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Tag: Christian question (CQ)

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Constantinople Goths Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 114

St. John Chrysostom exhorting Aelia Eudoxia. Note how the Empress—the spouse of the Roman Emperor Arcadius—, in this painting by Jean-Paul Laurens, has people in her Byzantine entourage who are not whites.

Editor’s note: In a nationalist forum last month a commenter said:

A BS narrative that makes no sense. The idea that Jews created Christianity to subjugate the world is absurd and has no basis in historical fact. Anyone with a basic knowledge of history knows that anti-Jewish Rome and Byzantium spread Christianity—to the Jews disfavour. 

It is true that some Jews suffered with the Christian emperors from the times of Constantine, but it cannot be said that the spread of Christianity was unfavourable to them. Quite the contrary: by the time of the reign of Theodosius II only two religions were legal in the Roman Empire: Judaism and Christianity! Not gratuitously I called ‘Apocalypse for Whites’ my translations of Evropa Soberana’s book on Judea vs. Rome.

The mentioned commenter does not seem to understand the double-edged strategy of the Semitic Christians of the Ancient World. Contemporary Jews are capable to withstand the open anti-Semitism of millions of Muslim migrants. Why they do that? Because they want to dilute the blood of the Aryan Man within his own land. In the same way, in the Ancient World they tolerated some repression since Constantine and his successors in order to annihilate the Greco-Roman culture of the Hellenes (i.e., the White culture), their true enemy.

Byzantium took over after the Western Roman Empire collapse. Byzantium had far more riches than Rome and its rule lasted 1,000 years. The Jews were greatly restricted under Byzantium rule. Again, you demonstrate your historical ignorance. 

Does the commenter ignore that in the times of Byzantium (Constantinople) a war was fought—a war of ethnic cleansing of pure Whites instigated by St. John Chrysostom? When Karlheinz Deschner writes below about a mood, ‘typical of the anti-Germanism that prevailed in Constantinople’, one must keep in mind that the xenophobic muds of the old Byzantium disliked the blond Nordics and massacred 7,000 of them, women and children included.

Christian readers of the history of Constantinople, even those who comment in Alt-Right forums, usually don’t care about the ethnicity of the residents of the Mud City that Constantine had founded. Not even Richard Spencer has cared about it when he mentions Byzantium in glowing terms. New visitors of this site who have not read Evropa Soberana’s essay should read it now (see sticky post), together with the only histories about the White race, by William Pierce and Arthur Kemp, that have been written.

Karlheinz Deschner wrote:
 

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The massacre of Goths in Constantinople

Arcadius, who was still a boy, was named Augustus in 383 and in 384 became independent sovereign of the East. He was educated first by his mother Aelia Flaccilla, a strict Catholic, and then by the deacon Arsenius, who came from Rome. Although not without training—even a pagan, Themistius, prefect of Constantinople, had been his teacher—, the monarch always depended on his advisors and also his wife Aelia Eudoxia (mother of St. Pulcheria and Theodosius II): a determined anti-German, that pushed Arcadius against the ‘heretics’ and the followers of the old faith, and who largely directed his internal policy. On August 7, 395, the emperor, who was then seventeen years old, censured the negligence of the authorities in the persecution of idolatrous cults.

General Gainas, an Arian Goth, who rose rapidly in the Roman army, had succeeded in the meantime. He was in 394 in the war against Eugenius; in 395, in the campaign of Stilicho against Alaric. Gainas participated next in the murder of Rufinus, and from 396 to 399, under the command of Eutropius, became et magister utrius que militiae.One day they sent Gainas to the leaders of the party opposed to the Germans, their greatest adversary: the consul Aurelian, the consular Saturninus and the clerk John. However, the Goth only touched them with the sword, manifestly implying that they would have deserved death, and sent them into exile.

Now, after an unfortunate operation in the year 399 against the Goth Tribigild, who had risen in arms, Gainas fell into suspicion. Also in Constantinople, as a reaction to the pillages of the Goths, the tributes of war and all kinds of demagogues, a rigorous national orientation had developed, a remarkable anti-Germanism ‘represented mainly by Orthodox Christians’ (Heinzberger). The people, incited with rumours, hated the Germans, the ‘barbarians’ and the Arian ‘heretics’, who even aspired to have their own church in the capital. For this reason, Gainas maintained a lively polemic with patriarch John Chrysostom, who tried vehemently to ‘convert’ the Goths and who had assigned to the Catholic Goths a temple of their own, the church of Saint Paul, thus becoming ‘the founder of a German national church in Constantinople’ (Baur, Catholic).

However, the bishop strictly banned Arian religious services. He protested before the emperor against the requests of Gainas of a church of his own. Expletives against the Arians and the remaining ‘heretics’ were unleashed. He prayed insistently to the sovereign, dominated by Eudoxia, the anti-German fanatic—since the year 400 she was considered ‘August’—who did not allow the dogs to be thrown at the saint. It is better to lose the throne than to betray the house of God. Compare this to the similar advice given by Chrysostom’s colleague, Ambrose. The intervention of the bishop encouraged the citizens, with whom conflicts had already taken place. They rebelled in the so-called ‘hot summer of the year 400’, probably due to xenophobia, the differences between the two peoples. ‘However, what was decisive was the confessional antagonism; the shedding of blood begins, curiously, when Gainas demands for its Argive Goths the concession of a church’ (Aland).

