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Literature New Testament Old Testament St Paul Theology

Gospel Fictions, 7


 
Below, part of Gospel Fictions’ seventh chapter, “Resurrection fictions” by Randel Helms (ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages):


 
The earliest extended statement about the Easter experiences appears not in the Gospels but in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. It dates from the early 50’s, some twenty years after the crucifixion. Paul’s statement is as interesting for what it does not say as for what it does:

I handed on to you the facts which had been imparted to me: that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the Scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised to life on the third day, according to the Scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas, and afterwards to the Twelve. Then he appeared to over five hundred of our brothers at once, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, and afterwards to all the apostles. (15:2-7)

None of these appearances, in anything like the sequence Paul lists, is depicted in the four Gospels. Moreover, not one of the Gospel resurrection appearances is identical to those listed by Paul. Paul did not know the Gospel resurrection stories, for the simple reason that they had not yet been invented, and the four evangelists, who wrote twenty to fifty years after Paul, either did not know his list of appearances or chose to ignore it.

Perhaps most surprising of all the differences is Paul’s failure to mention the legend of the empty tomb, which was, for the writer of the earliest Gospel (Mark), the only public, visible evidence for the resurrection. Though Paul vigorously attempts to convince the Christians at Corinth, some of whom apparently doubted, that Jesus indeed rose from the dead (“if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain”), he never mentions this most striking piece of evidence.

Indeed, he had probably never heard of it; it was a legend that grew up in Christian communities different from his own. It may even have post-dated his death, for Mark wrote almost twenty years after his letter to Corinth. Worse yet, Paul would not have agreed with Mark’s theology even had he known it; for Paul, resurrection meant not the resuscitation of a corpse involving the removal of a stone and the emptying of a tomb, but a transformation from a dead physical body to a living spiritual one. “Flesh and blood can never possess the kingdom of God” (I Cor. 15:50).

Not only is St Paul apparently unaware of the resurrection narratives recorded in the Gospels, but his own list of appearances is irreconcilable with those of the evangelists written later. Paul has it that the first appearance of the risen Lord was to Cephas (he always calls Peter by his Aramaic name, and apparently knows no stories about him in Greek). The Gospels describe no initial resurrection appearance to Peter (some women, the number varying from three to two to one, see him first), though Luke says that Peter did see him. According to equally irreconcilable accounts on the Gospels, the first appearance was to Mary Magdala alone (John), or to Mary Magdala and the other Mary (Mathew), or to Mary Magdala, Joanna, and Mary, the mother of James (Luke). Again, Paul declares that the second resurrection appearance was to the “twelve,” whereas both Mathew and Luke stress that the appearance before the disciples was to the “eleven,” Judas being dead. Either Paul did not know the story about the defection and suicide of Judas Iscariot or else the “twelve” meant something different to him.

In other words, different centers of early Christianity produced their own collections of evidence of Jesus’ resurrection; these grew up independently and had, in the cases considered so far, almost nothing to do with each other. Of course, the most famous of the stories appear in the Gospels. Already in the mid-first century A.D., when Paul first wrote to the Corinthians, the idea was well established that Jesus rose again “on the third day, according to the Scriptures” (15:34). That is to say, Christians had scoured the Old Testament for passages that could, out of context, be interpreted as ancient oracles about the career of Jesus.

This involved interpretative methods that to modern eyes seem bizarre. Matthew’s assertion, in 21:4-5, based on his failure to understand the parallelism in the language of Zech. 9:9, that Jesus rode into Jerusalem astride two animals at once, is such an example. Moreover, the length of Jesus’ stay in the tomb was computed by reading Hosea 6:1-2 out of context, it being the only passage in the Old Testament with an “on the third day” allusion:

Come, let us return to the Lord;
for he has torn us and will heal us,
he has struck us and he will bind up our wounds;
after two days he will revive us,
on the third day he will restore us,
that in his presence we may live.

Hosea is, in these verses, not discussing the career of a holy man seven hundred years in the future. He is addressing his own countrymen in his own time, calling upon a corrupt people for moral and religious reform, berating people of whom one could say:

Their deeds are outrageous.
At Israel’s sanctuary I have seen a horrible thing:
there Ephraim played the wanton
and Israel defiled himself. (Hos. 6:10)

Some early Christians were aware of the paucity of Old Testament predictions about the length of Jesus’ stay in the tomb, and set about to invent more. Matthew’s additional evidence contains a prophecy in conflict with his own resurrection narrative. According to this evangelist, Jesus was buried on Friday just before sundown, and the tomb was found empty at sunrise on Sunday; thus, Jesus was presumably in the tomb two nights and one day. Nonetheless, Matthew imputed to Jesus the following, composed out of the Book of Jonah: “Jonah was in the sea-monster’s belly for three days and three nights in the bowels of the earth” (Matt. 12:40).

The oldest Christian narratives describing the discovery of the empty tomb on the third day appears in the Gospel of Mark:

When the Sabbath was over, Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought aromatic oils intending to go and anoint him; and very early on the Sunday morning, just after sunrise, they came to the tomb. They were wondering among themselves who would roll away the stone for them from the entrance to the tomb, when they looked up and saw that the stone, huge as it was, had been rolled back already. They went into the tomb, where they saw a youth sitting on the right-hand side, wearing a white robe; and they were dumbfounded. But he said to them, “Fear nothing; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here; look, there is the place where they laid him. But go and give this message to his disciples and Peter: ‘He will go on before you into Galilee and you will see him there, as he told you’.” Then they went out and ran away from the tomb, beside themselves with terror. They said nothing to anybody, for they were afraid. (Mark 16:1-8).

