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Category: Thomas Aquinas

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Dominion (book) Thomas Aquinas

Dominion, 13

The Inquisition as a subject belongs more to Karlheinz Deschner’s series, which I will continue in the future. I rather use Tom Holland’s book to show how Christianity inverted the values of the white man. But it is worth picking up other passages from the chapter we started quoting yesterday:

Anxieties in Paris were heightened by the discovery in 1210 of various heretics whose reading of Aristotle had led them to believe that there was no life after death. The reaction of the city’s bishop was swift. Ten of the heretics were burned at the stake. Various commentaries on Aristotle were burned as well. Aristotle’s own books on natural philosophy were formally proscribed. ‘They are not to be read at Paris either publicly or in private.’

One thing that is completely overlooked on the racial right is that it is impossible to heal after Christian infection unless we repudiate the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. No wonder the medieval freethinkers who began to question this dogma ended up at the stake. No fear of hell, no Church power.

But the ban failed to hold. In 1231, Gregory IX issued a decree that guaranteed the university effective independence from the interference of bishops, and by 1255 all of Aristotle’s texts were back on the curriculum. The people best qualified to learn from them, it turned out, were not heretics, but inquisitors. The days of annihilating entire towns on the grounds that God would know his own were over.

The author refers to Caedite eos: Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius! (‘Kill them: the Lord knows those that are his own!’), a phrase reportedly spoken by the commander of the Albigensian Crusade to eliminate Catharism in France.

The responsibility for rooting out heresy had now been entrusted to friars. Taking the lead was an order that had been established by papal decree back in 1216, to provide the Church with a shock force of intellectuals. Its founder, a Spaniard by the name of Dominic, had toured where the good men were to be found, matching them in all their austerities, and harrying them in debate. In 1207, two years before the annihilation of Béziers, he had met with a good man just north of the city, and argued publicly with him for over a week. To friars schooled in this tradition of militant preaching, Aristotle had come as a godsend. [pages 265-266]

‘…before the annihilation of Béziers’. Holland refers to the massacre of so-called heretics at Béziers, France on 22 July 1209.

The labour of reconciling Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian doctrine did not come easily. Many contributed to it; but none more so than a Dominican called Thomas, a native of Aquino, a small town just south of Rome. The book he worked on between 1265 and his death in 1274, a great compendium of ‘things pertaining to Christianity’, was the most comprehensive attempt ever undertaken to synthesise faith with philosophy.

Thomas Aquinas himself died thinking that he had failed in his efforts, and that, before the radiant unknowability of God, everything he had written was the merest chaff; in Paris, two years after his death, various of his propositions were condemned by the city’s bishop. It did not take long, though, for the sheer scale of his achievement to be recognised and gratefully acknowledged. In 1323, the seal was set on his reputation when the pope proclaimed him a saint. The result was to enshrine as a bedrock of Catholic theology the conviction that revelation might indeed co-exist with reason. A century after the banning in Paris of Aristotle’s books on natural philosophy, no one had to worry that the study of them might risk heresy.

Yet this very sublimity had its shadow. If all of eternity were Christian, then it rendered those who persisted in the ways of heresy, obdurate in their folly, only the more damnable. The slaughter of the Albigensians had set a precedent that was not readily forgotten. [pages 266-267]

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Catholic Church Christendom Egalitarianism Jesus Karl Marx Martin Luther Protestantism Reformation Thomas Aquinas

