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Tag: Christian problem (CP)

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Dominion (book) Egalitarianism

Dominion, 16

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

One might think that the egalitarian follies of our time are a modern phenomenon. But militant, even very violent egalitarianism has ancient Christian roots.

The term Hussites or Hussite Church refers to a reform and revolutionary movement that arose in Bohemia in the 15th century. The name comes from the Bohemian theologian Jan Hus, who had been burnt in the stake. The movement later joined the Reformation.

A town was founded in 1420 by a group of the most radical wing of the Hussites, who gave it the biblical name of ‘Tabor’: the mountain where, according to the gospels, the transfiguration of Jesus took place. The members of this radical wing soon became known as Taborites and the word Tabor has come to mean in Czech ‘camp’.

The radical Hussites established a communal society in Tabor in which private property didn’t exist and any religious hierarchy was rejected. The egalitarian experiment lasted only one year, for in 1421 a moderate Hussite faction overran the Taborite fiefdom.

The town was rebuilt in the 16th century. In the chapter ‘Apocalypse, 1420: Tabor’ Tom Holland says:

The most popular preachers were those who condemned the wealth of monasteries adorned with gold and sumptuous tapestries, and demanded a return to the stern simplicity of the early days of the Church. The Christian people, they warned, had taken a desperately wrong turn. The reforms of Gregory VII, far from serving to redeem the Church, had set it instead upon a path to corruption. The papacy, seduced by the temptations of earthly glory, had forgotten that the Gospels spoke most loudly to the poor, to the humble, to the suffering. ‘The cross of Jesus Christ and the name of the crucified Jesus are now brought into disrepute and made as it were alien and void among Christians.’ Only Antichrist could have wrought such a fateful, such a hellish abomination. And so it was, in the streets of Prague, that it had become a common thing to paint the pope as the beast foretold by Saint John, and to show him wearing the papal crown, but with the feet of a monstrous bird. [page 295]

A couple of pages later Holland writes:

In the wake of Hus’ execution, denunciations of the papacy as Antichrist had begun to be made openly across Prague. Of Sigismund as well—for it was presumed that it was by his treachery that Hus had been delivered up to the flames…

The Taborites were hardly the first Christians to believe themselves living in the shadow of Apocalypse. The novelty lay rather in the scale of the crisis that had prompted their imaginings: one in which all the traditional underpinnings of society, all the established frameworks of authority, appeared fatally compromised. Confronted by a church that was the swollen body of Antichrist, and an emperor guilty of the most blatant treachery, the Taborites had pledged themselves to revolution. But it was not enough merely to return to the ideals of the early church: to live equally as brothers and sisters; to share everything in common. The filth of the world beyond Tabor, where those who had not fled to the mountains still wallowed in corruption, had to be swept away too. Its entire order was rotten. ‘All kings, princes and prelates of the church will cease to be.’ This manifesto, against the backdrop of Sigismund’s determination to break the Hussites, and the papacy’s declaration of a crusade against them, was one calculated to steel the Taborites for the looming struggle. Yet it was not only emperors and popes whom they aspired to eliminate. All those who had rejected the summons to Tabor, to redeem themselves from the fallen world, were sinners. ‘Each of the faithful ought to wash his hands in the blood of Christ’s foes.’

Many Hussites, confronted by this unsparing refusal to turn the other cheek, were appalled. ‘Heresy and tyrannical cruelty,’ one of them termed it. Others muttered darkly about a rebirth of Donatism. The summer of 1420, though, was no time for the moderates to be standing on their principles. The peril was too great. In May, at the head of a great army of crusaders summoned from across Christendom, Sigismund advanced on Prague. Ruin of the kind visited on Béziers two centuries earlier now directly threatened the city. Moderates and radicals alike accepted that they had no choice but to make common cause. The Taborites, leaving behind only a skeleton garrison, duly marched to the relief of Babylon. At their head rode a general of genius. Jan Žižka, one-eyed and sixty years old, was to prove the military saviour that the Albigensians had never found. That July, looking to break the besiegers’ attempt to starve Prague into submission, he launched a surprise attack so devastating that Sigismund was left with no choice but to withdraw. Further victories quickly followed. Žižka proved irresistible. Not even the loss late in 1421 of his remaining eye to an arrow served to handicap him. Crusaders, imperial garrisons, rival Hussite factions: he routed them all. Innovative and brutal in equal measure, Žižka was the living embodiment of the Taborite revolution. Noblemen on their chargers he met with rings of armoured wagons, hauled from muddy farmyards and manned by peasants equipped with muskets; monks he would order burnt at the stake, or else personally club to death. Never once did the grim old man meet with defeat. By 1424, when he finally fell sick and died, all of Bohemia had been brought under Taborite rule…

Readying Prague for their Lord’s arrival, they had systematically targeted symbols of privilege. Monasteries were levelled; the bushy moustaches much favoured by the Bohemian elite forcibly shaved off wherever they were spotted; the skull of a recently deceased king dug up and crowned with straw. As the months and then the years passed, however, and still Christ failed to appear, so the radicalism of the Taborites had begun to fade. They had elected a bishop; negotiated to secure a king; charged the most extreme in their ranks with heresy and expelled them from Tabor. Žižka, displaying a brusque lack of concern for legal process that no inquisitor would ever have contemplated emulating, had rounded up fifty of them and burnt the lot.[1] Well before the abrupt and crushing defeat of the Taborites by a force of more moderate Hussites in 1434, the flame of their movement had been guttering. Christ had not returned. The world had not been purged of kings. Tabor had not, after all, been crowned the New Jerusalem. In 1436, when Hussite ambassadors— achieving a startling first for a supposedly heretical sect—succeeded in negotiating a concordat directly with the papacy, the Taborites had little choice but to accept it. There would be time enough, at the end of days, to defy the order of the world. But until it came, until Christ returned in glory, what option was there except to compromise? [pages 297-300]

Jan Žižka is now a Czech national hero. Above, a statue by J. Strachovský, 1884 in his honor in the town square of Tabor, also called Žižka Square.

____________

[1] Only one man was spared, to provide an account of his sect’s beliefs.

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Axiology Dominion (book)

Dominion, 15

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

Giovanni di Paolo, The Mystic
Marriage of St Catherine of Siena.

On one occasion, when Christ appeared to Catherine of Siena, he did so accompanied by Mary Magdalene. Catherine, weeping with an excess of love, remembered how Mary, kneeling before the feet of her Lord, had once wet his feet with her own tears, and then wiped them with her hair, and kissed them, and anointed them with perfume. ‘Sweetest daughter,’ Christ told her, ‘for your comfort I give you Mary Magdalene for your mother.’ Gratefully, Catherine accepted the offer. ‘And from that moment on,’ so her confessor reported, ‘she felt entirely at one with the Magdalene.’