The most ancient manuscripts of Mark end at this point, one of the strangest and most unsatisfying moments in all the Bible, depicting fear and silence on Easter morning and lacking a resurrection appearance. But within about fifty years, at least five separate attempts were made by various Christian imaginations to rewrite Mark’s bare and disappointing story; they appear in the Long Ending and the Short Ending of Mark, and in the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John.

The first two are second-century interpolations in some texts of Mark and are identified as such in any responsible modern text. They are Mark 16:9-20 (in the King James version and others based on late manuscripts), an unskillful paraphrase of resurrection appearances in other Gospels; and Mark 16:9 in few other late manuscripts, in which the women followed the youth’s instructions to tell the disciples, a statement that conflicts with verse 8 of the original text.

Probably the first large-scale effort to rewrite Mark’s account and make it more pleasing to the faithful took place when the Gospel of Mathew was written in the last two decades of the first century. Although the major written source information was the Gospel of Mark, Matthew made up striking changes in Mark’s resurrection narrative. Mark’s account ends with the women running away from the tomb in terror and in their fear say nothing to anybody. Matthew did not like this ending, however, so he changed it, consciously constructing a fictional narrative that more closely fit what he and his Christian community wanted to have happen on Easter morning: “They hurried away from the tomb in awe and great joy, and ran to tell the disciples” (Matt. 28:8). How did Matthew feel justified in making such a major change in Mark, a source he obviously regarded, for the most part, as authoritative?

The answer is that Matthew was a conscious literary artist who sincerely believed in the resurrection; moreover, he believed he had the authority, granted him by his church and by its interpretation of the Old Testament, to “correct” Mark’s Gospel and theology. Indeed, he had corrected Mark many times before, often doing so on the basis of what he regarded as his superior understanding of the oracles in the Old Testament. For since Jesus’ life happened “according to the Scriptures,” early Christians were confident that in order to find out about him, they did not need to engage in historical research or consult witness (in our understanding of these two approaches); they found detailed history in the ancient oracles of the Hebrew Bible, read as a book about Jesus.

Matthew was a careful student of both the Old Testament and of Mark, which in his time was not yet accepted as canonical Scripture and thus could be changed at need. His study revealed how frequently Mark’s Gospel was transparent upon Scripture (or based upon it), and in ways that Mark himself apparently did not recognize. Mark had composed his Gospel on the basis of earlier oral and written sources, which in turn had found much of their information about Jesus in the Old Testament. Though Mark seems not to have realized that this was so, Matthew readily recognized the relationships between Mark and the Old Testament, and even took it upon himself to extend and correct them.

In this case he saw Mark’s resurrection narrative as transparent upon de Book of Daniel, especially chapter 6, the story of the lion’s den. On recognizing the relationship, Matthew seems to have consulted the Septuagint version of Daniel and believed that he found there details of a more accurate account of the happenings of the Sunday morning than could be found in the pages of Mark; never mind that Daniel’s narrative is a story in the past tense about presumed events in the distant past. Matthew ignored its narrative and historical content and turned it into a prophetic oracle, as had the originators of Mark’s story.

It seems clear that in a literary sense at least, Matthew was right: the account of the empty tomb used by Mark was indeed structured on Daniel’s story of the lion’s den. In the 30’s and 40’s, the empty tomb story was not part of the tradition about the resurrection: Paul was unaware of it. The legend grew in Mark’s community, or one from which it borrowed, as part of its stock of evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. As Matthew was to do again nearly a generation later, certain Christians, perhaps in the 50’s and 60’s, searched the Old Testament, a major source of what was for them authoritative information about Jesus, in order to construct their account of the passion and resurrection, and found in the Book of Daniel much of what they needed. Consider the parallels. […]

[Helms’ text cannot be copied and pasted in the internet. Above I typed directly pages 129 to 135 from his book, Gospel Fictions, Prometheus Books, 1988. But I’ll omit Helms’ detailed account of these parallels and jump to page 142:]

In sum, we may say that Matthew’s account of the resurrection is a fictional enlargement of Mark’s fictional narrative, produced, at least in part, because of what he saw as the incomplete and inadequate nature of Mark’s last chapter. Certainly, Matthew sincerely believed in the resurrection; he also believed that his version of the story was more authoritative, more “scriptural,” than Mark’s, but his sincerity does not make the story less fictive. The same may be said of Luke’s enlargement of the Markan resurrection account.

The Gospel of Luke is, like that of Matthew, an expanded revision of Mark. Of Mark’s 661 verses, some 360 appear in Luke, either word-for-word or with deliberate changes. Some of the most dramatic of these changes appear in Luke’s version of Mark’s resurrection narrative.

Luke’s most significant change from Mark—the totally different angelic message at the tomb—finds its origin not in the Old Testament, however, but in Luke’s need to prepare his readers for the story of Pentecost in the Book of Acts, which he also wrote. In the version of the story Luke wishes to present, the disciples cannot be ordered, or even allowed, to leave Jerusalem for Galilee; they must remain for the all-important Pentecost experience.