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 17

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
The Christian origins of modern liberalism and socialism
The “anticipatory” consequences of spiritual equality meant social and economic equality for the church, leading to the establishment of formal communism in the early Christian communities. This was not just philanthropy, but a highly organized social welfare system that maximized the redistribution of wealth. Early Christian communism was widespread and lasted for centuries, crossing both geographical and ethno-cultural boundaries. The communist practices of the ante-Nicene church were rooted in the Jesus tradition of the 1st century. The existence of early Christian communism is well-attested by the Ante-Nicene fathers and contemporary pagans.
After Christianity became the official state religion, the church became increasingly hierarchical as ecclesiastical functions were merged with those of imperial bureaucracy. The communist socio-economic practices of the early church were abandoned by medieval Christians. This was replaced by a view of inequality as static, the result of a “great chain of being” that ranked things from lowest to highest. The great chain was used by theologians to justify cosmologically the rigidly stratified social order that had emerged from the ashes of the old Roman world. It added a veneer of ideological legitimacy to the feudal system in Europe. In the great chain, Christ’s vicar, the pope, was stationed at the top, followed by European monarchs, clergy, nobility and, at the very bottom, landless peasantry. This entailed a view of spiritual equality as “antipathetic.” St. Thomas Aquinas provided further justification for inequality along narrowly teleological lines. In the Summa Contra Gentiles, diversity and variety in creation reflect the harmonious order established by god. If the universe only contained equal things, only one kind of good would exist and this would detract from the beauty and perfection of creation.
The antipathetic view of Christian equality was the dominant one until the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Martin Luther’s iconic act—the nailing of the 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Castle door in 1517—began an ecclesiastical crisis of authority that was to have tremendous repercussions for the future of Western history. The pope was no longer the supreme representative of Christ on earth, but an irredeemably corrupt tyrant, who had wantonly cast the church into the wilderness of spiritual oblivion and error.
Access to previously unknown works of ancient science and philosophy introduced to an educated public the pagan epistemic values that would pave the way for the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. The humanist cry of ad fontes! was eagerly embraced by Reformers. It allowed them to undermine scholastic hermeneutical principles (i.e. the Quadriga) and the major doctrines of medieval Christianity. The rediscovery of more reliable manuscripts of the Bible served as an important catalyst of the Reformation.
Reformed theologians, armed with humanist textual and philological methods, studied the New Testament and the Ante-Nicene fathers in the original languages. This led to a Christian “renaissance,” a rediscovery of the early Christian world. Compared to the lax morality and spiritual indifference of late medieval clergy, the first 4 or 5 centuries of the primitive church seemed like a golden age, one that maintained the doctrinal purity of Christian orthodoxy until Pope Gregory I, unencumbered by the gross distortions of scholastic theology and ecclesiastical tradition. Early Christian teachings and practices, forgotten during the Middle Ages, became popular once again among Protestants.
Reformers sought to recapture the spirit of primitive Christianity by incorporating egalitarian and majoritarian principles into an early modern ecclesiastical setting. Egalitarian thought was first enunciated in Luther’s teaching on the universal priesthood of all believers. In contrast to medieval Christian teaching, which viewed the clergy as members of a spiritual aristocracy, Luther proclaimed all Christians equally priests before god, with each one having the same capacity to preach and minister to fellow believers. On this basis, Luther demanded an end to the differential treatment of clergy and laity under canon law. He also defended the majoritarian principle by challenging the Roman ecclesiastical prerogative of appointing ministers for Christian congregations. Calvin, the other great Reformed leader, acknowledged the real-world consequences of spiritual equality, but approached it from the perspective of universal equality in total depravity.
Protestant radicals viewed the egalitarian policies of the mainstream Reformed churches as fundamentally inadequate; any concrete realization of Christian spiritual equality entailed a large-scale revival of the communistic socio-economic practices of the primitive church. Muntzer, an early disciple of Luther, is representative of this more radical egalitarian version of the gospel. In 1525, a group of religious fanatics, including Muntzer, seized control of Muhlhausen in Thuringia. During their brief rule over the city, they implemented the program of the Eleven Articles, a revolutionary document calling for social justice and the elimination of poverty. Idols were smashed, monks were driven out of their convents and monastic property was seized and redistributed to the poor. From the pulpit, Muntzer delivered fiery sermons ordering his congregation to do away with the “idol” of private property if they wished the “spirit of God” to dwell among them. A leader of the Peasant’s War in Germany, he was captured in May of 1525 after his army was defeated at Frankenhausen. He was tortured and then executed, but not before his captors were able to extract the confession: “Omnia sunt communia.” Whether the confession represents the exact words of Muntzer is controversial; nevertheless, it accurately reflects Muntzer’s anti-materialistic piety and view that the teachings of the gospel were to be implemented in full.
The Munster Rebellion of 1534-1535, led by Jan Matthys and Johann of Leiden, was far more extreme in its radicalism. After the Anabaptist seizure of the city, Matthys declared Munster the site of the New Jerusalem. Catholics and Lutherans were then driven from the town, their property confiscated and redistributed to the poor “according to their needs” by deacons who had been carefully selected by Matthys. They set about imposing the primitive communism of the early church upon the town’s inhabitants. Money was abolished; personal dwellings were made the public property of all Christian believers; people were forced to cook and eat their food in communal kitchens and dining-halls, in imitation of the early Christian “love feasts.” Ominously, Matthys and Johann even ordered the mass burning of all books, except the Bible. This was to symbolize a break with the sinful past and the beginning of a new communist era, like the Year One of the French Revolutionary National Convention. In the fall of 1534, Anabaptist-controlled Munster officially abolished all private property within city limits. But the Anabaptist commune was not to last for long. After a lengthy siege, the Anabaptist ringleaders, including Johann of Leiden, were captured, tortured and then executed by the Bishop of Munster.
The Diggers (or “True Levellers”) and the Levellers (or “Agitators”), active during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651) and the Protectorate (1653-1659), were strongly influenced by primitive Christian teaching. The Diggers, founded by Gerard Winstanley, were inspired by the communist socio-economic practices of the early Christians. They tried to establish agrarian communism in England, but were opposed in this endeavor, often violently, by wealthy farmers and local government officials who dismissed them as atheists and libertines. The more influential Levellers, a radical Puritan faction, tried to thoroughly democratize England by introducing policies of religious toleration and universal male suffrage. Their rejection of the arbitrary monarchical power of King Charles I in favor of egalitarian democracy was ultimately informed by Christian theological premises. Prominent Levellers like “Freeborn” John Lilburne argued for democratic egalitarian principles based on their exegetical interpretation of the Book of Genesis. All men were created equal, they said, with no one having more power, dignity and authority than anyone else in the Garden of Eden. Since no man had the right to exercise authority over others, only popular sovereignty could legitimately serve as the underlying basis of civil government. Many Leveller proposals, as written down in the Agreement of the People, were incorporated into the English Bill of Rights of 1689. This document later influenced the American Bill of Rights of 1791.
