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Category: Classical sculpture

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Classical sculpture Film Racial studies

Walking tours

in the Aryan past

To fully understand my most recent book Crusade against the Cross it is necessary not only to have read its appendix where the theme of the Italian Renaissance is touched upon, but preferably also to have read Nietzsche’s masterpiece: The Antichrist. Nietzsche was a critic of culture. Only then could we understand what I said to Berk yesterday in one of the recent discussion threads:

But Nietzsche’s idea was never to execute Luther, simply that the power of the image of Renaissance sculpture and paintings was already transvaluing values (the God of the Sistine Chapel is actually a Zeus), and the Italians would have finished transvaluing them if it hadn’t been for the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

One of the things that make my blood boil the most is that on some YouTube channels, it has become fashionable to use beautiful ‘walking tours’—a sort of Bran the Broken’s magic of touching the Weirwood tree to see the remote past—, for example, this video on ancient Sparta, Corinth and Olympia. What makes them impossible for me to watch is that they replace the historical population with dark-skinned mudbloods!

That the ancient Greeks, before they interbred, were blond and blue-eyed is clear from this article in American Renaissance (currently being discussed in hundreds of comments on The Unz Review). We have also contributed to the subject by translating this essay by Eduardo Velasco (later collected in The Fair Race). And let’s never forget two essential books to understand our point of view: William Pierce’s story of the white race, and Arthur Kemp’s story.

I know very little about the magic of computing, or how the people who upload these videos made them. But if I had the means I would do the same about, say, cities like Sparta or Thebes that for several centuries resisted miscegenation and whose inhabitants, descendants of the Dorians, were blue-eyed blonds. Even Athena, the goddess of ancient Athens before the massive miscegenation of the Mediterranean occurred, was blonde and blue-eyed.

Our videos would be similar to the one I linked above, but we would replace the fictional mudblood figures they put with figures that look like their real ancient inhabitants. The last thing the ethnocidal System wants is for the contemporary Aryan to regain his self-image, and lost self-esteem after WW2, by reclaiming history.

Categories
Art Aryan beauty Classical sculpture

Aryan beauty

Photograph by Heinrich Hoffmann. Adolf Hitler introducing Myron’s Discobolus (Discus Thrower) during the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition of 1938 in Munich:

May none of you who visit this house fail to go to the Glyptothek, and may you then realise how wonderful man once was in his physical beauty and how we can only talk about progress when we not only achieve this beauty but, if possible, surpass it. But let the artists also judge how wonderful the eye and skill of that Greek Myron reveal themselves to us today, the Greek who created the work almost two and a half millennia ago, in front of whose Roman image we stand in deep admiration today. And may they all find from this a benchmark for the tasks and achievements of our own time. May they all strive for the beautiful and the sublime so that their people and art can also withstand the critical assessment of the millennia.(*)

Speech by Hitler on July 10, 1938 at the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich, House of German Art, published in Völkischer Observer on 11 July 1938.

Few things bother me more in today’s racial right than the lack of these panegyrics to the physique of Aryans (‘…and how we can only talk about progress when we not only achieve this beauty but, if possible, surpass it’ —my emphasis, remember my crush on Mayfield Parrish’s painting!).

The Greco-Romans knew the metaphysics of the Aryan body perfectly well. Most Christians and neo-Christians today have forgotten it. Let us never forget that the first thing the Judeo-Christians did when conquering the Roman Empire was to destroy the statuary. How many better sculptures than the discus thrower were lost for eternity because of Christian takeover of the Empire?

To ignore these facts is to be a historical fool.

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(*) Mögen Sie alle, die Sie dieses Haus besuchen, nicht versäumen, in die Glyptothek zu gehen, und mögen Sie dann erkennen, wie herrlich schon einst der Mensch in seiner körperlichen Schönheit war und wie wir von Fortschritten nur dann reden dürfen, wenn wir diese Schönheit nicht nur erreichen, sondern wenn möglich noch übertreffen. Mögen aber auch die Künstler daran ermessen, wie wunderbar sich das Auge und das Können jenes Griechen Myron uns heute offenbaren, jenes Griechen, der vor fast 2 1/2 Jahrtausenden das Werk schuf, vor dessen römischen Abbild wir heute in tiefer Bewunderung stehen.

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Ancient Rome Aryan beauty Classical sculpture Maxfield Parrish Racial right

Semitic OS in the Observer

Last week I said:

What nationalists do is keep their parents’ Operating System (OS) and try to add racialist or reactionary programs to it. Such a naive strategy won’t work. We need a real Nietzschean transvaluation, the most radical operation of the mind I can think of: substituting an OS with another one (again, cf. what we say about ‘medicine’ in the above post).

The day before yesterday, The Occidental Observer (TOO) published an article that exemplifies my criticism. I was going to read it because of its enticing title, ‘Blond Hair, Blue Eyes: Some Thoughts on the Aryan Ideal’. But I got the idea to scroll it down first, to see if I could see an artistic image portraying Aryan beauty.