Matthew composed a Galilee resurrection appearance using the Book of Daniel as the source of what Jesus would have said. But Luke eliminates the angels’ statement that the risen Jesus is going to Galilee; in contrast to Matthew, who composes a new statement for Jesus out of the youth’s speech in Mark (“take word to my brothers that they are to leave to Galilee”—Matt. 28:10), Luke imputes to Jesus a new saying that demands quite the opposite: “Stay here in this city until you are armed with the power from above” (Luke 24:49).

Luke thus presents resurrection appearances only in the vicinity of Jerusalem. Mark implies, and Matthew specifically declares, that Jesus, followed later by his disciples, left Jerusalem immediately after his resurrection and went to Galilee some eighty or ninety miles to the north, where they all met. Luke writes (Acts 1:3-4) that the risen Jesus “over a period of forty days… appeared to them and taught them about the kingdom of God. While he was in their company he told them not to leave Jerusalem.” For Luke, the story of Pentecost, described in the second chapter of Acts, overshadowed any assertion that the disciples were in Galilee meeting Jesus; they had to be in Jerusalem, so he placed them there and constructed a saying by Jesus to justify this change.

The fourth evangelist, John (who was not the Apostle, but a Christian who wrote at the very end of the first century), possessed a collection of resurrection narratives different from those used by Matthew and Luke, and irreconcilable with them.

In Luke, when the women returned to the disciples with the joyous news that the tomb was empty and that two angels had declared Jesus risen, “The story appeared to them to be nonsense, and they would not believe” (24:11); but in John, when Peter and the other disciples hear the women’s message, they run to the tomb and find it empty, whereat, says John, they “believed” (20:28). […]

The Gospel of John , as originally written (circa 100 A.D.), ended immediately after Jesus’ appearance before the doubting Thomas. Early in the second century, however, certain Christians to whom the gospels of Mathew and Luke were important, recognized that both these earlier works stress, in opposition to John, that the resurrection appearances occurred in Galilee as well as Jerusalem. They took it upon themselves to reconcile John with the others by adding a twenty-first chapter.

That this section is not by the author of the rest of the Gospel is clear from the prominence it gives to the “sons of Zebedee” (John 21:2), who are mentioned by this name nowhere else in the Fourth Gospel, though they are central figures in the Synoptics. A major propose of this addition, and another sign of its late date, is betrayed by the last saying attributed to Jesus in the chapter. For no reason apparent in the narrative, we are told that Peter “saw” an unnamed disciple, the one “whom Jesus loved,” and asked Jesus, “What will happen to him?” Jesus’ response was, “If it should be my will that he should wait until I come, what is that to you? Follow me.”

The saying of Jesus became current in the brotherhood, and was taken to mean that the disciple would not die. But in fact Jesus did not say that he would not die, he only said “If it should be my will that he should wait until I come, what is that to you?” (21:21-23)

Obviously, this disciple (in fact all the first-generation Christians) had long since died, and Jesus showed no signs of returning. The tradition persisted, however, that those were the words of Jesus, for the first generation indeed confidently expected the early return of their Lord (had he not said, in Mark 9:1, “There are some of those standing here who will not taste death before they have seen the kingdom of God already come”?). A saying had to be constructed that would not only demystify and reinterpret this persistent legend, so troubling to the faithful, but solve the apologetic problem it presented. Chapter 21 exists, in part, for this purpose; and though the attempt is an unconvincing quibble, it had to be made.

The resurrection narratives in the last chapters of the four Gospels are effective stories that have given solace and hope to millions of believers who have not read them carefully.

Categories
Deranged altruism Literature

A haunting novel

by Jared Taylor

Fiction can be more powerful than fact. Authors have always lent their talents to causes, often swaying events more effectively than journalists or politicians. Fiction, including virtually everything emitted by Hollywood, has usually been in the service of the left, but occasionally an author declares his allegiance to culture and tradition.

In The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail goes further and declares his allegiance to his race—though it is an allegiance tinged with bitterness at the weakness of the White man. It is the story of the final, tragic end of European civilization which falls, like all great civilizations, by its own hand.

The novel is set in the near future in France, where the leftist sicknesses of multi-culturalism and multi-racialism have undermined all natural defenses. As Mr. Raspail writes of young Europeans:

That scorn of a people of other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest—none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains, or at least so little that the monstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience had quashed it in no time at all.

By then, “the White race was nothing more than a million sheep,” beaten down by decades of anti-White propaganda. As Mr. Raspail explains, it was “a known fact that racism comes in two forms: that practiced by Whites—heinous and inexcusable, whatever its motives—and that practiced by blacks—quite justified, whatever its excess, since it’s merely the expression of a righteous revenge.”

This is the state of mind with which the West confronts its final crisis: nearly a million starving, disease-ridden boat people—men, women, and children—set sail from the Ganges delta for Europe. Practically no one is willing to say that this flotilla must be stopped at all costs. Instead, liberals and Christians spout confident nonsense about welcoming their Hindu brothers into the wealth and comfort of Europe.
 