John Locke was the founder of modern liberalism, a political tradition soaked in Christian religious dogma. He drew many social and political implications from Christian spiritual equality. His belief in equality was rooted in the firm conviction that all men were created in the image of god, making them equal by nature. Church fathers and medieval theologians had long argued that all men, whether slave or free, were “by nature equal,” but that social inequality among men was god’s punishment for sin. John Locke agreed with the patristic and medieval authors on natural equality but repudiated their use of original sin to justify the passive acceptance of human social and economic inequality. Like the Protestant reformers before him, he believed that spiritual equality was not merely eschatological, but entailed certain real-world implications of far-reaching political significance.
Locke’s argument for universal equality was derived from a careful historical and exegetical interpretation of the biblical narrative. The creation of man in god’s image had enormous ramifications for his political theory, especially as it concerns his views on the nature of civil government and the scope of its authority. From his reading of Genesis, Locke argued that no man had the right to dominate and exploit other members of the human species. Man was created by god to exercise dominion over the animal kingdom. Unlike animals, who are by nature inferior, there can be no subjection among humans because their species-membership bears the imprint of an “omnipotent and infinitely wise maker.” This meant that all men are born naturally free and independent. Locke’s view of universal equality further entailed the “possession of the same faculties” by all men. Although men differed in terms of gross intellectual endowment, they all possessed a low-level intellectual ability that allowed them to manipulate abstract ideas and logically reason out the existence of a supreme being.
In Locke’s view, all government authority must be based on the consent of the electorate. This was an extension of his belief in mankind’s natural equality. Any abuse of power by elected representatives, when all judicial and political avenues of redress had been exhausted, was to be remedied by armed revolution. This would restore men to the original liberty they had in the Garden of Eden. Freedom from tyranny would allow them to elect a government that was more consonant with the will of the people.
Locke’s theory of natural rights was based on biblical notions of an idyllic prehistory in the Garden of Eden. Contrary to monarchical theorists like Filmer, man’s earliest social organization was not a hierarchical one, but egalitarian and democratic. If all men were created equal, no one had the right to deprive any man of life, liberty and private property. In Lockean political philosophy, rights are essentially moral obligations with Christian religious overtones. If men were obliged to surrender certain natural rights to the civil government, it was only because they were better administered collectively for the general welfare. Those rights that could not be surrendered were considered basic liberties, like the right to life and private property.
Early modern Christian writers envisioned in detail what an ideal communist society would look like and how it would function. The earliest communist literature emerged from within a Christian religious context. A famous example is Thomas More’s Utopia, written in 1516, which owes more to patristic ideals of communism and monastic egalitarian practice than Plato’s Republic. Another explicitly communist work is the Dominican friar Tommaso Campanella’s 1602 book City of the Sun. These works form an important bridge between pre-modern Christian communism and the “utopian” and “scientific” socialism of the 19th century. For the first time in history, these writings provided an in-depth critique of the socio-economic conditions of contemporary European society, indicating that only through implementation of a communist system would it be possible to fully realize the humanist ideals of the Renaissance. They went beyond communalization of property within isolated patriarchal communities to envisage the transformation of large-scale political units into unified economic organisms. These would be characterized by social ownership and democratic control. Implicit in these writings was the assumption that only the power of the state could bring about a just and humanitarian social order.
“Utopian” or pre-Marxian socialism was an important stage in the development of modern leftist ideology. Its major exponents, Blanc, Cabet, Fourier, Saint-Simon and Owen, were either devout Christians or men profoundly influenced by the socio-economic and ethical teachings of primitive Christianity. They often viewed Jesus of Nazareth as a great socialist leader. They typically believed that their version of communism was a faithful realization of Jesus’ evangelical message. In the pre-Marxian vision, the primitive communism of the early Christian church was an ideal to be embraced and imitated. Many of these writers even defended their communist beliefs through extensive quotation from the New Testament.
Louis Blanc saw Jesus Christ as the “sublime master of all socialists” and socialism as the “gospel in action.” Etienne Cabet, the founder of the Icarian movement, equated true Christianity with communism. If Icarianism was the earthly realization of Jesus’ vision of a coming kingdom of god, it was imperative that all communists “admire, love and invoke Jesus Christ and his doctrine.” Charles Fourier, an early founder of modern socialism, viewed Jesus Christ and Isaac Newton as the two most important figures in the formative development of his belief-system. He grounded his socialist ideology squarely within the Christian tradition. As the only true follower of Jesus Christ, Fourier was sent to earth as the “Comforter” of John 14:26, the “Messiah of Reason” who would rehabilitate all mankind along socialist industrial lines.
Henri de Saint-Simon, another important founder of modern socialism, believed the true gospel of Christ to be one of humility and equality. He advocated a “New Christianity” that would realize the practical and economic implications of the just world order preached by Jesus. Saint-Simon was also an early precursor of the Social Gospel movement, which sought to ameliorate social pathology through application of Christian ethical principles. The early Welsh founder of modern socialism, Robert Owen, although hostile to organized Christianity and other established religions, regarded his version of socialism as “true and genuine Christianity, freed from the errors that had been attached to it.” Only through the practice of socialism would the “invaluable precepts of the Gospel” be fully realized in contemporary industrial society.
The earliest pioneers of socialism, all of whom maintained socio-economic views grounded upon Christian religious principles, exercised a profound and lasting influence on Marx. His neo-Christian religious beliefs must be regarded as the only real historical successor of orthodox Christianity, largely because his ideology led to the implementation of Christian socio-economic teachings on a scale hitherto unimaginable. Muntzer, the radical Anabaptists and other Christian communists are considered important predecessors of the modern socialist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. For example, in Friedrich Engels’ short monograph The Peasant War in Germany, Muntzer is immortalized as the man whose religious and political views were way ahead of his times. He even possessed a far more sophisticated “theoretical equipment” than the many communist movements of Engels’ own day.
The primitive communist transformation of the socio-economic order under Christianity is based on 1.) the elimination of all ethno-linguistic and socio-economic distinction between men—unity in Christ—and; 2.) the fundamental spiritual equality of all human beings before god; it is the mirror image of the modern communist transformation of the socio-economic order under classical Marxist ideology, which is based on 1.) elimination of all class distinction between men and; 2.) a fundamental “equality” of access to a common storehouse of agricultural produce and manufactured goods. The numerous similarities between Christian communism and Marxism are too striking to be mere coincidence. Without the dominant influence of Christianity, the rise of modern communism and socialism would have been impossible.
The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century links the socio-economic egalitarianism of the early Christian communities with the socio-economic egalitarianism of the modern West. As a religious mass movement beginning in late medieval times, it profoundly affected the course of Western civilization. The Reformation played an instrumental role in the initial formulation and spread of liberal and socialist forms of egalitarian thought that now serve as the dominant state religions of the modern Western “democracies.” Without Luther and the mass upheaval that followed in his wake, Christian spiritual equality would have remained an eschatological fact with no direct bearing on the modern secular world.
Spengler’s observation that “Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism” is a truism. All forms of Western communism are grounded in the Christian tradition. The same applies to liberal egalitarian thought, which was also formulated within a Christian religious milieu.