I found none. The article by Thomas Dalton, PhD is pure text: as is usual in that webzine and many others. So I decided not to read it, but rather to write a short note about an article I didn’t read…
 

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TOO contributors aren’t Jew-wise. If they were, they would realise that a western culture of the written word is a Semitic-inspired epiphenomenon, and this includes the early Pilgrims who migrated to the North American colonies carrying their Bibles, idealising the Old Testament, and wanting to found their city on a hill.

In contrast, the pre-Christian culture in Europe, as we have already said, was a culture of architectural and sculptural art that showed the beauty of the naked Aryan man in all his splendour. And what little remains of the paintings of ancient Rome show that they understood delicate feminine beauty as well. As we have also said, in his 1969 television series Kenneth Clark, whose forte was European art, said that with Christianity the human figure disappears for centuries; it only reappears, in the sense of majesty, until the Renaissance.

The Jews of Greek and Roman times were ugly. In recent centuries they have absorbed much European blood; but in the first century of our era they resembled this type, which in no way resembles the Renaissance idealisation of Jesus. It is understandable that the ancient Jews were ashamed of their physiques, and considered the flaunting of their naked bodies sinful. Their physical ugliness explains why their culture is a culture of the written word; why they score so high in verbal IQ but not in spatial intelligence.

If the TOO folk had already transvalued Semitic values to Aryan values, they would have nymphs in their webzines like the ones I have on my sidebar. But they do exactly the opposite. When Greg Johnson wrote a decade or so ago that there should be sculptures of naked teenagers, male and female, on every street corner, some scoffed at him. But that’s exactly what the Romans did when they destroyed Jerusalem and, after razing the Temple of Jerusalem to the ground, founded Aelia Capitolina.

In other words, when someone sticks to the culture of the word and mocks the culture of the arts that manifest the divinity of the Aryan body, he is obeying the Judeo-Christian, ethnosuicidal mandates that conquered the soul of Rome after Constantine.

Text, text, text. What a boring thing. What normie is persuaded by them alone? One picture of those nymphs on the rocks that Parrish painted should be enough to convert a noble Aryan to the religion of the 14 words!

When will the so-called white nationalists replace their Semitic-inspired culture of the word with the culture of the image? I don’t mean that they ought to stop writing, but that they should be inspired by a nation that was in the process of transvaluing its values, as can be seen in the YouTube clip of the Third Reich that appears at the top of the sidebar (real-life nymphs start to appear a few seconds before the 21st minute).

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Ancient Rome Architecture Aryan beauty Classical sculpture Racial right

I’m still alone

One of the things that strike me when I say that I am speaking to myself is that some respond that they are listening to me, or that they have learned about anti-Christian matters thanks to this site. The reality is that that would be only one aspect of being accompanied.

A few days ago I quoted once again what Nietzsche said of Luther. This monk, instead of kneeling in Rome grateful for the transvaluation of visual values that had started at the very headquarters of Christendom, none of that impacted him, but returned to his dark Germany to write religious texts.

White nationalism is a basically American phenomenon. All major websites are American, not European. Europe died after World War II when two Judaised nations to the core annihilated it. But we should not blame Roosevelt’s US and Stalin’s SU one hundred percent, as both socio-political experiments were two branches that emerged from the same egalitarian baobab that began to engulf the West right after the French Revolution.

White nationalism being basically an American phenomenon, a descendant of the Calvinist Puritanism of the first colonists, is blind to the values that the Renaissance advocated: the plastic and visual arts. If we remember the texts of Evropa Soberana, a European from the westernmost part of Europe, for the Greeks and the Romans the beauty of the statuary and the temples, more than the texts—not all of them could read—was central. Remember what Greg Johnson said in the comments section of The Occidental Observer in 2012: ‘We need a regime that (1) bans pornography and (2) erects statues of gorgeous naked nymphs and athletes in every public square and crossroads’.

The texts of white nationalism, including the ones Johnson posts on his webzine, bore me (worst of all is the very verbose Unz Review whose admin is a Jew). They are a direct result of those who conquered the American continent, alienated in the Old Testament ethos and consequently inspired by Judaic legalisms and moralising rather than by the visual arts. Unlike these Judaised whites, what interests me is the beauty of nymphs, sylphs, and dryads (and it doesn’t bother me in the least that some pederasts include androgynous ephebes in the list).

Instead, the pundits of white nationalism, even those who have read Nietzsche, as little and prudish Luthers are blind not only to the beauty of the Aryan body, insofar their webzines don’t dream about it in every crossroad, but blind also about the squares that should inspire them to create the ethnostate. Remember ‘What Did Ancient Rome Look Like?’ that I embedded not long ago!

