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Category: Constantine

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Catholic Church Constantine Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 172

Constantine I (also Saint Constantine or Constantine the Great)
was a Roman emperor from 306 to 337 c.e.

 

Karlheinz Deschner responds to Prof. Maria R.-Alföldi’s review

Mrs Alföldi reviews and censures in just twelve pages (148-159), and under the title ,,Kaiser Konstantin: ein Grosser der Geschichte?”, the seventy-two pages of my chapter ‘Saint Constantine, the first Christian Emperor: Symbol of Seventeen Centuries of Ecclesiastical History’, which appears in the first volume of my Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums [pages 157-176 of our abridged translation — Ed.]

Almost at the outset, she finds it ‘difficult to give even a rough account of the content of Deschner’s explanations’ (page 149). Why’s that? No doubt because she dislikes the content itself, which is divided into ten subheadings and thus perfectly outlined, just as she dislikes the non-academic orientation, which she describes as ‘popular’ and even ‘populist’ (page 159), ‘marked by a strong tendentiousness’ (page 149), which I had already explicitly acknowledged in my General Introduction. And at the end of her report, she urges a cautious handling of historiography, which I can only agree with all my energy!

Maria R.-Alföldi’s essay appears in the book’s third part, which the editor entitles ‘Model of Concrete Criticism’. Model, pars pro toto. I now submit this rebuttal, closely following the text, to a detailed critique.

‘It is read’, writes the professor ‘that Constantine falsified his genealogy.’ And also: ‘The first years of the young emperor’s rule in the West are nothing but dreadful wars against the poor Germans, who were later taken prisoner and mercilessly slaughtered’.

It all appears as terribly exaggerated by me, as untrue, although again this isn’t said explicitly. Both ancient sources and modern research confirm that Constantine’s barbarism was already in his time something infrequent and appalling. However, the lady critic prefers discreet insinuations, and hurtful ironies, which present me as an obscurantist historian, without her openly expressing it with decent malice aforethought.

But while Mrs Alföldi reproaches me, as she often does, of misleading the reader, it’s she who does it. And while she states that I suggest that Constantine carried out the war, she suggests already with the following sentence, and again against truthfulness, ‘once again one reads extremely emotional descriptions of atrocities of all kinds’ (page 150). Such descriptions, as I wrote, come to me in their entirety from the Church Fathers Eusebius and Lactantius.

With ‘underhanded acrimony’ (page 150), that is what I am reproached for, I then comment on the universal sovereignty of him whom she labels ‘Byzantine’ rhetoric. Constantine ‘forces the Church to come under his sway; and the Church in turn, according to Deschner, willingly and opportunistically bends over backwards to get at money and power’. But that would only be ‘a certain, perfectly recognizable palace group.’

No, because the Church as a whole achieved through Constantine, and his immediate successors, eminent influence and prestige. This is indisputable. Throughout the empire, the bishops exalted the dictator. Their tokens of favour were showered even on the hierarchies of distant countries, and reached the Catholic clergy as a whole—who was now a recognised and privileged caste—in the form of money, honours, titles, basilicas and other buildings; in the form of exemption from burdens and taxes, release from oath-taking and the obligation to testify, permission to use the state post, the right to admit last dispositions and bequests; moreover, the sovereign—as many others would do in the future!—delegated part of the state power to the prelates, although he also decided on matters of faith.

Quite a few prelates already imitated the style and ceremony of the imperial residence in their episcopal sees. Again and again, it is said in the sources: ‘He made them respectable and enviable in the eyes of all’, ‘with his orders and laws he brought them even greater prestige,’ and ‘with imperial munificence, he opened up all the treasures…’ Soon, precisely the greatest fathers of the Church, such as Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome and Cyril of Alexandria, will praise Constantine, who not only called himself co-bishop, ‘bishop for external interests’ (epískopos tôn ektós) but who modestly didn’t hesitate to call himself ‘our divinity’ (nostrum numen)…

The always obscene association of the throne and altar, especially in countless massacres from the 4th century to the present day, is not a product of my ‘tendentiousness’ (page 149), but something quite appalling. But as with so many conformists by profession, in her prose there is hardly any blood flowing, not a single drop; whereas it reminds me, as it seems to me, with all horror: ‘the battles are awash with blood’ (page 149) as if I had spilt it!

On the contrary, she ignores, no doubt with the bulk of the historians’ guild, the lamentable practice of hanging the little rascals and extolling the great ones. Nothing specifically Christian, no doubt. Already the African bishop Cyprian, martyr and saint, decried this practice in paganism and lamented that when blood is shed in private, the act is called a heinous crime, but if it is shed publicly it is bravery. ‘The extent of the havoc is that which leaves the crime unpunished.’

She speaks only in an aside, summarily and with the coldness of the investigator, of the ‘tragic end’ of Constantine’s relatives. Conversely, my prose narrates that the great saint had his father-in-law Maximian hanged in Marseilles, then had his brothers-in-law Licinius and Basianbus strangled; had Licinius’ son murdered at Carthage, ordered his own son Crispus poisoned (while murdering many of his friends) and had his wife Fausta, mother of five children, drowned in the bath… In addition, Constantine sent other parricides to hell using the terrible and long-gone insaculation (poena cullei, the particularly slow drowning in a leather sack).

This in no way fits in with his apologetic concept of the despot who is still highly celebrated by theologians and historians; who, ‘under the influence of Christian conceptions’, as the Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte exalts him, shows ‘a growing respect for the dignity of the human person’, the ‘Christian respect for human life’ (Baus, Catholic). That saintly usurer would, for example, have the tongues of informers cut out before their execution, would have the domestic servants who had taken part in the abduction of a bride killed, would have the slaves burnt and the wet nurses killed by pouring molten lead into their mouths, would have every slave and domestic who had accused his master executed immediately, without investigation or the production of witnesses.

On all these things and many more, the expert on Constantine doesn’t say a word. Quite the contrary: she goes on to say that I always treat the Constantinian penal legislation negatively, that I even ‘brand the emperor as anti-Semitic’, and this ‘despite the known fact that at that time the Jews were still free to practise their faith’ (page 151).

As if the Jews’ free practice of their faith were in contradiction with the anti-Semitism of the emperor, a sovereign who mocks the Jews as spiritually blind, a ‘hateful nation’ to whom he attributes an ‘innate insanity’; to whom he allows the visit to Jerusalem only one day a year. He bluntly forbids them to have Christian slaves, thus beginning their alienation from agriculture, with such grave consequences. Moreover, this is the first anti-Jewish law on conversion to Judaism (autumn 315), threatening both the Jew who converts and the Christian convert with the stake.

The specialist on the emperor silences the fact that her hero, with increasing power and freedom of movement, also attacked the pagans with increasing rigour.

This is particularly evident in the last years of Constantine’s rule, although he had no interest in opposing the vast majority of the empire. Nevertheless, Constantine forbade the rebuilding of ruined temples and even ordered their closure. In all the provinces, moreover, the temples were stolen and ‘plundered without regard’ (Tinnefeld) for him, his favourites and the churches; in fact, it came to ‘the theft of works of art such as had never occurred before’ (Kornemann). And then Constantine also arranged for their destruction. ‘He destroyed to the ground those temples which the idolaters held in the greatest veneration’ (Kornemann). ‘At a sign whole temples were lying on the ground’, Bishop Eusebius recounts in triumphant tones.

Nor did the potentate delay in ordering the burning of Porphyry’s fifteen books Against the Christians, in which he ‘advanced the entire biblical criticism of the Modern Age’ (Poulsen), which, according to the theologian Harnack, ‘has not yet been refuted’.

On all this Maria R.-Alföldi is once again completely silent…
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: I won’t abbreviate the following 4,700 words of Deschner’s retort; the above translation is enough to provide an idea. My post tomorrow Sunday will be devoted to my aspirations on how to pass on Deschner’s legacy in the English-speaking community, especially among those non-Christians who still believe in the fourteen words.

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Constantine Heinrich Himmler Hitler's Religion (book) Richard Weikart Sexual "liberation"

Some reflections

I would like to say something about the seventh chapter of Hitler’s Religion; not just what I quoted here, but the entire chapter. My reading of this book continues to confirm my premise: The most influential NS men, and those who inspired them, were just one step away from reaching the other side of the psychological Rubicon, but didn’t reach solid ground. (N.b.: I cannot link to the article ‘My stepping stones’ on the psychological Rubicon for the moment, as a technician is just about to see if it is possible to upload the WordPress-censored entries here. If this new incarnation of WDH doesn’t appear for a few moments, don’t be alarmed: we’re reconfiguring it.)

From this follows the need to create a new religious movement to take this last step, a movement I call the priesthood of the sacred words. And in doing so I must confess that I find myself somewhat closer to Himmler than to Hitler on this point.