Failure of churches to assist white flock

The thought of this wretched brown mass sailing for Europe is a source of great joy for the World Council of Churches. Its men are “shock-troop pastors, righteous in their loathing of anything and everything that smacked of present-day Western society, and Woodford Green, Essexss in their love of whatever might destroy it.” They are determined “to welcome the million Christs on board those ships, who would rise up, reborn, and signal the dawn of a just, new day…”

One of the few Europeans who recognizes that what has come to be called the “Last Chance Armada” spells the doom of Christendom and reproaches a group of anti-Western churchmen: “There’s not one of you proud of his skin, and all that it stands for.” “Not proud or aware of it either,” replies one. “That’s the price we have to pay for the brotherhood of man. We’re happy to pay it.”

Europe is rife with fifth-column propagandists, products of earlier capitulations. Typical of these is Clement Dio, “citizen of France, North African by blood… who possessed a belligerent intellect that thrived on springs of racial hatred barely below the surface, and far more intense than anyone imagined.”

 

Europe’s fifth column

Knowing full well that acceptance of the first wave of third world refugees will only prompt imitators that will eventually swamp the White West, he writes happily about how “the civilization of the Ganges” will enrich a culturally bankrupt continent:

Considering all the wonders that the Ganges had bestowed on us already—sacred music, theatre, dance, yoga, mysticism, arts and crafts, jewellery, new styles in dress—the burning question was how we could manage to do without these folks any longer!

As the flotilla makes for Europe, schoolteachers set assignments for their students:

Describe the life of the poor, suffering souls on board the ships, and express your feelings toward their plight in detail, by imagining, for example, that one of the desperate families comes to your home and asks you to take them in.

The boat people steam towards the Suez Canal, but the Egyptians, not soft like Whites, threaten to sink the entire convoy. One hundred ships turn south, around the horn of Africa—towards Europe. The refugees run out of fuel for cooking and start burning their own excrement. Pilots sent to observe the fleet report an unbearable stench.

A few deluded Whites have boarded the ships in Calcutta and sail along with “the civilization of the Ganges,” dreaming of Europe:

Already they saw it their mission to guide the flock’s first steps on Western soil. One would empty out all our hospital beds so that cholera-ridden and leprous wretches could sprawl between their clean White sheets. Another would cram our brightest, cheeriest nurseries full of monster children. Another would preach unlimited sex, in the name of the one, single race of the future…

The Hindus tolerate these traitors until almost the end of the voyage and then strangle them, throwing their naked bodies overboard so that they drift onto a Spanish beach as the armada heads for the south of France. The boat people have no need for guides of this kind, from a race that has lost all relevance:

The Last Chance Armada, en route to the West, was feeding on hatred. A hatred of almost philosophical proportions, so utter, so absolute, that it had no thoughts of revenge, or blood, or death, but merely consigned its objects to the ultimate void. In this case, the Whites. For the Ganges refugees, on their way to Europe, the Whites had simply ceased to be.

Finally, on the morning of Easter Sunday, the 100 creaking hulks crash onto the beaches. The local inhabitants have abandoned all thought of taking in a family of Hindus, and have fled north. Many of the fashionable leftist agitators have likewise left their editorial jobs and radio programs and disappeared, with their gold bars, to Switzerland. The army has been sent south to prevent a landing, but there are doubts as to whether Whites can be made to slaughter unarmed civilians.

As one government official explains to another, “Don’t count on the army, monsieur. Not if you’ve got… genocide in mind.”

The other replies: “Then it just means another kind of genocide… Our own.”

At the last moment the French President is unable to give the order to fire. He urges the troops to act according to their consciences. They throw down their rifles and run.

Bands of hippies and Christians, who have come south to welcome their brown brothers also turn and run as soon as they get a whiff of the new arrivals. “How could a good cause smell so bad?”

 

Feeble resistance

The few remaining Whites with any sense of their civilization find they can communicate practically without speaking: “That was part of the Western genius, too: a mannered mentality, a collusion of aesthetes, a conspiracy of caste, a good-natured indifference to the crass and the common. With so few left now to share in its virtues, the current passed all the more easily between them.”

A handful of citizens drive south with their hunting rifles on suicide missions to do the job their government is unable to do. One of these, ironically, is an assimilated Indian. As he explains to another band of citizen-hunters, “Every White supremacist cause—no matter where or when—has had blacks on its side. And they didn’t mind fighting for the enemy, either. Today, with so many Whites turning black, why can’t a few ‘darkies’ decide to be White? Like me.”

The Indian is killed, along with his White comrades, in an attack by fighter-bombers sent by the French government to put down resistance to the invasion. Soldiers who were unable to kill brown people make short work of “racist” Whites.

All over France non-Whites take the offensive. Algerians on assembly lines rise up and kill their White bosses. African street cleaners knock on the doors of deluxe Paris apartments and move in. A multi-racial government, including a few token Whites, announces a new dispensation.
 

Heading our way: refugees from the third world

Capitulation by the French means capitulation everywhere. Masses of ragged Chinese pour into Russia, whose troops are likewise unable to fire on hungry civilians. Huge fleets of beggars set sail from every pestilential southern port, heading for Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. The same drama unfolds in the United States. “Black would be black, and White would be White. There was no changing either, except by a total mix, a blend into tan. They were enemies on sight, and their hatred and scorn only grew as they came to know each other better.” Americans lay down their arms just as the French do.

Raspail hints here and there at what the new Europe will be like: “At the time, each refugee quarter had its stock of White women, all free for the taking. And perfectly legal. (One of the new regime’s first laws, in fact. In order to ‘demythify’ the White woman, as they put it.)”