If I am alone it is because I have not been understood when I speak of the transvaluation. Perhaps many believe that I am still referring to texts or cold reason, when what I want is an ethnostate whose architecture resembles the Rome that appears in the aforementioned video.

The anti-white climate of our time is exactly the reverse of the dream of putting gorgeous naked nymphs and ephebes in every public square and crossroads. If contemporary racialists had already transvalued their values, instead of verbose texts that few read they would show in their webzines that beauty.

This is one of the reasons why I am not in the least concerned that the insane American negrolatres, and the blacks themselves, are smashing white male statues in America. All the statues knocked down by BLM and the antifa have been statues of clothed Christians: statues that had to be thrown away anyway after the Nietzschean revolution. What we need throughout the re-conquered West are thousands of completely naked pagan statues showing Aryan beauty in their full frontal glory.

To save the race, values must be revalued, and that means understanding things as inconceivable to American racists as what I said to European Vig these days in the context of how music would sound like if Christianity had not murdered our souls.

Categories
Classical sculpture

Jupiter Verospi

Seated statue of Jupiter:
the so-called Jupiter Verospi.
Vatican Museums, Rome.

Categories
Ancient Greece Aryan beauty Classical sculpture Destruction of Greco-Roman world

Physiognomy

The Greeks, and particularly the Spartans, studied ‘physiognomy’ to interpret the character, personality, and ultimately the soul of an individual based on physical features, especially of the face to the point that ugliness in certain Greek states was practically a curse. It was also believed that beauty and a willingness of the features should be an expression of noble qualities necessary for a beautiful body bearer, if only dormant. The creators of the Greek statues made them with that knowledge of the human face and the perfect proportions in mind, and therefore represented not only a beautiful body but also a beautiful body carrying a beautiful soul.

The blind rage with which the Christians destroyed most Greek statues indicates that they greatly feared what they represented, because in them the Hellenes fixed and settled, once and for all, as a goal and template, and ideal: the human type that Christianity would never be able to produce.

(Passages from one of Evropa Soberana’s essays in The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour.)

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Aristotle Aryan beauty Classical sculpture Destruction of Greco-Roman world Eugenics Exterminationism Horace Indo-European heritage Leonidas Miscegenation Plato

Great personalities defend eugenics, 2

by Evropa Soberana

Antiquity

With the de-barbarization that ensued after the emergence of a sedentary lifestyle, the people soon realised that a society uprooted from Nature immediately degenerates. In short, humanity woke up to the dangers of civilisation.

To compensate for it, the leaders of these societies set up processes aimed at counteracting the pernicious effects of the greatest cancer that humanity has suffered: dysgenics, that is, the degeneration of the race that results from the absence of natural selection.

Here we will see that, in many civilised societies of antiquity, the laws of Nature were automatically followed. Its leaders intervened consciously and voluntarily to stop human reproduction and allow reproduction only to the best, so that the species did not degenerate. As Madison Grant wrote, where the environment is too soft and luxurious and it is not necessary to fight to survive, not only weak individuals are allowed to live. Strong types also gain weight mentally and physically!

The most illustrative examples of this era are Hindus, Greeks (among these the Spartans) and Romans. The Hellenic ideal of the kalokagathia, that is to say, an association of goodness-beauty—achieved by maintaining the purity of blood within the framework of a process of selection of the best—laid the foundations to everything that in the West has been considered ‘classical’ and ‘beautiful’ since then until recently.

In another long essay we have seen that the art that has come to us from European antiquity is perhaps only two percent of what existed and, to top it off, probably the least interesting and sublime: primitive Christians destroyed almost every legacy Greco-Roman civilisation. No one can know how many philosophers and authors suffered total destruction of their works, without anyone knowing again who they were or what they thought; and many other classic writings were censored, adulterated, corrected or mutilated.

However, we have at least some spoils of the pre-Christian era. Although ninety-eight percent of classical art was destroyed by the early Christians, what survived speaks for itself as a tribute to the selection, balance, health and excellence of all human qualities.

The Hindus. The Indo-European (i.e., Nordic) invaders arrived in India around 1400 BCE and immediately placed measures to favour high birth rates of the best elements of the population, identified with the Aryan invaders, and the decline of the worst, identified with the Negroid-Dravidic stratum.

The entire caste system was a great eugenics process in which the chandala (a term also used by Nietzsche to define the morals of Jews and Christians), the outcast, the untouchable, the sinful caste, the one considered inferior, was subjected to a horrendous lifestyle: using only the clothes of the dead bodies, drink only water from stagnant areas or animal tracks, not allow their women to be attended during childbirth, prohibition of washing, work as executioners, burials and latrine cleaners, and an unpleasant etcetera. Such impositions favoured that diseases were endemic among them; they fell like flies so that their numbers never constituted a danger for the best.