On pages 189-90 of Hitler’s Religion Weikart informs us that, although Hitler criticised Gothic cathedrals and medieval mysticism for their somberness, he didn’t believe that NS was a religious cult for holding mystical ceremonies. In fact, his 1938 Nuremberg Rally speech was an open rebuke to Himmler, Rosenberg and other neo-pagans in the movement. Rosenberg himself in his major work recalled that Hitler had disapproved of Himmler’s plans to reintroduce the cult of Wotan and Thor. Hitler was even suspicious of Rosenberg’s studies of Germanic prehistory because he preferred the cultures of Greece and Rome.

Recall from The Fair Race that the original cultures of Greece and Rome were founded by Norsemen, and that only in their more decadent stages did they undergo interbreeding. I can well understand Hitler on this point and what he said about Wotan in one of his after-dinner talks. But Himmler’s idea was the right one: for a movement to be successful, it is necessary for believers to feel the mysterium tremendum, what Jung and others call the numinous.

And that can only be inspired by a semi-religious movement. I understand Hitler because there were occult and parapsychological aspects in some high-ranking National Socialists that had to be rejected. But an ideal compromise would have been, as Manu Rodríguez rightly said in one of our books, to use the rebuilt Greco-Roman temples (starting e.g., by destroying the Vatican and putting in its place a huge temple to Zeus) to teach languages, history and literature of the peoples with Nordic blood (peoples that obviously include Greece and Rome in their origins).

The other reflection I wanted to communicate this day is due to the recent article ‘What is a Woman?’ by Spencer Quinn, who tells us: ‘It began in the 1960s, when we pretended that blacks were the intellectual equals of whites’.

That is not true. While Quinn is correct in saying that Matt Walsh (pic above), who produced the amazing documentary What is a Woman?, didn’t dare to name the influential Jews in gender ideology, the ideology of equality began in the writings of a much older Jew, St Paul. Constantine brought to Constantinople the inversion of Greco-Roman values we read in that famous verse in the Epistle to the Galatians, inducing, with all the power of the Roman Empire, a melting pot of races in the so-called second Rome. There began the Aryan decline big time. While the ancient Greeks and Romans with Nordic blood were racists, Christianity broke down the barriers—not something as recent as the 1960s.

Once I finish reviewing Weikart’s book on Hitler’s religion, we will continue translating Karlheinz Deschner’s history of Christianity.

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Albert Speer Alfred Rosenberg Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Catholic Church Constantine Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian Heinrich Himmler Hitler's Religion (book) Jesus Joseph Goebbels Michelangelo Old Testament Protestantism Richard Weikart Schutzstaffel (SS) St Paul

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 4

(excerpts)

by Richard Weikart

Many Christian leaders in the 1930s and 1940s, both within and outside Germany, recognized Hitler was no friend to their religion. In 1936, Karl Spiecker, a German Catholic living in exile in France, detailed the Nazi fight against Christianity in his book Hitler gegen Christus (Hitler against Christ). The Swedish Lutheran bishop Nathan Soderblom, a leading figure in the early twentieth-century ecumenical movement, was not so ecumenical that he included Hitler in the ranks of Christianity. After meeting with Hitler sometime in the mid-1930s, he stated, “As far as Christianity is concerned, this man is chemically pure from it.”

Many Germans, however, had quite a different image of their Führer. Aside from those who saw him as a Messiah worthy of veneration and maybe even worship, many regarded him as a faithful Christian. Rumors circulated widely in Nazi Germany that Hitler carried a New Testament in his vest pocket, or that he read daily a Protestant devotional booklet. Though these rumors were false, at the time many Germans believed them…

Most historians today agree that Hitler was not a Christian in any meaningful sense. Neil Gregor, for instance, warns that Hitler’s “superficial deployment of elements of Christian discourse” should not mislead people to think that Hitler shared the views of “established religion.” Michael Burleigh argues that Nazism was anticlerical and despised Christianity. He recognizes that Hitler was not an atheist, but “Hitler’s God was not the Christian God, as conventionally understood.” In his withering but sober analysis of the complicity of the Christian churches in Nazi Germany, Robert Ericksen depicts Hitler as duplicitous when he presented himself publicly as a Christian…

However, when we turn to Hitler’s view of Jesus, we find a remarkable consistency from his earliest speeches to his latest Table Talks. He expressed admiration for Jesus publicly and privately, without once directly criticizing Him. But his vision of Jesus was radically different from the teachings of the Catholic Church he grew up in. For him, Jesus was not a Jew, but a fellow Aryan. He only rarely stated this explicitly, though he frequently implied it by portraying Jesus as an anti-Semite. However, in April 1921, he told a crowd in Rosenheim that he could not imagine Christ as anything other than blond-haired and blue-eyed, making clear that he considered Jesus an Aryan. In an interview with a journalist in November 1922, he actually claimed Jesus was Germanic…

While Hitler appreciated Jesus because he considered him a valiant anti-materialistic anti-Semite, I have never found any evidence that Hitler believed in the deity of Jesus. Richard Steigmann-Gall bases his mistaken claim that Hitler believed in Jesus as God on a mistranslation of Hitler’s April 22, 1922 speech (some of which we discussed earlier in this chapter). According to the Norman Baynes’ edition of The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, during that speech Hitler stated about Jesus, “It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to the fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as sufferer but as fighter.” The term that is translated “God’s truth!” is wahrhaftiger Gott, a common German interjection that is rendered in some German-English dictionaries as “good God!” or “good heavens!” In the original German edition, wahrhaftiger Gott is set off in commas, indicating that it is indeed an interjection… Steigmann-Gall uses this mistranslation to argue that Hitler believed in the deity of Jesus. Apparently, he did not understand the colloquial expression used…

While Hitler’s positive attitude toward Jesus—at least the Jesus of his imagination—did not seem to change over his career, his position vis-a-vis Christianity is much more complex. Many scholars doubt that as an adult he was ever personally committed to any form of Christianity. They interpret his pro-Christian utterances as nothing more than the cynical ploy of a crafty politician. Almost all historians, including Steigmann-Gall, admit that Hitler was anti-Christian in the last several years of his life…

Even when he publicly announced his Christian faith in 1922 or at other times, Hitler never professed commitment to Catholicism. Further, despite his public stance upholding Christianity before 1924, he provided a clue in one of his earliest speeches that he was already antagonistic toward Christianity. In August 1920, Hitler viciously attacked the Jews in his speech, “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” One accusation he leveled was that the Jews had used Christianity to destroy the Roman Empire. He then claimed Christianity was spread primarily by Jews. Since Hitler was a radical anti-Semite, his characterization of Christianity as a Jewish plot was about as harsh an indictment as he could bring against Christianity. Hitler was also a great admirer of the ancient Greeks and Romans, whom he considered fellow Aryans. Blaming Christianity for ruining the Roman Empire thus expressed considerable anti-Christian animus. Hitler often discussed both themes—Christianity as Jewish, and Christianity as the cause of Rome’s downfall—later in life.

Hitler’s anti-Christian outlook remained largely submerged before 1924, because—as Hitler himself explained in Mein Kampf—he did not want to offend possible supporters…

But by the time Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in 1924-25, he was walking a tightrope. His political ally, General Ludendorff, was increasingly hostile to the Catholic Church, as were many on the radical Right in Weimar Germany. Hitler did not want to follow them into political oblivion—and indeed Ludendorff did end up politically isolated, perhaps in part because of his antireligious crusade. But Hitler was also sensitive to the anticlerical thrust within and outside his party. Thus, after warning his followers in the first volume of Mein Kampf against offending people’s religious tastes, he threw caution to the wind in the second volume by sharply criticizing Christianity. In one passage, he complained that both Christian churches in Germany were contributing to the decline of the German people, because they supported a system that allowed those with hereditary diseases to procreate. The problem, he thought, was that the churches focused on the spirit and neglected the physical basis of a healthy life. Hitler immediately followed up this critique by blasting the churches for carrying out mission work among black Africans, who are “healthy, though primitive and inferior, human beings,” whom the missionaries turn into “a rotten brood of bastards.” In this passage, Hitler harshly castigated Christianity for not supporting his eugenics and racial ideology.

Worse yet, he actually threatened to obliterate Christianity later in the second volume. After calling Christianity fanatically intolerant for destroying other religions, Hitler explained that Nazism would have to be just as intolerant to supplant Christianity:

A philosophy filled with infernal intolerance will only be broken by a new idea, driven forward by the same spirit, championed by the same mighty will, and at the same time pure and absolutely genuine in itself. The individual may establish with pain today that with the appearance of Christianity the first spiritual terror entered in to the far freer ancient world, but he will not be able to contest the fact that since then the world has been afflicted and dominated by this coercion, and that coercion is broken only by coercion, and terror only by terror. Only then can a new state of affairs be constructively created.