The first provisional government also has a Minister of Population—a French woman married to a black—to ensure a permanent solution to the race problem. After all: “Only a White woman can have a White baby. Let her choose not to conceive one, let her choose only non-White mates, and the genetic results aren’t long in coming.”

 

It is all over for the white man

And so ends the saga of Western man, not in pitched battle, not in defeat at the hands of superior forces, but by capitulation.

Even after a quarter century, the novel is astonishingly current. It was written before Communism collapsed, and the new French revolution is spiced with anti-capitalist slogans that now sound slightly off key. One might also complain that a few of the characters verge on caricature. Nevertheless, the central tragedy—suicidal White weakness—is brilliantly portrayed and could have been written in 1995.

Mr. Raspail obviously loves his culture and his race, and wrote in the afterward that although he had intended to end the book with a spasm of White self-consciousness that saves Europe, the final catastrophe seemed to write itself. Perhaps he could not, in good faith, write a different ending. In the preface to the 1985 French edition he observed:

The West is empty, even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul left. At every level—nations, race, cultures as well as individuals— it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles.

The Camp of the Saints puts the White man’s dilemma in the most difficult terms: slaughter hundreds of thousands of women and children or face oblivion. Of course, a nation that had the confidence to shed blood in the name of its own survival would never be put to such a test; no mob of beggars would threaten it.

The story that Mr. Raspail tells—the complete collapse of Western man even when the very survival of his civilization so clearly hangs in the balance—may seem implausible to some. And yet, what Whites do in The Camp of the Saints is no different from what they have done every day for the past forty years. The only difference is that the novel moves in fast forward; it covers in months what could take decades.

Whites all around the world suffer from Mr. Raspail’s “monstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience.” South Africans vote for black rule. Americans import millions of non-Whites and grant them racial preferences. Australians abandon their Whites-only immigration policy and become multi-cultural.
 

White extinction inevitable—or is it?

Even if he did not actively cooperate in his own destruction, time works against the White man. As Mr. Raspail writes in the afterward, “the proliferation of other races dooms our race, my race, irretrievably to extinction in the century to come, if we hold fast to our present moral principles. No other race subscribes to these moral principles—if that is really what they are—because they are weapons of self-annihilation.”

Mr. Raspail’s powerful, gripping novel is a call to all Whites to rekindle their sense of race, love of culture, and pride in history —for he knows that without them we will disappear.

 

_____________________

“A Haunting Novel about the End of the White Race”
is a 1995 book-review by Taylor of Jean Raspail’s
Camp of the Saints.

Categories
Autobiography Hojas Susurrantes (book) Literature Oracle of Delphi Psychology Stefan Zweig

New literary genre

“Know thyself” (gnōthi seafton)
Delphic maxim in the Temple of Apollo

 

I started Hojas Susurrantes (HS) in 1988 and added the last touchups last year. It is neither a novel nor an essay; nor memoirs in the traditional sense nor a pamphlet or poetry. It is difficult to define this non-fictional genre in few words. My first reader, Andreas Wirsén, a Swede lover of literature, wrote in an online forum that I am “a pioneer developing a new sport.”

As stated in Day of Wrath which contains a Spanish-English translation of the longest chapter of HS, Stefan Zweig wrote in Adepts in Self-Portraiture that when Western literature began with Hesiod and Heraclitus it was still poetry, and of the inevitability of a decline in the mythopoetic talent of Greece when a more Aristotelian thought evolved. As compensation for this loss, says Zweig, modern man obtained with the novel an approach to a science of the mind. But the novel genre does not represent the ultimate degree of self-knowledge:

Autobiography is the hardest of all forms of literary art. Why, then, do new aspirants, generation after generation, try to solve this almost insoluble problem?

[For a] honest autobiography […] he must have a combination of qualities which will hardly be found once in a million instances. To expect perfect sincerity on self-portraiture would be as absurd as to expect absolute justice, freedom, and perfection here on earth. No doubt the pseudo-confession, as Goethe called it, confession under the rose, in the diaphanous veil of novel or poem, is much easier, and is often far more convincing from the artistic point of view, than an account with no assumption of reserve. Autobiography, precisely because it requires, not truth alone, but naked truth, demands from the artist an act of peculiar heroism; for the autobiographer must play the traitor to himself.

Gnothi_seautonOnly a ripe artist, one thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the mind, can be successful here. This is why psychological self-portraiture has appeared so late among the arts, belonging exclusively to our own days and those yet to come. Man had to discover continents, to fathom his seas, to learn his language, before he could turn his gaze inward to explore the universe of his soul. Classical antiquity had as yet no inkling of these mysterious paths. Caesar and Plutarch, the ancients who describe themselves, are content to deal with facts, with circumstantial happenings, and never dream of showing more than the surface of their hearts.

Zweig then devotes a long paragraph to St Augustine’s Confessions, the thinker I abhor the most of all Western tradition and whose theology about Hell caused massive psychological damage in my own life (also recounted in HS). Then Zweig wrote:

Many centuries were to pass before Rousseau (that remarkable man who was a pioneer in so many fields) was to draw a self-portrait for its own sake, and was to be amazed and startled at the novelty of his enterprise. Stendhal, Hebbel, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Amiel, the intrepid Hans Jaeger, have disclosed unsuspected realms of self-knowledge by self-portraiture. Their successors, provided with more delicate implements of research, will be able to penetrate stratum by stratum, room by room, farther and yet farther into our new universe, into the depths of the human mind.