To be paired with the woman who had first beheld the risen Christ was, of course, a rare mark of divine favour. From childhood, Catherine had taken the Magdalene as a particular role model. Far from betraying complacency, though, this had borne witness to the opposite: Catherine’s own gnawing sense of sin. As reported by Luke, the woman who wept before Jesus, and anointed his feet, had ‘lived a sinful life’. Although she was never named, the identification of her with the Magdalene was one that had enjoyed wide currency ever since Gregory the Great, back in 591, had first made it in a sermon. Over time—and despite the lack of any actual evidence for it in the gospels—the precise character of her ‘sinful life’ had become part of the fabric of common knowledge. Kneeling before Jesus, seeking his forgiveness, she had done so as a penitent whore. Catherine, by accepting the Magdalene as her mother, was embracing the full startling radicalism of a warning given by Christ: that prostitutes would enter the kingdom of God before priests. [pages 285-286]

My book Daybreak (pages 132-135) contains an article with a splendid quote from Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, where a wise Franciscan tells his pupil that the radicalism of St Francis was about empowering all sorts of ‘lepers’—the radical message of the gospel—as opposed to giving them simple alms. Those who haven’t read that article, which I entitled ‘On empowering carcass-eating birds’, should read it now. Using an article of The Occidental Observer it illuminates our understanding of how, in the secular phase of Christianity, the metastasis of gospel ethics has reached our day with the transgender movement: the new ‘leper’ to be empowered just as prostitutes would enter the Kingdom before priests! However, Christians, even medieval Christians, have always been contradicting themselves. Tom Holland continues:

In Paris, as the great cathedral of Notre Dame was being built, the offer from a collective of prostitutes to pay for one of its windows, and dedicate it to the Virgin, had been rejected by a committee of the university’s leading theologians. Two decades later, in 1213, one of the same scholars, following his appointment as papal legate, had ordered that all woman convicted of prostitution be expelled from the city—just as though they were lepers…

Yet always, lurking at the back of even the sternest preacher’s mind, was the example of Christ himself. In John’s gospel, it was recorded that a woman taken in adultery had been brought before him by the Pharisees. Looking to trap him, they had asked if, in accordance with the Law of Moses, she should be stoned. Jesus had responded by bending down and writing in the dust with his finger; but then, when the Pharisees persisted in questioning him, he had straightened up again. ‘If any of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ The crowd, shamed by these words, had hesitated—and then melted away. Finally, only the woman had been left. ‘Has no one condemned you?’ Jesus had asked. ‘No one, Sir,’ she had answered. ‘Then neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.’ [pages 286-287]

In the video I embedded on Thursday St Francis, dressed in rags, in front of the pope on his throne with the cardinals, bishops and abbots of the papal court, recites some of the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount praising ultimate poverty as a protest that the teachings of Christ are totally opposed to Rome’s obsession with wealth. The struggle between the purist monks that follow the gospel message and the more practical Roman curia has always existed. But it is something the American racial right is unwilling to acknowledge: obsessed as they are with blaming only contemporary Jewry for the subversion of the Church when the revolutionary message of the last being first came directly from the New Testament—a NT written by Jews!

Innocent III, that most formidable of heresy’s foes, never forgot that his Saviour had kept company with the lowest of the low: tax-collectors and whores. Endowing a hospital in Rome, he specified that it offer a refuge to sex-workers from walking the streets. To marry one, he preached, was a work of the sublimest piety… Prostitutes themselves, perfectly aware of the example offered them by the Magdalene, veered between tearful displays of repentance and the conviction that God loved them just as much as any other sinner. Catherine, certainly, whenever she met with a sex-worker, would never fail to assure her of Christ’s mercy. ‘Turn to the Virgin. She will lead you straight into the presence of her son.’

Categories
Dominion (book)

Dominion, 14

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

The following quotations are taken from the section ‘Brides of Christ’ in the chapter ‘Flesh, 1300 Milan’.

When workmen digging the foundations of a new house uncovered the statue, experts from across Siena flocked to admire the find. It did not take them long to identify the nude woman as Venus, the goddess of love. Buried and forgotten for centuries, she constituted a rare trophy for the city: an authentic masterpiece of ancient sculpture. Few people were better qualified to appreciate it than the Sienese. Renowned across Italy and far beyond for the brilliance of their artists, they knew beauty when they saw it. Everyone agreed that it would be a scandal for such a prize to be hidden away. Instead, the statue was taken to the Campo, the city’s great central piazza, and placed on top of a fountain. ‘And she was paid great honour.’ At once, everything began to go wrong. A financial crash was followed by a rout of the Sienese army. Then, some five years after the discovery of the Venus, horror almost beyond comprehension brought devastation to the city. A plague, arriving from the east, and spreading with such lethal virulence across the whole of Christendom that it came to be known simply as the Great Dying, reached Siena in May 1348…

Leaders in the new governing council, looking from the Palazzo Pubblico to the statue in the Campo outside, knew what to blame. ‘From the moment we found the statue, evils have been ceaseless.’ This paranoia was hardly surprising. Admiration for ancient sculpture could not outweigh the devastating evidence for divine anger. Almost eight hundred years before, during the pontificate of Gregory the Great, it was cries of repentance that had halted the plague. It was told how Saint Michael, standing above the Tiber, had held aloft a blazing sword—and then, accepting the Romans’ prayers, had sheathed it, and at once the plague had stopped. Now, overwhelmed by calamity, the Sienese scrabbled to show repentance. On 7 November 1357, workmen pulled down the statue of Venus. Hauling it away from the piazza, they smashed it into pieces. Chunks of it were buried just beyond the border with Florence.

The insult offered by the honouring of Venus had been very great. Siena was the city of the Virgin… Those who had demanded the destruction of the Venus were right to see in its delectable and unapologetic nudity a challenge to everything that Mary represented. [pages 278-279]

Recently, in discussing The Ring of the Nibelung, I wrote about the differences between Wagner and Nietzsche, and how the latter distanced himself from his old friend when he realised that, despite rescuing Germanic paganism, Wagner was making concessions to Christian morality.

The first opera I saw was Tannhäuser. I was very impressed that in the end the symbol of Mary triumphed over the symbol of Venus in Wagner’s first masterpiece, which is loaded with sexual symbolism. I didn’t expect to find such a message, but one has to understand that Wagner, unlike the young Nietzsche who used to visit him at home, was stuck halfway across the psychological Rubicon.

This is fundamental. So fundamental in fact that it moved me to add footnotes to Savitri Devi’s book which we recently translated because, like Hitler, Savitri was more inclined to Wagner than to Nietzsche. Unlike them, I believe that if we don’t understand Christianity exactly as the German philosopher understood it, the white race will continue to die out until the end.

Tom Holland then discusses Catherine of Siena: a mystic, activist and writer who had a great influence on Italian literature. Canonised after her death, she is considered a Doctor of the Church by the Roman Catholic Church. By 1377, Catherine had become an antithesis of Venus, so to speak: the most celebrated paradigm of chastity in Christendom.