Hitler’s anti-Christian sentiment shines through clearly here, as he called Christianity a “spiritual terror” that has “afflicted” the world. Earlier in the passage, he also argued Christian intolerance was a manifestation of a Jewish mentality, once again connecting Christianity with the people he most hated. Even more ominously, he called his fellow Nazis to embrace an intolerant worldview so they could throw off the shackles of Christianity. He literally promised to visit terror on Christianity. Even though several times later in life, especially before 1934, Hitler would try to portray himself as a pious Christian, he had already blown his cover.

Hitler’s tirade against Christianity in Mein Kampf, including the threat to demolish it, diverged remarkably from his normal public persona… In January 1937, Goebbels was with Hitler during an internecine debate on religion and reported, “The Führer thinks Christianity is ripe for destruction. That may still take a long time, but it is coming.”

In reading through Goebbels’ Diaries, Hitler’s monologues, and Rosenberg’s Diaries, it is rather amazing how often Hitler discussed religion with his entourage, especially during World War II. He was clearly obsessed with the topic. On December 13, 1941, for example, just two days after declaring war on the United States, he told his Gauleiter (district leaders) that he was going to annihilate the Jews, but he was postponing his campaign against the church until after the war, when he would deal with them. According to Rosenberg, both on that day and the following, Hitler’s monologues were primarily about the “problem of Christianity.” In a letter to a friend in July 1941, Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder claimed that in Hitler’s evening discussions at the headquarters, “the church plays a large role.” She added that she found Hitler’s religious comments very illuminating, as he exposed the deception and hypocrisy of Christianity. Hitler’s own monologues confirm Schroeder’s impression…

When Hitler told his Gauleiter in December 1941 that the regime would wait until after the war to solve the church problem, he was probably trying to restrain some of the hotheads in his party. But he also promised the day of reckoning would eventually come. He told them, “There is an insoluble contradiction between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic worldview. However, this contradiction cannot be resolved during the war, but after the war we must step up to solve this contradiction. I see a possible solution only in the further consolidation of the National Socialist worldview”…

At a cabinet meeting in 1937, Hitler commented, “I know that my un-Christian Germanic SS units with their general non-denominational belief in God can grasp their duty for their people (Volk) more clearly than those other soldiers who have been made stupid through the catechism.” Hitler’s contempt for Christianity could hardly have been more palpable.

Hitler’s press chief, Otto Dietrich, confirmed Frank’s impression. In private, according to Dietrich, Hitler was uniformly antagonistic to Christianity. Dietrich wrote in his memoirs:

…Primitive Christianity, he declared, was the “first Jewish-Communistic cell”…

Dietrich stated, “Hitler was convinced that Christianity was outmoded and dying. He thought he could speed its death by systematic education of German youth. Christianity would be replaced, he thought, by a new heroic, racial ideal of God.” This confirms the point Goebbels made in his diary—that Hitler hoped ultimately to replace Christianity with a Germanic worldview through indoctrination of children…

[Albert] Speer recalled a conversation in which Hitler was told that if Muslims had won the Battle of Tours, Germans would be Muslim. Hitler responded by lamenting Germany’s fate to have become Christian: “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” As this conversation reveals, Hitler saw religion not as an expression of truth, but rather as a means or tool to achieve other ends—namely, the preservation and advancement of the German people or Nordic race. In April 1942, Hitler again compared Christianity unfavorably with Islam and Japanese religion. In the case of Japan, their religion had protected them from the “poison of Christianity,” he opined…

In fact, Hitler contemptuously called Christianity a poison and a bacillus and openly mocked its teachings… After scoffing at doctrines such as the Fall, the Virgin Birth, and redemption through the death of Jesus, Hitler stated, “Christianity is the most insane thing that a human brain in its delusion has ever brought forth, a mockery of everything divine.” He followed this up with a hard right jab to any believing Catholic, claiming that a “Negro with his fetish” is far superior to someone who believes in transubstantiation. Hitler… believed black Africans were subhumans intellectually closer to apes than to Europeans, so to him, this was a spectacular insult to Catholics… Then, according to Hitler, when others did not accept these strange teachings, the church tortured them into submission…

Another theme that surfaced frequently in Hitler’s monologues of 1941-42 was that the sneaky first-century rabbi Paul was responsible for repackaging the Jewish worldview in the guise of Christianity, thereby causing the downfall of the Roman Empire. In December 1941, Hitler stated that although Christ was an Aryan, “Paul used his teachings to mobilize the underworld and organize a proto-Bolshevism. With its emergence the beautiful clarity of the ancient world was lost.” In fact, since Christianity was tainted from the very start, Hitler sometimes referred to it as “Jew-Christianity”… He denigrated the “Jew-Christians” of the fourth century for destroying Roman temples and even called the destruction of the Alexandrian library a “Jewish-Christian deed.” Hitler thus construed the contest between Christianity and the ancient pagan world as part of the racial struggle between Jews and Aryans.

In November 1944, Hitler described in greater detail how Paul had corrupted the teachings of Jesus…

Hitler’s preference for the allegedly Aryan Greco-Roman world over the Christian epoch shines through clearly in Goebbels’s diary entry for April 8, 1941… “The Führer is a person entirely oriented toward antiquity. He hates Christianity, because it has deformed all noble humanity.” Goebbels even noted that Hitler preferred the “wise smiling Zeus to a pain-contorted crucified Christ,” and believed “the ancient people’s view of God is more noble and humane than the Christian view.” Rosenberg recorded the same conversation, adding that Hitler considered classical antiquity more free and cheerful than Christianity with its Inquisition and burning of witches and heretics. He loved the monumental architecture of the Romans, but hated Gothic architecture. The Age of Augustus was, for Hitler, “the highpoint of history.”

From Hitler’s perspective, Christianity had ruined a good thing. In July 1941 he stated, “The greatest blow to strike humanity is Christianity,” which is “a monstrosity of the Jews. Through Christianity the conscious lie has come into the world in questions of religion.” Six months later, he blamed Christianity for bringing about the collapse of Rome. He then contrasted two fourth-century Roman emperors: Constantine, also known as Constantine the Great, and Julian, nicknamed Julian the Apostate by subsequent Christian writers because he fought against Christianity and tried to return Rome to its pre-Christian pagan worship. Hitler thought the monikers should be reversed, since in his view Constantine was a traitor and Julian’s writings were “pure wisdom.” Hitler also expressed his appreciation for Julian the Apostate in October 1941 after reading Der Scheiterhaufen: Worte grosser Ketzer (Burned at the Stake: Words of Great Heretics) by SS officer Kurt Egger. This book contained anti-Christian sayings by prominent anticlerical writers, including Julian, Frederick the Great, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Lagarde, and others. It was a shame, Hitler said, that after so many clear-sighted “heretics,” Germany was not further along in its religious development… A few days later, Hitler recommended that Eggers’s book should be distributed to millions because it showed the good judgment that the ancient world (meaning Julian) and the eighteenth century (i.e., Enlightenment thinkers) had about the church.

This notion that Christianity was a Jewish plot to destroy the Roman world was a theme Hitler touched on throughout his career, from his 1920 speech “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” to the end of his life. It made a brief appearance in his major speech to the Nuremberg Party Rally in 1929, and reappeared in a February 1933 speech to military leaders. In a small private meeting with his highest military leaders and his Foreign Minister in November 1937, Hitler told them that Rome fell because of “the disintegrating effect of Christianity.” From the way that Hitler bashed a generic “Christianity” as a Jewish-Bolshevik scheme, it seems clear that he was targeting all existing forms of Christianity…

During a monologue on December 14, 1941, Hitler divulged a decisive distaste for Protestantism. That day, Hitler learned Hanns Kerrl, a Protestant who was his minister for church affairs, had passed away. Hitler remarked, “With the best intentions Minister Kerrl wanted to produce a synthesis of National Socialism and Christianity. I do not believe that is possible.” Hitler explained that the form of Christianity with which he most sympathized was that which prevailed during the times of papal decay. Regardless of whether the pope was a criminal, if he produced beauty, he is “more sympathetic to me than a Protestant pastor, who returns to the primitive condition of Christianity,” Hitler declared. “Pure Christianity, the so-called primitive Christianity… leads to the destruction of humanity; it is unadulterated Bolshevism in a metaphysical framework.” In other words, Hitler preferred Leo X, the great Renaissance patron of the arts who excommunicated Luther, to the Wittenberg monk who called the church back to primitive, Pauline Christianity. According to Rosenberg’s account of this same conversation, Hitler specifically mentioned the corrupt Renaissance Pope Julius II, Leo X’s predecessor, as being “less dangerous than primitive Christianity”…


(Note of the Editor: Left, The monument of Julius II, with Michelangelo’s statues of Moses, with Rachel and Leah). Many anti-Semites in early twentieth-century Germany despised the Old Testament as the product of the Jewish spirit, and Hitler was no exception. He saw the Old Testament as the antithesis of everything he stood for. In his view, it taught materialism, greed, and deception. Further, it promoted racial purity for the Jews, since it taught them to avoid mingling with other races…

Moreover, Hitler lamented that the Bible had been translated into German, because this made Jewish doctrines readily available to the German people. It would have been better, he stated, if the Bible had remained only in Latin, rather than causing mental disorders and delusions…

Many SS members followed Himmler’s example and encouragement to withdraw from the churches, and Hitler lauded them for their anti-church attitude. Hitler once advised Mussolini to try to wean the Italian people away from the Catholic Church, lest he encounter problems in the future. When Mussolini asked how to do this, Hitler turned to his military adjutant and asked him how many men in Hitler’s entourage attended church. The adjutant replied, “None”…

In the end… he [Hitler] had utter contempt for the Jesus who told His followers to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. He also did not believe that Jesus’s death had any significance other than showing the perfidy of the Jews, nor did he believe in Jesus’s resurrection.