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Catholic Church Christendom Constantinople Thomas Aquinas

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 11

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
More Christian excuses
Christian religionists tout Aquinas and Bacon as exceptions to the anti-scientific world-view of the church, but these men were writing in response to Aristotle, who had just been rediscovered in the 12th century. Even in antiquity, Aristotle was considered outdated.
Neither Aquinas nor Bacon were scientists, none of them performed any real scientific experiments and none of them advanced science in any real or tangible way. Their achievement was to reconcile the Semitic doctrines of Christianity with the superior pagan ways of Aristotle, but the results of this were highly unsatisfactory.
Aquinas was also the father of medieval scholasticism, which proved highly detrimental to the rise of modern science in Europe. Scholastic methodology was eventually mocked for its absurdities by Renaissance writers like François Rabelais.
Because of the Christian emphasis on scripture and tradition as final source of authority, the church was opposed to the pagan epistemic values of public verifiability of evidence and empirical rationality. To the church hierarchy, the search for knowledge in accordance with such principles was both arrogant and dangerously heretical. Even with the reintroduction of pagan science and philosophy in the 12th century, there was still significant ecclesiastical opposition to the unaided reason as guide to truth.
The Christian church persecuted those who chose to question Christian religious orthodoxy with impunity. This fostered an environment in which pursuit of scientific and technical progress became a virtual impossibility. For example, the posthumous condemnation of the 6th century Alexandrian philosopher John Philoponus as a heretic ensured that his principled rejection of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian philosophy would remain unknown for centuries to come. This organized ecclesiastical persecution of free thinkers ruled out any possibility of material progress until the Scientific Revolution.
Despite what the facts reveal, Christian religionists have tried to distort the historical record by pretending otherwise. They believe that Christianity was a necessary ingredient, the “spark” that began the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. This ignores the fact that science and religion, specifically Christianity in this case, are fundamentally incompatible.
Christianity is about blind faith, with revelation and authority serving as the only valid criteria for the evaluation of truth. In contrast, science is the accumulation of knowledge through logical reasoning, empirical observation and measurement. Christianity is a form of magical thinking; it is not open to revision. Science, on the other hand, is continuously in search of new ideas with ever greater explanatory power. Though scientific and technological progress occurred between 400 BC to 300 AD, leading to the development of ideas that would not be surpassed until the Scientific Revolution, there was virtually no progress from 300 AD to the 12th century, the apogee of Christian power and influence in Europe.
Even Christian Byzantium, which was more successful than the post-Roman successor states of the Latin West, never made any significant progress in science and technology. Under Christian influence, Europe regressed to a Neolithic stage of existence. This is well-supported by recent archeological evidence revealing numerous medieval simplifications of the earlier Roman material culture. Trade, industry and agriculture all witnessed significant declines in technical sophistication, economic productivity and output. Population size also decreased because of overall declines in prosperity and comfort.

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Ancient Rome Christendom Constantinople Intelligence quotient (IQ) Thomas Aquinas