This quote explains why I decided to devise a hybrid genre between the self-portraiture that betrays the author and thus penetrates beyond the strata pondered by Romantic autobiographers. Over the boards anti-Nazis have been making fun about my experiences in London last year. They have no idea what I am trying to say because they completely lack context. Together with the Zweig quote my December 31 entry, “Etiology,” provides a bit of the context of what I’m trying to say in the book I’m presently writing.

Categories
Inquisition Kevin MacDonald Literature Metaphysics of race / sex Miscegenation Women

On Spain and literature – V

retrato de soledad anaya
 
My Mac broke down again (I didn’t fix it properly the previous time for lack of funds) but I’ll use a borrowed laptop because I’ve read a classic in Spanish literature and would like to say something about it.

Quoting Julio Rodríguez-Puértolas, on page 7 of The Culture of Critique Kevin MacDonald wrote:

A prime example is The Celestina (first edition dating from 1499) by Fernando de Rojas, who wrote “with all the anguish, pessimism, and nihilism of a converso who has lost the religion of his fathers but has been unable to integrate himself within the compass of Christian belief.” Rojas subjected the Castilian society of his time to “a corrosive analysis, destroying with a spirit that has been called ‘destructive’ all the traditional values and mental schemes of the new intolerant system. Beginning with literature and proceeding to religion, passing through all the ‘values’ of institutionalized caste-ism—honor, valor, love—everything is perversely pulverized.”

I confess that I found La Celestina quite boring, but I am not sure if it would be proper to catalogue this comedy—because it is a comedy—as “destructive” in the sense that MacDonald (who doesn’t seem to have actually read it) put it.

en la estacaHowever, it is true that Fernando de Rojas felt alienated in the late 15th century Spain. Some of his biographers even claim that, when Rojas was a bachelor studying in Salamanca, he received the tragic notice that his father, a Jew converted to Catholicism, had been condemned to die at the stake by the Inquisition.

As crypto-Jews usually did, Rojas married a converso woman; i.e., an ethnic Jewess, the daughter of Álvaro de Montealbán. De Montealbán also suffered a trial by the Inquisition and, although Rojas was a very successful lawyer by profession, he was not allowed to defend his father-in-law because Rojas was also of Jewish heritage, and therefore suspicious.

La Celestina was a huge bestseller of the time, even in translations outside Spain, but Rojas was always scared for having written it in his youth and, for forty years, remained silent about his authorship.

See my recent entry about the Spanish Catholic Kings Ferdinand and Isabella, who in 1492 promulgated a law to expel those Jews who didn’t want to convert to Christianity. The Jews who had lived in Spain for centuries had to go and the conversos who stayed became second-class citizens for the next centuries. The mission of the Inquisition was to keep under close scrutiny the conversos and see if they continued to practice their religious ways in secret.

Except for the first act, which was not authored by Rojas but by a non-Jew (either Juan de Mena or Rodrigo de Cota), as I said I found the comedy boring. Whatever the influence of this searing exposé of the Neo-Platonic idealization of women, an idealization so common in popular authors those times such as Petrarch, it probably didn’t go beyond the similar exposé by Cervantes of the chivalric novels of the age. To my taste mentioning La Celestina in the first pages of The Culture of Critique is a little off the mark, especially when taking into account that the most hilarious pages against women were authored by a gentile.

Rojas died in 1541, four years after Pope Paul III granted the bachelor soldiers in America permission to mix their blood with Amerind women. Now that I’ve just read the book I’d say that, although there’s a ring of truth in what MacDonald quoted, it should be obvious that the Spaniards’ lust for gold (see my previous entry about my teacher of literature), together with Catholicism, were the main cause of their racial suicide in the Americas. In those centuries conversos rarely got—as Rojas did—positions of cultural influence in this society that seriously tried to get rid of the subversive tribe. For those knowledgeable of the history of Spain and of Spanish literature, it would be laughable to hear that the book written by Rojas was a factor in the mestization of the New World.

Categories
Literature Poetry

On Spain and literature – IV

retrato de soledad anaya
 
Apropos of what I said in my previous post about blaming the Iberians’ lust of gold for their inter-breeding in the Americas, let me quote a translation of some lines of one of the poems of Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645), “Poderoso caballero es don dinero,” that I reread recently in the book of my teacher Soledad Anaya (pic).

When Quevedo writes, “in the Indies did they nurse him” he means of course that gold is found in the newly-conquered West Indies, the lands of New Spain (now Mexico); and when he says “in Genoa did they hearse him” he means that the gold is buried as jewelry with the corpses of the wealthy merchants of the Italian city Genoa.

Mother, unto gold I yield me,
He and I are ardent lovers;
Pure affection now discovers
How his sunny rays shall shield me!
For a trifle more or less
All his power will confess,
Powerful knight is don money.

In the Indies did they nurse him,
While the world stood round admiring;
And in Spain was his expiring;
And in Genoa did they hearse him;
And the ugliest at his side
Shines with all of beauty’s pride;
Powerful knight is don money.

Noble are his proud ancestors
For his blood-veins are patrician;
Royalties make the position
Of his Orient investors;
So they find themselves preferred
To the duke or country herd,
Powerful knight is don money.