The national party, which had armed the citizens, attacked along with the Roman garrison and the palace guard, the Goth minority. Gainas was saved with a part of his troops on the night of July 12, 400, when the assault took place at the city gate. However, many of their soldiers, along with their wives and children, were killed or burned inside the ‘church of the Goths’, where they had sought refuge; in total, apparently, more than seven thousand people. It occurred ‘at the instigation of Bishop Chrysostom’ (Ludwig), though perhaps to a greater extent at the behest of the later Bishop Synesius. His manifestations as an emissary are typical of the anti-Germanism that prevailed in Constantinople.

The prestige of St. John Chrysostom ‘was reinforced by these disturbances’. Nevertheless, it was not, as the Catholic Stockmeier thinks, because he was ‘above the parties’ but because he was on the side of the victors. The Catholics, who avoided the open struggle, removed the roof of the church and massacred the ‘barbarians’ with a shower of burning stones and beams, killing every last one of them (thirty-four years before, the procedure had already given good results in Rome in the fight between two popes). After the battle, they sang a thanksgiving to heaven and Chrysostom once again praised the man who directed human destinies in his sermon.

The fugitive Gainas, now officially an enemy of the State, went to Thrace to join his people on the other side of the lower Danube. However, after the annihilation of his army, on crossing the Hellespont on 23 December of the year 400, he was killed and his head sent to Constantinople at the beginning of the following year.

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To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translationof Volume I.

Categories
Catholic Church Catholic religious orders Christendom Darkening Age (book) Emperor Julian Free speech / association Libanius Ovid

Darkening Age, 21

Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Story of Saint Paul: The Burning of the
Books at Ephesus, designed ca. 1529, woven before 1546 (medium:
wool and silk, woven under the direction of Jan van der Vyst).

Editor’s note.Bold-typed emphasis in the last paragraph is mine. In chapter eleven of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:

In Egypt, a fearsome monk and saint named Shenoute entered the house of a man suspected of being a pagan and removed all his books. The Christian habit of book-burning went on to enjoy a long history. A millennium later, the Italian preacher Savonarola wanted the works of the Latin love poets Catullus, Tibullus and Ovid to be banned while another preacher said that all of these ‘shameful books’ should be let go, because if you are Christians you are obliged to burn them’…

* * *

Before there had been competing philosophical schools, all equally valid, all equally arguable. Now, for the first time, there was right—and there was wrong. Now, there was what the Bible said—and there was everything else. And from now on any belief that was ‘wrong’ could, in the right circumstances, put you in grave danger.

As Dirk Rohmann has highlighted, Augustine said that works that opposed Christian doctrine had no place in Christian society and had scant time for much of Greek philosophy. The Greeks, Augustine said dismissively, ‘have no ground for boasting of their wisdom’. The Church’s authors were greater, and more ancient. John Chrysostom went far further. He described pagan philosophy as a madness, the mother of evils and a disease.

Classical literature was filled with the incorrect and demonic and it came under repeated and vicious attack from the Church Fathers. Atheism, science and philosophy were all targeted. The very idea that mankind could explain everything through science was, as Rohmann has shown, disparaged as folly. ‘Stay clear of all pagan books!’ the Apostolic Constitutions advised Christians bluntly. ‘For what do you have to do with such foreign discourses, or laws, or false prophets, which subvert the faith of the unstable?’ If you wish to read about history, it continued, ‘you have the Books of Kings; if philosophy and poetry, you have the Prophets, the Book of Job and the Proverbs, in which you will find greater depth of sagacity than in all of the pagan poets and philosophers because this is the voice of the Lord… Do therefore always stay clear of all such strange and diabolical books!’…

An accusation of ‘magic’ was frequently the prelude to a spate of burnings. In Beirut, at the turn of the sixth century, a bishop ordered Christians, in the company of civil servants, to examine the books of those suspected of this. Searches were made, books were seized from suspects and then brought to the centre of the city and placed in a pyre. A crowd was ordered to come and watch as the Christians lit this bonfire in front of the church of the Virgin Mary. The demonic deceptions and ‘barbarous and atheistic arrogance’ of these books were condemned as ‘everybody’ watched ‘the magic books and the demonic signs burn’. As with the destruction of temples, there was no shame in this…

What did the books burned on such occasions really contain? Doubtless some did contain ‘magic’—such practices were popular prior to Christianity and certainly didn’t disappear with its arrival. But they were not all. The list given in the life of St Simeon clearly refers to the destruction of books of Epicureanism, the philosophy that advocated the theory of atomism. ‘Paganism’ appears to have been a charge in itself—and while it could mean outlawed practices it could, at a stretch, refer to almost any antique text that contained the gods. Christians were rarely good chroniclers of what they burned.