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 5

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
Christianity: destroyer of empires
Christianity was a key factor in Rome’s decline. When the church became the dominant institution of late classical antiquity, it became a significant drain on the economic resources of the empire. This was not a simple wealth transfer; funds for pagan temples and shrines were not simply diverted from secular coffers to finance ecclesiastical growth.
Unlike the pagan cults, the Nicene state religion was administered by a vast centralized bureaucracy, whose reach was empire-wide and whose officials were more numerous and more highly paid than those of the state. Revenue that could have been used to improve infrastructure, such as the building of roads, bridges, aqueducts and theatres went towards the building of useless structures like churches and monasteries and the feeding of “idle mouths”: monks, priests and bishops, who contributed nothing of material or economic value to the state.
This tremendous waste of resources becomes even more staggering when one considers the relatively low level of technological and scientific development in the empire. Actual labor-saving devices were rare, so productive labor was done by hand or with the help of oxen. The amount of manpower needed to feed, clothe and house the “idle mouths” of the Christian church was considerably more than what was needed for a typical official of the Roman civil service.
The enormous talents of men like Athanasius and John Chrysostom, who would have been better employed defending the empire as able generals and rulers, were instead wasted on expanding the power and influence of the church in daily life. Indeed, valuable manpower and material resources squandered in the service of “idle mouths” is a recurring theme in the history of Christianity. The Christian concern for “idle mouths” exerted a profoundly dysgenic effect on the European gene pool.
Europe’s cognitive elite, instead of passing on their genes, were encouraged to withdraw from society and embrace the spiritual discipline of perpetual chastity or virginity. This negatively affected average population IQ, leaving the church with an abundance of easily controlled and docile serfs less able to maintain the civilization around them with each passing generation. Thomas Aquinas is the prime casualty of this destructive waste of human talent. His genius would have been more profitably employed in the field of medicine or experimental physics; instead, it was foolishly squandered on angelology and other medieval superstitions.
The worst destruction inflicted on the western empire was, of course, perpetrated by Christians. The great sack of Rome in 411—considered a decisive moment in the decline of the West—was perpetrated by an Arian Christian. The sack of Rome in 455, even more devastating than the first barbarian rampage through the eternal city, was perpetrated by another Christian, who had earlier weakened the empire by seizing the province of Africa as his own personal fiefdom. And of course, the person who delivered the final coup de grace, effectively ending Roman imperial rule in the West and inaugurating the Dark Ages in western Europe, was also a Christian.
Apologists typically deny Christianity’s role in imperial decline, retorting that Byzantium survived the fall of the Latin West. Our Christian excuse-makers fail to realize that the east was richer and more populous. This allowed the Byzantine state to better absorb the tremendous internal damage caused by the depredations of the parasitical Nicene state religious cult. There are also geographical reasons for Byzantine survival. The eastern emperor had a much shorter frontier to defend. Constantinople, the imperial capital, was surrounded by a series of massive fortifications begun by Constantine and completed in the early 5th century. These were virtually impregnable to barbarian invaders. Unlike the east, the west had no second line of defense.
The Nicene state religious cult forced Rome to her knees, drawing the curtain over classical antiquity. The civilizational collapse that followed is known as the Dark Ages, when post-Roman Europe underwent a significant decline in living standards.
When Christians were at their most powerful, the roads and highways that covered the empire fell into disrepair; use of bridges and aqueducts virtually ceased; knowledge of building in stone and mortar almost disappeared; literacy, such as it was, disappeared, with the exception of the clergy; personal standards of hygiene disappeared; indoor plumbing disappeared; large areas of the former empire were depopulated, and lastly; use of coinage nearly ceased, signifying an end to the complex monied economy of Roman times.
Christian hegemony in Byzantium led to centuries of scientific and technological stagnation. There was even a Byzantine Dark Age that lasted for hundreds of years. During this period, borders shrank, cities were reduced to fortified enclaves, money gave way to barter, and Byzantine literature consisted of reams of insipid hagiography.
This was the world of Christianity: a world of profound ignorance and stupidity, where brutal men, under the guise of religion, tyrannized over a weak and helpless populace. The Dark Ages were Christianity’s gift to Europe. They were ushered in by Christians, presided over by Christians and prolonged for centuries by Christians. Europe endured one of its darkest hours when Christians were at the apogee of their power and influence.

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James Mason Kali Yuga Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Thomas Aquinas

Superficial thumbs up

During the fourth century as divisions and sects grew, the schisms and the heresies developed with increasing boldness. The anti-heretic shouting also became more strident, more aggressive. At the same time, the struggle against non-Catholics sought judicial support. It was time of agitation and almost pathological actions: a true ‘spiritual disease’ [my emphasis].

This quotation from my last excerpts of Deschner’s book gives an idea why I reproduce chapters of the Julian novel on Sundays. Also, if we reread the italicised sentence it is impossible not to see the analogies with our times.
As I see it, the West has suffered two great psychotic breakdowns in history: the first in the 3rd and 4th centuries that resulted in the conquest of the Roman Empire by a cult of Levantine extraction (as we shall see in Deschner’s chapters on Constantine), and what has been happening in the West in the 20th and 21st centuries.
For white nationalists it is easy to see the descending spiral of a spiritual disease that destroys their race today. (Just take a look at Tucker at Fox News: not every interviewee is a kike: there are ethnosuicidal whites as well.) But few have notion of the first psychotic breakdown that suffered the fair race in the centuries in which Christianity was born. And this, despite that much earlier than Deschner, Edward Gibbon also blamed Christianity in his magnum opus.
Recall these passages from the introduction to Criminal History of Christianity, quoted in The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour:

