web analytics

Tag: Christian question (CQ)

Categories
Catholic religious orders Christendom Eschatology Free speech / association Kali Yuga Liberalism Oliver Cromwell Protestantism St Francis

Crackdown!

After the events in Charlottesville, white nationalists have become the target group of the System forces. Not only The Daily Stormer (which for the moment can be seen: here) but Radio Red Ice, VDARE, NPI, American Renaissance, Mike Enoch, Counter Currents Publishing, Pax Dickinson, The Right Stuff, PolNewsForever, Altright.com, Vanguard America, RootBocks, Weev’s Linkeldn account, IdentityEuropa, Instagram, and Xurious have either been shut down or affected by the cancellation of their PayPal service.

Also, two of Richard Spencer’s upcoming conferences have been cancelled; in the case of Christopher Cantwell, both his Facebook page and his PayPal account have disappeared. In addition, Hatreon which provided donations for dissidents is offline; the Swedes Daniel Friberg and Christopher Dulny were banned from entering the US for their presence in the white nationalism movement, and the Paranormies account has been ousted from Soundcloud (Soundcloud is the same service that houses The West’s Darkest Hour Radio Show).

At least Trump has been brave in not joining the demonization of the Alt-Right like most American elites have. I believe, like James Mason, that the whole matter can be understood much better if we concede that the Enemy has won (since 1945), and that only a civil war can save the white race from extinction.

White nationalists horribly err when blaming the few swastikas (only three apparently) that some flaunted in Charlottesville. The myopia of these anti-swastika pundits borders psychosis. The original sin lies in the religion of our parents; in the liberal culture following the French Revolution, and in the American culture in particular that emerged from a version of Christianity friendly to the Jews.

White nationalists do not realise that practically all contemporary westerners are the product of a Christian and a liberal culture that has carried the principle of the human soul in a Christian sense—as opposed to the biological notion of the human psyche as Himmler explains—to its logical conclusion.

If there was a Pope of all Western culture today, whether religious or secular, he would be similar to the High Sparrow character of Game of Thrones: If you cannot equate those below with those above, humiliate and destroy the Aryan nobility of Westeros so that, this way, everyone will be equal. Studying the history of Christianity is fundamental to understand the atheistic world of today. I would go as far as claim that, if there is a key for the contemporary world, it is precisely the mendicant orders, such as the Dulcinians, which became fashionable after St. Francis tried to follow Jesus’ words in all of their purity.

White nationalists do not realise that the eschatological times we are living in are nothing but the last death rattles of Christianity, just as a dying star expands and burns all the planets near its orbit. It is Christianity what is dying, and before it becomes the white dwarf that will become the next century, it is giving us a hell of a fight by burning the whole West, including the precious blood of westerners through miscegenation. The madness of importing foreign people is not suffered in China or the countries under Islam: it is a folie en masse that only affects whites, upon whom sixteen hundred years ago a Levantine faith was imposed.

I am tempted tomorrow to continue the series on Deschner’s history of Christianity, but perhaps not with translations of whole chapters. I might limit myself to quote the anti-Semitic texts of the first fathers of the Church. Those millennial texts are a treat if we compare them with the version of Christianity that conquered the United States: the worst Christianity of all times! It’s the worst precisely because it transmuted the anti-Semitism of these early theologians into the philo-Semitism brought to this continent by the spiritual sons of Cromwell.

Write down my email address! If the System continues the crackdown, my WordPress, Twitter and Facebook accounts could be nuked. But if you save my email, I’ll to let you know the new address of this site.

cesartort [at] yahoo.com

Categories
Ancient Rome Axiology Emperor Julian Jesus New Testament Old Testament

WN is deluded, the rabbi is right

“Why were you so ungrateful to our gods as to desert them for the Jews?”

—Emperor Julian to the Christians

 
White nationalism is deluded. WNsts believe, to use Alex Linder’s recent words: “it is now understood by huge numbers of people that JEWS ARE THE PROBLEM. Not a problem, THE problem.” Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer has made very similar comments this year.