From childhood, she had made a sacrifice of her appetites. She fasted for days at a time; her diet, on those rare occasions when she did eat, would consist exclusively of raw herbs and the eucharist; she wore a chain tightly bound around her waist. Naturally, it was with sexual yearnings that the Devil most tempted her…

Not merely a virgin, she had been a bride. As a young girl pledging herself to Christ, she had defied her parents’ plans to marry her by hacking off all her hair. She was, so she had told them, already betrothed. Their fury and consternation could not make her change her mind. Sure enough, in 1367, when she was twenty years old, and Siena was celebrating the end of carnival, her reward had arrived. In the small room in her parents’ house where she would fast, and meditate, and pray, Christ had come to her. The Virgin and various saints, Paul and Dominic included, had served as witnesses. King David had played his harp. The wedding ring was Christ’s own foreskin, removed when he had been circumcised as a child, and still wet with his holy blood.[1] Invisible though it was to others, Catherine had worn it from that moment on. [pages 280-282]

___________

[1] According to her confessor, the ring was a gold band; but Catherine herself in her letters, states otherwise.

Categories
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]

Categories
Dominion (book) Inquisition So-called saints

Dominion, 12

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

Before quoting the book, we should recall the pride shown in the Greco-Roman world for the Aryan nude in the form of public statuary, something that both Jews and Christians abhorred. The so-called Catholic saints only show a monstrous reversal of these values, as can be seen in the hagiographies rephrased by Tom Holland in his chapter ‘Persecution: 1229 Marburg’:

The Lady Elizabeth had been born to greatness. Descended from a cousin of Stephen, Hungary’s first truly Christian king, she had been sent as a child to the court of Thuringia, in central Germany, and groomed there for marriage. At the age of fourteen, she had joined Louis, its twenty-year-old ruler, on the throne. The couple had been very happy. Elizabeth had borne her husband three children; Louis had gloried in his wife’s demonstrable closeness to God. Even when he was woken in the night by a maid tugging on his foot, he had borne it patiently, knowing that the servant had mistaken him for his wife, whose custom it was to get up in the early hours to pray. Elizabeth’s insistence on giving away her jewellery to the poor; her mopping up of mucus and saliva from the faces of the sick; her making of shrouds for paupers out of her finest linen veils: here were gestures that had prefigured her far more spectacular self-abasement in the wake of her husband’s death. Her only regret was that it did not go far enough. ‘If there were a life that was more despised, I would choose it.’ When Count Paviam urged Elizabeth to abandon the rigours and humiliations of her existence in Marburg, and return with him to her father’s court, she refused point blank…

Clerks in the service of the papal bureaucracy and scholars learned in canon law had long been toiling to strengthen the foundations of the Church’s authority. They understood the awful responsibility that weighed upon their shoulders. Their task was to bring the Christian people to God. ‘There is one Catholic Church of the faithful, and outside of it there is absolutely no salvation.’ So it had been formally declared during Elizabeth’s childhood, in 1215, at the fourth of a series of councils convened at the Lateran. To defy this canon, to reject the structures of authority that served to uphold it, to disobey the clergy whose solemn prerogative it was to shepherd souls, was to follow the path to hell. [pages 247-249]

One thing that is completely absent on the intellectual right today is the historical memory of what the doctrine of eternal damnation meant for the mental health of medieval Europeans. I touched on the subject in my books on family tragedy; and more succinctly in ‘On Erasmus’, collected in one of the books of the featured post.

In 1206, a one-time playboy by the name of Francis, a native of the Italian city of Assisi, had spectacularly renounced his patrimony. Taking off his clothes, he had handed them over to his father. ‘Moreover he did not even keep his drawers, but stripped himself naked before all the bystanders.’ The local bishop, impressed rather than appalled by this display, had tenderly covered him with his own cloak, and sent him on his way with a blessing. Here, with this episode, had been set the pattern of Francis’ career. His genius for taking Christ’s teachings literally, for dramatising their paradoxes and complexities, for combining simplicity and profundity in a single memorable gesture, would never leave him. [page 251]

Above, St Francis’ renunciation of worldy goods by Giotto.

He served lepers; preached to birds; rescued lambs from butchers. Rare were those immune to his charisma. Admiration for his mission reached to the very summit of the Church. Innocent III, the pope who in 1215 had convened the Fourth Lateran Council, was not a man easily impressed. Imperious, daring and brilliant, he gave way to no one, overthrowing emperors, excommunicating kings. Unsurprisingly, then, when Francis, at the head of twelve ragged ‘brothers’, or ‘friars’, first arrived in Rome, Innocent had refused to see him. The whiff of heresy, not to mention blasphemy, had seemed altogether too rank. Francis, though, unlike Waldes, never stinted in his respect for the Church, in his obedience to its authority. Innocent’s doubts were eased. Imaginative as well as domineering, he had come to see in Francis and his followers not a danger, but an opportunity. Rather than treating them as his predecessors had treated the Waldensians, he ordained them a legally constituted order of the Church. ‘Go, and the Lord be with you, brethren, and as He shall deign to inspire you, preach repentance to all.’ [pages 251-252]

By 1217, less than a decade after this proclamation, a Franciscan mission had reached Germany. Elizabeth would grow up profoundly inspired by its example. By dressing in secret as a beggar, she had been paying tribute to Francis. Other demonstrations of her enthusiasm for his teachings were more public. In 1225, she provided the Franciscans with a base at the foot of the Wartburg, in the town of Eisenach. Three years later, following the death of her husband, she made her way there and formally renounced her ties to the world. Yet no matter how desperately she longed to do so, she did not then go begging from door to door. Elizabeth had properly absorbed the lessons of Francis’ example. She understood that to embrace poverty without obedience was to risk the fate of Waldes. [page-252]

While Waldes was very similar to Elizabeth and Francis in terms of mortifications of the flesh (which today would be considered a mental disorder, self-harm), in the eyes of the Church he was reprehensible because, unlike Elizabeth and Francis, he didn’t faithfully obey his ecclesiastical superiors: enough for him to be considered a heretic.

No mortification, no gesture of abasement, could possibly be undertaken unless at the command of a superior. Here, for a princess, the mistress of many servants, was a realisation that was itself a form of submission. So Elizabeth, even as she sat enthroned by her husband’s side, had employed a magister disciplinae spiritualis: a ‘master of spiritual discipline’. Not just any master, either. ‘I could have sworn obedience to a bishop or an abbot who had possessions, but I thought it better to swear obedience to one who has nothing and relies totally on begging. And so I submitted to Master Conrad’…

Even before Louis’ death, he had punished her for missing one of his sermons with a beating so violent that the stripes were still visible three weeks later… To suffer was to gain redemption. In 1231, when Elizabeth died of her austerities at the tender age of twenty-four, Conrad did not hesitate to hail her as a saint. As gold is purified by fire, so had she been purged of sin. The same strictness that had brought her to an early grave had brought her to heaven. [pages 252-253]

Elizabeth of Hungary submits to her master of spiritual discipline. This image appears in Holland’s book. Conrad was tireless in his defence of the Church and its authority:

In 1231, there came a fresh refinement. A new pope, Gregory IX, authorised Conrad not merely to preach against heresy, but to devote himself to the search for it—the inquisitio. No longer was it the responsibility of a bishop to bring heretics to trial, and sit in judgement on them, but rather that of a cleric especially appointed to the task. Even though, as a priest, Conrad could not himself ‘decree or pronounce a sentence involving the shedding of blood’, he was licensed by Gregory to compel the secular authorities to impose it. Never before had power of this order been given to a campaigner against heresy. Now, when Conrad rode on his mule from village to village, summoning the locals to answer his interrogation of their beliefs, he did so not merely as a preacher, but as a whole new breed of official: an inquisitor.