Categories
Constantine Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) St Paul

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 8

Historically, little is known about the person of Jesus of Nazareth, his origins, his life before the age of thirty, so much so that serious authors have questioned his very existence.

Editor’s Note: Incredibly, Savitri said this decades ago. Nowadays, for most white nationalists questioning the existence of the historical Jesus is still taboo.

According to the canonical Gospels, he was raised in the Jewish religion. But was he a Jew by blood? More than one of the words attributed to him would suggest that he was not.

Editor’s Note: But this phrase is slightly misleading. If we are dealing with a mythical figure, it makes no sense to speculate about what ‘he’ used to say.

It has been said that the Galileans were an island of the Indo-European population in Palestine. In any case, what is important—what is at the origin of the turning point in history that Christianity represents—is that, Jewish or not, he is presented as such, and, what is more, as the expected Messiah of the Jewish people, by Paul of Tarsus, the true founder of Christianity, as well as by all the apologists who follow one another over the centuries.

What is important is that he is integrated into the Jewish tradition, he is the link between it and the old Mediterranean myth of the young God of Vegetation, dead and resurrected: the Messiah to whom the essential attributes of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Dionysus, and all the other dead and victorious Gods of Death are attributed, and who pushes them all into the shadows for his own benefit—and that of his people—with an intransigence that none of them knew, a typically Jewish intransigence: that of Paul of Tarsus, of his teacher Gamaliel, and all the servants of the ‘jealous God’, Yahweh.

Not only is a ‘new meaning’ given to the ancient mysteries, but this meaning is proclaimed the only good, the only true one: the rites and myths of pagan antiquity, from the most remote times, having only ‘prepared’ and ‘prefigured’ it, just as ancient philosophy had only sensitised souls to the reception of the supreme revelation. And this revelation is, for Paul, as it was for the Jews of the Judeo-Alexandrian school before him, and for all the Christian apologists who were to follow him—Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Origen—, the one given to Jews by the God ‘of all men’.

Jewish intolerance, hitherto confined to one people (and to a despised people whom no one thought of imitating), spread with Christianity, and later with Islam—this reaction against the Hellenisation of Christian theology—to half of the earth. And, what is more, it is this very intolerance that has made the success of the religions linked to the tradition of Israel.

I have mentioned the religions of salvation—in particular that of Mithras and that of Cybele—that flourished in the Roman Empire at the time when Christianity was in its infancy. At first sight, each of them had as much chance as Christianity of attracting to itself the restless crowds for whom the Roman order was not, or was no longer, sufficient, and who, increasingly bastardized, felt themselves alienated from any national cult whatsoever. Each of them offered the average person everything he was promised—the religion of the crucified Jesus—and with rites all the more capable of attracting his adhesion, because they were more barbaric.

In the third century of the Christian era, it was the cult of Mithra, the old Indo-European solar god, seen through the thousand distorting mirrors represented by the races and traditions of his new worshippers, which seemed to be the one to prevail, provided that no decisive factor intervened in favour of one of his rivals. The God was popular with the legionaries and their officers. Emperors had seen fit to receive initiation into his mysteries under the hot-blooded shower of the Redeeming Bull. An increasing number of common people were following the movement. It may be said with all certainty that the world dominated by Rome came very close to becoming Mithraic—instead of Christian—for some twenty centuries. It can be said with no less certainty that it did not become so, not because of any ‘superiority’ of the Christian doctrine of salvation over the teaching of the priests of Mithras, nor because of the absence of bloody rites among the Christians, but because of the protection accorded to the religion of the Crucified One by Emperor Constantine, and no other factor. Now, it was precisely the intolerance of Christianity—especially, if not solely—that earned the preference of the master of the Roman world.

Editor’s Note: Like almost everyone else, Savitri was unaware that Christianity was imposed on the Mediterranean by destroying the temples, statues and libraries of the classical world (those new visitors who haven’t read the Judea vs. Rome essay should read it now).

What the emperor wanted above all was to give this immense world, populated by people of the most diverse races and traditions, as solid a unity as possible, without which it would be difficult for it to resist for long the push of those who were called Barbarians. Unity of worship was the only thing he could hope to impose on it, provided he could achieve it quickly. Among the religions of salvation, which were so popular, that of Mithras undoubtedly had the greatest number of followers. But it did not promise to spread quickly enough, first and foremost because it did not claim to be the only Way and the only Truth. It risked allowing its rivals to remain for a long time, and the much-desired unity would not be achieved—or would take centuries to achieve—when the interests of the Empire demanded that it be achieved in a few decades.

Editor’s Note: This madness was similar to what Western governments do today: Let’s dilute the white race in the hope that the mongrel masses will be easier to tame. Those familiar with the content of this site know that the policies of Constantine and subsequent emperors only weakened the West to the point of rendering it vulnerable, centuries later, to Islam and the conquests of the Huns and Mongols.

The same could be said of the old cult of Cybele and Attys: its priests did not proclaim, like the Jews, that they alone possessed the truth. On the contrary, they believed, like all the men of antiquity (except the Jews), that the truth has innumerable facets, and that each cult helps its followers to grasp one aspect of it. They too would have allowed rival religions to flourish freely.

Christianity, though already in the fourth century steeped in ideas and symbols borrowed either from Neoplatonism, the old Aegean mysticism or forms even further removed from the eternal Tradition, had inherited from Judaism the spirit of intolerance. Even its most enlightened apologists, those most richly nourished by classical Greek culture, such as St. Clement of Alexandria or Origen, who, far from rejecting ancient wisdom, considered it as a preparation for that of the Gospels, did not put the two pearls of wisdom on the same level.

There was, in their eyes, ‘progress’ from the former to the latter, and Jewish ‘revelation’ retained its priority over the more distant echo of the voice of the one god which could be detected in the pagan philosophers. As for the great mass of Christians, they regarded all the gods of the earth as ‘abominations’—or ‘demons’—except the one who had revealed himself to men of all races through the Old Testament prophets—the Jewish prophets—and through Jesus and his posthumous disciple, Paul of Tarsus; the latter, a hundred per cent Jew, the first considered a Jew and a son of David by the Church, although his origin is unknown and his historicity has been questioned.

Categories
Constantine Currency crash Michael O'Meara Racial right

Oasis in the middle of the desert

Concerned about the events of this month, I began my work this morning by visiting the main sites of white nationalism. I felt completely dehydrated when I ran into the usual: these guys are bourgeois to the core! Not even with this transitional government that will hand over all power to an anti-white mulatta after the senile man doesn’t run for a second term, do they speak like Aryans.

Desperate, in a search engine I typed the words ‘revolution’ and the name of the retired revolutionary writer ‘Michael O’Meara’. I came across an oasis in the desert! I am referring to the article I added today, ‘Against white reformists’, although I had already quoted some of those passages almost seven years ago. The first sentence of the article was the water that brought me back to life after wandering in the wasteland of white nationalism: ‘Almost as depressing as the thought of our people’s extinction is that of the white opposition to it’. But O’Meara is not perfect. He said:

The Modern West, unlike its Medieval and Ancient counterparts, has shed all sense of tradition, transcendence, and fidelity.

Although he wrote it in 2007, this shows that he was unaware of the real history of Christianity (‘unlike its Medieval and Ancient counterparts…’). In fact, the best way to understand what’s happening today—a passion to destroy the West—is to see it as the second round of the anti-white zeitgeist in vogue since the House of Constantine, which includes his sons, took over the Roman Empire. (New visitors to this site should read the linked masthead in the sidebar that I once tagged as ‘Apocalypse for whites’.) But O’Meara got this other passage right:

Our people face extinction, it follows, because the entire structure of Western life—culture, civilisation, economy, whatever you want to call it—betrays the defining essence of their being.