Sometimes, clues to the texts remain. In Beirut, just before the bonfire of the books, pious Christians had gone to the house of a man suspected of owning books that were ‘hateful to God’. The Christians told him that they ‘wanted the salvation and recovery of his soul’; they wanted ‘liberation’. These Christians then entered his home, inspected his books and searched each room. Nothing was found—until the man was betrayed by his slave. Forbidden books were discovered in a secret compartment in a chair. The man whose house it was—clearly well aware of what such ‘liberation’ might involve—‘fell to the ground and begged us, in tears, not to hand him over to the law’. He was spared the law but forced to burn his books. As our chronicler Zachariah records with pleasure, ‘when the fire was lit he threw the books of magic into it with his own hands, and said that he thanked God who had granted him with his visit and liberated him from the slavery and error of demons’. One of the books removed from the house in Beirut is mentioned: it is very possible it was not magic but a history by a disapproved-of Egyptian historian.

Divination and prophecy were often used as pretexts to attack a city’s elite. One of the most infamous assaults on books and thinkers took place in Antioch. Here, at the end of the fourth century, an accusation of treasonous divination led to a full-scale purge that targeted the city’s intellectuals. By sheer chance, Ammianus Marcellinus, a non-Christian and one of the finest historians of the era, happened to be in the city; a wonderful piece of luck for later historians and wretched luck for the man himself, who was horrified. As Ammianus describes it,

the racks were set up, and leaden weights, cords, and scourges put in readiness. The air was filled with the appalling yells of savage voices mixed with the clanking of chains, as the torturers in the execution of their grim task shouted: ‘Hold, bind, tighten, more yet.’

A noble of ‘remarkable literary attainments’ was one of the first to be arrested and tortured; he was followed by a clutch of philosophers who were variously tortured, burned alive and beheaded. Educated men in the city who had considered themselves fortunate now, Damocles-like, realized the fragility of their fortune. Looking up, it was as if they saw ‘swords hung over their heads suspended by horse-hairs from the ceiling’.

And, once again, there was the burning of books as bonfires of volumes were used as post-hoc justification for the slaughter. Ammianus Marcellinus writes with distaste that

innumerable books and whole heaps of documents, which had been routed out from various houses, were piled up and burnt under the eyes of the judges. They were treated as forbidden texts to allay the indignation caused by the executions, though most of them were treatises on various liberal arts and on jurisprudence. 

Many intellectuals started to pre-empt the persecutors and set light to their own books. The destruction was extensive and ‘throughout the eastern provinces whole libraries were burnt by their owners for fear of a similar fate; such was the terror which seized all hearts’. Ammianus wasn’t the only intellectual to be scared in these decades. The orator Libanius burned a huge number of his own works…

* * *

The Great Library of Alexandria might have attempted to collect books on every topic, but Christianity was going to be considerably more selective…

One surviving Byzantine manuscript of Ovid has been scarred by a series of ridiculous redactions—even the word ‘girl’ seems to have been considered too racy to remain. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuits were still censoring and bowdlerizing their editions of the classics. Individual abbots, far from Umberto Eco’s avenging intellectual ideal, sometimes censored their own libraries. At some point in the fifteenth century, a note was left in a mutilated manuscript in Vienna. ‘At this point in the book,’ it records, ‘there were thirteen leaves containing works by the apostate Julian; the abbot of the monastery… read them and realised that they were dangerous, so he threw them into the sea.’

Much classical literature was preserved by Christians. Far more was not. To survive, manuscripts needed to be cared for, recopied. Classical ones were not. Medieval monks, at a time when parchment was expensive and classical learning held cheap, simply took pumice stones and scrubbed the last copies of classical works from the page. Rohmann has pointed out that there is even evidence to suggest that in some cases ‘whole groups of classical works were deliberately selected to be deleted and overwritten in around AD 700, often with texts authored by [the fathers of the Church or by] legal texts that criticised or banned pagan literature’. Pliny, Plautus, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Livy and many, many more: all were scrubbed away by the hands of believers…

The texts that suffer in this period are the texts of the wicked and sinful pagans. From the entirety of the sixth century only ‘scraps’ of two manuscripts by the satirical Roman poet Juvenal survive and mere ‘remnants’ of two others, one by the Elder and one by the Younger Pliny.

From the next century there survives nothing save a single fragment of the poet Lucan.

From the start of the next century: nothing at all.

Far from mourning the loss, Christians delighted in it. As John Chrysostom crowed, the writings ‘of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated’. He warmed to the theme in another sermon: ‘Where is Plato? Nowhere! Where Paul? In the mouths of all!’

The fifth-century writer Theodoret of Cyrrhus observed the decline of Greek literature with similar enthusiasm. ‘Those elaborately decorated fables have been utterly banned,’ he gloated. ‘Who is today’s head of the Stoic heresy? Who is safeguarding the teachings of the Peripatetics?’ No one, evidently, for Theodoret concludes this homily with the observation that ‘the whole earth under the sun has been filled with sermons’.