‘In all things he broke her will, to ensure that the merit of her obedience to him would increase.’ So Conrad had justified his handling of Elizabeth. Now, with all of Germany his to discipline, he could not afford to soften. The truest kindness was cruelty; the truest mercy harshness. The swarm of heretics that confronted Conrad were not readily to be redeemed from damnation. Only fire could smoke them out. Pyres needed to be stoked as they had never been stoked before. The burning of heretics—hitherto a rare and sporadic expedient, only ever reluctantly licensed, if at all—was the very mark of Conrad’s inquisition. In towns and villages along the Rhine, the stench of blackened flesh hung in the air. ‘So many heretics were burned throughout Germany that their number could not be comprehended.’ Conrad’s critics, unsurprisingly, accused him of a killing spree. They charged him with believing every accusation that was brought before him; of rushing the process of law; of sentencing the innocent to the flames. No one, though, was innocent. All were fallen. Better to suffer as Christ had suffered, tortured in a place of public execution for a crime that he had not committed, than to suffer eternal damnation. Better to suffer for a few fleeting moments than to burn for all eternity.

With Master Conrad, the yearning to cleanse the world of sin, to heal it of its leprosy, had turned murderous. That made it no less revolutionary. The suspicion of the worldly order that had brought Gregory VII to humble an anointed king before the gates of Canossa was one that Conrad more than shared. As Elizabeth’s master, he had forbidden her to eat food ‘about which she did not have a clear conscience’. Anything on her husband’s table that might have derived from exploitation of the poor, that might have been extracted from peasants as a tribute or a tax, she had dutifully spurned. ‘As a result, she often suffered great penury, eating nothing but rolls spread with honey.’ The Lady Elizabeth had been a saint. Her peers were not. In the summer of 1233, Conrad dared to accuse one of them, the Count of Sayn, of heresy. A frantically convened synod of bishops, in the presence of the German king himself, threw out the case. Conrad, nothing daunted, began to prepare charges against further noblemen.

Then, on 30 July, as he was returning from the Rhine to Marburg, he was ambushed by a group of knights and cut down. The news of his death was greeted with rejoicing throughout Germany. In the Lateran, though, there was indignation. As Conrad was laid to rest in Marburg, by the side of the Lady Elizabeth, Gregory mourned him in sombre terms. The murderers, so the Pope warned, were harbingers of a rising darkness. All of heaven and earth had shuddered at their crime. Their patron was literally hellish: none other than the Devil himself. [pages 254-256]

Categories
Dominion (book) Racial right

Dominion, 11

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

The following passages are taken from the section ‘Laying Down the Law’ of chapter ‘Revolution, 1076 Cambrai’ of Dominion:

[Pope] Urban’s speech had reverberated to miraculous effect. A great host of warriors drawn from across the Latin West had taken a familiar road. As pilgrims had been doing since the time of the millennium, they had journeyed across Hungary to Constantinople; and then from Constantinople to the Holy Land. Every attempt by the Saracens to halt them had been defeated. Finally, in the summer of 1099, the great army of warrior pilgrims had arrived before Jerusalem. On 15 July, they stormed its walls. The city was theirs. Then, once the slaughter was done, and they had dried their dripping swords, they headed for the tomb of Christ. There, in joy and disbelief, they offered up praises to God. Jerusalem—after centuries of Saracen rule—was Christian once again.

So extraordinary was the feat as to be barely believable—and the news redounded gloriously to the credit of the papacy. Urban himself died a fortnight after the city’s capture, too soon for news of the great victory that he had inspired to reach him; but the programme of reform to which he had devoted his life was much burnished by the winning of the Holy City. Emperors since the time of Charlemagne had fought wars of conquest beneath the banner of Christ; but none had ever sent an entire army on pilgrimage. Warriors present at the capture of Jerusalem reported having seen ‘a beautiful person sitting atop a white horse’—and there were some prepared to wonder if it might not have been Christ himself. Whatever the truth of the mysterious horseman’s identity, one thing was clear: the Holy City had been won, not in the name of any king or emperor, but in that of a much more universal cause.

But what name to give this cause? Back in the Latin West, the word starting to be used was one that, until the capture of Jerusalem, had barely been heard. The warrior pilgrims, so it came to be said, had fought under the banner of Christianitas: Christendom. Such a categorisation—divorced as it was from the dynasties of earthly kings and the holdings of feudal lords—was one well suited to the ambitions of the papacy. Who better to stand at the head of Christendom than the heir of Saint Peter? Less than a century after Henry III had deposed three popes in a single year, the Roman Church had carved out a role of leadership for itself so powerful that Henry’s grandson, the son of Henry IV, was brought in 1122 to sue for peace. In that year, in Worms, where his father had once commanded Gregory VII to abdicate, Henry V agreed to a momentous concordat. By its terms, the fifty-year-old quarrel over the investiture of imperial bishops was finally brought to an end. Although ostensibly a compromise, time would demonstrate that victory was decisively the papacy’s. Decisive too was the increasing acceptance of another key demand of the reformers: that the clergy distinguish themselves from the great mass of the Christian people— the laicus, or ‘laity’—by embracing celibacy. By 1148, when yet another papal decree banning priests from having wives or concubines was promulgated, the response of many was to roll their eyes. ‘Futile and ludicrous—for who does not know already that it is unlawful?’

Increasingly, then, the separation of church from state was an upheaval manifest across the whole of Christendom. Wherever a priest was called upon to minister to the laity, even in the humblest, the most isolated village, there the impact of reformatio could be felt. The establishment of the Roman Church as something more than merely a first among equals, as ‘the general forum of all clergy and all churches’, gave clerics across the Latin West a common identity that they had not previously possessed. In the various kingdoms, fiefdoms and cities that constituted the great patchwork of Christendom, something unprecedented had come into being: an entire class that owed its loyalty, not to local lords, but to a hierarchy that exulted in being ‘universal, and spread throughout the world’.