But Jews are only the most serious external enemy. What is behind the external foe is the internal enemy: the religion of our parents, as commenter Justin Kire put it in this site:

Christian Identity is a rather clever twist. Rather than seek to avoid the fact that Christianity is rooted in worship of the chosen, you [a CI commenter] pretend that you are the chosen people whose racial consciousness is so unabashedly advocated in the Old Testament. But if you are going to pretend to be jews (not jews, you say, but Hebrews!), you should just follow the Old Testament, as horrible as that is. Because the problem is not that the New Testament has been perverted, but rather that Jesus is a pervert who really did intend for his followers to be wandering, penniless pacifists with no healthy sense of the real world or any drive to preserve themselves.

That’s why no one can technically follow the insanity offered in the sermon on the mount. But what Christians can do is make that sermon part of their mentality, which is disastrous… And as racial as the Old Testament is, the New Testament really did dispense with that. Jesus himself dispensed with it (if he existed at all).

But we won’t overcome jews by pretending to be them. And the idea makes my skin crawl anyway. I’m of Norwegian / German and I won’t trade my heritage by pretending to be a semite. The ten commandments are a step down from the nine noble virtues. Aryan values are what we need, not semitic values. And the same scientific discoveries that smash the out of Africa theory of human origins also dispenses with the kinds of scientific claims made by William Finck or any other proponents of CI. Think about the words of Rabbi Marcus Eli Ravage.

Justin refers to a quote in The Century Magazine of January 1928, Volume 115, Number 3 pages 346-350, “Part I: A Real Case Against the Jews” by Marcus Eli Ravage that can be found in a number of places on the web (e.g., here). This is the truly shocking quote of the rabbi addressing the Aryans:

Our tribal customs have become the core of your moral code. Our tribal laws have furnished the basic groundwork of all your august constitutions and legal systems. Our legends and our folk-tales are the sacred lore which you croon to your infants. Our poets have filled your hymnals and your prayer-books. Our national history has become an indispensable part of the learning of your pastors and priests and scholars. Our kings, our statesmen, our prophets, our warriors are your heroes.

Our ancient little country is your Holy Land. Our national literature is your Holy Bible. What our people thought and taught has become inextricably woven into your very speech and tradition, until no one among you can be called educated who is not familiar with our racial heritage.

Jewish artisans and Jewish fishermen are your teachers and your saints, with countless statues carved in their image and innumerable cathedrals raised to their memories. A Jewish maiden is your ideal of motherhood and womanhood. A Jewish rebel-prophet is the central figure in your religious worship. We have pulled down your idols, cast aside your racial inheritance, and substituted for them our God and our traditions. No conquest in history can even remotely compare with this clean sweep of our conquest over you.

The rabbi is right, painfully right. Something similar, but written from the pro-Aryan POV, can be found in William Pierce’s Who We Are.

We drank the deadliest potion ever concocted when we abandoned the beautiful and healthy religion that we inherited from the Hellenes for the cult of a demonic, volcano deity that allegedly spoke to a Semite. Christianity is what transmuted healthy Aryan values into the ethnosuicidal meta-ethics that is killing whites around the globe.

It doesn’t matter that Linder and others assign some blame to Christianity. They believe that it is a secondary causative factor. The truth is that what our parents taught us is the primary factor. Jewry takeover of the West is the secondary infection—an infection after the religious treason in Imperial Rome, as Julian saw.

Want to save your race? Give up Christian ethics, which includes what in this site we have been calling Secular Christianity (e.g., the values of the American Constitution).

Give up Christian ethics and the next day we’ll have a final solution to the JP. Give up your parents’ sense of moral decency and the world will be yours.

Umwertung aller Werte!