Augustine contentedly observed the rapid decline of the atomist philosophy in the first century of Christian rule. By his time, he recorded, Epicurean and Stoic philosophy had been ‘suppressed’—the word is his. The opinions of such philosophers ‘have been so completely eradicated and suppressed… that if any school of error now emerged against the truth, that is, against the Church of Christ, it would not dare to step forth for battle if it were not covered under the Christian name’…

Much was preserved. Much, much more was destroyed. It has been estimated that less than ten per cent of all classical literature has survived into the modern era. For Latin, the figure is even worse: it is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains. If this was ‘preservation’—as it is often claimed to be—then it was astonishingly incompetent. If it was censorship, it was brilliantly effective. The ebullient, argumentative classical world was, quite literally, being erased.

Categories
Catholic Church

A message for Catholics

A few days ago some Santería practitioners ritually sacrificed a poor chicken and they came to throw the decapitated corpse at the corner of my house in Mexico City.

I want you to know that I blame the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation, brought here by the Spanish and Portuguese, of these cruelties with animals.

If the Iberians had practiced ethnic cleansing in Latin America as the English did in the northern countries, there would be no reminiscence of ritual sacrifices in this part of the continent. Remember that, before the Conquest, the Amerindians practiced the sacrifice of children, as I explain in Day of Wrath. When the Spaniards banned such sacrifices, the Amerindians simply transferred their cruelty towards these poor animals.

Christian love for the Other is not only murdering the white race: it is contributing to a kind of cruelty to animals that is easier to outlaw in those nations that were Aryan. The Catholicism that the Europeans brought to the Americas—Thou shalt not ethnically cleanse; just marry the Indian women!—is a damn shit, recognise it.

Categories
Christendom Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (book) Judea v. Rome St Paul

Commissary to the Gentiles, 5

by (((Marcus Eli Ravage)))

If Paul’s own writings fail to convince you of this interpretation of his activities, I invite your attention to his more candid associate John. Where Paul, operating within the shadow of the imperial palace and half the time a prisoner in Roman jails, is obliged to deal in parable and veiled hints, John, addressing himself to disaffected Asiatics, can afford the luxury of plain speaking. At any rate, his pamphlet entitled “Revelation” is, in truth, a revelation of what the whole astonishing business is about.

Rome, fancifully called Babylon, is minutely described in the language of sputtering hate, as the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth, as the woman drunken with the blood of saints (Christians and Jews), as the oppressor of “peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues” and—to remove all doubt of her identity—as “that great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth.” An angel triumphantly cries, “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen.” Then follows an orgiastic picture of ruin. Commerce and industry and maritime trade are at an end. Art and music and “the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride” are silenced. Darkness and desolation lie like a pall upon the scene. The gentle Christian conquerors wallow in blood up to the bridles of their horses. “Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her.”

And what is the end and purpose of all this chaos and devastation? John is not too reticent to tell us. For he closes his pious prophecy with a vision of the glories of the new—that is, the restored—Jerusalem: not any allegorical fantasy, I pray you, but literally Jerusalem, the capital of a great reunited kingdom of “the twelve tribes of the children of Israel.”

Could any one ask for anything plainer?

Of course, no civilization could forever hold out against this kind of assault. By the year 200 the efforts of Paul and John and their successors had made such headway among all classes of Roman society that Christianity had become the dominant cult throughout the empire. Meantime, as Paul had shrewdly foreseen, Roman morale and discipline had quite broken down, so that more and more the imperial legions, once the terror of the world and the backbone of Western culture, went down to defeat before barbarian invaders. In the year 326 the emperor Constantine, hoping to check the insidious malady, submitted to conversion and proclaimed Christianity the official religion. It was too late. After him the emperor Julian tried to resort once more to suppression. But neither resistance nor concession were of any use. The Roman body politic had become thoroughly worm-eaten with Palestinian propaganda. Paul had triumphed.

This at least is how, were I an anti-Semite in search of a credible sample of subversive Jewish conspiracy, I would interpret the advent of a modified Jewish creed into the Western world.

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Editor’s note: This final instalment of Ravage’s essay says exactly the same that Evropa Soberana says in his ‘Judea vs. Rome’essay—but from the other side!

Some time ago a correspondent in Germany told me that he missed, in the later editions, the Conservative Swede essay that, on pages 77-88 of the 2014 edition of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, appears as ‘The historical demise of Christianity’ (and on this site as ‘The Red Giant’).The reason I eliminated that essay from the print edition was the author’s behaviour.

Ten years ago, Conservative Swede was furious when I mentioned the Third Reich at the anti-jihad site Gates of Vienna. Then he invited me to read an essay on his blog on the subject and asked me if I wanted to eliminate the Jews. Already in 2010, in the now defunct blog Mangan’s, I mentioned two books to awaken visitors to the Jewish question: MacDonald’s and Lindemann’s. Faced with that awakening of mine to the Jewish question, the Swede replied that he would retire from blogging: which he definitely did. I was stupefied but years later I suspected that Conservative Swede could have, in his bloodline, Jewish background.

That’s how ‘The Red Giant’ was eliminated in the most recent editions. Now, to the 2019 edition of The Fair Race that will soon be available, I’ve added the essay by Marcus Eli Ravage that concludes with the entry above. It is the only essay by a Jew in the 2019 edition: an essay that can also be read as a PDF (here).