We are therefore faced with an example of negative eugenics: limiting the procreation of the worst. These measures are included in the Laws of Manu, the legendary Indo-Aryan legislator who laid the foundations for caste hierarchy. According to scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky, a renowned Ukrainian geneticist, ‘The caste system of India has been the greatest genetic experiment ever conducted by man’ (Genetic Diversity and Human Equality).

A woman always gives the world a child endowed with the same qualities as the one who has fathered him… A man of abject birth takes the natural evil of his father or his mother, or both at the same time, and can never hide its origin (Law of Manu, Book X).

Lycurgus (8th century BCE), a regent of Sparta, travelled through Spain, Egypt and India accumulating wisdom and, later, carrying out a revolution in Sparta after which the polis would militarize and establish a social system based on eugenics. The measures of this program highlight the infanticides of deformed, ugly or stupid newborns. Broadly speaking, Lycurgus’s policy was based on training perfect human beings that gave birth to perfect human beings, and there was no place for genetic engenders in that plan. On the other hand, the crypteia, carried out by the Spartan authorities on the helots (the submissive plebs) can perfectly be considered a very brutal and primitive example of negative eugenics.
 

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Editor’s Note: Having helots as slaves was a fatal flaw for Spartan civilisation. The laws of Lycurgus did not foresee that eugenic customs would fatally relax after a catastrophic war (as would happen after the Peloponnesian War). A real solution would have been, as William Pierce saw in his study on Greece, to exterminate the non-Nordic Mediterraneans of Sparta and extend such policy to all Greece, and eventually to all Europe.
 

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As for the Spartan policies of positive eugenics—favouring the multiplication of the best—we see popular rituals such as the coronation of a male champion and a female champion in a sports competition, or a king and queen in a beauty pageant, or tax exemption to the citizens who left four children. The best were expected to marry the best. Single people over twenty-five years old were extremely frowned upon and punished with fines and humiliating acts.

If the parents are strong, the children will be strong (Fr. 7).

Heraclitus (535-484 BCE), a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher known for his aphorisms in the style of the Oracle of Delphi. He established that wisdom was much more than a mere accumulation of knowledge and intelligence, also valuing intuition, instinct and will. He said: ‘I ask all mortals to father well-born children of noble parents’.

Leonidas (dies in 480 BCE), King of Sparta and supreme commander of the Greek troops in the Battle of Thermopylae. He fought in numerical inferiority against the Persians until the end, giving time for the evacuation of Greek cities, granting margin for an Athenian victory in the battle of Salamis and laying the foundations of the definitive Persian defeat in Plataea. Leonidas and his Spartans are an example of heroism, dedication to their people, a spirit of sacrifice, training and honour for all Western armies of all time.

Marry the capable and give birth to the capable! (exhortation to the Spartan people before leaving for the Thermopylae according to Plutarch, On the Malice of Herodotus, 32).

Theognis of Megara (6th century BCE) was one of the great Greek poets. He has bequeathed us in his Theognidea a series of interesting reflections and advice to his disciple Cyrnus. Among other things, Theognis divides the population into ‘good’—the nobility, identified with the Hellenic invaders—and ‘bad’—the native plebeian population of Greece, which progressively accumulated money and rights:

In rams and asses and horses, Cyrnus, we seek
the thoroughbred, and a man is concerned therein
to get him offspring of good stock;

Yet in marriage a good man thinketh not twice of wedding
the bad daughter of a bad sire if the father give him many possessions;

Nor doth a woman disdain the bed of a bad man if he be wealthy,
but is fain rather to be rich than to be good.

For ’tis possessions they prize;
and a good man weddeth of bad stock and a bad man of good;
race is confounded of riches.

In like manner, son of Polypaus,
marvel thou not that the race of thy townsmen is made obscure;
’tis because bad things are mingled with good.

Even he that knoweth her to be such, weddeth a low-born woman for pelf,
albeit he be of good repute and she of ill;
for he is urged by strong Necessity, who giveth a man hardihood.
 

Critias (460-403 BCE), Athenian philosopher, speaker, teacher, poet and uncle of Plato. He is known for being part of the Spartan occupation government known as the thirty tyrants. We will appreciate the importance that this man attached not only to inheritance, but to sports training without which a human being will never be complete.

I begin with the birth of a man, demonstrating how he can be the best and strongest in the body if his father trains and endures hardness, and if his future mother is strong and also trains.

Plato (428-347 BCE), probably the most famous philosopher of all time, was inspired by Sparta to propose the measures of Greek regeneration in his work The Republic, plagued with values of both positive eugenics—promoting the best—as negative eugenics—limit the worst—, especially with regard to the caste of the ‘guardians’. Plato, like most Greek philosophers, was in favour of exposing defective children to the weather so that they died.

It is necessary, according to our principles, that the relationships of the most outstanding individuals of one sex or the other are very frequent, and those of the lower individuals very rare. In addition, it is necessary to raise the children of the first and not of the second, if you want the flock to not degenerate (The Republic).

