppressed,’ he says, ‘this execrable superstition was once again breaking out not only in Judea, the cradle of the plague, but in Rome itself, where all the horrors and infamies that exist flow from all sides and are believed…’
The imperial principle is at this time the instrument of a conception of the world carried out as a vast project. Thanks to it, the Pax Romana reigns in an ordered world. Filled with admiration, Horace exclaims: ‘The ox wanders safely through the fields fertile by Ceres and Abundance, while sailors everywhere plogh the peaceful seas.’ In Halicarnassus, a tripartite inscription in honour of Augustus proclaims: ‘Cities flourish amid order, concord and wealth.’ But for the early Christians the pagan State is the work of Satan. The Empire, the supreme symbol of a proud force, is nothing but arrogance worthy of ridicule. The harmonious Roman society is declared without exception guilty, for its resistance to monotheistic demands, traditions and way of life, are so many offences against the laws of heavenly socialism. And as guilty, it must be punished; that is, destroyed. Like a lengthy complaint, the Christian literature of the first two centuries breathes out its rosary of anathemas. With feverish impatience the apostles preach the ‘hour of vengeance,’ ‘so that all things which are written may be fulfilled’ (Luke XXI, 22). As the Fathers of the Church did after them, they announce the imminence of revenge, of the ‘great night’ when everything will be turned upside down. The Epistle of James contains a call to class struggle: ‘Come now, you rich people! Weep and howl for the misery that will come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your clothes are moth-eaten’ (V,1-2).
James, who has read the Book of Enoch, predicts terrible tortures for the rich and the pagans. He imagines the final judgment as a ‘knock to the throat,’ ‘a kind of immense slaughterhouse to which thousands of the well-off, fat and splendid, and with all their wealth on them, will be dragged. He is joy at seeing them go one by one, returning their ill-gotten gains before feeding with their fat the formidable carnage he glimpses in his dreams’ (Gérard Walter, op. cit.). Above all, he accuses the rich of deicide: ‘You condemned and killed the Just One.’ (V, 6.) This thesis, which makes Jesus the victim, not of a people, but of a class, will soon become popular. Tertullian writes: ‘The time is ripe for Rome to end up in flames. She will receive the reward her works deserve’ (On Prayer, 5).
The Book of Daniel, written between 167 and 165 b.c.e., and the Book of Revelation are the two great sources from which this holy fury draws. St. Hippolytus (c. 170-235), in his Commentary on Daniel, places the end of Rome around the year 500 and attributes it to the rise of democracies: ‘The toes of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream represent the coming democracies, which will separate from each other like the ten toes of the statue, in which iron will be mixed with clay.’ Around 407, St. Jerome, in another Commentary on Daniel, defines the end of the world as ‘the time when the kingdom of the Romans will be destroyed.’ Other authors repeat these prophecies: Eusebius, Apollinaris and Methodius of Olympus. The revolutionary ardour against Rome, the ‘accursed city,’ ‘new Babylon,’ and ‘great harlot’ knows no bounds. The city is the last avatar of Leviathan and Behemoth.
In all these apocalypses, sibylline mysteries and double-meaning prophecies, in all this mental trepidation, hypersensitive to ‘symbols’ and ‘signs,’ in all this psalm-like literature, we find more imprecations than would have been necessary to warm the spirits, shake the imaginations and even arm still hesitant hands. This explains the accusations that followed the burning of Rome in the year 64.
Deuteronomy ordered the services of God to slaughter unbelieving populations and burn their cities in honour of Yahweh, and Jesus repeated the image: ‘He who does not abide in me will be thrown out like a branch that withers, and is gathered and thrown into the fire and is burned’ (John XV, 6). And indeed, from Rome to the bonfires of the Inquisition, much will burn. Sacred pyromania will be exercised without respite. ‘This idea (that the world of the impious will be destroyed by fire),’ says Bouché-Leclercq, ‘had been received by Christians from Jewish seers, from those prophets and sibilants who invoked lightning as quickly as a torch, iron as quickly as fire on the cities and peoples hostile to Israel. Never has the imagination burned so much as in the prophecies of Isaiah and Ezekiel, the richest collection of anathemas that religious literature has ever produced.’
‘In this opinion of a general fire,’ adds Gibbon, ‘the faith of Christians came to coincide with the Eastern tradition… The Christian, who based his belief not so much on the fallacious arguments of reason as on the authority of tradition and the interpretation of Scripture, awaited the event with terror and confidence, was sure of its ineluctable imminence. As this solemn idea permanently occupied his mind, he regarded all the disasters that befell the Empire as so many infallible symptoms of the agony of the world.