Never meets he dames ungracious
To his smiles or his attention,
How they glow but at the mention
Of his promises capacious!
And how bare-faced they become
To the coin beneath his thumb
Powerful knight is don money.

I’m not sure if the translation of “…to the duke or country herd” conveys accurately the meaning. In the original Spanish it says that the yellow metal “hace iguales al duque y al ganadero,” makes the duke and country herd equals.

You can imagine how the young and ambitious commoners in those times (like Cortés) looked for chances of upward mobility in the “West Indies.”

See Dr. William Pierce’s take on this very subject: here.

Categories
Aryan beauty Literature Poetry

On Spain and literature – III

retrato de soledad anaya

The reason I almost never include poetry in this blog is simple. Very, very rarely a poem reaches the innermost of my soul. The first poem that reached me was one by Luis de Góngora, which I read in the textbook of Miss Anaya (photo) in my middle teens.

Góngora was a Baroque poet of the golden age of Spain. He, and his contemporary Francisco de Quevedo (about whom I have to quote something in the future), are considered the most prominent Spanish poets of all time. Góngora flourished by the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries, when the Spanish language reached its maximum degree of perfection. Anaya, my former school teacher, tells us in Literatura Española that later in his life Góngora became a priest and lived in a chaplaincy of honor in Madrid in the palace of King Philip III.

Góngora composed his Sonnet LCXVI when he was twenty-one years old:

Mientras por competir con tu cabello
Oro bruñido el sol relumbra en vano,
Mientras con menosprecio en medio el llano
Mira tu blanca frente al lilio bello;

Mientras a cada labio, por cogello,
Siguen más ojos que al clavel temprano,
Y mientras triunfa con desdén lozano
Del luciente cristal tu gentil cuello,

Goza cuello, cabello, labio y frente,
Antes que lo que fue en tu edad dorada
Oro, lilio, clavel, cristal luciente,

No sólo en plata o vïola troncada
Se vuelva, más tú y ello juntamente
En tierra, en humo, en polvo, en sombra, en nada.
 

Following is Edward Churton’s translation. Góngora’s urgent appeal to a young blonde nymph to enjoy her youth before time destroys her made a huge impression in the lad I was:
 

While to contend in brightness with thy hair
Sunlight on burnished gold may strive in vain,
While thy proud forehead’s whiteness may disdain
The lilies of the field, which bloom less fair,
While each red lip at once more eyes will snare
Than the perfumed carnation bud new born,
And while thy graceful neck with queenly scorn
Outshines bright crystal on the morning air:

Enjoy thy hour, neck, ringlets, lips, and brow;
Before the glories of this age of gold:
Earth’s precious ore, sweet flowers, and crystal bright
Turn pale and dim; and Time with fingers cold
Rifle the bud and bloom; and they, and thou
Become but ash, smoke, shadow, dust and night.

Categories
Goths Islam Islamization of Europe Literature Reconquista

On Spain and literature – I

Annoyed at the infamous TV series Toledo I tried to find some consolation in the epic film El Cid, “a romanticized story of the life of the Christian Castilian knight Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, called ‘El Cid’, who in the 11th century fought the North African Almoravides and ultimately contributed to the unification of Spain.” But even that movie released in 1961 starts with a politically-correct scene. El Cid, interpreted by Charlton Heston, spares the live of a Moorish king in the hope that the Moor will behave in the future after an anti-Christian raid (and in fact he behaves like a gentleman in the rest of the film). Then in the royal palace El Cid has a private conversation with the woman he loved, acted by Sophia Loren, and makes a speech about his pacifist intentions when he is accused of treason for having spared the life of the Muslim king.

Well, well… What about forgetting old and new movies altogether and focus instead in the Spanish literature of the Middle Ages? What will we find there? Big surprise: the historical “Cid” found some work fighting for the Muslim rulers of Taifa of Zaragoza! This happened after his falling out of favor of Alfonso VI, king of León and Castile, who in 1081 ordered Rodrigo Díaz’s exile.

But what else can the literature of the age say about the ethno-nationalist mores, values, moral grammar and zeitgeist of medieval Spain? Let’s take a look…

retrato de soledad anaya

This is a photograph of Soledad Anaya Solórzano (1895-1978), who graduated in Spanish letters at Guadalajara in Mexico. From 1920 to 1923 she served as Director of Primary and Higher Education in the Mexican government. She also taught Spanish literature, a field that she mostly loved, and was the Principal of the Secundaria Héroes de la Libertad until her death (the Middle School in Mexico City where I studied). Of course, when Miss Anaya taught me she was in her late seventies and looked a little older than in the photo, but she still was in command of her intellectual capacities. Anaya never married and was the single author of Literatura Española (1941), a textbook of more than thirty editions that we used in her classroom and I will use below and in the coming entries on the subject of Spain. I must say that in the first chapters of Anaya’s textbook, first published during the Second World War, she unabashedly uses the word “arios” (Aryan) when referring to the first conquerors of the Iberian Peninsula.