Emperors and kings, although they might try to take a stand against it, would repeatedly find themselves left bruised by the attempt. Not since the age of Constantine and his heirs had any one man exercised an authority over so wide a sweep of Europe as did the bishop of the ancient capital of the world. His open claim was to the ‘rights of heavenly and earthly empire’; his legates travelled to barbarous lands and expected to be heard; his court, in an echo of the building where the Roman Senate had once met, was known as the ‘Curia’. Yet the pope was no Caesar. His assertion of supremacy was not founded on force of arms, nor the rank of his ministers on their lineage or their wealth. The Church that had emerged from the Gregorian reformatio was instead an institution of a kind never before witnessed: one that had not merely come to think of itself as sovereign, but had willed itself into becoming so. ‘The Pope,’ Gregory VII had affirmed, ‘may be judged by no one.’ All Christian people, even kings, even emperors, were subject to his rulings. The Curia provided Christendom with its final court of appeal. A supreme paradox: that the Church, by rending itself free of the secular, had itself become a state. [pages 233-235]

Once the papal state was formed, Tom Holland mentions the formation of the first university and, very relevant to our research, the formation of so-called canon law. He then writes:

[St] Paul’s authority on this score was definitive. ‘The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’ Here, for Gratian, was the foundation-stone of justice. So important to him was the command that he opened the Decretum by citing it. Echoing the Stoics much as Paul had done, he opted to define it as natural law—and the key to fashioning a properly Christian legal system. All souls were equal in the eyes of God [bold by Ed.]. Only if it were founded on this assumption could justice truly be done. Anything obstructing it had to go. ‘Enactments, whether ecclesiastical or secular, if they are proved to be contrary to natural law, must be totally excluded.’

Much flowed from this formulation that earlier ages would have struggled to comprehend. Age-old presumptions were being decisively overturned: that custom was the ultimate authority; that the great were owed a different justice from the humble; that inequality was something natural, to be taken for granted. Clerks trained in Bologna were agents of revolution as well as of order. Legally constituted, university-trained, they constituted a new breed of professional. Gratian, by providing them with both a criterion and a sanction for weeding out objectionable customs, had transfigured the very understanding of law. No longer did it exist to uphold the differences in status that Roman jurists and Frankish kings alike had always taken for granted. [Remember: for the Merovingian and Frankish kings it was not the same to kill a blond-haired, blue-eyed man as it was to kill a Mediterranean mudblood—Ed.] Instead, its purpose was to provide equal justice to every individual, regardless of rank, or wealth, or lineage—for every individual was equally a child of God…

Image of pages from the Decretum of Burchard of Worms, an 11th-century book of canon law.

How, for instance, were the Christian people to square the rampant inequality between rich and poor with the insistence of numerous Church Fathers that ‘the use of all things should be common to all’? The problem was one that, for decades, demanded the attention of the most distinguished scholars in Bologna. By 1200, half a century after the completion of the Decretum, a solution had finally been arrived at—and it was one fertile with implications for the future. A starving pauper who stole from a rich man did so, according to a growing number of legal scholars, iure naturali—‘in accordance with natural law’. As such, they argued, he could not be reckoned guilty of a crime. Instead, he was merely taking what was properly owed him. It was the wealthy miser, not the starving thief, who was the object of divine disapproval. Any bishop confronted by such a case, so canon lawyers concluded, had a duty to ensure that the wealthy pay their due of alms. Charity, no longer voluntary, was being rendered a legal obligation.

That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, though, was a matching principle: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was—in a formulation increasingly deployed by canon lawyers—a human ‘right’.

Law, in the Latin West, had become an essential tool of its ongoing revolution. [pages 238-239]

Countless times I have said that white nationalists, who are generally sympathetic to Christianity even though they are not all Christians, are ignorant of the history of the West in general and of the Church in particular. It is amusing to see them anathematise the current pope, as if his liberalism were a phenomenon of our century. They constantly complain in their forums: ‘Alas, the Jews have subverted Christianity!’ In fact the first, baby steps to equalise men by law, based on St Paul the Jew, had already been taken a millennium earlier.

Categories
Dominion (book) Roman Catholic popes

Dominion, 10

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

The chapter ‘Revolution, 1076 Cambrai’ begins by explaining how the Catholic Church decided to expand the vow of celibacy, which already existed for alienated monks, to all priests.

This, from my point of view, was a step that led to the abuse of children and pubescents in the Church throughout the next millennium, as now even the clergy could not marry, burning themselves in celibacy and masturbation. Such an aberrant step has to do with the Christian view of the human soul, which assumes that lust doesn’t exist in a pure soul, but that we simply indulge in impure thoughts, concupiscence.

A millennium later such a view of the human soul would become, in secularised form, in the trans movement that assumes that we are not sexualised animals but that we can simply ‘choose’ our sexes. In the following pages, Tom Holland mentions a milestone in the mentality of Europeans regarding the increasing power of the Church:

‘The Pope is permitted to depose emperors.’ This proposition, one of a number of theses on papal authority drawn up for Gregory’s private use in March 1075, had shown him more than braced for the inevitable blow-back. No pope before had ever claimed such a licence; but neither, of course, had any pope dared to challenge imperial authority with such unapologetic directness. Gregory, by laying claim to the sole leadership of the Christian people, and trampling down long-standing royal prerogatives, was offending Henry IV grievously. Heir to a long line of emperors who had never hesitated to depose troublesome popes, the young king acted with the self-assurance of a man supremely confident that both right and tradition were on his side. Early in 1076, when he summoned a conference of imperial bishops to the German city of Worms, the assembled clerics knew exactly what was expected of them. The election of Hildebrand, so they ruled, had been invalid. No sooner had this decision been reached than Henry’s scribes were reaching for their quills. ‘Let another sit upon Saint Peter’s throne.’ The message to Gregory in Rome could not have been blunter. ‘Step down, step down!’

But Gregory also had a talent for bluntness. Brought the command to abdicate, he not only refused, but promptly raised the stakes. Speaking from the Lateran, he declared that Henry was ‘bound with the chain of anathema’ and excommunicated from the Church. His subjects were absolved of all their oaths of loyalty to him. Henry himself, as a tyrant and an enemy of God, was deposed. The impact of this pronouncement proved devastating. Henry’s authority went into meltdown. Numerous of his princely vassals, hungry for the opportunity that his excommunication had given them, set to dismembering his kingdom. By the end of the year, Henry found himself cornered. To such straits was his authority reduced that he settled on a desperate gambit. Crossing the Alps in the dead of winter, he headed for Canossa, a castle in the northern Apennines where he knew that Gregory was staying. For three days, ‘barefoot, and clad in wool’, the heir of Constantine and Charlemagne stood shivering before the gates of the castle’s innermost wall. Finally, ordering the gates unbarred, and summoning Henry into his presence, Gregory absolved the penitent with a kiss. ‘The King of Rome, rather than being honoured as a universal monarch, had been treated instead as merely a human being—a creature moulded out of clay.’

Henry IV, King of Germany from 1054 to 1105, King of Italy and Burgundy from 1056 to 1105, and Duke of Bavaria begging forgiveness of Pope Gregory VII at Canossa, the castle of the Countess Matilda, 1077.