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Christianity:
The communism of antiquity, 4
by Alain de Benoist
The ancients believed in the unity of the world, in the dialectical intimacy of man with nature. Their natural philosophy was dominated by the ideas of becoming and alternation. The Greeks equated ethics with aesthetics, the kalôn with the agathôn, the good with beauty, and Renan rightly wrote: ‘A system in which the Venus de Milo is only an idol is a false system, or at least a partial one, because beauty is worth almost as much as goodness and truth. With such ideas, a decline in art is inevitable.’ (Les apótres, p. 372). The ‘new man’ of Christianity professed a very different vision of things. He carried within himself a conflict, not the everyday one that forms the fabric of life, but an eschatological, absolute conflict: the divorce from the world.
Early Christianity extends the messianic idea present in Judaism in an exacerbated form, due to a millennial expectation. In the words attributed to Jesus we find literal quotations from the visions of the Book of Enoch. For the first Christians, the world, a mere stage, a vale of tears, a place of unbearable difficulties and tensions, needed compensation, a radiant vision that would justify (morally speaking) the impotence of here below. That is why the earth appears as the field on which the forces of Evil and Good, the prince of this world and the heavenly Father, those possessed by the devil and the sons of God, confront each other: ‘And this is the victory that has overcome the world: our faith’ (I John V, 4). The idea that the world belongs to Evil, later characteristic of certain Gnostics (the Manicheans), appears frequently in the first writings of Christianity. Jesus himself affirmed: ‘I do not pray for the world…, as I am not of the world’ (John XVII, 9-14). St. John insists: ‘Do not love the world, nor the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world.’ (I John II, 15-16.) ‘Do not be surprised if the world hates you.’ (Ibid. III,13). ‘We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.’ (Ibid. V, 19.) Later, the Rule of St. Benedict will state as a precept that monks must ‘make themselves strangers to the things of the world’ (A saeculi actius se facere alienum). In the Imitation of Christ we read: ‘The truly wise man is he who, in order to gain Christ, considers all the things of the earth as rubbish and dung.’ (I, 3, 5).
In the midst of the great artistic and literary renaissance of the first two centuries, Christians, as outsiders who pleased to be so, remained indifferent or, more often, hostile. Biblical aesthetics rejected the representation of forms, the harmony of lines and volumes; consequently, they had only a disdainful look on the statues that adorned squares and monuments. For the rest, everything was an object of hatred. The colonnades of temples and covered walks, the gardens with their fountains and domestic altars where a sacred flame flickered, the rich mansions, the uniforms of the legions, the villas, the ships, the roads, the works, the conquests, the ideas: everywhere the Christian saw the mark of the Beast. The Fathers of the Church condemned not only luxury, but also any profane work of art, colourful clothing, musical instruments, white bread, foreign wines, feather pillows (had not Jacob rested his head on a stone?) and even the custom of cutting one’s beard, in which Tertullian sees ‘a lie against one´s own face’ and an impious attempt to improve the work of the Creator.
The rejection of the world became even more radical among the early Christians because they were convinced that the Parousia (the return of Jesus Christ at the end of time) was going to take place immediately. It was Jesus himself who had promised it to them: ‘Assuredly, I say to you, some who are standing here will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.’ (Matthew XVI, 28). ‘Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened.’ (Matthew XXIV, 34). In view of this, they repeated the good news more and more. But the end of all things is at hand (I Peter IV, 7). ‘It is the last time’ (I John II, 18). Paul returns again and again to this idea. To the Hebrews: ‘Therefore cast not away your confidence, which has great reward… For yet a little while, and He that shall come will come, and will not delay’ (Hebrews X, 35-37). ‘Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together… but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the day approaching’ (Ibid., X, 25). To the Thessalonians: ‘Stand firm, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.’ To the Corinthians: ‘Brothers, the time is short; therefore let those who have wives be as though they had none…’ (I Cor. VII, 29). To the Philippians: ‘The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything…’ (Phil. IV, 5 and 6).
In his dialogue with Trypho, Justin affirms that Christians will soon be gathered in Jerusalem, and that it will be for a thousand years (LXXX – LXXXII). In the second century, the Phrygian Montanus declares that he foresees the imminence of the end of the world. In Pontus, Christian peasants abandon their fields to await the day of judgment. Tertullian prays pro mora fines, ‘that the end may be delayed.’ But time passed and nothing happened. Generations disappeared, one after another, without having seen the glorious advent; and faced with the continual delay of its eschatological hopes, the Church, giving proof of prudence, ended by resigning itself to placing the Parousia in an undetermined ‘beyond.’ Today only Jehovah’s Witnesses repeat on a fixed date: ‘Next year in the Jerusalem of heaven.’