The magnificent temples of worship of antiquity were destroyed almost everywhere: irreplaceable value buildings burned or demolished, especially in Rome itself, where the ruins of the temples served as quarries. In the tenth century they still engaged in breaking down statues, architraves, burning paintings, and the most beautiful sarcophagi served as bathtubs or feeders for pigs.
But the most tremendous destruction, barely imaginable, was caused in the field of education. Gregory I, the Great, the only doctor Pope of the Church in addition to Leo I, according to tradition burned a large library that existed on the Palatine. The flourishing book trade of antiquity disappeared; the activity of the monasteries was purely receptive. Three hundred years after the death of Alcuin and Rabanus Maurus, the disciples were still studying with manuals written by them. Even St. Thomas Aquinas, the Church’s official philosopher, writes that ‘the desire for knowledge is a sin when it does not serve the knowledge of God.’
In universities, the Aristotelian hypertrophy aborted any possibility of independent research. To the dictation of theology were subject philosophy and literature. History, as a science, was completely unknown. The experimentation and inductive research was condemned; experimental sciences were drowned by the Bible and dogma; scientists thrown into the dungeons, or sent to the stake. In 1163, Pope Alexander III (remember in passing that at that time there were four anti-popes) forbade all clerics studying physics. In 1380 a decision of the French parliament forbade the study of chemistry, referring to a decree of Pope John XXII.
And while in the Arab world (obedient to Muhammad’s slogan: ‘The ink of scholars is more sacred than the blood of martyrs’) the sciences flourished, especially medicine, in the Catholic world the bases of scientific knowledge remained unchanged for more than a millennium, well into the sixteenth century. The sick were supposed to seek comfort in prayer instead of medical attention. The Church forbade the dissection of corpses, and sometimes even rejected the use of natural medicines for considering it unlawful intervention with the divine. In the Middle Ages not even the abbeys had doctors, not even the largest. In 1564 the Inquisition condemned to death the physician Andreas Vesalius, the founder of modern anatomy, for opening a corpse and for saying that man is not short of a rib that was created for Eve.
Consistent with the guidance of teaching, we find another institution, ecclesiastical censure, very often (at least since the time of St. Paul in Ephesus) dedicated to the burning of the books of pagans and the destruction (or prohibition) of rival Christian literature, from the books of the Arians and Nestorians until those of Luther. But let us not forget that Protestants sometimes also introduced censorship, even for funeral sermons and also for non-theological works, provided they touched on ecclesiastical matters or religious customs.

However self-destructive it may have been for whites to empower a Levantine cult in Imperial Rome, at least Christianity had not a focused agenda to exterminate whites. The second psychotic breakdown, which we see developing in our days, is more vicious. Unless a racial revolution takes over it would no longer be possible to recover—as in the Renaissance—because the purpose now is to destroy Aryan DNA through miscegenation. Alas, there’s no revolution on the horizon, so we need to delve deeper into history to understand the West’s darkest hour.
Those thumbs up that I receive on my Facebook page for Siege links I don’t receive on Kriminalgeschichte—they’re superficial thumbs up. I wonder if their authors are able to see that, after a life dedicated to National Socialism, Christianity corrupted the mind of the author of Siege into going astray mystically. We can only imagine the revolutionary movement that Mason could have inspired in the US had he remained focused on racial matters.

Categories
Axiology Christendom Der Antichrist (book) Deranged altruism Emperor Julian Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Indo-European heritage Miscegenation Philosophy of history St Francis Thomas Aquinas William Pierce

Two ways of looking at history

The following is the introduction to the fourth part of the forthcoming 2017 edition of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour. As in my introductory article to that compilation, “The word racism,” regular visitors to this site will recognize that I have been merging and recycling different pieces that have already been published here.

______ ______

 

Part IV:

Ethno-suicide: Christian ethics

Why were you so ungrateful to our
gods as to desert them for the Jews?
—Julian (addressing the Christians)

FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK:

Two ways of looking at history

Note of September 2017: I have relocated the first paragraphs of this post: here. The 2018 edition of the book will be much shorter than the below one:

The life of Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) illustrates the phenomenon of deranged altruism, that Kevin MacDonald has called pathological altruism. Schweitzer was a New Testament scholar and a medical missionary in Africa. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of “Reverence for Life,” expressed in many ways but most famously in founding the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Africa. We are greatly indebted to Schweitzer and the other Germans who started a secularized research on the New Testament texts since the 18th and 19th centuries. Personally, these Germans were of great help for me in my late twenties during my inner struggle with my father’s Catholicism. But at the same time we should note that the biography of Schweitzer illustrates what is wrong with those who abandon faith in the gospel only to become out-group altruists. Eric, a Swede who used to comment at the blogsite Gates of Vienna, commented in a July 2009 thread:

Our progressivist paradigm is based on Christian ethics. The Left is all about Christian ethics. What the left-wing is doing is not destroying Western civilization, but completing and fulfilling it: what I call “The Finish of the West.” The current order is the last and terminal phase of Western Christian civilization. Western Christian civilization is in fact the worst enemy of what I call European civilization: another reason for wanting the Western Christian civilization to go away. For the very same reason that Christian ethics abhors infanticide, it causes the population explosion in the world.

Christian ethics cannot stand the sight of little brown children dying. They must help them, or they will freak out. According to Christian ethics it is forbidden and unthinkable to think in terms of not saving every little brown child across the planet.

schweitzers-pickaninniesBut the consequences of this mindset are catastrophic, not only to us but also to them, as I have already explained. But since people are so programmed according to Christian ethics, what I’m saying does not seem to enter their heads. The thought is too unthinkable to be absorbed. It’s an utter taboo.

This is derived from the deepest moral grammar of Christianity. The population explosion is not caused by liberalism, it is caused by Christianity in its most general form.