Categories
Kali Yuga

History

To the sticky post, I just added the phrase, ‘If you think the news is fake, wait until you learn about History!’

Yesterday I saw YouTube moments when Jean-François Gariépy refuted, in ‘Vox Delusion’, Vox’s pseudoscientific pronouncements on biology. I told myself how alienated these guys from Alt-Lite and Alt-Right are regarding the humanities! If History is the mighty tower of experience, it doesn’t matter that a high IQ fellow like Gariépy says scientifically accurate things. Ultimately all that can go to the trashcan if it is not properly accompanied by a solid nexus with the past of the West. And Gariépy is so ignorant about elemental facts of History that he ignores that the ancient Greeks, and the patrician Romans, were whites of the Nordic type.

If we pay attention to what I have been saying in the sticky post, including its links, we can see that the white man went bananas simply because they lied to him about the facts of his past. What could be more important—as I do now on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays—than demystifying the great lies about the founding myths of the West?I mean: the non-historicity of Jesus (my Monday entries), the real Holocaust committed in the Second World War (my Tuesday entries), and the history of early Christianity (my Wednesday entries).

If you think the news is fake, wait until you learn about History! The white man will continue to be a raving looney unless the findings of the true historians permeate the popular culture to the degree of reversing the current narrative. Otherwise, they will continue to howl at the Moon until their race is extinguished.

Remember the old proverb, ‘Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad’. With the fictional life of Jesus (and the inversion of values it implies); the history that we were taught as children about early Christianity, and the history that we were taught as adults about WW2, (((they))) have taken over our souls.

In the odyssey of the human spiritthat Sallie Nichols recounts in Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, from the enchanted night of the Moon card we have to travel through that of the Splendor Solis. And the only way to do it is to set the record straight as far as History is concerned.

Remember, ‘there is no possible return: the road leads clearly forward’, that is, towards the tower at the left that contains the books of real history, unlike the tower at the right: the fake history we believed during the dense night of the West.

Categories
Judaism

Commissary to the Gentiles, 3

by (((Marcus Eli Ravage)))

The upshot, then, of Jesus’ mission was a new sect in Judea. It was neither the first nor the last. Judea, like modern America, was a fertile soil for strange creeds. The Ebionim—the paupers, as they called themselves—did not regard their beliefs as a new religion. Jews they had been born, and Jews they remained. The teachings of their master were rather in the nature of a social philosophy, an ethic of conduct, a way of life.

To modern Christians, who never tire of asking why the Jews did not accept Jesus and his teachings, I can only answer that for a long time none but Jews did. To be surprised that the whole Jewish people did not turn Ebionim is about as intelligent as to expect all Americans to join the Unitarians or the Baptists or the Christian Scientists.

In ordinary times little attention would have been paid to the ragged brotherhood. Slaves and laborers for the most part, their meekness might even have been encouraged by the solider classes.

But with the country in the midst of a struggle with a foreign foe, the unworldly philosophy took on a dangerous aspect. It was a creed of disillusion, resignation and defeat. It threatened to undermine the morale of the nation’s fighting men in time of war. This blessing of the peacemakers, this turning of the other cheek, this non-resistance, this love your enemy, looked like a deliberate attempt to paralyze the national will in a crisis and assure victory to the foe.

So it is not surprising that the Jewish authorities began persecuting the Ebionim. Their meetings were invaded and dispersed, their leaders were clapped into jail, their doctrines were proscribed. It looked for awhile as if the sect would be speedily wiped out.

Then, unexpectedly, the curtain rose on act three, and events look a sudden new turn.

Categories
Christendom Julian (novel) Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Libanius Literature Science

Christianity’s Criminal History, 112

Editor’s note: Here we see once again some passages on the historical Libanius: a central character in Gore Vidal’s Julian. What Deschner says here about Libanius is splendidly novelized by Vidal in the very final paragraph of his novel.

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

The Western world darkens more and more

Culture was highly esteemed in the 4th and 5th centuries. It was one of the legacies of antiquity and enjoyed an ‘almost religious veneration’ (Dannenbauer). Still in the year 360 a law of the emperor Constantius could declare that education was the supreme virtue. And really many noble families of that time, Gallic and Roman, were consecrated to it and particularly in the bosom of the Senatorial proceedings.

But they were already simple custodians of the culture, to which they did not enrich. And everywhere there were circles and social forces of a very different kind, even in the highest positions. The Christian king Theodoric the Great was no longer able to write his own name on the documents: neither could most of the Christian princes. Theodoric wrote the four letters LEGI (‘I read it’) by means of an aureus mold expressly forged for him. The instruction of the Goth children was practically forbidden by him, since, as he seems to have said, he who trembled before the master’s blows would never know how to despise the cuts and rushes of the sword in battle.

In Gaul, apparently, where the school system had flourished from the beginning of the 2nd century until the end of the 4th century, public schools are disappearing over the course of the next century, no matter how much here and there, in Lyon, Vienne, Bordeaux and Clermont there still are schools of grammar and rhetoric in addition to, naturally, the private ones. But all the teachings, at least the literary, served exclusively for the collection of material for sermons and treatises, to deal with the Bible and for the consolidation of the faith. Scientific inquiry was already a thing of the past: it no longer counted or was appreciated. The knowledge of Greek, which for centuries was the requirement of every authentic culture, became a rarity. Even the Roman classics, such as Horace, Ovid and Catullus, were cited less and less.