A huge flaw in American white nationalism, and this is one of O’Meara’s greatest insights, is that it isn’t enough to expose Jewry but rather the enablers of Jewry: the whites themselves. That happened from the bishops of the Constantine House to date.

The development of alternative media, consciousness raising, various local activities to defend white existence must, to start, give no credence to the reformist snare that the system can be made receptive to white interests. This illusion is the greatest treason.

This reminds me of what Greg Johnson said on his most recent podcast: that the only thing we can do is keep talking in the hope that someone in power will support us sooner or later: a feminine stance unworthy of a true Aryan. But Johnson is not alone. All the sites that were ‘dehydrating’ me in the morning say virtually the same thing. As O’Meara predicted, ‘Only a social crisis set off by some cataclysm that makes their normal way of life impossible will cause them to look for alternatives’, to which he adds:

The white race will be reborn, then, not by electing Congressmen, hiring lobbyists, and participating in a system that seeks its destruction, but by returning to its original self—and to the challenge of creating a new elite, a revolutionary vanguard morally and organisationally armed to stand against the Jewish age—so that when the foul system supporting it collapses in decay, there will be someone around to fight for our fair share of the spoils. It’s in this way that the nobles of blood and spirit are born and come to rule.

Yes: this is not the time to write the obituary of the white race as the dollar crisis that we have been talking about is getting closer and closer. And Biden or his current VP when she reaches the presidency will likely be the fallen guy when the American currency collapses. By the way, when in 2014 I had already quoted some passages from O’Meara’s article a commenter said: ‘O’Meara pretty well nailed the White apathy problem here. Whites are unlikely to act, except as a response to dire economic, social and political crises. They really have to realise that they are threatened, dispossessed and hungry, before they will act’.

Very true. And speaking of those who dehydrated me recently Richard Spencer confessed that he is interested in political stability (!!) in his country with the excuse that he has a family, etc. Wanting stability for the establishment is the greatest treason, as O’Meara would say.

Compare such bourgeois way of thinking with what I wrote, and quoted from a Game of Thrones fan, in November 2019 about Baelish’s words, Chaos is a ladder: The character Petyr Baelish, popularly called Littlefinger, is not my favourite. But his biography arc shows a kind of ruthless man to achieve his goals that currently doesn’t exist in the racialist world. Watch Littlefinger describing his philosophy of manipulation at a time when he was allied to the evil King Joffrey.

The ‘climb’ is a metaphor for achieving power, and the ladder—chaos—is how Littlefinger climbs. When things are in disarray it allows him to manipulate so that he is ahead. Chaos means the great houses overlook his birth (he wasn’t a noble), because they need him. It means they are weakened, so they are brought more to his level. Chaos provides opportunities for him to advance, because there are problems to be solved.

I wonder who among so-called nationalists wants System stability, and who craves for utter chaos so that those who fight shall share the spoils after the dollar crashes?

Categories
Constantine

When will you know

that the white race is saved?

When you ask a thousand whites who was the best person in history and they say ‘Hitler’.

When you ask them who was the worst person in history and they say ‘St. Constantine’.

Categories
Constantine Pederasty Rape of the Sabine Women Real men

The transvaluation explained

Stefan Molyneux was recently expelled from YouTube and his thousands of videos, deleted. Yesterday, they also kicked him out of Twitter. For one thing, that’s fine, as Moly, whose mother was Jewish, was always a gate-keeper on the Jewish question. And it is impossible to understand what happens to the West unless someone expands the JQ into what we have been calling CQ, the Christian Question.

However, the day before yesterday, before being expelled from Twitter, Moly was interviewed by a Christian who still has his YouTube channel. Moly said something in the context of parent-child abuse, a topic that I consider my forte: ‘People used to have their fathers’ wounds heal with their relationship with God’.

Very true! And what is happening now in the Aryan collective unconscious is that, since they took away their (((god))), now they have no choice but to imitate, albeit secularly, Jesus through their own self-immolation as in the recent negrolatric events.

Speaking of Twitter, Will Westcott has been a white advocate who uses that platform and says very sharp things. Yesterday for example he said: ‘Liberalism is a state backed religion. Dissent and freedom of speech is not allowed. Heretics will be dox’d, fired from their job, arrested, and charged with a hate crime’.

I don’t mind the word liberalism, but I would have said it this way: Neochristianity, or following Jesus through secular self-immolation, is a state-backed religion. Dissent and freedom of speech are not allowed. Apostates of neochristianity will be dox’d, fired from their job, arrested, and charged with a hate crime.

Westcott recently also tweeted, putting up an image of the Constantine statue, ‘Constantine at York statue is incredibly powerful. The authority, the glamour, the supremacy of the Imperator is so far beyond any leader of our current age who would be worthy of such representation’.

I strongly called Westcott’s attention, leaving him a link to the PDF of The Fair Race and suggesting that he read the first part of the book, which is about how Constantine should be considered the greatest imaginable villain in the history of the ancient world.

Unlike Westcott, Robert Morgan does have a clear notion of the damage that Christianity did to the white race. In his most recent comment he wrote:

The fish doesn’t perceive the water he swims in; or as Ellul put it, when a propaganda has triumphed completely, it disappears from view as propaganda. Then it becomes the normal, replacing whatever existed before with itself. Christianity conquered the West so completely and uprooted paganism so thoroughly that nothing remains in the culture that opposes it. There are only various Christian heresies, some of which, like Marxism, accept the Christian moral outlook on the so-called “brotherhood of man”, but relegate belief in Jesus to an optional accessory, or even oppose it. Gone with paganism is the white man’s primeval joyousness, his celebration of himself as depicted in the sculptures of ancient Rome and Greece. Gone is his sensuality and love of life; gone his love of victory; gone his pride. He learned from Christianity to despise himself, be ashamed of sex, and look forward to death.

And in another comment he added:

A prominent feature of today’s totalitarianism is a 1984-style Anti-Sex League. This operates synergistically with the Puritanical view of sex fostered by Christianity, and now persists as Christianity’s cultural residue even among those who aren’t religious, or even consider themselves anti-Christian.

This is very true and we must analyse it.

Almost without exception, all white advocates ignore, like Westcott, that the anti-white zeitgeist in the collective unconscious of the white man was born in the times of Constantine. That is why it is so important to read Evropa Soberana’s essay in that first part of the book that I compiled. However, reading it is only the beginning to amend our ways, as we shall see in this post.

An individual who truly transvalues all values detects reminiscences of the Christian ethos even in the harshest novel a white advocate has written. I have already talked about this but it is worth repeating. The Turner Diaries contains a passage in which it is said that the Order would take a freedom fighter to the firing squad if he rapes a woman who also belongs to that liberation movement.

The first thing to consider here is that Pierce wrote his novel before the movement of frustrated men emerged on the internet analysing women’s psychology to the point of understanding it. In short, women only become bad if they don’t have many children, just as men become bad if we fail to kill the enemy.

In the context of war, the life of a man is worth infinitely more than the life of a woman, and this is where Pierce erred. One of the toughest episodes during Julius Caesar’s war in Gaul happened when those on Vercingetorix’s side had to expel Gallic women and children from a besieged fortress, as the food was scarce, and it was understood that without the precious life of the male warriors the war would be lost.

Unlike the above anecdote, which shows how precious the male life is during wartime, in the reader’s mind that passage from Pierce’s novel which is very brief, only demoralises the would-be soldier. In total war what counts is to kill, genocide, exterminate, and not leave stone upon stone of the enemy culture as the Romans did in Carthage. Occasionally, this Blond Beast is allowed to rape even the women in his tribe. Although the Vikings TV series is as flawed as Game of Thrones to describe the spirit of yesteryear, I remember in one of the episodes of the first season that Rollo raped a woman from his village simply because he fancied her.

For the white advocate who wants to do something for his race, and even for the Pierce who wrote that passage, it would be absolutely inconceivable if you carried that barbarism into the world today. True, once there is a social contract in a pure white society (think of the Jane Austen or Downton Abbey worlds), rape should not be allowed. But in those societies the institution of marriage (every Jack had his Jill) was rock solid.

The point is that we do not live in times of early or late Victorianism. We live in the time when Christianity (cf. once again Soberana’s essay) has been axiologically transformed into a neochristianity whose goal is that whites immolate themselves.

In these times, the only thing that matters is to disabuse the Aryan man from the lie of millennia as Nietzsche would say. (Hence the priest of the 14 words’ first guideline: ‘Speak only to Aryan males’.) What Morgan says in his second quote could be illustrated not only with the case of the Viking Rollo raping a woman from his village, but with the siege of the Vercingetorix warriors, although now seen from the Roman side.