Categories
Holocaust New Testament

On schizo white nationalism

In 2012 I started to type directly from Randel Helms’ book Gospel Fictions for this blog. Recently, at Greg Johnson’s Counter Currents Aedon Cassiel started a series on exactly the same subject and from the same point of view, that we may call ‘mythicism’ (see e.g., here). Even Cassiel himself, after being asked in the comments section if Helms’ approach in analysing the Gospels had influenced him, responded that he was certain that he has read Helms. Since I won’t be adding weekly translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s history of Christianity as I started to do on Saturdays, perhaps this Saturday the anti-Christian reader might find it interesting how the most recent exegesis continues the debunking of the gospel narrative…

But white nationalism is a schizophrenic movement. Most of them want to have it both ways: universalist Christianity and a white-only ethnostate; feminism (cf. Covington’s novels to create the ethnostate) and women having lots of kids within the white republic; they want a takeover of the State but fail to even form a political party. In the specific case of Counter Currents, Andrew Hamilton once said that the webzine that published his articles was ‘schizophrenic’, presumably referring to the fact that he and others reject open homosexuality while the webzine’s editor at the same time publishes homosexualist articles. The list could go on an on. In another of his Counter Currents articles, Cassiel wrote:

So to make it abundantly clear that this argument is posed with no hostility, I’ve decided to collaborate with Christopher Robertson to make this a sort of Bible Week at Counter-Currents. While I publish a discussion of the possibility that Jesus never existed as a historical figure, Robertson will be publishing a sort of Bible study (which he agreed to do by my insistence—I genuinely found it interesting). This way, the overall tone of Counter-Currents won’t be skewed towards either its Christian or non-Christian readers. And I hope that this token of good faith will help defuse any sense of hostility potentially created by this essay.

This is another example of the ‘split personality’ in the movement. I had already noted Johnson’s forked tongue on the subject of Christianity. This is reflected in the fact that his set of values is schizoid too, as can be seen in the first paragraphs of ‘Dies Irae’, the first article of my book Day of Wrath.

But all nationalists are schizophrenic, not only Johnson. Read ‘Dies Irae’ and ask yourself if you’re stuck with Christian ethics, even if you have superficially abandoned the religion of your parents.

The problem is not a peculiar man named Johnson: it’s the country where he was born. In the 1980s I lived at the other side of the Golden Gate where Johnson is currently living (I hated to visit the big city; beautiful Marin County on the other hand had few spics then). I was shocked to see how deeply biblical the country was. Yesterday I watched this video by Steven Anderson.

The first monologues of the video are the best exposé of the Holocaust narrative that I’ve ever watched. Then pastor Anderson—for the first twenty minutes I didn’t know he was a pastor—started to talk about how Jews and Muslims will burn in hell, the fate for all those who reject the Lord Christ, etc.

We can imagine how Americans, if they apostatized from Christianity, could tap the hidden forces of the Aryan psyche. But in a schizophrenic movement that tries to mix water and oil, such as white nationalism, that won’t happen.

Categories
Swastika

Healthy religion

by Wotans Krieger


 
The ancients believed that religion is indissolubly related to the race and ethnicity of a people. Once an individual, family, clan, tribe or nation divorces itself from the foundation religion of their ancestors they face the prospect of initially a loss of identity and then ultimately extermination as a distinct sociobiological entity…

The Christianization of the northern European peoples resulted in a gradual loss of racial consciousness which followed an inversion of their spiritual values and a suppression of their beliefs. Today the Germanic and Celtic peoples of Britain are experiencing anomie, a lack of values and norms. Feeling cut off from their spiritual and cultural roots many of them turn to alcohol, drug addiction, gambling and vice as a palliative cure for their feelings of rootlessness.

The adoption of Christianity at the point of the sword and the fire brand has caused Aryan man to adopt a set of anti-values which denigrate the hierarchical nature of human society which is a reflection of nature. False ideals of humanitarianism, ‘democracy’ and equality have psychologically weakened the Aryan peoples so that they now lack the will to resist the genocide that awaits them perpetrated by the alien and Semitic religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The adherence to a universalist religion which denies the validity and primacy of race and ethnicity is a form of race treason.

Only by responding to the call of the blood will we as a race deliver ourselves from the disaster which awaits us as a race.