The shock was seismic. That Henry had soon reneged on his promises, capturing Rome in 1084 and forcing his great enemy to flee the city, had done nothing to lessen the impact of Gregory’s papacy on the mass of the Christian people. For the first time, public affairs in the Latin West had an audience that spanned every region, and every social class. ‘What else is talked about even in the women’s spinning-rooms and the artisans’ workshops?’…

The humiliation of Henry IV had made visible a great and awesome prize. The dream of Gregory and his fellow reformers—of a Church rendered decisively distinct from the dimension of the earthly, from top to bottom, from palace to meanest village—no longer appeared a fantasy, but eminently realisable. A celibate clergy, once disentangled from the snares and meshes of the fallen world, would then be better fitted to serve the Christian people as a model of purity, and bring them to God…

Nevertheless, deep though the roots of Gregory’s reformatio lay in the soil of Christian teaching, the flower was indeed something new. The concept of the ‘secular’, first planted by Augustine, and tended by Columbanus, had attained a spectacular bloom. Gregory and his fellow reformers did not invent the distinction between religio and the saeculum, between the sacred and the profane; but they did render it something fundamental to the future of the West, ‘for the first time and permanently’. A decisive moment…

It was no longer enough for Gregory and his fellow reformers that individual sinners, or even great monasteries, be consecrated to the dimension of religio. The entire sweep of the Christian world required an identical consecration. That sins should be washed away; the mighty put down from their seats; the entire world reordered in obedience to a conception of purity as militant as it was demanding: here was a manifesto that had resulted in a Caesar humbling himself before a pope. ‘Any custom, no matter how venerable, no matter how commonplace, must yield utterly to truth—and, if it is contrary to truth, be abolished.’ So Gregory had written. Nova consilia, he had called his teachings—‘new counsels’.

A model of reformatio had triumphed that, reverberating down the centuries, would come to shake many a monarchy, and prompt many a visionary to dream that society might be born anew. The earthquake would reach very far, and the aftershocks be many. The Latin West had been given its primal taste of revolution. [pages 227-231]

Categories
Dominion (book)

Dominion, 9

by Tom Holland

  A bare couple of decades after Charlemagne’s death in 814, a Saxon poet, writing in praise of the god brought by the Franks to his people, had contrasted ‘the bright, infinitely beautiful light’ of Christ with the waxing and waning of mortals. ‘Here in this world, in Middle Earth, they come and go, the old dying and the young succeeding, until they too grow old, and are borne away by fate.’ The coronation of Otto in the ancient capital of the world bore potent witness to just how unpredictable were the affairs of men. The throne of empire had stood vacant for over half a century. The last descendant of Charlemagne to occupy it had been deposed, blinded and imprisoned back in 905. The Regnum Francorum, the ‘Kingdom of the Franks’, had fractured into a number of realms. Of these, the two largest were on the western and eastern flanks of the one-time Frankish empire: kingdoms that in time would come to be known as France and Germany. The dynasty to which Otto belonged, and which had been elected to the rule of eastern Francia in 919, had no link to Charlemagne’s. Indeed, it was not even Frankish. Otto the Great, the heir of Constantine, the shield of the West, the wielder of the Holy Spear, was sprung from the very people who, less than two centuries before, had been so obdurate in their defiance of Christian arms: the Saxons…

  Meanwhile, in the northern seas, the forces of Christian order were recovering from near implosion. In 937, a great Viking invasion of Britain was defeated by the king of Wessex, a formidable warrior by the name of Athelstan. The triumph, though, was not Athelstan’s alone. For three generations, under his father and grandfather, the West Saxons had been locked in a desperate struggle for survival. They alone, of all the Anglo-Saxon peoples, had managed to preserve their kingdom from Viking conquest—and even then, only just. For a spell, the very future of Christianity in the lands cast by Bede as a new Israel had seemed to hang by a thread. God, though, had saved it from being cut. Not only had the Vikings been brought to submit to Christ, but an entire new Christian kingdom had been built out of the ruins of the old. Athelstan had emerged from a lifetime of relentless campaigning as the first king of a realm that, by the time of his death, stretched from Northumbria to the Channel. ‘Through God’s grace he ruled alone what previously many had held among themselves.’ Redeemed from the brink of disaster, Bede’s vision of the Angles and the Saxons as a single people had been fulfilled.

   Great conquerors such as Otto and Athelstan stood in no barbarian’s shadow. After a long century of reverses and defeats, Christian kingship had recaptured its swagger, its mystique. What god could possibly rival the power of the celestial emperor who had brought the Saxons from sinister obscurity to such greatness, or the House of Wessex to feed so many of their foes to the wolves and the ravens? It was only natural for a pagan warlord defeated by Christian arms to ponder this question long and hard. Battle was the ultimate testing-ground of a god’s authority. Not only that, but the rewards of suing for terms from Christ were evident. To accept baptism was to win entry into a commonwealth of realms defined by their antiquity, their sophistication and their wealth. From Scandinavia to central Europe, pagan warlords began to contemplate the same possibility: that the surest path to profiting from the Christian world might not be to tear it to pieces, but rather to be woven into its fabric. Sure enough, two decades after the great slaughter of his people beside the Lech, Géza, the king of the Hungarians, became a Christian. Reproached by a monk for continuing to offer sacrifice ‘to various false gods’, he cheerily acknowledged that hedging his bets ‘had brought him both wealth and great power’. Only a generation on, the commitment to Christ of his son, Waik, was altogether more full-blooded. The new king took the name Stephen; he built churches across the Hungarian countryside; he ordered that the head be shaved of anyone who dared to mock the rites performed within them; he had a rebellious pagan lord quartered, and the dismembered body parts nailed up in various prominent places. Great rewards were quick to flow from these godly measures. Stephen, the grandson of a pagan chieftain, was given as his queen the grand-niece of none other than Otto the Great. Otto’s own grandson, the reigning emperor, bestowed on him a replica of the Holy Spear. The pope sent him a crown. In time, after a long and prosperous reign, he would end up proclaimed a saint.

   By 1038, the year of Stephen’s death, the leaders of the Latin Church could view the world with an intoxicating sense of possibility. It was not just the Hungarians who had been brought to Christ. So too had the Bohemians and the Poles, the Danes and the Norwegians. Ambitious chieftains, once they had been welcomed into the order of Christian royalty, were rarely tempted to renew the worship of their ancestral gods. No pagan ritual could rival the anointing of a baptised king. The ruler who felt the stickiness of holy oil upon his skin, penetrating his pores, seeping deep into his soul, knew himself joined by the experience to David and Solomon, to Charlemagne and Otto. Who was Christ himself, if not the very greatest of kings? Over the course of the centuries, he ‘had gained many realms and had triumphed over the mightiest rulers and had crushed through his power the necks of the proud and the sublime’. It was no shame for even the most peerless of kings, even the emperor himself, to acknowledge this. From east to west, from deepest forest to wildest ocean, from the banks of the Volga to the glaciers of Greenland, Christ had come to rule them all.