I must acknowledge that my axiological approach to Christianity and civilizational suicide originated from studying Eric’s texts carefully. The following is the crux of his views. This POV explains why, once Schweitzer researched honestly the New Testament texts to the point of abandoning his faith, he found himself irrationally compelled to help the downtrodden, like the pickaninnies that he holds in his arms above, to fulfill a form of secularized Christianity:

With Christ as part of the equation, the Christian ethics of the Gospels became balanced. Humans were seen as imperfect and it was Christ who covered for us with his self-sacrifice. In Secular Christianity each person has to be like Jesus himself [emphasis added], doing self-sacrifice, since there’s no other way to realize Christian ethics. On top of that, with the Industrial Revolution and the surplus it created in our societies, we came to the point where all the good deeds of Christian ethics could finally be executed by giving off our surplus to all the poor and weak foreign people around the world: food, Western medicine, and other aid.

We should remember that our progressivist paradigm, which is always going left, is based on Christian ethics. And Christian ethics means the inversion of values [emphasis added]. So it’s the weak that is considered good, while the strong is considered evil.

“Inversion of values” is a Nietzschean concept. The keynote of Schweitzer’s personal philosophy, which he considered to be his greatest contribution to mankind, was the idea of Reverence for Life (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben). Like millions of “secular Christians” today, Schweitzer inverted healthy Aryan values when he questioned the historicity of the gospel narrative to elaborate an ethical foundation for his new tables. Instead of helping the crown of the evolution in Germany—for instance the nymphs that have inspired my site, The West’s Darkest Hour—, he moved to a savage part of the world to help the cloaca gentium of Africa.

Schweitzer died in 1965 at his beloved African hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon. His grave, on the banks of the Ogooué River, is marked by a cross he made himself. This, in spite of the fact that in his most famous book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, it is clear that he had ceased to believe in the gospel stories. But the cross was appropriate: internally, Schweitzer never gave up Christian ethics, only Christian dogma. Like millions of liberals today he was a partial apostate from Christianity; his apostasy was not complete. It is my belief that only complete apostasy from Christianity and its secular offshoot will save whites from extinction. And by total I mean what Nietzsche said:

In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there. —We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.

I have quoted the retired blogger Eric above, that Lawrence Auster used to call the “Nietzschean of the North.” Presently I fully agree with Eric that what we are witnessing is nothing else than the historical demise of Christianity. The metaphor that he used explains it all: “When a star dies, in its last phase it expands into a red giant, before it shrinks into a white dwarf. Liberalism is the red giant of Christianity. And just as a red giant is devoid of its core, it expands thousand-fold while losing its substance and is about to die. The world I live in consists of Christians and liberals. It’s their world and I do not belong to them.”

But paradigms do not die: they are replaced. William Pierce for one said that Christianity and a pro-white ethos are mutually exclusive and added:

We need ethics; we need values and standards; we need a world view. And if one wants to call all of these things together a religion, then we need a religion. One might choose instead, however, to call them a philosophy of life. Whatever we call it, it must come from our own race soul; it must be an expression of the innate Aryan nature. And it must be conducive to our mission of racial progress.

The Spaniard Manu Rodríguez, with whom I have exchanged a copious correspondence, has told me that we do not need a new religion in the American sense; only to be aware of our pre-Christian cultures. We must recover such cultures, says Rodríguez, to educate our children according to the varied heritage that these cultures represent. He had in mind the Edda, the Mabinogion; Homer and Virgil—not to mention our tragedians, our poets, our philosophers. We must extract that immensely rich heritage and moral maxims.

We also need… temples!—Rodríguez told me—: enclosures for re-connection as he calls them. This is my Spanish-English translation of what Manu wrote to me: “An ever living fire in these areas will suffice. We need places where we can gather and remember our stories: readings of texts, commentaries, discussion panels and more. Something collective and social; religious and cultural centers where our people may have psychological or spiritual support, or get truthful information about our ancestors, or the incidents of our history. We need dividing the year with special celebrations related to happy or tragic milestones of our past; our own calendars of days of ‘saints’ (our heroes and those most representative). We need to retrieve the Greek, Roman, Celt, German and other names…”

That is, we need what we could not do in Christendom: having our own history because our history was usurped by the Christian clergy. We only have had a Judaic narrative inimical to the Aryan spirit. In one of his blog posts “The sublime Indo-European heritage”, Rodríguez wrote:

For hundreds of years our cultural genius was forced to speak in alien terms for our being. Think of the literature, the music or the architecture we would have had if we had not been dominated by a foreign ideology or culture; if we had remained Persians, Greeks, Germans, Slavs…

In short, for Rodríguez we need to create the Aryan community (ecclesia) which, for the above circumstances, we never had. The Aryan ecclesias need to thrive in our towns and cities. Our “priests” will be, according to my Spanish friend, not experts in theology but in history, anthropology and Indo-European linguistics. The priest of the 14 words must be skilled in the various Indo-European traditions. Such bonding in quasi-religious temples will only be for whites. The rest of the peoples or races are excluded. This won’t be a universal ideology but an ethnic one.

Rodríguez graciously allowed me to translate and publish his epistles and philosophy for the present book. On the other hand, American white nationalists seem to be living in another age. While visiting their blogsites it never ceases to surprise me the enormous quantity of Christians among them. I have already said that Pierce was the best mind that the United States has produced. I would go as far as blaming American Christianity for the fact that Pierce’s association, the National Alliance, disbanded after his death on July 23, 2002.