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Christianity:
The communism of antiquity, 3
by Alain de Benoist
Christianity, ‘an Eastern religion by its origins and fundamental characteristics’ (Guignebert), infiltrated ancient Europe almost surreptitiously. The Roman Empire, tolerant by nature, paid no attention to it for a long time. In Suetonius’ Life of the Twelve Caesars, we read of an act of Claudius: ‘He expelled from Rome the Jews, who were in continual ferment at the instigation of a certain Chrestos’. On the whole, the Greco-Latin world remained at first closed to preaching. The praise of weakness, poverty, and ‘madness’, seemed to them foolish. Consequently, the first centres of Christian propaganda were set up in Antioch, Ephesus, Thessalonica and Corinth. It was in these great cities, where slaves, artisans and immigrants mingled with merchants, where everything was bought and sold, and where preachers and enlightened men, in ever-increasing numbers, vied to seduce motley and restless crowds, that the first apostles found fertile ground.
Causse, who was a professor at the Protestant theology faculty of the University of Strasbourg, writes: ‘If the apostles preached the Gospel in the village squares, it was not only because of a wise missionary policy, but because the new religion was more favourably received in these new surroundings than by the old races attached to their past and their soil. The true Greeks were to remain alien and hostile to Christianity for a long time. The Athenians had greeted Paul with ironical indifference: “You will tell us another day!” it was to be many years before the old Romans would abandon their aristocratic contempt for that detestable superstition. The early Church of Rome was very little Latin, and Greek was scarcely spoken in it. But the Syrians, the Asiatics and the whole crowd of the Graeculi received the Christian message with enthusiasm’ (Essai sur le conflit du christianisme primitif et de la civilisation, Ernest Leroux, 1920).
J.B.S. Haldane, who considered fanaticism as one of the ‘four truly important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400’ (The Inequality of Man, Famous Books, New York, 1938), attributed its paternity to Judeo-Christianity. Yahweh, the god of the Arabian deserts, is a lonely and jealous god, exclusive and cruel, who advocates intolerance and hatred. ‘Do I not hate those who hate you, O Yahweh, and do I not rage against your enemies? I hate them and regard them as my enemies’ (Psalm 139:21 and 22). Jeremiah implores: ‘You will give them their due, O LORD, and your curse will be upon them! You will pursue them in anger and exterminate them from under heaven’ (Lamentations, 111, 64-66). ‘Surely, O God, you will surely put to death the wicked’ (Psalm 139:19). ‘And in Your mercy You will dispel my enemies, and destroy all the adversaries of my soul…’ (Psalm 143:12). Wisdom, who personifies the infinitely good, threatens: ‘I too will laugh at your misfortune, I will mock when your fear comes upon you’ (Prov. I, 26). Deuteronomy speaks of the fate that must be reserved for ‘idolaters’: ‘If your brother, your mother´s son, your daughter, or the woman who lies in your bosom, or your friend, who is like yourself, should incite you in secret, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods”, whom you do not know…, you shall first kill him; your hand shall be laid upon him first to put him to death, and then the hand of all the people shall be laid upon him. When you hear that in one of the cities which Yahweh grants you to dwell, it is said that unworthy men have arisen who have seduced their fellow citizens, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods!” which you do not know, you shall inquire, and if you see that such an abomination is true, you shall smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword; you shall consecrate it to extermination, as well as all that is in it. You shall gather all its spoil amid its streets, and burn the city and all its prey in the fire to the honour of the LORD your God. Thus it shall become a perpetual heap of ruins, and shall not be rebuilt…’ (Deut. XIII).
In the Gospel, Jesus says, when they come to arrest him: ‘…for all who take the sword will perish by the sword’ (Matthew XXVI, 52). But before that he had said: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man´s enemies will be those of his household’ (Matthew X, 34-36). He also pronounced the phrase that is the motto of all totalitarianism: ‘He who is not with me is against me’ (Matthew XII, 30).