Libanius, the champion of Hellenistic culture, the most famous professor of rhetoric of the century, complains about the aversion aroused by that profession. ‘They see’, he says, referring to his students, ‘that this cause is despised and thrown on the floor; that does not bring fame, power or wealth but a painful servitude under many lords, parents, mothers, pedagogues and other students, who put things upside down and believe that it is the teacher who needs them. When they see all this they avoid this depreciated profession like a boat the pitfalls’.

In the time of Augustine there are hardly any schools of philosophy in the West. Philosophy is frowned upon, it is a thing of the devil, the original father of all ‘heresy’, and it causes fear to the pious. Even in a centre of culture as important as Bordeaux philosophy is no longer taught. And even in the East, the largest and most important of the universities of the Roman Empire, that of Constantinople, has only one chair of philosophy out of a total of 31.

The knowledge of something that had existed for a long time was lost in almost all areas. The spiritual horizon became increasingly narrower. Ancient culture languished from Gaul to Africa, while in Italy it practically disappeared. The interest in natural science vanished. Also jurisprudence, at least in the West, suffers ‘havoc’, an ‘astonishing demolition’ (Wieacker).

The bishop Paulinus of Nola, who died in 431, never read a historian: a typical attitude of the moment. Whole eras fall in the oblivion, for example, the time of the Roman emperors. The only renowned historian in the late 4th century is Ammianus Marcellinus, a non-Christian. Entire synods forbid the bishops to read ‘pagan’ books. In short: scientific research ceases; experimental testing stops; people think increasingly with less autonomy.

A few decades later no doctor could heal Bishop Gregory de Tours, a man with a mind full of superstitions, but he could miraculously be healed through a drink of water with some dust taken from the tomb of St. Martin.

Only clerics will still read.

Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom Jesus Reformation

Commissary to the Gentiles, 2

by (((Marcus Eli Ravage)))

But even these plots and revolutions are as nothing compared with the great conspiracy which we engineered at the beginning of this era and which was destined to make the creed of a Jewish sect the religion of the Western world. The Reformation was not designed in malice purely. It squared us with an ancient enemy and restored our Bible to its place of honor in Christendom. The Republican revolutions of the eighteenth century freed us of our age-long political and social disabilities. They benefited us, but they did you no harm. On the contrary, they prospered and expanded you. You owe your preeminence in the world to them.

But the upheaval which brought Christianity into Europe was—or at least may easily be shown to have been—planned and executed by Jews as an act of revenge against a great Gentile state. And when you talk about Jewish conspiracies I cannot for the world understand why you do not mention the destruction of Rome and the whole civilization of antiquity concentrated under her banners, at the hands of Jewish Christianity.

It is unbelievable, but you Christians do not seem to know where your religion came from, nor how, nor why. Your historians, with one great exception, do not tell you. The documents in the case, which are part of your Bible, you chant over but do not read. We have done our work too thoroughly; you believe our propaganda too implicitly. The coming of Christianity is to you not an ordinary historical event growing out of other events of the time; it is the fulfilment of a divine Jewish prophecy—with suitable amendments of your own. It did not, as you see it, destroy a great Gentile civilization and a great Gentile empire with which Jewry was at war; it did not plunge mankind into barbarism and darkness for a thousand years; it came to bring salvation to the Gentile world!

Yet here, if ever, was a great subversive movement, hatched in Palestine, spread by Jewish agitators, financed by Jewish money, taught in Jewish pamphlets and broadsides, at a time when Jewry and Rome were in a death-struggle, and ending in the collapse of the great Gentile empire. You do not even see it, though an intelligent child, unbefuddled by theological magic, could tell you what it is all about after a hasty reading of the simple record. And then you go on prattling of Jewish conspiracies and cite as instances the Great War and the Russian Revolution! Can you wonder that we Jews have always taken your anti-Semites rather lightly, as long as they did not resort to violence?

And, mind you, no less an authority than Gibbon long ago tried to enlighten you. It is now a century and a half since The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire let the cat out of the bag. Gibbon, not being a parson dabbling in history, did not try to account for the end of a great era by inventing fatuous nonsense about the vice and degradation of Rome, about the decay of morals and faith in an empire which was at that very time in the midst of its most glorious creative period. How could he? He was living in the Augustan Age in London which—in spite of nearly two thousand years since the coming of Christian salvation—was as good a replica of Augustan Rome in the matter of refined lewdness as the foggy islanders could make it.

No, Gibbon was a race-conscious Gentile and an admirer of the culture of the pagan West, as well as a historian with brains and eyes. Therefore he had no difficulty laying his finger on the malady that had rotted and wasted away the noble edifice of antique civilization. He put Christianity down—the law which went forth from Zion and the word of God from Jerusalem—as the central cause of the decline and fall of Rome and all she represented.