In sharp contrast to the prevailing paradigm in white nationalism, in a February 1989 bulletin for National Alliance members, Pierce said:

The greatest obstacle to the survival of our race is Christianity. Even with all their malice and cunning, the Jews would pose no real threat to the race were it not for their Christian collaborators. In the U.S. just as in South Africa, the Jews may be pulling a lot of strings behind the scenes, but the troops in the war against the White Race are mainly White Christians filled with religious guilt and obsessed with the need to expiate that guilt by sacrificing their own race on the altar of “equality”.

Let us never forget… that Christianity itself is an alien, hostile, racially destructive creed of Jewish origin, and in the future most of those who have fallen under its spell will continue to be our enemies and the enemies of our race.

Apparently, those Christian sympathizers who inherited the National Alliance censured the above memo, which Pierce wrote twenty-seven years ago. In this section we will see how, more than seventy years ago, Adolf Hitler also showed far more enlightened views about Christianity than American white nationalists today.

David Irving, the famed historian of the Third Reich, wrote:

The Table Talk’s content is more important in my view than Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and possibly even more than his Zweites Buch (1928). It is unadulterated Hitler. He expatiates on virtually every subject under the sun, while his generals and private staff sit patiently and listen, or pretend to listen, to the monologues.

Hitler’s talks were transcribed from 1941 to 1944. His remarks were recorded by Heinrich Heim, Henry Picker and Martin Bormann in shorthand. The book has been translated to English and the Ostara Publications edition should be read to understand the historical Hitler in contrast to the fantastic Hitler of the media. In this section I will include Hitler’s table talks about Christianity; the first one taken from what the Führer said in a night of July of 1941.

I will also include some texts by a commenter who posted under the penname of Jack Frost. I find hilarious that at the white nationalist webzine The Occidental Observer other commenters still believe that the US started unpolluted. Jack Frost rubs salt into their wounds. The fact is that the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the third President of the United States violated, or allowed among one of the male members of his family to violate, our First Commandment: thou shalt not mix your blood with non-whites, let alone a nigger. Replying to his angry critics, Frost said: “The fact is that the Jefferson Y chromosome entered the Hemings line [a Negro family], and it is still true that it came either from Jefferson himself or one of his male relatives. In the latter case, either he knew his slave was being used sexually, which makes him a pimp, or he didn’t know, which makes him a fool. The Hemings case was not unusual.”

Most American blacks today have higher IQs than African negroes precisely because such happenings among slave owners were not unusual. What infuriates me the most about miscegenation is that the comparatively smart blacks and mulattoes we see on TV have been using their Anglo-Saxon genes to subvert what remains of Anglo-Saxon culture. This was a gift of compassionate Christians who did not castrate the slave negroes while arriving into the shores of the New World.

Young Americans who are starting to question the worldview of the Founding Fathers are realizing that men are not created equal, nor are women equal to men; that these beliefs are religious beliefs, and that society is just as religious as ever it was—I am quoting them—with an official state religion of progressivism: an evil religion. I would go as far as claim that egalitarianism, equality, universalism, the brotherhood of man, the purported inexistence of races and its corollary, non-discrimination as the central value constitute the faith of the worst generation ever since prehistory!

Genuine post-Christians do not propose that the West went wrong forty or fifty years ago, or even two-hundred years ago after the French Revolution; but millennia ago with the debasement of the Aryan gene pool among the Roman citizenship and the eventual destruction of the hard ethos of the classic world. Christianity introduced universalism and the Byzantine Empire, originated by the first Christian Emperor, soon became a mongrel empire. A thousand years later the remaining whites had a choice to revaluate Christian values after the Renaissance, but the Reformation did the exact opposite: it brought the monkey of the Old Testament onto the whites’ backs (cf. Nietzsche’s text in this section). The Enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about human nature and the State, another “good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.” Furthermore, the Enlightenment does not actually represent a clean break from our ancestors’ religion.

There are two ways of looking at western history. The accepted view is that Christianity reached its peak in the times of St Francis of Assisi and St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. This is only true if our glance is purely dogmatic (Aquinas), not axiologic (St Francis). The novel approach is that Christianity did not decay; it mutated like a virus for the white mind. To put it succinctly, the so-called Enlightenment and liberalism are but Secular Christianity. From the axiological viewpoint, Christianity, a red giant star that is about to die, that fateful experiment that started with Constantine, has reached its peak in our twenty-first century. Essays by Revilo Oliver, Manu Rodríguez and Tom Sunic explaining this claim will be included in this section.

This section also reproduces translated excerpts of the general introduction of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity). I must note that Deschner, who died when I was editing this book, was a liberal and probably would have disapproved my inclusion of his translated text in the present collection. Hadn’t Britain declared war to Germany in the last century we would have now thorough German studies on the criminal history of Judaism and Christianity not from the pen of liberals like Deschner, but from National Socialists. The point of including an abridgement of Deschner’s introduction to his incredibly erudite, ten-volume work, is that most white nationalist Christians ignore the history of the Church. Finally, I include Nietzsche’s last pages of his book The Antichrist and a post by a well-known commenter in nationalist forums, Franklin Ryckaert, asking if Christianity is redeemable.

The next article reproduces excerpts from the remains of Against the Galileans by Julian the Apostate, Roman Emperor from 361 to 363 C.E. Remains I say, because the Imperial Church did not even respect the writings of one of their emperors if he happened to dismiss Christianity. Julian only reigned twenty months. In 364 his friend Libanius stated that Julian had been assassinated by a Christian.