The early Church will scrupulously apply such slogans. Unbelievers and pagans are subhumans in the eyes of the apostles. St. Peter compares them to ‘irrational animals, born to be taken and destroyed’ (2 Peter II, 12). Jerome advised the converted Christian to kick the body of his mother if she tried to prevent him from leaving her forever to follow the teachings of Christ. In 345, Fermicus Maternus made slaughter a duty: ‘The law forbids, most holy emperors, to spare either son or brother. It forces us to punish the woman we love tenderly and to plunge the iron into her breast. It puts weapons in our hands and orders us to turn them against our closest friends…’
From then on, the evangelical practice of charity will be strictly subordinated to the degree of adherence to mysteries and dogmas. Europe will be evangelized by iron and fire. Heretics, schismatics, freethinkers and pagans will be, renewing the gesture of Pontius Pilate, handed over to the secular arm to be subjected to torture and death. Denunciation will be rewarded with the attribution of the property of the victims and their families. Those who, ‘having understood the judgment of God,’ wrote St. Paul, ‘are worthy of death’ (Romans, I, 32). Thomas Aquinas specifies: ‘The heretic must be burned.’ One of the canons adopted at the Lateran Council declares: ‘They are not murderers who kill heretics’ (Homicidas non esse qui heretici trucidant). By the bull Ad extirpenda, the Church will authorize torture. And, in 1864, Pius IX proclaimed in the Syllabus: ‘Anathema be he who says that the Church has no right to use force, that it has no direct or indirect temporal power’ (XXIV).
Voltaire, who knew how to add up, had counted the victims of religious intolerance from the beginnings of Christianity to his time. Taking into account exaggerations and making a large allowance for the benefit of the doubt, he found a total of 9,718,000 people who had lost their lives ad majorem Dei gloriam. Compared to this figure, the number of Christians killed in Rome under the sign of the palm (a symbol of martyrdom and glorious resurrection in early Christianity) seems insignificant.
‘Gibbon believes he can affirm’ —writes Louis Rougier— ‘that the number of martyrs throughout the entire Roman Empire, over three centuries, did not reach that of Protestants executed in a single reign and exclusively in the provinces of the Netherlands, where, according to Grotius, more than one hundred thousand subjects of Charles V died at the hands of the executioner. However conjectural these calculations may be, it can be said that the number of Christian martyrs is small compared with the victims of the Church during the fifteen centuries: the destruction of paganism under the Christian emperors, the fight against the Arians, the Donatists, the Nestorians, the Monophysites, the Iconoclasts, the Manicheans, the Cathars and the Albigensians, the Spanish Inquisition, the wars of religion, the dragonads of Louis XIV, pogroms of the Jews… Faced with such excesses, we can ask ourselves, with Bouché-Leclercq, ‘whether the benefits of Christianity (however great) have not been more than compensated for by the religious intolerance which it borrowed from Judaism to spread throughout the world’… (Celse contre les chrétiens, Copernic, 1977).
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Apologetics
Excerpts from Gaedhal’s latest communication:
Apologetics is for Christians. It is a Christian product, and the target demographic is Christians—and, in particular, those Christians who have an IQ in excess of 90, who are beginning to doubt Christianity.
Apologetics is not for non-believers. To non-believers, Apologetics is a pseudo-discipline that merely serves to infuriate us and to confirm us in our disbelief. To a non-believer, Apologetics is every bit the pseudoscience that Astrology is. In the same way that Celestial bodies do not influence earthly events, dead Jewish carpenters usually stay dead—and certainly don’t float off into the sky. This is really the end of the matter for us non-believers. Apologetics is a product—it is intellectual property—and its consumer base is almost exclusively Christian…
Without the threat of Hell, then Christianity really does fall apart [emphasis added by Editor]…
If we heed William of Ockham and throw out God, Heaven, and inscrutable morally sufficient reasons [that try to solve the problem of evil—Ed.], then we are left with the vulgarity: “shit happens”. In a godless swirl of cause and effect, such as this planet seems to be, then we would expect to see the quantity of horrendous suffering that we do in fact see upon this planet.
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The dissolution
of Germanic racial care by medieval Christianity (3)
by Hans F. K. Günther
The most popular book of the Middle Ages. Note the devils behind the naked women and remember Nietzsche’s aphorism: ‘Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice’.
The church’s devaluation of all earthly life extends to all parts of the meaningful order. Sexual life was desecrated because it now belonged to the respected ‘flesh’. The woman, the mistress of the house as guardian of the racial heritage, became an object that could ignite carnal desires. This dissolved the order of procreation described above. Those who had become circumcised for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven were considered particularly pious (Matthew 19:127). Origen, the great teacher of the Church, had castrated himself. The degradation of the body, which was so contrary to the Indo-European veneration of the body, went so far that Athanastus (born around 297 in Alexandria) praised the Egyptian Antonius, a saint, because he no longer washed his feet, and Saint Agnes (in the 4th century) so disrespected her body for the sake of her soul striving for the afterlife that she no longer took a bath. The Indo-Europeans had always valued physical and mental health as a great asset. Wholeness, health and joy of life were wished for in the greeting: Heil (in English whole, entirely ‘vale’ or ‘chaire’). Saint Steronymus (340-420) taught: ‘One should conquer the flesh! A face radiant with health is the sign of a defiled soul. Health should be a danger to the soul, physical beauty, an expression of refined nature, a work of the devil to incite the flesh to fornication’.