However, about the first ancient text that Anaya analyzes, the 8th century legend of King Rodrigo and the Loss of Spain (pages 28-31), the jew-wise reader is shocked to see that no accusation is made of Jews inviting any Muslim into the peninsula. The old legend tells instead that Florinda, a Visigothic maid (a purely Aryan young woman) was seduced by King Rodrigo, another Iberian white, in Rodrigo’s castle. As revenge the Count Julián, Florinda’s father, “opened Spain to Muslim expansion” Anaya wrote: an expansion that had been previously contained by the Count himself. The Moors then invaded the peninsula “and easily destroyed the Visigothic power that already was much debilitated.” Anaya adds that “it is not known what happened to King Rodrigo, who caused so much harm” and that the “historical happenings related to this legend occurred in 711 A.D.” Note that King Rodrigo, not Count Julián (or the Moors, or a purported Jew who opened the gates) is blamed. Presumably, the accent of the legend rested on the sense of honor among the Iberians of those remote times.

Later, on pages 40-47 of the textbook I used in my middle teens, Anaya mentions the case of the legend of The Seven Infants of Lara, which recounts other Iberian whites using other Moors to take revenge about other cases of Aryan offences! This very famous medieval tale has Gonzalo Gustios, the crying father of the seven decapitated white boys in Córdova, marrying Aixa, the daughter of Almanzor (Almanzor, who had imprisoned Gonzalo Gustios, was one of the most powerful characters in the Caliphate). Mudarra González, the mongrel son of the Christian Gonzalo Gustios and the Muslim Aixa, is The One destined to avenge the father. The victim of course is not Almanzor, the Moor that ordered the decapitation of the boys on behalf of the valiant knight Ruy Vásquez. The victim is Ruy Vásquez himself that the mongrel dispatches at the end of the story.

Once more, for the medieval Spaniard race did not seem to be the central issue at all: but a knightly sense of honor, especially during in-group vendettas.

In the next chapter Anaya approaches the ancient texts about El Cid. His life inspired the most important epic poem of Spanish literature: the Cantar de mio Cid. Now that I reread her book after forty years of reading it for the first time I was shocked to see Anaya’s sentence that El Cid was “the terror of Moors and Christians” (my emphasis). When I finished the chapter I was surprised to learn that El Cid’s fame was not entirely based on the feat of expelling some Moors from the peninsula, but mainly on the chivalrous character of this historical (and legendary) figure of the Reconquista.

This, and similar cases I’ll be recounting in these brief series about the classics of Spanish literature, moves me to expand the category of this blog previously known as “White suicide” as the “Aryan problem.”

Categories
Literature

Ward Kendall’s

Hold Back This Day is a dystopian science-fiction novel about a future in which a totalitarian government promotes universal miscegenation to eliminate all racial differences—in the name of diversity, of course.

Categories
Literature

Anti-white dystopia

“We have the last unblended arrivals from Europe Zone 5—in particular from Iceland Sector 15.”

Jeff observed studiously, noting how the black students from Borneo and New Guinea were being purposely intermingled with various blondes, brunettes, and redheads of European heritage.

“As demonstrated here, these Europe Zone candidates are entirely Skintone 1s and 2s. Like their darker counterparts, they too are far removed from the government ideal that the World Gov is very near to achieving…”

“Which is a world Skintone Class 5s,” Jeff amplified, unconsciously parroting the government party line. [p. 11]

Categories
Child abuse Literature Yearling (novel)

The Yearling, 10

“Hey, Ma, Flag’ll soon be a yearlin’. Won’t he be purty, Ma, with leetle ol’ horns? Won’t his horns be purty?”

“He’d not look purty to me did he have a crown on. And angel’s wings.”

He followed her to cajole her. She sat down to look over the dried cow-peas in the pan. He rubbed his nose over the down of her cheek. He liked the furry feel of it.

“Ma, you smell like a roastin’ ear. A roastin’ ear in the sun.”

“Oh git along. I been mixin’ cornbread.”

“‘Tain’t that. Listen, Ma, you don’t keer do Flag have horns or no. Do you?”

“Hit’ll be that much more to butt and bother.”

He did not press the point. Flag was in increasing disgrace, at best. He had learned to slip free from the halter about his neck. When it was tightened so that he could not get out of it, he used the same tactics that a calf used against restraint. He strained against it until his eyes bulged and his breathing choked, and to save his perverse life, it was necessary to release him. Then when he was free, he raised havoc. There was no holding him in the shed. He would have razed it to the ground. He was wild and impudent. He was allowed in the house only when Jody was on hand to keep up with him. But the closed door seemed to make him possessed to enter. If it was not barred, he butted it open. He watched his chance and slipped in to cause some minor damage whenever Ma Baxter’s back was turned.

♣ ♣ ♣


Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
I don’t want to add more excerpts. But I must say that an incident narrated in the rest of the tale, which I read this year, shocked me. I could easily write a long, detailed entry for my blog on Alice Miller, but child abuse is a subject that does not interest the readers of WDH.

A couple of days ago I caught my father telling his grandson that instead of watching TV for hours he should be reading the beautiful literature for young people, and he mentioned the beauty of a Julius Verne novel. But he’s a hypocrite, since his grandson does exactly what my father does: watching TV for hours everyday and, even in his late eighties, still going to the theater to watch Hollywood filth.

With classics like The Yearling I find it almost a sacrilege that adults are allowing their kids to watch TV. Although I only read The Yearling as an adult, I must say that as a child Wyeth’s illustrations provided some homely zest and a sense of trust in life and in one’s own parents that is difficult to transmit in words.

If anyone actually read the whole novel and is curious about why the culmination of the story surprised me so much, let me know and we can discuss it here.

Spoilers for those who haven’t read it!