Homer describes Ganymede as the most beautiful of mortals, and in one version of the myth, Zeus falls in love with his beauty and abducts him to serve as cup-bearer in Olympus. Although Zeus was basically hetero and always had countless affaires with goddesses and human women, he wanted to know what the cute brat tasted like (Lol!). Imagine that one of Julius Caesar’s centurions, a married man with children in a distant village, as most soldiers was sexually starved in the camp. Following the example of Zeus-Jupiter, he fancied a teenager as androgynous as Giton, whom I alluded to recently in this comment, and adopted him as the cup-bearer of his tent.

Who in the Roman world would care, in times of war, that this centurion felt that infatuation for the ephebe? Who the hell would tear their clothes like even racist ‘anti-Christians’ would do today, so loaded on their backs with the ogre of the Xtian superego?

These two examples illustrate what Morgan says in the quote above. Just as Westcott apparently had no inkling of the role Constantine played in the destruction of the ancient world, contemporary racists, even so-called anti-Christians, remain slaves to the moralism dictated by Moses rather than the morality of Homer.

Many people, even those who have congratulated me on this site for the texts I have translated unmasking Christianity, have no idea what the phrase ‘transvaluation of all values’ means.

It means: Be humble!

Be humble enough to recognise that we committed a blunder seventeen hundred years ago. Constantine’s mistake that may cost the race its very existence meant exchanging the beautiful Aryan Gods and the mores accompanying them for the nefarious god of the Jews.

If the white race is heading towards extinction it is due to the pride of refusing to see something so obvious.

Categories
Constantine Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian Evil Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Libanius Library of Alexandria Porphyry of Tyre Roman Catholic popes St Paul

Christianity’s Criminal History, 101

 

Editors’ note:

To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, see the abridged translation of Volume I (here).

 

The Christian Book Burning
and the Annihilation of Classical Culture

Where is the wise person? Where is the educated one? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

—St. Paul, I Corinthians 1:20

Charlatanism is initiated among you by the schoolteacher, and as you have divided the science into parts [sacred & profane], you have moved away from the only true one.

—Tatian

After Jesus Christ, all research is already pointless. If we believe, we no longer demand anything that goes beyond our faith.

—Tertullian

If you want to read historical narratives, there you have the Book of The Kings. If, on the contrary, you want to read the wise men and philosophers, you have the prophets… And if you long for the hymns, you also have the psalms of David.

—Apostolic Constitution (3rd Century)

Religion is, therefore, the central core of the entire educational process and must permeate all educational measures.

—Lexicon for Catholic Life (1952)

 
Constantine ordered to burn the fifteen books of the work Against the Christians written by Porphyry, the most astute of the opponents of Christianity in the pre-Constantinian era: ‘The first state prohibition of books decreed in favour of the Church’ (Hamack). And his successors, Theodosius II and Valentinian III, condemned Porphyry’s work again to the bonfire, in 448. This happened after Eusebius of Caesarea had written twenty-five books against this work and the doctor of the Church Cyril nothing less than thirty.

Towards the end of the 4th century, during the reign of Emperor Valens, there was a great burning of books, accompanied by many executions. That Christian regent gave free rein to his fury for almost two years, behaving like ‘a wild beast’, torturing, strangulating, burning people alive, and beheading. The innumerable records allowed to find the traces of many books that were destroyed, especially in the field of law and the liberal arts. Entire libraries went to the fire in the East. Sometimes they were eliminated by their owners under the effect of panic.

On the occasion of the assaults on the temples, the Christians destroyed, especially in the East, not only the images of the gods but also the liturgical books and those of the oracles. The Catholic Emperor Jovian (363-364) had the Antioch library destroyed by fire: the same library installed there by his predecessor Julian the Apostate. Following the assault on the Serapis in 391, during which the sinister Patriarch Theophilus himself destroyed, axe in hand, the colossal statue of Serapis carved by the great Athenian artist Bryaxis, the library was consumed by flames.

After the library of the Museum of Alexandria, which already had 700,000 rolls, was consumed by a casual fire during the siege war by Cesar (48-47 BC), the fame of Alexandria as a city possessing the most numerous and precious bibliographic treasures only lasted thanks to the library of the Serapis, since the supposed intention of Antony to give Cleopatra, as compensation for the loss of the library of the museum, the entire library of Pergamum, with 200,000 rolls , does not seem to have come to fruition. The burning of libraries on the occasion of the assault on the temples was indeed something frequent, especially in the East.

It happened once again under the responsibility of Theophilus, following the destruction of an Egyptian sanctuary in Canopus and that of the Marneion of Gaza in 402.

At the beginning of the 5th century, Stilicho burned in the West—with great dismay on the part of the Roman aristocracy faithful to the religion of his elders—the books of the Sibyl, the immortal mother of the world, as Rutilius Claudius Namatianus complained. To him, the Christian sect seemed worse than the poison of Circe.

In the last decades of the 5th century, the libelli found there (‘these were an abomination in the eyes of God’—Rhetor Zacharias)—were burnt in Beirut before the church of St. Mary. The ecclesiastical writer Zacharias, who was then studying law in Beirut, played a leading role in this action supported by the bishop and state authorities. And in the year 562 Emperor Justinian, who had ‘pagan’ philosophers, rectors, jurists and physicians persecuted, ordered the burning of Greco-Roman images and books in the Kynegion of Constantinople, where the criminals were liquidated.

Apparently, already at the borderline of the Middle Ages, Pope Gregory I the Great, a fanatical enemy of everything classical, burned books in Rome. And this celebrity—the only one, together with Leo I, in gathering in his person the double distinction of Pope and Doctor of the Church—seems to have been the one who destroyed the books that are missing in the work of Titus Livy. It is not even implausible that it was he who ordered the demolition of the imperial library on the Palatine. In any case, the English scholastic John of Salisbury, bishop of Chartres, asserts that Pope Gregory intentionally destroyed manuscripts of classical authors of Roman libraries.

Everything indicates that many adepts of the Greco-Roman culture converted to Christianity had to prove to have really moved their convictions by burning their books in full view. Also, in some hagiographic narratives, both false and authentic, there is that commonplace of the burning of books as a symbol, so to speak, of a conversion story.

It was not always forced to go to the bonfire. Already in the first half of the 3rd century, Origen, very close in this regard to Pope Gregory, ‘desisted from teaching grammar as being worthless and contrary to sacred science and, calculating coldly and wisely, he sold all his works of the ancients authors with whom he had occupied until then in order not to need help from others for the sustenance of his life’ (Eusebius).

There is hardly anything left of the scientific critique of Christianity on the part of adherents to classical culture. The emperor and the Church took care of it. Even many Christian responses to it disappeared! (probably because there was still too much ‘pagan poison’ on its pages). But it was the classical culture itself on which the time came for its disappearance under the Roman Empire.
 

The annihilation of the Greco-Roman world

The last emperor of classical antiquity, the great Julian, certainly favoured the adherents of the old culture, but simultaneously tolerated the Christians: ‘It is, by the gods, my will that the Galileans not be killed, that they are not beaten unjustly or suffer any other type of injustice. I declare, however, that the worshipers of the gods will have a clear preference in front of them. For the madness of the Galileans was about to overthrow everything, while the veneration of the gods saved us all. That is why we have to honour the gods and the people and communities that venerate them’.

After Julian’s death, to whom the orator Libanius felt united by faith and friendship, Libanius complains deeply, moved by the triumph of Christianity and by its barbarous attacks on the old religion.

Oh! What a great sorrow took hold not only of the land of the Achaeans, but of the entire empire… The honours of which the good ones participated have disappeared; the friendship of the wicked and unbridled enjoys great prestige. Laws, repressive of evil, have already been repealed or are about to be. Those that remain are barely fulfilled in practice.

Full of bitterness, Libanius continues to address his co-religionists:

That faith, which until now was the object of mockery and that fought against you so fierce and untiring, has proved to be the strongest. It has extinguished the sacred fire, the joy of sacrifices, has ordered to savagely neat [its adversaries] and demolish the altars. It has locked the shrines and temples, if not destroyed them or turned them into brothels after declaring them impious. It has abrogated any activity with your faith…

In that final assault on the Greco-Roman world, the Christian emperors were mostly and for a long time less aggressive than the Christian Church. Under Jovian (363-364), the first successor of Julian, Hellenism does not seem to have suffered major damage except the closure and demolition of some temples. Also the successors of Jovian, Valentinian I and Valens, during whose government appears for the first time the term pagani referring the faithful of the old polytheism, maintained an attitude of relative tolerance toward them.

The Catholic Valentinian with plenty of reasons, because his interest was in the army and needed inner peace, tried to avoid religious conflicts. He still covered the high positions of the government almost evenly, even with a slight predominance of the believers in the gods.

Under Valens, nevertheless, the high Christian officials already constituted a majority before the Hellenes. Yet he fought the Catholics, even using the help of the Hellenes for reasons, of course, purely opportunistic.