Of course, such teachings never took hold of the entire Germanic people, as they were too deeply rooted in the aristocratic peasant nature and the everyday life of the peasant warrior. Only a few people completely fell for the church teachings, which always proclaimed a monastic life rather than a truly Christian life. But these teachings did dissolve the high-minded and ultimately ignoble beliefs of the Germanic people, so that some of the Germanic customs could only continue to exist as a tolerated secular tradition, while this customs before the conversion were actually an expression of Germanic piety. Nowadays, much of the tradition was considered ‘pagan and reprehensible’ and gradually dissolved in the course of the medieval centuries or became a class tradition of the nobility alone, which increasingly lost its original, biological meaning based on the laws of life.
The Midgard concept, which included the order of procreation that was so significant in terms of life law and race, and all the noble peasant values described by Neckel, was bound to be quickly disintegrated by the church teachings; the security of the world was bound to dissolve. This disintegration extended to the value of home, which was at the core of the Midgard idea. In his book Usketische Heimatlosigkeit (1930), Campenhaufen described the church value of xeniteia, the turning away from home and the holy emigration to foreign lands, which was opposed to the idea of home, the peregrinatio, as this turning away from home was called in the West. The value of homelessness as a means of healing the soul emerged above all in Irish-Anglo-Saxon Christianity. In the rest of the West this teaching later faded into the background, but peregrinatio was still practiced and practiced as a particularly sanctifying form of feudal conduct in the High Middle Ages. But the church’s devaluation of the homeland struck the heart of the Midgard concept. The monk Otfried von Weisenburg (in Elfass) wrote his Gbangelienbuch in 868, in which he explains (I, 18) that our homeland is paradise, that we humans live on this earth like outcasts in a foreign land because of our sins, and that only through repentance and turning away from the world can we regain our true homeland.
This was the exact opposite of Germanic belief – aversion to home and clan had become a sign of the greatest piety. For the Germanic people, maintaining clan ties was the safeguarding of peace that created prosperity. The word peace originally meant the prosperity of all growth in clan settlements through clan order. The most sinister thing for the Germanic people was clan division. Grönbech has convincingly demonstrated this. Therefore, even with the most appropriate interpretation, a word from Jesus such as that recorded in Matthew 10:35 must have seemed outrageous to the Germanic people, who still thought in terms of clanship: I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be his own household. For the church, such a word was confirmation of the spiritual value of turning away from the world. However, such a turning away from the world also meant a turning away from the idea of ancestry and clan care.
The idea of descent from noble peasant ancestors of one’s own tribe was further opposed as church teaching by the idea of a connection, at least of the souls, to the ancestors of the Jewish people. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians (3:27) it was taught: ‘But if you are Christ’s, you are Abraham’s seed. The Jews were now to be regarded as the chosen people from whom salvation comes’ (John 4:22), as the people chosen by God, because Old Testament terms such as Elohim or Jahn (ehoba), terms for the special god of the Hebrew tribes, were translated by the Holy Scripture, the Bulgata, as dominus or deus, as ‘lord’ or ‘god’, thus no longer with the designation as a special god, but as a one and only god and all-god who encompasses all peoples and obliges all to his commandments. It is precisely in this tacit equation of Hebrew names for gods with names for the all-god himself that the ‘great deception’ that was disastrous in the history of faith and to which Delitzsch has pointed out emphatically is touched upon.
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Oliver’s essay
The PDF of Revilo Oliver’s article
on Christianity is now available here.
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Xtianity:
A religion for sheep, 3
by Revilo P. Oliver
Published by Liberty Bell Publications in 1980,
under Oliver’s nom de guerre Ralph Perier.
God’s race
The Fathers of the Church got down to work near the end of the second century, when, incidentally, the Emperor in Rome, although he bore a Roman name, was a man from northern Africa, probably of mixed Semitic and Berber ancestry, whose native language was Punic, a Semitic dialect. Their overriding purpose, to judge from the results, was to preserve and protect the Jewish connection, which the Marcionites and other “heretics” had threatened.