   Yet there was a paradox. Even as kings bowed the knee to him, the hideousness of what he had undergone for humanity’s sake, the pain and helplessness that he had endured at Golgotha, the agony of it all, was coming to obsess Christians as never before. The replica of the Holy Spear sent to Stephen served as a sombre reminder of Christ’s suffering. Christ himself—unlike Otto—had never borne it into battle. It was holy because a Roman soldier, standing guard over his crucifixion, had jabbed it into his side. Blood and water had flowed out. Christ had hung from his gibbet, dead. Ever since, Christians had shrunk from representing their Saviour as a corpse. But now, a thousand years on, artists had begun to break that taboo. In Cologne, above the grave of the archbishop who had commissioned it, a great sculpture was erected, one that portrayed Christ slumped on the cross, his eyes closed, the life gone from his body. Others beheld a similar scene in their visions. A monk in Limoges, rising in the dead of night, saw ‘the image of the Crucified One, the colour of fire and deep blood for half a full night hour’, high against the southern sky, as if planted in the heavens. The closer that 1033, the millennial anniversary of Christ’s death, drew near, so the more did vast crowds, in an ecstasy of mingled yearning, and hope, and fear, begin to assemble. Never before had a movement of such a magnitude been witnessed in the lands of the West. Many gathered in fields outside towns across France, ‘stretching their palms to God, and shouting with one voice, “Peace! Peace! Peace!”, as a sign of the perpetual covenant which they had vowed between themselves and God’. Others, taking advantage of the land-route that the conversion of the Hungarians had opened up, followed the road to Constantinople, and thence to Jerusalem. The largest number of all set out in 1033, ‘an innumerable multitude of people from the whole world, greater than any man before could have hoped to see’. Their journey’s end: the site of Christ’s execution, and the tomb that had witnessed his resurrection.

  What were they hoping for? If they declared it, they did so under their breath. Christians were not oblivious to Augustine’s prohibition. They knew the orthodoxy: that the thousand-year reign of the saints mentioned in Revelation was not to be taken literally. In the event, the millennium of Christ’s death came and went, and he did not descend from the heavens. His kingdom was not established on earth. The fallen world continued much as before. Nevertheless, the longing for reform, for renewal, for redemption did not fade. On one level, this was nothing new. Christ, after all, had called on his followers to be born again. The longing to see the entire Christian people purged of their sins had deep roots [bold by Ed.]. It was what, some two and a half centuries previously, had inspired Charlemagne in his great project of correctio. Yet though his heirs still claimed the right to serve as the shepherds of their people, to rule—as Charlemagne had done—as priest as well as king, the ambition to set the Christian world on new foundations was no longer the preserve of courts. It had become a fever that filled meadows with swaying, moaning crowds, and inspired armies of pilgrims to tramp dusty roads…

  Arnold was right to foretell upheaval. Much that had been taken for granted was on the verge of titanic disruption. Revolution of a new and irreversible order was brewing in the Latin West.  [pages 216-221]

Categories
Destruction of Germanic paganism Dominion (book)

Dominion, 8 

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

“Carolingian Forces are Defeated by Saxon rebels in the Suntel Hills”
From: “Conquest of Saxony 782-785 (Campaign 271)”, pages 58-59.
Illustrator: Graham Turner.

In the summer of 772, fifty years after Boniface’s felling of Thunor’s oak, another tree—the greatest of all the Saxons’ totems—was brought crashing down. Fearsome, phallic, and famed across Saxony, the Irminsul was believed by devotees of the ancient gods to uphold the heavens. But it did not. The skies remained in their place, even once the sanctuary had been demolished. Yet to the Saxons themselves, it might well have seemed as though the pillars of the world were crumbling. Devastation on a scale never before visited on their lands was drawing near. The desecrator of the Irminsul was no missionary, but a king at the head of the most menacing war-machine in Europe. Charles, the younger son of Pepin, had ascended to the sole rule of the Franks only the previous December. Not since the vanished age of the Caesars had anyone in the West commanded such resources. Prodigious both in his energies and in his ambitions, he exerted a sway that was Roman in its scope. In 800, the pope set an official seal on the comparison in Rome itself: for there, on Christmas Day, he crowned the Frankish warlord, and hailed him as ‘Augustus’. Then, having done so, he fell before Charles’ feet. Such obeisance had for centuries been the due of only one man: the emperor in Constantinople. Now, though, the West had its own emperor once again. Charles, despite his reluctance to admit that he might owe anything to an Italian bishop, and his insistence that, had he only known what the pope was planning, he would never have permitted it, did not reject the title. King of the Franks and ‘Christian Emperor’, he would be remembered by later generations as Charles the Great: Charlemagne.

Many were his conquests. During the four decades and more of his rule, he succeeded in annexing northern Italy, capturing Barcelona from the Arabs, and pushing deep into the Carpathian Basin. Yet of all Charlemagne’s many wars, the bloodiest and most exhausting was the one he launched against the Saxons… [pages 207-208]

On the same page Tom Holland talks about what this warlord, who wanted to imitate King David, did in 782: in a single day he beheaded 4,500 Saxon prisoners who refused to worship the god of the Jews. Then he adds:

There was more to the bloody rhythms of Frankish campaigning, however, than the goal merely of securing for the new Israel a troubled flank. Charlemagne aimed as well at something altogether more novel: the winning of the Saxons for Christ.

Christianity was imposed by force upon the white race. The Aryan religions were destroyed by Constantine and his successors as well as by Charlemagne and his successors: the architects of a Dark Age which in our woke days has reached its blackest hour.

What American white nationalists did not, do not and will not understand is that like other Jews St Paul was, in itself, harmless. It required imperial violence by Aryans to impose his subversive ideas on white peoples. I have said it many times: as long as the racial right doesn’t want to see historical reality, their movement shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Only by washing away all that they had been, and erasing entirely their former existence, could they be brought to a proper submission. In 776, Charlemagne imposed a treaty on the Saxons that obliged them to accept baptism. Countless men, women and children were led into a river, there to become Christian. Nine years later, after the crushing of yet another rebellion, Charlemagne pronounced that ‘scorning to come to baptism’ would henceforward merit death. So too, he declared, would offering sacrifice to demons [the Germanic Gods—Ed.], or cremating a corpse, or eating meat during the forty days before Easter. Ruthlessly, determinedly, the very fabric of Saxon life was being torn apart. There would be no stitching it back together. Instead, dyed in gore, its ragged tatters were to lie for ever in the mud. As a programme for bringing an entire pagan people to Christ, it was savage as none had ever been before. A bloody and imperious precedent had been set. [page 209]

History and biography are the same animal: the former is simply a conglomeration of many biographies. In my previous post, I said that my family of normies have not wanted to see tragedy because of their denials and repressions, something very common in human beings (cf. Susan Forward’s Toxic Parents). Exactly the same could be said not only of Western historians but of all readers of history who see the history of white peoples through a lens sympathetic to the religion of our parents.

In the following pages Holland again mentions how this monster (that deluded whites call Charles the Great) was inspired by the book of our ethnic enemies:

Charlemagne, declaring in 789 his ambition to see his subjects ‘apply themselves to a good life’, cited as his model a king from the Old Testament: Josiah, who had discovered in the Temple a copy of the law given to Moses. ‘For we read how the saintly Josiah, by visitation, correction and admonition, strove to recall the kingdom which God had given him to the worship of the true God.’ [Admonitio Generalis. Preface.]