Based on what was agreed, it is necessary for the best men to join the best women as often as possible, and on the contrary, the worst with the worst; and the offspring of the best and not the worst should be raised, so our flock will become excellent (Statesman, 459).

That even better children are born from elite men, and from useful men to the country, even more useful children (Statesman, 461).

Xenophon (430-354), soldier, accomplished horseman during the Peloponnesian war, mercenary in the heart of Persia during the expedition of the ten thousand, philosopher, pro-Spartan and historian. Notorious anti-democrat who abhorred the Athenian government, he longed for fairer forms of government such as those he met in Persia and Sparta, where he sent his children to be educated. Together with Plutarch, Xenophon is the greatest source of information about Sparta, admiring the eugenic practices established by Lycurgus.

[Lycurgus] considered that the production of children was the noblest duty of free citizens (Constitution of the Lacedaemonians).

An old man had to introduce his wife to a young man in the prime of life whom he admired for his qualities, to have children with him (Constitution of the Lacedaemonians).

Isocrates (436-338 BCE), politician, philosopher and Greek teacher, was one of the famous ten Attic speakers and probably the most influential rhetorician of his time. He founded a public speaking school that became famous for its effectiveness and criticised the politics of many Greek cities, which instead of stimulating their birth rate inflated their numbers through the mass immigration of slaves, which he considered inferior to the Hellenic population. In this quotation it is verified to what extent Isocrates valued quality versus quantity:

It should not be said as happy that city which, from all extremes, randomly accumulates many citizens; but the one that best preserves the race of the settled since the beginning.

Euripides (480-406 BCE), playwright, a friend of Socrates and undoubtedly one of the greatest poets of all antiquity; his stain was an excessive machismo that led him to criticise the greater freedom enjoyed by women in Sparta. Disappointed and disgusted by the policies of a decadent Greece he retired to Macedonia, a place where Hellenic traditions were still pure, where he finally died.

There is no more precious treasure for children than to be born of a noble and virtuous father and to marry among noble families. Curse to the reckless who, defeated by passion, joins the unworthy and leaves his children to dishonour in return for guilty pleasures (Heracleidae).

Aristotle (384-322 BCE), the famous philosopher who educated Alexander the Great and laid the western foundations of Hellenism, logic and sciences such as biology, taxonomy and zoology. Aristotle extends extensively in his work Politeia on the problems posed by eugenics, birth control, childhood feeding and education (books VII and VIII). He generally admired the ancient Spartan system, with some reservations—in my opinion unfounded as Sparta was not decadent—because the ephorate was tyrannical.

(Left, a Patrician bust.) The Patricians were the Roman leaders in the early days, when Rome was a Republic. These men were the patriarchs or clan chiefs of each of the thirty noble families descended from Italic invaders, and they ran all Roman institutions including the legions, the courts and the Senate. Sober, pure, ascetic and hard, their people held them in high regard as repositories of the highest wisdom and Roman posterity honoured them as gods.

Their descendants formed the Patricians, the later Roman aristocracy, which gradually decayed throughout the Empire until almost completely dissolving, turning Rome into a disgusting decadent monster that deserved to be razed. After the Punic wars and Julius Caesar, Rome largely lost its Indo-European spirit.

In the IV of the XII tablets of the law, it was established that deformed children must be killed at birth. It was also left to the patriarchs of the patrician clans to decide which were the unfit children. They were usually drowned in the waters of the Tiber River, and other times abandoned, exposing them to wild animals and elements in a process called exposure. Apparently, the Romans did not fare so badly with this purifying tactic as we see in their conquering history.

Distorium vultum sequitur distortio morum, ‘A crooked face follows a crooked moral’—Roman proverb.

Meleager of Gadara (1st century BCE), Greek epigram compiler within the Hellenistic stage, who wrote: ‘If one mixes good with bad, a good progeny would not be born, but if both parents are good, they will beget noble children’ (Fr. 9).

Horace (65 BCE-8 CE) said: ‘The virtue of parents is a great dowry’ and ‘’The good and the brave descend from the good and the brave’ (Odes, IV, 4, 29).

Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE), Roman philosopher of the Stoic school (the same school that Marcus Aurelius and Julian the Apostate belonged), of Hispanic-Celtic origin and teacher of Emperor Nero.

We exterminate hydrophobic dogs; we kill the indomitable bulls; we slaughter sick sheep for fear that they infest the flock; we suffocate the monstrous foetuses and even drown the children if they are weak and deformed. It is not passion, but reason, to separate healthy parts from those that can corrupt them (Of Anger, XV).

Plutarch (45-120 CE). Philosopher, mathematician, historian, speaker and priest of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi. It is also one of the important sources of information about Sparta in his books Ancient Customs of the Lacedaemonians and Life of Lycurgus.