When the Christians started scribbling gospels around the middle of the second century, they produced a very large number, and the composition of gospels to suit the whims or ambitions of would-be holy men went on through most of the next two centuries.
From such compositions, the Fathers of the Church collected and selected their favourites, making such revisions as they deemed expedient and probably composing supplements. These they eventually put together into a small anthology, which they called a “New Testament” and thus indissolubly joined to the Jews’ story book, which they called an “Old Testament.” The final selection of pieces for the anthology is said to have been made in 367 by Athanasius, a particularly bull-headed holy man, who is still revered for his services in establishing the incomprehensible doctrine of a three-in-one-god, of which Jesus was 33%. His authority made it thenceforth impossible to compose new gospels with any chance of implanting them in the canon he had established. Thereafter, revision of the stories about Jesus was limited to short interpolations and verbal substitutions.
A Christian artist’s conception of the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, which had secured the official endorsement of Roman Emperor Constantine, and which served to marginalize the many Christian sects (and their innumerable gospels) which had been competing with the “Fathers of the Church” — and set the stage for their persecution.
The effect of this combination of “Testaments” was to impose on Christians, under pain of eternal damnation, the odd belief that, throughout the greater part of human history, the Jews were the Chosen People of a terrible and truculent god, who savagely and often capriciously afflicted the lower races when they did not cravenly submit to his Master Race. To be sure, the Jews temporarily alienated his affections when they crucified one-third of him, but Christian doctrine assures us that God will eventually “change their hearts” and they will come flocking back to Jesus. (No one seems to worry about the morality of changing a man’s mind by a psychological process that must resemble hypnosis.) In the meantime, God still loves his erring children, even though they worship only a third of him, and they must be preserved for the coming miracle of their reconciliation with daddy.
Another consequence of the Fathers’ convenient doctrine is that the Jews were God’s Race until a date that Christians now set at sometime between A.D. 29 and 34; thereafter, they became a religion, since Jews who have been laundered in holy water miraculously cease to be Jews.
The effect of this paradox was to make Christianity seem anti-Jewish and therefore attractive to all the goyim who resented their exploiters, while preserving for the Jews their prestige as a wonderfully “righteous” and “god-fearing” people, who had long been the intimates of the Christians’ own god.
Of the many advantages that Christianity conferred on the Jews, none was greater than the privilege of masquerading as a religion and thus concealing their race. It ensured them the protection of both church and state as they rapaciously amassed wealth in mediaeval Europe. One has only to ask oneself what would have happened, had Chinese or Malays swarmed into the cities to set up their enclaves (ghettos) to monopolise commerce, practise usury, and control finance. Even more important, it gave them perpetual access to the seats of power.
We are told that Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492. Nonsense! By that time, Jews were safely and immovably ensconced in every important segment of Spanish society as “converts.” A century later, one-third of the archbishops in Spain and of the higher clergy was composed of Jews who practised Christian rites in public and privately snickered at the stupidity of the goyim. Toynbee estimates that Jews formed about the same proportion of the nobility. And no one need be told that a tightly cohesive third of any organisation has effective control of it. The Inquisition, to be sure, caught a few of the marranos who were careless or inept in their dissembling, but that served to reassure and pacify the populace.
Edward I banished the Jews from England in 1290, and we are told that England was Judenfrei until they swarmed in (with their money-bags) under Cromwell. No one, I believe, has tried to compute how many Jews, in keeping with the immemorial tactic of their race, had themselves sprinkled with the Christians’ magic water, took English names, and tried not to laugh at the British in public. And one can only guess how much the masqueraders had to do with the rise of Puritanism, a brand of Christianity that was primarily based on the “Old Testament,” and the revolution that placed in power fanatics who, for example, made the observation of Christmas illegal.
Christians today wax irate when they are shown translations of certain passages in the Jewish Talmuds, which are said to prove how much the Jews hate Christianity. It is true that there are pejorative references to Jesus of Nazareth, who was certainly one of the christs who contributed to the composite figure in the “New Testament.”
No one seems to notice that the Talmuds speak as pejoratively of the last of the important christs in antiquity, of whose Jewish orthodoxy there can be no question.
Assuming the name Bar-Kokhba, he caught thousands of the Greeks and Romans off guard and butchered them, and he carried on a guerrilla war of terrorism for almost three years until the Roman legions gave proof that Yahweh had again forgotten to send celestial reinforcements to help His People exterminate the goyim. Nevertheless, the Talmudists denounce him bitterly, even changing his assumed name from Bar- Kokhba (“the son of the star”) to Bar-Koziba (“the son of the liar”). The Jews hate him and asperse his memory because he failed.