So far so good. But Gibbon did not go far enough. He was born and died, you see, a century before the invention of scientific anti-Semitism. He left wholly out of account the element of deliberation. He saw an alien creed sweeping out of the East and overwhelming the fair lands of the West. It never occurred to him that it was precisely to this destructive end that the whole scheme of salvation was dedicated. Yet the facts are as plain as you please.

Let me in very brief recount the tale, unembroidered by miracle, prophecy or magic.

For a good perspective, I shall have to go back a space. The action conveniently falls into four parts, rising to a climax in the third. The time, when the first curtain rises, is roughly 65 B.C. Dramatis persona; are, minor parts aside, Judea and Rome. Judea is a tiny kingdom off the Eastern Mediterranean. For five centuries it has been hardly more than a geographical expression. Again and again it has been overrun and destroyed and its population carried into exile or slavery by its powerful neighbors. Nominally independent, it is now as unstable as ever and on the edge of civil war. The empire of the West, with her nucleus in the City Republic of Rome, while not yet mistress of the world, is speedily heading that way. She is acknowledged the one great military power of the time as well as the heir of Greece and the center of civilization.

Up to the present the two states have had little or no contact with one another. Then without solicitation on her part Rome was suddenly asked to take a hand in Judean affairs. A dispute had arisen between two brothers over the succession to the petty throne, and the Roman general Pompey, who happened to be in Damascus winding up bigger matters, was called upon to arbitrate between the claimants. With the simple directness of a republican soldier, Pompey exiled one of the brothers, tossed the chief priesthood to his rival, and abolished the kingly dignity altogether. Not to put too fine a point on it, Pompey’s mediation amounted in effect to making Judea a Roman dependency.

The Jews, not unnaturally perhaps, objected; and Rome, to conciliate them and to conform to local prejudice, restored the royal office. She appointed, that is, a king of her own choosing. He was the son of an exciseman, an Idumean by race, named Herod. But the Jews were not placated, and continued making trouble. Rome thought it very ungrateful of them.

All this is merely a prelude, and is introduced into the action to make clear what follows. Jewish discontent grew to disaffection and open revolt when their Gentile masters began importing into Jerusalem the blessings of Western culture. Graven images, athletic games, Greek drama, and gladiatorial shows were not to the Jewish taste. The pious resented them as an offense in the nostrils of Jehovah, even though the resident officials patiently explained they were meant for the entertainment and edification of the non-Jewish garrison. The Judeans resisted with especial strenuousness the advent of the efficient Roman tax-gatherer. Above all, they wanted back a king of their own race and their own royal line.

Among the masses the rebellion took the form of a revival of the old belief in a Messiah, a divinely appointed savior who was to redeem his people from the foreign yoke and make Judea supreme among the nations. Claimants to the mission were not wanting. In Galilee, one Judas led a rather formidable insurrection, which enlisted much popular support. John, called the Baptist, operated in the Jordan country. He was followed by another north-country man, Jesus of Nazareth. All three were masters of the technique of couching incendiary political sedition in harmless theological phrases. All three used the same signal of revolt—“The time is at hand.” And all three were speedily apprehended and executed, both Galileans by crucifixion.

Personal qualities aside, Jesus of Nazareth was, like his predecessors, a political agitator engaged in liberating his country from the foreign oppressor. There is even considerable evidence that he entertained an ambition to become king of an independent Judea. He claimed, or his biographers later claimed for him, descent from the ancient royal line of David. But his paternity is somewhat confused. The same writers who traced the origin of his mother’s husband back to the psalmist-king also pictured Jesus as the son of Jehovah, and admitted that Joseph was not his father.

It seems, however, that Jesus before long realized the hopelessness of his political mission and turned his oratorical gifts and his great popularity with the masses in quite another direction. He began preaching a primitive form of populism, socialism and pacifism. The effect of this change in his program was to gain him the hostility of the substantial, propertied classes, the priests and patriots generally, and to reduce his following to the poor, the laboring mass and the slaves.

After his death these lowly disciples formed themselves into a communistic brotherhood. A sermon their late leader had once delivered upon a hillside summed up for them the essence of his teachings, and they made it their rule of life. It was a philosophy calculated to appeal profoundly to humble people. It comforted those who suffered here on earth with promised rewards beyond the grave. It made virtues of the necessities of the weak. Men without hope in the future were admonished to take no thought for the morrow. Men too helpless to resent insult or injury were taught to resist not evil. Men condemned to lifelong drudgery and indigence were assured of the dignity of labor and of poverty.

The meek, the despised, the disinherited, the downtrodden, were—in the hereafter—to be the elect and favored of God. The worldly, the ambitious, the rich and powerful, were to be denied admission to heaven.

Categories
Goethe Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Science Theology

Christianity’s Criminal History, 111


 Editors’ note: To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.

 

Everything a person needs to know is contained in the Bible

Augustine’s intellectual achievements—which are of a theological nature—have been always overrated. With the exception of certain psychological observations, he always wrote under the inspiration of others, and limited himself to ‘converting into a personal experience what he grasped when meditating on the thoughts of others’ (H. Holl). ‘Never in his life did he have the courage to think autonomously’. A historian so enlightening and worthy of being read as H. Dannenbauer is tempted to apply to Augustine the old sentence with which Goethe referred to Lavater: ‘Strict truth was not his. He lied to himself and others’.