Leaving a being who is not healthy and strong from the beginning is not beneficial for the State or for the individual himself (Ancient Customs of the Lacedaemonians).

When a baby was born he was taken to a council of elders to be examined. If the baby was defective in some way the elders threw him down a ravine. Such a baby, in the opinion of the Spartans, should not be allowed to live (Life of Lycurgus).

Categories
Ancient Greece Athens Classical sculpture Darkening Age (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world

Darkening Age, 7

Yesterday I said that in the third volume of the series Christianity’s Criminal History, ‘The Ancient Church: Forgery, Brainwashing, Exploitation, Annihilation’, Deschner argues that the tales of Christian martyrs in early Christianity were grossly exaggerated, and that I planned in the future to translate some passages of it. But the impatient English reader can go to his nearest library and read chapter four of Catherine Nixey’s recently published The Darkening Age, ‘On the Small Number of Martyrs’.

Within that chapter are included the images in colour that illustrate the book. Above, you can see the surviving figures of the Parthenon in Athens. Nixey says that these figures ‘were almost certainly mutilated by Christians who believed them to be “demonic”. The central figures of the group are missing, probably levered off the ground into rubble to build a Christian church’ (image facing page 57).

Categories
Ancient Rome Catholic Church Classical sculpture Egalitarianism Enlightenment Individualism Jesus Liberalism Martin Luther New Testament Protestantism St Paul Tacitus

Heisman’s suicide note, 3

Rupture: How Christ hijacked
the moral compass of the West

The English word “virtue” is derived from the Roman word virtus, meaning manliness or strength. Virtus derived from vir, meaning “man”. Virilis, an ancestor of the English word “virile”, is also derived from the Roman word for man.
From this Roman conception of virtue, was Jesus less than a man or more than a man? Did the spectacle of Jesus dying on a Roman cross exemplify virtus; manliness; strength; masterliness; forcefulness? Consistent with his valuation of turning the cheek, it would seem that Jesus exemplified utterly shamelessness and a total lack of the manly honor of the Romans.
Yet the fame of his humiliation on the cross did, in a sense, exemplify a perverse variety of virtus, for Jesus’s feminine, compassionate ethics have mastered and conquered the old pagan virtues of the gentiles. Jesus’s spiritual penis has penetrated, disseminated, and impregnated the West with his “virtuous” seed. And it is from that seed that “modernity” has sprouted.
Jesus combined the highest Roman virtue of dying honorably in battle with highest Jewish virtue of martyrdom and strength in persecution. This combination formed a psychic bridge between pagan and Jew, i.e. between ideal cruelty in war and ideal compassion in peace. This is one way in which Christianity became the evolutionary missing link between the more masculine ethos of the ancient pagan West and the more feminine ethos of the modern West.
The original Enlightenment notion of revolution reflects a quasi-creationist view of change that makes the sudden rupture between the moral assumptions of the ancient and modern world almost inexplicable. However, if we take a more gradualistic view of social change wherein modern egalitarianism evolved from what preceded it, then the origins of modern political assumptions become more explicable. The final moral-political rupture from the ancients became possible, in part, because Christianity acted as an incubator of modern values.
Christian notions of “virtue” were not an outright challenge to pagan Roman virtue by accident; these values were incompatible by design. To even use the Roman term “virtue” to describe Christian morality is an assertion of its victory over Rome. The success of the Christian perversion of the manliness of Roman “virtue” is exemplified by its redefinition as the chastity of a woman.
A general difference between ancient Greco-Roman virtue and modern virtue can be glimpsed through the ancient sculpture, the Dying Gaul. The sculpture portrays a wounded “barbarian”. Whereas moderns would tend to imitate Christ in feeling compassion for the defeated man, its original pagan cultural context suggests a different interpretation: the cruel defeat and conquest of the barbarian as the true, the good, and the beautiful.