Theologians who are concerned to show Christians how much the Jews hate their religion translate as “Christians” or “Christianity” some or all of a dozen words and phrases in Rabbinic, of no one of which is the meaning so indubitable that the Jews cannot quibble about it. It would be a waste of time to quibble with them. The Jews do feel contempt for persons who believe the Christian tales, and they do hate our race, which is probably meant by those words and phrases which are not merely synonyms of goyim, their general term for races and peoples who perversely refuse to recognise the vast superiority of the Jews.
Categories
Xtianity:
A religion for sheep, 1
by Revilo P. Oliver
Published by Liberty Bell Publications in 1980,
under Oliver’s nom de guerre Ralph Perier.
OUR contemporaries are coming to a radically new understanding of the Jewish problem. One by one, and independently of one another, several of our best minds have re-examined the historical record or analysed the forces that are today driving our race to suicide. And each of them has come spontaneously to the conclusion that Christianity was a Jewish invention, devised for the specific purpose of enfeebling and paralysing the civilised peoples of the world, on whom the Jews were preying in antiquity and have preyed ever since.
A century ago, Nietzsche perceived that our civilisation, although it seemed to have an absolute mastery of the whole world, was infected by a degenerative disease, a cancer of the spirit that would destroy it, if our people did not have the intelligence and the fortitude to excise the malignancy. He came to the conclusion that Christianity was a “transvaluation of values,” a mental virus cunningly invented and propagated by the Jews to implement “Jewish vengeance and hatred, – the deepest and sublimest hatred in human history.” Our contemporaries, whether or not they have read the Genealogy of Morals, reason largely from events that have occurred or from historical evidence that became available since Nietzsche’s day. They come to substantially the same conclusion.
The origins of Christianity are extremely obscure. No historical record of its beginnings has survived, and scholars can only draw deductions from the earliest historical references to it and inferences from its confusing and incoherent mythology.
One thing is certain. Christianity was originated by Jews and based on oral traditions about one or, more probably, several of the Jewish agitators and miracle-mongers who bore the extremely common Jewish name of Jesus and called themselves christs. The word ‘christ’ comes from a Greek word that means ‘oil, grease,’ but which was used in the Jews’ uncouth dialect of Greek to mean ‘a messiah,’ that is, a man appointed by the Jews’ tribal god to lead his Chosen barbarians to a definitive victory over the civilised peoples, whom they implacably hated. One of the cleverest tricks of the Fathers of the Church in promoting their cult was to give to non-Jews the impression that ‘christ’ was the name of a person, and even to this day many Christians ignorantly believe that their god was a man who was baptised “Jesus Christ.”
Nietzsche saw that successful promotion of Christianity depended on a pretence of reciprocal hostility between Christians and Jews. It depended on making the Jewish cult, when peddled to the goyim, seem non-Jewish and even anti-Jewish. “Was it not,” he asked, “a necessary feature of a truly brilliant politics of vengeance, a far-sighted, subterranean, slowly and carefully planned vengeance, that Israel had to deny its true instrument publicly and nail him to the cross like a mortal enemy, so that ‘the whole world’ (meaning all the enemies of the Jews) might naively swallow the bait?” This policy, however, produced an unexpected backlash, which was only with difficulty brought under control.
It would take a volume even to summarise the scandalous and scabrous history of Christianity from its known beginnings around the middle of the second century to the triumph of a particularly shrewd and aggressive sect in the fifth century. There were hundreds of sects, each with its own bundle of gospels, peculiar doctrines, and adroit theologians, but among them there were dozens of sects that took seriously the purported antagonism of the Jews to the new religion.
One of the earliest of the Christian sects of which we have some record, and for almost two centuries one of the largest, was the Marcionites. It is noteworthy, by the way, that until quite recently, the earliest extant inscription from a Christian church came from a Marcionite church that was built in 318 and, of course, destroyed when the victorious sect got the power to persecute.
The Marcionites believed that the Jews were “the synagogue of Satan.” They denied that their Jesus had been a Jew. They saw that it was preposterous to claim that an incarnate god could die or would foolishly have himself crucified. They held that it was outrageous to identify the supreme god, who was a just god and loved all mankind, with the capricious, ferocious, and highly immoral god described in the Jews’ story-book, which Christians now call “the Old Testament.” The Marcionites naively thought those stories historical, but regarded them as a chronicle of the crimes perpetrated by the Jews and their supernatural accomplice, a much inferior deity whose abused power the supreme god had justly revoked. Other Christian sects took the logical step of frankly identifying the Jews’ god with Satan. This plausible identification commended itself to goyim who had to live with Jews and suffer their depredations.