Although the emperor Gratian, for continuing the rather liberal religious policy of his father Valentinian I, had promised tolerance to almost all the confessions of the empire by an edict promulgated in 378, in practice soon followed an opposite behaviour, for he was strongly influenced by the bishop of Milan, Ambrose.

Under Valentinian II, brother of Gratian, things really turned around and the relationship between high Christian officials and the adherents of the old culture was again balanced and the army chiefs, two polytheists, played a decisive role in the court. Even in Rome two other Hellenes of great prestige, Praetextatus and Symmachus, exerted the charges of praetorian and urban prefect respectively.

Gradually, however, Valentinian, as his brother once did, fell under the disastrous influence of the resident bishop of Milan, Ambrose. Something similar to what would happen later with Theodosius I. Ambrose lived according to his motto: ‘For the “gods of the heathen are but devils” as the Holy Scripture says; therefore, anyone who is a soldier of this true God must not give proof of tolerance and condescension, but of zeal for faith and religion’.

And indeed, the powerful Theodosius ruled during the last years of his term, at least as far as religious policy was concerned, strictly following Ambrose’s wishes. First, the rites of non-Christians were definitively banned at the beginning of 391. Later the temples and sanctuaries of Serapis in Alexandria were closed, which soon would be destroyed. In 393 the Olympic games were prohibited. The infant emperors of the 5th century [1] were puppets in the hands of the Church. That is why the court also committed itself more and more intensely in the struggle against classical culture, a struggle that the Church had already vehemently fuelled in the 4th century and that led gradually to the systematic extermination of the old faith.

The best-known bishops took part in this extermination, which intensified after the Council of Constantinople (381), with Rome and the East, especially Egypt, as the most notorious battlefields of the conflict between the Hellenes and the Christians.
 
___________

[1] Deschner is referring to emperors Arcadius, Theodosius II and Honorius whose reigns will be described in other translations of his books.

Categories
Christendom Constantine Jesus New Testament St Paul

Saint Paul, that tiny seed

To what should we compare God’s imperial rule, or what parable should we use for it? Consider the mustard seed. It is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth—yet when it is sown, it comes up and becomes the biggest of all garden plants, and produces branches, so that the birds of the sky can nest in its shade.

—Mark 4:30-31.

On Wednesday night I added a disclaimer to my post about the Epistle of James. I confessed that, mistakenly, I had used the New Testament (NT) chronologically ordered by a Christian fundamentalist. Instead, I’ll be using the order of Marcus Borg (1942-2015), a more reliable scholar, for the 27 books of the NT.

The earliest book in the NT according to this more serious scholar is not the Epistle of James but 1 Thessalonians, an original letter of Paul’s. The last book in the NT is 2nd Peter, not the Book of Revelation. Borg died three years ago but in the website of the Marcus J. Borg Foundation we can be read:

Chronological means ‘contextual’. What we see is how the message about Jesus developed or ‘evolved’. Paul’s letters to the early ‘Christ communities’ were written some 20 years earlier than the first gospel. And some letters attributed to Paul were written after his death!

The gospel of Mark was written around 70 and the other gospels written later, Matthew in the 80’s or early 90’s. They are obviously not firsthand accounts. And their stories don’t match. Does this surprise you?

Our New Testament [in the common Bible] is not chronological. Why do you think the NT was ordered the way it was?

In my forthcoming NT series the goal is to read the NT in the order the books were written, and share my impressions. Once it is understood that the oldest NT texts consist of fewer legendary layers about who the historical Jesus might have been, it is a real treat to read them.

Instead of the list that mistakenly I had published (the list by a Christian fundamentalist) the order that I will be using appears in Evolution of the Word: The New Testament in the Order the Books Were Written. Letters in grey below mean that these books are forgeries in the sense that the real authors are not those that the NT book claims authorship. The following dates are taken from the last pages of Evolution of the Word.

The 30s CE. Jesus is executed in ca. 30. His followers continue his mission in the Jewish homeland, especially in Galilee. Somehow, Christ-communities reached Syria, in the Jewish Diaspora beyond the homeland and Paul is converted in ca. 33-35.

The 40s CE. Emperor Caligula orders the erection of a statue in the Jerusalem Temple, sparking massive Jewish resistance while Paul is in Asia Minor (present-day Turkey). The controversy about whether gentile converts need to become Jewish—that is, circumcision for males—means that the Jerusalem church differed in principle from the incipient Pauline church.

The 50s CE. The seven genuine letters of Paul were apparently written in Greece and Asia Minor:

First Thessalonians

Galatians

First Corinthians

Philemon

Philippians

Second Corinthians

Romans

The 60s. Armed revolt against the Roman occupation in the Jewish homeland begins (cf. the essay that is still the masthead of The West’s Darkest Hour: ‘Rome vs. Judea; Judea vs. Rome’).

The 70s. In 70, Roman legions re-conquer Jerusalem and destroy the temple. Probably a majority of Jesus’ followers live in the Diaspora. Although the four gospels were anonymous writings and the later Church invented the names of the evangelists, I am not using grey letters for them because the intention of the authors was not to claim authorship for Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. (This does not mean that books in black letters are reliable biographical or historical accounts.)

Mark

The 80s and onward. The centre of Judaism in the homeland moves to Galilee. Judaism and the followers of Jesus begin to separate into two different religions. Second- and third- generation Christians struggle in an alien, Gentile world.

James

Colossians

Matthew

Hebrews

The 90s. The earliest reference to Jesus in a non-Christian source (Josephus), albeit tampered by the Christian scribes in the extant copies of Josephus. The extreme anti-Roman—i.e., anti-white—stance of the Christ cult by the end of the siècle is manifest in the lyric and stunning book by John of Patmos, inspired by the literary genre known as Jewish apocalyptic.

John

Ephesians

Revelation

The 100s. These NT books were written already in the second century of the Christian Era.

Jude

1 John

2 John

3 John

The 110s. Earliest references to Jesus and Christianity in Roman sources: Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny. Unsuccessful Jewish revolt in Egypt because of tensions between Jews and white Hellenes.

Luke

Acts

Second Thessalonians

First Peter

First Timothy

Second Timothy

Titus

The 120s. A century after the preaching career of Jesus the last canonical NT book is written.

Second Peter

The 130s. The Jewish revolt against the Roman rule in the Jewish homeland is brutally suppressed by the Romans. The surviving Jews are exiled from Jerusalem (132-135). Since the Romans could not be defeated physically, the exiled Jews resort to psychological warfare through the universalist, Pauline version of the Jesus cult (‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Yeshua the anointed one’).

Catholic means ‘universal’ and, after centuries of infiltration that culminated in a hostile takeover, Constantine and his Christian successors would enforce universalism throughout the Roman Empire even though it would mongrelise whites in Constantinople: something unthinkable in the early Roman Republic.

Putting aside for the moment the catastrophe that represented Constantine’s House for the Greco-Roman gene pool, in a chronologically ordered NT everything started with the Semite Paul. Therefore, let us take a closer look at the first mustard seed that would conquer Rome.

As can be seen in the above list, the seven genuine letters of Paul are the earliest NT writings. But the epistles are highly problematic for the traditional Christian. Unlike the four gospels, replete with Jesus sayings and stories about his deeds, shocking as it may seem the earliest phase of NT writings provide almost no substantial information about Jesus. Gifted writers Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, who were kind of novelists, would fill the gap decades later with moving Jesus narratives.

The Christianity that bequeathed us Rome was not the Christianity of the Jerusalem Church led by Peter and James, but the Christianity of a newcomer from Tarsus who never met Jesus in the flesh. But who was this Saul, whose version of Christianity was the one that eventually triumphed over the competing sects throughout the Roman Empire? Certainly he was a man with a religious imagination of a high order who managed to transform Jesus’ prosaic death into something fantastic for the Hellenes.

These decadent gentiles, some of whom thought that the god of the Jews was the most powerful of all gods, loved mystery cults: the New Age of the degenerate Roman Empire. In a chronological reading of the NT, Paul, not Yeshua, is present from the very first word of the movement that resulted in Christianity. Compared to him the twelve apostles, the genuine depositaries of the Jesus cult, are shadowy figures in the NT epistolary, as none of them left authentic epistles according to modern scholarship (cf. the first chapters of our translated book of Karlheinz Deschner’s Christianity’s Criminal History).