The circumstances of the sculpture’s origins confirm the correctness of this interpretation. The Dying Gaul was commissioned by Attalus I of Pergamon in the third century AD to celebrate his triumph over the Celtic Galatians of Anatolia. Attalus was a Greek ally of Rome and the sculpture was only one part of a triumphal monument built at Pergamon. These aristocratic trophies were a glorification of the famous Greco-Roman ability to make their enemies die on the battlefield.
A Christian is supposed to view Christ on the cross as an individual being, rather than as a powerless peasant of the despised Jewish people. If one has faith in Jesus, then one “knows” that to interpret Jesus as the member of a racial-religious group is wrong and we “know” that this interpretation is wrong. How do we “know” this? Because we have inherited the Christianity victory over Rome in that ancient war for interpretation.
Liberalism continues the Christian paradigm by interpreting Homo sapiens as individuals, rather than members of groups such as racial groups. If it is wrong to assume Jesus can be understood on the basis of group membership, then the evolutionary connection between Christianity and modern liberalism becomes clearer. Jesus was a paradigmatic individual exception to group rules, and his example, universalized, profoundly influenced modern liberal emphasis on individual worth in contradistinction to assumptions of group membership.
Love killed honor. The values of honor and shame are appropriate for group moralities where the group is valued over “the individual”. Crucially, such a morality is inconceivable without a sense of group identity. Jesus’s morality became liberated from a specifically Jewish group identity. Once it dominated gentile morality, it also eroded kin and ethnic identity. The Christian war against honor moralities became so successful and traditional [that] its premodern origins were nearly forgotten along with the native pagan moralities it conquered.
Jesus’s values implicated the end of the hereditary world by living the logical consequences of denying the importance of his hereditary origins. This is a central premise underlying the entire modern rupture with the ancient world: breaking the import of hereditary origins in favor of individual valuations of humans. In escaping the consequences of a birth that, in his world, was the most ignoble possible, Jesus initiated the gentile West’s rupture with the ancient world.
The rupture between the ancient and the modern is the rupture between the rule of genes and the rule of memes. The difference between ancient and modern is the difference between the moral worlds of Homer and the Bible. It is the difference between Ulysses and Leopold Bloom.
On Nero’s persecution of the Christians, Tacitus wrote, “even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being destroyed.” The modern morality of compassion begins with Christianity’s moral attack on the unholy Roman Empire. Christianity demoralized the pagan virtues that upheld crucifixion as a reasonable policy for upholding the public good.
If, as Carl Schmitt concluded, the political can be defined with the distinction between friend and enemy, then Jesus’s innovation was to define the political as enemy by loving the enemy, and thus destroying the basis of the distinctly political. The anarchy of love that Christianity spread was designed to make the Roman Empire impossible. The empire of love that Paul spread was subversive by design. It was as subversive as preaching hatred of the patriarchal family that was a miniature model for worldly empire.
Crossan and Reed found that those letters of Paul that are judged historically inauthentic are also the ones that carry the most inegalitarian message. It appears that their purpose was to “insist that Christian families were not at all socially subversive.” These texts “represent a first step in collating Christian and Roman household ethics.” For these historians the issue is “whether that pseudo-Pauline history and theology is in valid continuity with Paul himself or is, as we will argue, an attempt to sanitize a social subversive, to domesticate a dissident apostle, and to make Christianity and Rome safe for one another.”
What could be more ridiculous that the idea that Jesus’s attack on Roman values would not need some “modification” before making themselves at home in Rome? Jesus and Paul were heretics of mainstream or Pharisaic Judaism and rebels against Rome. Since the purity and integrity of the internal logic of Christianity is hostile to purely kin selective values, there is no way whatsoever that Christianity could survive as a mass religion without corrupting Jesus’s pure attitude towards the family. Jesus’s values subvert the kin selective basis of family values.
That subversion was part of the mechanism that swept Christianity into power over the old paganism, but it was impossible that Christianity maintain its hold without a thorough corruption of Jesus’s scandalous attacks on the family. If not this way, then another, but the long-term practical survival of Christianity required some serious spin doctoring against the notion that Jesus’s teachings are a menace to society.
These, then, are the two options: the pure ethics of Jesus must be perverted or obscured as models for the majority of people or Christianity will be considered a menace to society. The very fact that Christianity did succeed in achieving official “legitimacy” means its original subversive message was necessarily subverted. State-sanctioned Christianity is really a joke played upon on a dead man who never resurrected to speak on his own behalf.
Official Christianity was making Jesus safe for aristocracy; falsifying Jesus; subverting Jesus. Rome subverted his subversion. Jesus attempted to subvert them—and they subverted him. (Bastards!) Yet without this partial subversion of subversion, Christianity would never have taken the deep, mass hold that is its foundational strength.
This insight, that pure Christianity must be perverted in all societies that wish to preserve their kin selective family values, is a key to understanding the process of secularization. Secularization is, in part, the unsubverting of the evidence for Jesus’s original social program from its compromised reconciliation with Rome. The first truly major step towards unsubverting Rome’s subversion of Jesus’s message was the Protestant Reformation.
The Roman Catholic hierarchy contains elements of a last stand of the old Roman pagan virtue, a reminder that it had and has not been subdued completely. The Reformation begun by Martin Luther was directed, in part, against this last stand. While Luther partially continued the containment of Jesus by checking the advance of the idea that heaven should be sought on earth, this German also continued the work of the Jewish radical he worshiped in attacking the hierarchy of Rome.
Secularization is the unsubverting of Jesus’s message subverted by Christian practice. Modern liberal moral superiority over actual Christians is produced by unsubverting the subversion of Jesus’s message subverted by institutional Christianity. There is an interior logic to Jesus’s vision based on consistency or lack of hypocrisy. Liberal arguments only draw this out from its compromises with the actual social world. In this role, Protestantism was especially influential in emphasizing individual conscience over kinship-biological imperatives based on the model of the family.
The average secular liberal rejects Biblical stories as mythology without rejecting the compassion-oriented moral inheritance of the Bible as mythology. That people, still, after Nietzsche, tout these old, juvenile enlightenment critiques of Christianity would seem to be another refutation of the belief that a free and liberal society will inevitably lead to a progress in knowledge. The primitive enlightenment critique of Christianity as a superstition used as a form of social control usually fails to account that its “social control” originated as a weapon that helped to bring down the Goliath of Rome.
Still, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this old enlightenment era castigation of Christianity for not being Christian endures without realization that this is actually the main technical mechanism of the secularization of Christian values. When one asks, what is secularization?, the attempt to criticize Christianity for its role in “oppression”, war, or other “immoral” behaviors stands at the forefront. Liberal moral superiority over actual Christians commonly stems from contrasting Christian ideals and Christian practice. This is what gives leftism in general and liberalism in particular its moral outrage.
Secularization arises as people make sense of Christian ideals in the face of its practice and even speculate as to how it might work in the real world. Enlightenment arguments for the rationalization of ethics occurred in the context of a Christian society in which the dormant premises of the Christian creed were subjected to rational scrutiny. To secularize Christianity is to follow Jesus in accusing God’s faithful believers of a nasty hypocrisy:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. (Matt. 23:27-28)

