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.
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.
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.
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’.
You might get a headache after watching this video but the Christian proves our point!
Bob’s main argument was that throughout the Middle Ages Christians didn’t try to expel the Jews from their kingdoms permanently (e.g., Edward I / Oliver Cromwell). It’s fascinating that the red-headed Jew, after the 16th minute, tried to give an example to try to refute Bob the Christian. The Jew said that they were expelled from Jerusalem after the wars against Rome. But that was before Constantine! Those who prohibited the Jews from entering Jerusalem were the so-called ‘pagan’ emperors after the Rome vs Judea wars!
The Christian is right: the medieval kingdoms, before the Enlightenment, were comparatively tolerant of the Jews because they always expected that they would convert. In other words: without Constantine and the subsequent Christian emperors, intolerance against the Jews would have taken its natural course.
Let’s imagine the opposite case: that the Church had eradicated Judaism and, conversely, had tolerated what they called ‘paganism’. What would the world be like today? There would certainly be no Jewish problem! The way this Christian preacher, Bob, proves our point is impressive.
Even more fascinating is that after the 22-minute mark, Bob admits that the whole argument started (earlier) when he was arguing with a white nationalist. Unlike him, Bob sees nothing wrong with black people in the West cohabiting with us. The preacher yelled to the multitudes: ‘The Christian worldview has always been multi-racial, multi-ethnic and multi-national’ (exact moment: here).
Wow! What a way to expose Christianity!
Do you understand my claim now as to why the Christian Problem encompasses the Jewish Problem? Later Bob, when discussing with the other Jew said, ‘Do you know that the first Christians were all Jews?’ And then he says that the first edict of tolerance for the Jews was issued by Constantine in the year 315 (those who worshipped the true Gods wouldn’t have done such a thing)! But a few seconds later he says something that is not true: that there was always a place for pagans in Christianity. (Like the racial right folk, Bob ignores what Constantine, his successors—except Julian—and the bishops with Semitic blood did with those who worshipped Aryan Gods.)
Do you finally understand the concept of the transvaluation of Christian values (what Heydrich attempted)? When we think like him and not like Xtian nationalists, the Jewish problem will be solved—and the black problem, and the Hispanic problem, etc.
Notre-Dame de Paris is a novel by Victor Hugo, published in 1831, that focuses on the unhappy story of Quasimodo, the gipsy Esmeralda and the archdeacon Claude Frollo in 15th-century Paris. Its elements—medieval setting, impossible loves, and marginalised characters—make the novel a model for the literary themes of Romanticism.
Hugo’s book opens with a popular celebration of the Epiphany of 1482 at the Palais de Justice. The play introduces us to Esmeralda, a gipsy dancer, Quasimodo, a deformed young hunchback who is in charge of the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral, and the archdeacon Claude Frollo, the bell-ringer’s foster father.
Esmeralda, thanks to her great physical beauty, attracts the poet-student Pierre Gringoire and Captain Febo de Châteaupers, but also Claude Frollo, who decides to kidnap her. Frollo then orders his protégé Quasimodo to kidnap her.
The intervention of Captain Phoebus de Chateaupers prevents the kidnapping from taking place and leads Quasimodo to be condemned to public torture. The hunchback is flogged in the square and receives all the hatred and insults of the people, who cruelly despise him for his ugliness. Quasimodo asks for water and Esmeralda climbs the scaffold to quench his thirst.
I don’t want to tell the whole story but I do want to point out that at midnight I modified the post about my 50 recommended films, reversing the order of the first two, for reasons I am about to explain.
Since the films on my list are arranged in order of their release, before the midnight change, I had The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) as #2, and Frankenstein (1931) as #1. But yesterday, when I started watching the 1939 film after half a century of not seeing it, I detected some terrible messages from its opening.
It didn’t take me long to discover that the director was born into a German family of Ashkenazi Jews and that he even returned to Germany after the Allied dogs won the war!
Fifty years ago I had seen this 1939 film in black and white with my family on television, and both my sisters and I loved it (some of Hugo’s high culture is reflected in this adulterated version of the novel).
Since then I had not seen it again: I only remember that as a child I was impressed by the story. But yesterday when I started watching it again, after so long, I realised, as I just said, that the movie starts with bad messages.
In Paris, there is a new order preventing the passage of gipsies. True, the director cast mudblood actors to play them, but typically in Hollywood (and we’re talking about 1939!) he artfully chose an Aryan actress to play the gipsy Esmeralda, and has the King of France say ‘Who cares about her race, she’s pretty’.
This 1939 film has scenes too burlesque for my taste today (how I have changed since I saw it fifty years ago!) and the Christian piety in Notre Dame couldn’t be missing: ‘Please, help my people’ says the Nordic actress playing Esmeralda when referring to the mudblood gipsies while the French ask Providence for riches in their prayers. Surrealism reaches the viewer when the movie’s bad guy, Claude Frollo, says ‘You come from an evil race’ to the Aryan actress posing as a gipsy.