We have no means of estimating numbers, but it is possible that early in the third century, taking the numerous sects as a whole, a majority of the Christians repudiated the notion that the wily Jews were God’s People and that the Jesus who was divine could have been a Jew. The anti-Jewish sects, however, appear to have thought of themselves as merely religions and to have believed what was said in their scriptures about love, faith, and peace. Content to believe certain dogmas and to observe rules that would assure them postmortem bliss, they seem to have had no interest in political intrigue and conspiracy, for which they had no talent. So they eventually fell victims to a gang of crafty, ruthless, and tightly-organised theologians, who are now known as the Fathers of the Church and given a prominence they cannot have had in their own time, when they must have appeared to be just another clique of salvation-hucksters.
When the Fathers of the Church finally got their hands on the police powers of the state, doubtless with much covert help from the Jews, they extirpated the anti-Jewish Christians with fire and sword, the natural instruments of Christian love as understood by ambitious holy men. Despite all the pious massacres in the fifth century, the anti-Jewish “heresy” has reappeared from time to time in later ages. It is found today in certain “fundamentalist” churches and, most clearly, in the group of loosely affiliated sects called “British Israel,” whose members probably have never even heard of the Marcionites or their other ancient precursors.
“British Israel” may be another ploy that backfired. It began in England at the time when Disraeli was crawling up to the British Prime Ministry and peerage. In its original form, it taught that the “ten lost tribes” supposedly taken captive by the Assyrians had been Anglo-Saxons, who migrated en masse from Assyrian territory to the British Isles. A handsome genealogy was concocted to show that Queen Victoria was a lineal descendant of a bandit chief named David. It followed, therefore, that God’s Own People, to-wit, the Anglo-Saxons and the Jews, reunited at last after many centuries, should jointly rule the world. That notion, however, imposed too great a strain on even Christian credulity.
Bizarre “geneology” issued by a “British Israel” group; many of their claims are now echoed by “Christian Identity” churches.
Today, the “British Israelites” accept the story that the “ten tribes” were Anglo-Saxons or, at least, Nordics, and hot-footed it from Assyrian territory to the British Isles or, at least, northern Europe. They further claim that the Jesus of Holy Writ was an Aryan, despite his distinctively Jewish name and the distinctively Jewish (or conceivably Egyptian) name of his supposed mother. They rely principally on some of the early Christian forgeries which explicitly describe that Jesus as having had blue eyes and blond hair and beard. They do not use, and seem not to know, the tradition, attested as early as any of the other Christian tales, that one of the Jesuses was the son of a Jewess by a soldier named Pandara/Panthera, who probably was not a Jew and could well have been a Macedonian or other Greek in a Seleucid or Roman army.
We must feel a considerable sympathy for the “British Israelites” of the present. They candidly recognise the Jews as the eternal enemies of our race. They are the best of the Christians and are making a valiant effort to free their religion from its Jewish trammels and make it conducive to the survival of our race. Unfortunately, their doctrine is historically preposterous and, what is even worse, demoralising. It makes our race the accomplices and beneficiaries of the ferocious god, Yahweh, who, according to the “Old Testament,” helped his pets swindle, plunder, torment, and butcher their betters in Egypt and Canaan.
On Friday I posted a 13-minute segment of a video under the title ‘Transvaluing Cross’ about a recent interview with Tom Holland. Now I’d like to embed the full interview, which lasts more than an hour:
At minute 11 Holland says something that explains secular Christianity:
‘If you are hostile to Christianity in the West, almost certainly you will be hostile to Christianity because of deeply Christian reasons’ (my emphasis).
Now that I’ve watched the full interview, I’ve noticed something that Holland fails to notice. When he talks about Roman sexuality during the Roman Empire he says that it was ruthless compared to our morality. But like any normie, Holland doesn’t know he’s talking about the decadent Roman Empire, not Republican Rome. Anyone who wants to learn about Aryan customs and habits when it comes to marriage should read what Tacitus said about the ancient Germans, or what Eduardo Velasco wrote about Spartan marriage.
Quite apart from that flaw, the interview is excellent for understanding the POV of this site, The West’s Darkest Hour. Holland explains admirably how Christian ethics transmuted into the civil rights preached by Martin Luther King, and the sexual ‘liberation’ that reigns today including the ‘rights’ of transgender people.
Nevertheless, ‘although progressives are deeply Christian’ says Holland, ‘for the first time in American history they are not acknowledging that’.