To charge Christians with hypocrisy is to relish in the irony of Jesus’s biting charges of hypocrisy against the Pharisees. Jesus’s attempt to transcend the hypocrisies inherent in Mosaic law’s emphasis on outer behavior was one germinating mechanism that produced Christianity out of Judaism. The same general pattern generated modern liberalism out of Christianity. Just as Jesus criticized the Pharisees for worshipping the formal law rather than the spirit of the law, modern liberals criticize Christians for following religious formalities rather than the spirit of compassionate, liberal egalitarianism. It was precisely Christianity’s emphasis on the spirit that helps explain how the spirit of liberal compassion evolved out of the spirit of Christianity even if the letters of the laws are different.
To recognize hypocrisy is to recognize a contradiction between theory and action. The modern ideology of rights evolved, in part, through a critique of the contradictions of Christian theology and political action. Modern ideology evolved from Christian theology. Christian faith invented Christian hypocrites, and modern political secularism seized upon these contradictions that the Christian hypocrisy industry created. Resolving these moral contradictions through argument with Christians and political authorities is what led to the idea of a single, consistent standard for all human beings: political equality. The rational basis of the secularization process is this movement towards consistency of principle against self-contradiction (hypocrisy).
Modern ideas of political rights emerged out of a dialogue; a discourse; a dialectic in which Christianity framed the arguments of secularists, defining the domain upon which one could claim the moral high ground. The “arguments” of Christian theology circumscribed the moral parameters of acceptable public discourse, and hence, the nature of the counterarguments of “secular” ideology. Secular morality evolved by arguing rationally against the frame of reference provided by the old Christian Trojan Horse and this inevitably shaped the nature of the counter-arguments that followed. Christianity helped define the basic issues of secular humanism by accepting a belief in the moral worth of the meek of the world.
The Roman who conquered Jesus’s Jewish homeland could feel, in perfect conscience, that their conquest should confirm their greatness, not their guilt. Roman religion itself glorified Mars, the god of war. Pagan Roman religion did not automatically contradict the martial spirit—it helped confirm the martial spirit.
Chivalry, the code of honor that tempered and softened the warrior ethos of Christian Europe, is the evolutionary link between pagan virtue and modern virtue. Yet the imperial vigor of the Christian West was made, not by Christian religiosity, but by Christian hypocrisy. Christianity planted in its carriers a pregnant contradiction between Christian slave morality and Christian reality that was just waiting for the exposé of the “age of reason”. Christianity made the old European aristocracies “unjust” by dissolving the prehistoric and pagan assumptions of its existence.
Jesus himself contrasted his teachings with the ways of pagans:

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. (Matt 24:25-28)

To reverse the high political development of kin selection represented by Rome leads towards sociobiological primitivity; to an immature stage where human ontology is closest to a more primitive phylogeny; when humans are closest to our common evolutionary ancestors; when humans are biologically most equal to one another since genes and environment have not yet exacerbated differences.
Christianity reached a state of fruition called “modernity” when a kind of justice was reaped for the ancestral betrayal of a Christian’s pagan forefathers. The pagan values that genuinely supported an ancestral chain of sacrifice for their kin kind and the patriarchal kingdoms of this world were betrayed.
A war of generations broke Christianity from Judaism, and left wing humanism from Christianity. These are only peak points that matured from the gradual kneading of cultural dough; from change guided by visions of the moral high grounds in heaven or on earth. Out of a conflict between generations that Christianity helped leaven, the modern social idea of progress rose.