Saul moved to Jerusalem as a grown man. Christian scholars have him in very high regard and take his word, that he stood for the Jewish tradition. But Saul, who became Paul after his mental breakdown on the road to Damascus, fits the words in Rome vs. Judea; Judea vs. Rome: ‘This was a sinister Jewish and Greco-decadent schizophrenia that is evident in the very name of Jesus Christ: Yeshua, a Jewish name, and Christos, ‘the anointed one’ in Greek. To give examples of the insane Romanisation of Judea that echo the hybrid Yeshua-Christos…’

Hermann Samuel Reimarus was the first NT scholar that glimpsed who the historical Yeshua might have been, an apocalyptic seer that became frustrated when the eschaton did not occur. This historical Jesus, discovered by Reimarus and popularised by Albert Schweitzer, never had the intention to found a new religion. It was Paul the one who abrogated the Torah and created an amalgam between a mystery cult (that some scholars surmise he heard of in Tarsus) and esoteric Judaism. In his letters Paul claimed to be a Jew. Since Jews are the masters of deceit it does no harm to quote a modern (((scholar))) who specialised in the NT:

Paul, as the personal begetter of the Christian myth, has never been given sufficient credit for his originality. The reverence paid through the centuries to the great Saint Paul has quite obscured the more colourful features of his personality. Like many evangelical leaders, he was a compound of sincerity and charlatanry. Evangelical leaders of his kind were common at this time in the Greco-Roman world (e.g. Simon Magus, Apollonius of Tyana). [1]

Unlike the real disciples of Jesus who spoke Aramaic, Paul’s Greek is that of one who is a native speaker of the language. Hyam Maccoby (1924-2004), the author of the above paragraph, also said that Paul’s letters were written at a time when his break with the Jerusalem leaders was almost complete, and that Paul ‘refers to these leaders with hardly veiled contempt’.

The triumph of Pauline Christianity was overwhelming. After Paul’s death the teachings of the disciples of Peter and James were suppressed by the Romans, especially after Jerusalem was converted into Aelia Capitolina. In later generations, the remaining disciples of Peter and James were derogatorily called ‘Ebionites’ by the triumphant Church. The Ebionites regarded Jesus as messiah while rejecting his divinity and his virgin birth, and insisted—as precisely those that Paul criticises in his epistles—on the necessity of following Jewish law and rites.

The Ebionites revered Jesus’ brother James and rejected Paul as an apostate from the law. Since the Pauline Church eventually destroyed all texts of the competing denominations, Ebionite beliefs are only found in the writings of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Origen, Epiphanius and Jerome: church authors discussed in Deschner’s Christianity’s Criminal History (cf. the September draft of Deschner’s book). Although we don’t have the Ebionite texts themselves, all of the above authors confirm that they opposed Paul as a pseudo-apostle and—most telling of all—claimed that Paul knew nothing about the true teachings of Jesus.

Analogous forms of exegesis moved Schweitzer and other exegetes reach the conclusion that the historical Jesus is unknowledgeable as the four gospels would be written under the influence of Pauline Christology; not of those who knew Jesus. In the opinion of several white men Paul was a superb mythologist, the real inventor of Christianity:

‘Paul was the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus’. —Thomas Jefferson

‘Paul hardly ever allows the real Jesus of Nazareth to get a word in’. —Carl Jung

‘Paul’s words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul—a vast difference’. —Bishop John Spong

‘The new testament was less a Christiad than a Pauliad’. —Thomas Hardy

‘Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ… Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ’. —Will Durant

‘Where possible Paul avoids quoting the teachings of Jesus, in fact even mentioning it. If we had to rely on Paul, we should not know that Jesus taught in parables, had delivered the sermon on the mount, and had taught his disciples the “Our Father”.’ —Albert Schweitzer

But of course, in The Quest of the Historical Jesus Schweitzer casts doubts about the historicity of most sayings attributed to Jesus. It is paradoxical that if the Romans had not destroyed Jerusalem and built on its ruins Aelia Capitolina, the original Yeshua cult, represented by Peter and James, might have conserved a few manuscripts refuting the claims of the opportunist from Tarsus.

Saul of Tarsus must have amalgamated a sort of proto-Gnostic ideas within Judaism with the bloody cult of a sacrificed god in his native town. For example, in death and Resurrection the god Attis represented, through his Resurrection, salvation for the degenerate inhabitants of the Greco-Roman world. The celebrants of Cybele’s mystery cult achieved salvation through the Resurrection of Attis. ‘When they are satisfied with their fictitious grief a light is brought in, and the priest, having anointed their lips, whispers, “Be of good cheer, you of the mystery. Your god is saved; for us also there shall be salvation from ills”,’ wrote Firmicus Maternus.

__________

[1] Hyam Maccoby: The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (Harper & Row, 1986), p. 17. I read this book thirty years ago when I was living in San Rafael, California.

Categories
Art Aryan beauty Athens Christendom Constantine Constantinople Darkening Age (book) Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil Old Testament

Darkening Age, 10

In chapter seven of The Darkening Age: The Christian
Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:

Constantine… demanded that the statues be taken from the temples. Christian officials, so it was said, travelled the empire, ordering the priests of the old religion to bring their statues out of the temples. From the 330s onwards some of the most sacred objects in the empire started to be removed. It is hard, today, to understand the enormity of Constantine’s order. If Michelangelo’s Pietà were taken from the Vatican and sold, it would be considered a terrible act of cultural vandalism—but it wouldn’t be sacrilege as the statue is not in itself sacred. Statues in Roman temples were. To remove them was a gross violation, and Constantine knew it…
The possibility that Jesus would triumph over all other gods would, at the time, have seemed almost preposterous. Constantine was faced with an intransigent population who insisted on worshipping idols at the expense of the risen Lord. He realized that conversion would be more ‘easily accomplished if he could get them to despise their temples and the images contained therein’. And what better way to teach wayward pagans the vanity of their gods than by cracking open their statues and showing that they were, quite literally, empty? Moreover, a religious system in which sacrifice was central would struggle to survive if there was nothing to sacrifice to. There was good biblical precedent for his actions. In Deuteronomy, God had commanded that His chosen people should overthrow altars, burn sacred groves and hew down the graven images of the gods. If Constantine attacked the temples then he was not being a vandal. He was doing God’s good work.
And so it began. The great Roman and Greek temples were— or so Eusebius said—broken open and their statues brought out, then mutilated…
Not all the temple statues were melted down. The ‘tyrant’ Constantine also had an eye for art and many objects were shipped back as prize baubles for the emperor’s new city, Constantinople (Constantine, like Alexander the Great, was not one for self-effacement). The Pythian Apollo was put up as ‘a contemptible spectacle’ in one square; the sacred tripods of Delphi turned up in Constantinople’s hippodrome, while the Muses of Helicon found themselves relocated to Constantine’s palace. The capital looked wonderful. The temples looked—were—desecrated. As his biographer wrote with satisfaction, Constantine ‘confuted the superstitious error of the heathen in all sorts of ways’.
And yet despite the horror of what Constantine was asking his subjects to do there was little resistance…
Christianity could have been tolerant: it was not pre­ordained that it would take this path. There were Christians who voiced hopes for tolerance, even ecumenicalism. But those hopes were dashed. For those who wish to be intolerant, monotheism provides very powerful weapons. There was ample biblical justification for the persecution of non-believers.
The Bible, as a generation of Christian authors declared, is very clear on the matter of idolatry. As the Christian author Firmicus Maternus reminded his rulers—perfectly correctly—there lay upon emperors an ‘imperative necessity to castigate and punish this evil’. Their ‘severity should be visited in every way on the crime’. And what precisely did God advise as a punishment for idolatry? Deuteronomy was clear: a person indulging in this should be stoned to death. And if an entire city fell into such sin? Again, the answer was clear: ‘destruction is decreed’.
The desecration continued for centuries. In the fifth century AD, the colossal statue of Athena, the sacred centrepiece of the Acropolis in Athens, and one of the most famous works of art in the empire, was torn down from where she had stood guard for almost a thousand years, and shipped off to Constantinople—a great coup for the Christian city and a great insult to the ‘pagans’…
Note of the Ed.: After the centuries, Europeans even forgot how the Greco-Roman sculptures that were destroyed looked like. My guess is that Constantine’s bishops were not Aryans. Destroying a representation of the beauty of the Aryan physique was part of the Semitic takeover of white society: Let’s destroy your self-image as a means to undermine your self-esteem. Something similar is happening today with the religion of Holocaustianity: Let’s undermine your self-image from a decent person to historic grievances so that you may accept masses of non-white immigrants.
History is written by the winners and the Christian victory was absolute. The Church dominated European thought for more than a millennium. Until 1871 the University of Oxford required that all students were members of the Church of England, while in most cases to be given a fellowship in an Oxford college one had to be ordained. Cambridge was a little freer—but not much.
This was not an atmosphere conducive to criticism of Christianity and indeed, in English histories, there was little. For centuries, the vast majority of historians unquestioningly took up the Christian cause and routinely and derogatorily referred to non-Christians as ‘pagans’, ‘heathens ‘ and ‘idolaters’. The practices and sufferings of these ‘pagans’ were routinely belittled, trivialized or—more often—entirely ignored. As one modern scholar has observed: ‘The story of early Christian history has been told almost wholly on the basis of Christian sources.’