Augustine felt genuine addiction for authority. He always had to find shelter under something, to adhere to something: to the Manicheans, to academic scepticism, to neo-Platonism and, finally, to Christianity. In this regard, he only believed in the Bible by virtue of the authority of the Church (which based its authority on the Bible). The authority of the Bible is in turn a guarantee, Augustine thinks, of the truth. What it affirms is true; it is completely infallible. ‘Moreover, Scripture sometimes appears as a criterion of profane knowledge. Of the historical narratives, we should only believe as long as it does not contradict the affirmations of Scripture’.

Already in the time of Augustine both the wealth of knowledge and the quality of education had declined. However, some classical training still counted to the point that, with it, it was possible to make a career in the Roman Empire and get access the high and even the supreme dignities.

The bishop of Hippo had no notion of Hebrew. Also, his knowledge of Greek was flimsy. He could hardly translate Greek texts. He, a rhetor and for several years a professor at several high schools, barely read the Greek Bible.

To the classics, including Plato and Plotinus to the extent that he knew them, and to the Greek Patristics, he read them in a Latin version. And it is likely that most of his quotations were second hand. Only very few come from direct sources: Livius, Florus, Eutropius, perhaps Josephus, but above all Marcus Terentius Varro, the great scholar of ancient Rome, whose Antiquitates rerum humanarum and divinarum (Antiquities of Human and Divine Things) is his only source of information regarding the pagan deities.

Augustine’s scientific and natural training was very weak. Certainly he did not think it necessary to admit the existence of pygmies, of cynocephali, or of people who protected themselves from the sun under their flat feet. He firmly believed, of course, that the diamond could only be broken with the blood of a goat and that the wind from Cappadocia impregnated the mares. He also believed firmly in purgatory. Moreover, he was the theologian who endowed this idea dogmatic entity.

He also believed firmly in hell, being himself the one who depicts it for us as real physical fire, and who teaches that the intensity of heat is governed by the gravity of sins. On the other hand, he does not believe that the Earth is spherical (nulla ratione credendum est, ‘there is no reason to believe that’) even if it had been demonstrated centuries ago.

The natural sciences, according to Augustine, are opinions. The investigation of the world is at the most investigation of a world of appearances. This applies to the theatre as well as to natural science or magic—eagerness for shows, curiosity, that’s all.

Profane knowledge and culture do not have any value for themselves. They only acquire value in the service of faith and have no other purpose than to lead to holiness, to a deeper understanding of the Bible. Philosophy, that in his old age seemed to him ‘subtle charlatanism’ (garrulae argtiae), has no other value than mere help to interpret the ‘revelation’. Everything thus becomes a resource, an instrument for the understanding of Scripture. Otherwise science—any science—is alienation from God.

The curiosity, the eagerness to know always created suspicions in Christianity. Tertullian had already fought it with crudeness and Augustine, more fiercely, attacks almost systematically curiosity and the longing to know, which leads him to anathematize science.

Painting, music and sculpture are also superfluous. Medicine, architecture and agriculture deserve the same judgment, unless they are to be practiced professionally. This bishop saw in the Church the Schola Christi (Christ’s School) and all the sciences outside it were suspect. Ultimately, everything a person needs to know is in the Bible and what is not there is harmful.

My own paradigm shift

The following is my response to a comment in the previous thread:

When I say that Jews engineered Christianity I’m sort of hyperbolic, as it is not absolutely clear that Mark—the author of the only gospel (as the other Synoptics copied and pasted large sections of Mark into their gospels)—was a Jew.

Now that I lean toward the Christ myth theory the role of Paul, with his celestial Jesus, becomes more nebulous. It looks like Mark was the big author behind what today is understood as Christianity.

My bicausal point is that, even if the four gospel writers were Hellenized Jews, you still need two to tango.

In classic white nationalism, Jewish subversion is the main cause of white decline (non-Christian white nationalists could say that the kike deceived whites with Christian morality). Remember that duck-rabbit image Kuhn used to illustrate paradigm shifts? I use the above image to illustrate my own paradigm shift from classic white nationalism to, say, Pierce’s Turner Diaries that depicted common whites as despicable degenerates. In contrast to the classical interpretation of the above caricature, I see it the other way: present-day whites are unbelievable naïve and stupid and gullible to believe what the kike tells them.

These days that I have been immersed in mythicism I discovered that salvation gods and individualism (not only in Christianity) always came after the empires were established. Only in the healthy stages of a culture religion was understood as something for the common good. This supports what I said in my previous post about the ‘One Ring’ or gold over blood: those decadent whites who embraced Christianity a long time ago (two to tango) were more responsible for the inversion of values than the subversive kike.

Bourgeois life and comfort seem like the main enemy of every white culture throughout history. That’s why I think that only a convergence of catastrophes in this century will save whites. Such a scenario may push the reset button and shift their presently rotten psyche back again to survival mode.