I stopped watching the film at that point and started watching the original film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I mean the one from 1923: a film that, this year, has just turned 100 years old!
Now this is the one that is at #1 on my list not because it is very good, but because it has historical value for connoisseurs of cinematic art. This 1923 film is silent, although they added some music to it and it can now be seen, complete, in a colourised version on YouTube.
Although Esmeralda, in this century-old film, isn’t as Aryan as the other, in this version it is explained at the outset that her whiteness is due to the fact that she was born in a high cradle and, as a child, had been abducted by gipsies.
Naturally, being a hundred years old, the film is closer to theatre or operatic scenes than to the cinema that followed, once the human voice was technically synchronised with the soundtrack. That would revolutionise the Seventh Art.
I don’t want to get too much into the film from the point of view of the sacred words. That would mean messing directly with Victor Hugo—and that would mean another entry: an entry of literary criticism rather than cinematic criticism. Suffice it to say that baby Quasimodo wouldn’t have been allowed to live in Sparta, and that Hugo is right that Notre Dame reflects the soul of France which, unlike the teen I was half a century ago, is no longer the soul that interests me. (My surname, ‘Tort’, comes from France and Catalonia and my ancestors were devoted to Notre Dame of Lourdes.)
– For the context of these translations click here –
The emperor, the clergy and the imperial unity
Louis the Pious was even more accommodating to the clergy than his father, and the many historians who call him devout, clerical and prudish are quite right. Already at the beginning of his reign, the young monarch renewed all the ordinances that had been issued in the time of his predecessors in favour of the Church of God. For this, he relied almost exclusively on clerics, mostly ‘Aquitanians’, of whom Bishop Thegan, a personage well acquainted with the emperor, said that ‘he trusted his counsellors more than necessary’.
The one who probably became the emperor’s most important adviser was the Visigoth Witiza, whom he greatly revered, with his programmatic monastic name of Second Benedict, and who was the son of the Count of Maguelonne, one of the dreaded swordsmen. In any case, this Benedict educated in the courts of Pippin III and Charles I (his feast is celebrated on 11 February), took part as a good Christian—a ‘good Christian’ certainly, as well as a ‘great soldier’—in the military campaigns of Pippin and Charles, before the tragic death of his brother pushed him to wear the monastic cowl. But he failed again and again in his ascetic career. He left the monastery of Saint-Seine in Dijon because he found it too lax. Then, at his father’s estate of Aniane in Montpellier, he drove away his first disciples with his rigorism. He then professed the monastic rules of Pachomius and Basil, because he found the Rule of Benedict of Nursia useful only ‘for weaklings and beginners’. But when he again entered into a vocational crisis, he extolled the Rule of Benedict of Nursia, which he reviled as the only valid norm for a monastic existence.
But one can hardly speak of weakness in the Benedictine Rule. When monks were rebuked by a prelate, they had to prostrate themselves at his feet until he permitted them to rise. And if a monk ran away, Benedict ordered him to be dragged back with his legs locked and whipped. The saint also ordered to have a prison in every monastery, and the monastic prisons of the Middle Ages were barbarous, and the conditions of existence in them were extremely harsh, for imprisonment ‘was equivalent in its consequences to corporal punishment’. (Schild). Moreover, this monastic reform ‘always contained a touch of bitterness against human science and culture’ (Fried).
Abbot Benedict of Aniane—to whom Louis first entrusted the Marmoutier Abbey in Alsace and then, very close to Aachen, the monastery of Inden (Kornelimünster), a new foundation generously endowed with crown goods, a kind of model abbey in the whole empire—spent much more time at court than at his monastery. The sovereign went there frequently anyway, and so he was given the name of ‘the Monk’. Benedict, who ruled over all the Frankish abbeys, remained until his death (821) the key man at court, where he dealt with trifles, memorials and complaints as well as important and serious matters, advising the emperor above all on the vast politico-ecclesiastical reform begun in 816.
The reform movement of the abbot, inspired by the Rule of Benedict of Nursia, aimed at the formation of a single Christian people out of the numerous peoples of the empire—which corresponded exactly to state policy. It sought to make Christianity the basis of all public life; moreover, it wanted to establish the Civitas Dei on earth: one God, one Church, one emperor, whose office always counted within the Church more than any ministry conferred by God. The prelates were therefore strongly interested in the unity of the empire, and their leaders passionately defended the idea of such unity. But they were in no way primarily interested in the empire, but in the Church, with the benefit of the Church foremost in their minds.
Benedict’s monastic reform, his ‘principle of one rule,’ affected not only monastic life, the so-called spiritual affairs. At least as important, if not more so, was the ecclesiastical patrimony. The emperor did not want it to be divided or diminished either in his reign or in that of his successors. He also forbade the already long flourishing soul-hunting, the luring of children into the monastery with flattery to gain their fortune, thus prohibiting a practice which had been in vogue since ancient times and which is still practised today, namely the disinheritance of relatives in favour of the churches.