Categories
Dominion (book) Tree

Dominion, 7

Or:

How the Woke monster originated

Tom Holland titles the next section of his book ‘Christendom’ (the previous section, ‘Antiquity’). The first chapter of this second section (‘Conversion: 754’) opens with vignettes from the life of a so-called saint:

As dawn broke, the camp on the banks of the river Boorne was already stirring. Boniface, its leader, was almost eighty, but as tireless as he had ever been. Forty years after his first journey to Frisia, he had returned there, in the hope of reaping from its lonely mudflats and marshes a great harvest of souls. Missionary work had long been his life. Born in Devon, in the Saxon kingdom of Wessex, he viewed the pagans across the northern sea as his kinsmen. In letters home he had regularly solicited prayers for their conversion. ‘Take pity upon them; for they themselves are saying: “We are of one blood and bone with you.”’ Now, after weeks of touring the scattered homesteads of Frisia, Boniface had summoned all those won for Christ to be confirmed in their baptismal vows. It promised him a day of joy.

The first boats arrived as sunlight was starting to pierce the early morning cloud. A mass of men, after clambering onto dry land, walked up from the river and approached the camp. Then, abruptly, the glint of swords. A charge. Screams. Boniface came out of his tent. Already it was too late. The pirates were in the camp. Desperately, Boniface’s attendants fought back. Not the old man himself, though. Christ, when he was arrested, had ordered Peter to put up his sword; and now Boniface, following his Lord’s example, commanded his followers to lay down their weapons. A tall man, he gathered his fellow priests around him, and urged them to be thankful for the hour of their release. Felled by a pirate’s sword, he was cut to pieces. So violently did the blows rain down that twice a book he had in his hands was hacked through. Found long afterwards at the scene of his murder, it would be treasured ever after as a witness to his martyrdom. [pages 201-202]

The book which Saint Boniface, the ‘Apostle of the Germans’, reputedly held up to defend himself from the swords of the Frisians who killed him (Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt). This image appears in Holland’s book.

It was not the inheritance of Roman imperialism that inspired them, but the example of Patrick and Columbanus. To experience hardship was the very point. Fearsome stories were told of what missionaries might face. Woden [Wotan], king of the demons worshipped by the Germans as gods, was darkly rumoured to demand a tithe of human lives. [page 203]

Let’s compare this demonised vision of Wotan with the Wotan we just saw in the Wagnerian tetralogy (and let’s remember that for the Christians who destroyed the statues of Apollo and other Greco-Roman gods, they also said they were ‘demons’).

In the Low Countries, prisoners were drowned beneath rising tides; in Saxony, hung from trees, and run through with spears. Runes were dyed in Christian blood. Or so it was reported. Such rumours, far from intimidating Anglo-Saxon monks, only confirmed them in their sense of purpose: to banish the rule of demons from lands that properly belonged to Christ.

As vividly as anyone, they understood what it was to be born again. ‘The old has gone, the new has come!’ The tone of revolution in Paul’s cry, the sense that an entire order had been judged and found wanting, still retained a freshness for men like Boniface in a way that it did not in more venerable reaches of the Christian world. [page 203]

In the following pages Holland talks about something we have already seen in our translation of Deschner’s books: the felling of the sacred tree of the Saxons (here). He added:

To banish the past, to overturn custom: here was a fearsome project, barely comprehensible to the peoples of other places, other times… Barely a decade after Boniface’s arrival in the Low Countries, missionaries had begun to calculate dates in the manner of Bede: anno Domini, in the year of their Lord. The old order, which to pagans had seemed eternal, could now more firmly be put where it properly belonged: in the distant reaches of a Christian calendar. While the figure of Woden bestowed far too much prestige on kings ever to be erased altogether from their lineages, monks did not hesitate to demote him from his divine status and confine him to the remote beginnings of things. The rhythms of life and death, and of the cycle of the year, proved no less adaptable to the purposes of the Anglo-Saxon Church. So it was that hel, the pagan underworld, where all the dead were believed to dwell, became, in the writings of monks, the abode of the damned; and so it was too that Eostre, the festival of the spring, which Bede had speculated might derive from a goddess, gave its name to the holiest Christian feast-day of all. Hell and Easter: the garbing of the Church’s teachings in Anglo-Saxon robes did not signal a surrender to the pagan past, but rather its rout. Only because the gods had been toppled from their thrones, melted utterly by the light of Christ, or else banished to where monsters stalked, in fens or on lonely hills, could their allure safely be put to Christian ends. The victory of the new was adorned with the trophies of the old. [page 204]

The old incarnation of this site featured a Weirwood tree, straight out of the novels of George R.R. Martin, as the symbol of The West’s Darkest Hour (scroll down to the very bottom of e.g. this PDF). Since the theme of this new incarnation doesn’t allow displaying images in a sidebar, the Weirwood image no longer appears. However, in my mind it is still the symbol of this site, and I would like to explain why.

As past visitors know, I began my literary career by writing several books about the tragedy in my family. Unlike other victims who have already died because of such tragedy—my sister and two of my first cousins—I realised that only by telling myself the deep past could I heal.

That meant delving into our biographical past with the work equivalent of several doctorates, and the result was my series From Jesus to Hitler. But once I developed the gift of seeing the family past in a very different way than the family normies see it—with all their denials and repressions—, I realised that I could use that ‘gift’ to begin to see the authentic past of the West.

That’s why Martin’s fiction about the Weirwood trees appealed to me so much. If a greenseer touched them, he could paranormally see into Westeros’s past (what parapsychologists call retrocognition). It struck me greatly that I used to touch the trunk of the big tree in our backyard the way, in the television version of Martin’s books, Bran the Broken touched the Weirwood trees—but I did that decades before Martin began his novels.

The difference, of course, is that in the real world retrocognition probably doesn’t exist, and as a kid I didn’t see the past paranormally. But I touched the tree just as Bran would do decades later on an HBO series, and as a teenager I sensed that there was something numinous about it.

In order not to make this autobiographical vignette too long, the tree symbolises seeing the past as it happened, not as the normies believe it happened. That’s why Goodrich’s book is first on my list in ‘Our Books’. And the second book shows us the true history of Greece, Rome and how the Judeo-Christians ended that culture. (After all, the books that saved me were made from material taken from trees.)

Touching the Weirwood tree is what saves us, as long as the person touching it is a greenseer. For this reason, both Boniface and the invaders in Martin’s prose, the first thing they did was cut down the sacred trees. Holland ends that section with the following paragraphs:

As well as the Pope, he [Boniface] had won the backing of Charles Martel. The Frankish warlord, no less keen to break the eastern marches to his own purposes than the Anglo-Saxon bishop, had found in Boniface a man after his own heart. Tortured though Boniface was by the need to curry favour at court, and by his frustrated yearning to save the souls of pagans, he had succeeded, by the end of his life, in shaping the churches east of the Rhine to something like his own image. Returning, in the last year of his life, to the mission that had always been closest to his heart, he had done so as the dominant figure in the Frankish church…

Yet even as Boniface was being cut down amid the reeds and mud of Frisia, the lead given by missionaries in the spread of Christianity eastwards was passing. A new and altogether more militant approach to paganism was being prepared. The willingness of Boniface to meet death rather than permit his attendants to draw their swords was not one that the Frankish authorities tended to share. Three days after his murder, a squad of Christian warriors tracked down the killers, cornered them and wiped them out. Their women and children were taken as slaves. [pages 206-207]