— ‘Religion: A Question of Race and Identity’

Categories
Racial right

WN.2 gone with the wind too

Hunter Wallace has penned another article, “Alex Linder and White Nationalism 1.0” where he writes about Linder: “…his stance on Christianity, the awful things he has said about Sam Francis and Jared Taylor and exterminationism. We will never agree on those issues.”

On exterminationism and the subject of Francis and Taylor perhaps we will speak in the next episode of the WDH Radio Show. For the moment I limit myself to say that here we have reproduced the comments that a Jack Frost used to post on The Occidental Observer when trying to communicate with the commentators and authors that the Christian problem encompasses the Jewish problem.

Result? Frost’s very sharp comments did not make any substantial dent in the conservatives commenting on TOO. (Since white nationalists do not form a party similar to Golden Dawn in America, it could be said that they are de facto conservatives).

Nor have the articles of other authors which we have reproduced on Christianity made any dent in the mind of a Christian. The fact that mestization increased dramatically since the founding of Constantinople, as the requirement to live in that city was to be a Christian and not the Latin ethnicity, does not make in them any dent at all. When Wallace says “We will never agree on those issues” when referring to the universalist religion of his parents it is clear that his position is religious. Arguments do not count. And what we have said of Constantinople can also be said of what the Spanish and Portuguese did from the 16th century precisely because of Christian universalism.

The inability to apostatize from the religion of their parents is what has stopped Southern nationalists from understanding what is happening now with their tore down statues, together with their inability to question capitalism as Hajo Liaucius rightly saw on this site.

Categories
Antiochus IV Epiphanes Tom Sunic

On Judaised Americans

My last posts on the Greco-Roman wars against the Jews (here and here) made me wonder… Just compare how pre-Christian Europeans handled the Jewish problem with how, in modern America, the red carpet was rolled out for the Jews since the 19th century in line with the dominant Judeo-Christian, liberal ideology.

As Tom Sunic explained in the very first chapter of Homo Americanus, in the US not a single politician will ever admit that America is a theocratic system with a peculiar political theology. Think of how Donald Trump recently became the first sitting American president to visit Jerusalem’s Western Wall!

If Aryans ever wish to re-establish their own racial sovereignty, they must identify their foe: Judeo-Christian ethics, which pervades even the white nationalist movement. One example will suffice. Greg Johnson has been working on a White Nationalist Manifesto for some time. When he finally publishes and advertises it through the forums, will it contain his “Old Right” bashing favouring an effete Neo-Christian “New Right”?

Whatever the impact of the forthcoming White Nationalist Manifesto among American racists, many of whom are Christians, the US owes its very existence to the Jews. The 17th century reverence for the Old Testament by those naïve, starry-eyed colonisers who imagined a “City on the Hill” comes to mind. “Very early on America’s founding fathers, pioneers, and politicians identified themselves as Jews who had come to the new American Canaan from the pestilence of Europe,” writes Sunic.

After another post on the Jewish-Roman wars, the following Saturdays I’ll be adding passages from Deschner’s Criminal History of Christianity describing how the Early Church dealt with the Jews. Despite their rabid anti-Semitism, early theologians did not push for those pagan attempts to solve the Jewish problem once and for all.

Certainly, unlike the US, in anti-Semitic Christendom the Jews were not revered, but they were tolerated. Those early theologians that I’ll be quoting on Saturdays are similar to the white nationalists of today: much barking but no bites. This is why, unlike National Socialism, white nationalism won’t ever work. Whites must transvalue “New Right” values back to “Old Right” values!

Antiochus’ war (167-164 BCE)

“He ordered his soldiers to cut down without mercy those whom they met and to slay those who took refuge in their houses. There was a massacre of young and old, a killing of women and children, a slaughter of virgins and infants. In the space of three days, eighty thousand were lost, forty thousand meeting a violent death, and the same number being sold into slavery.” —2 Maccabees, 5:11–14.

The siege of Jerusalem (63 BCE)

Jews were massacred by invading Romans. The event marked the end of Jewish independence.

The Samaritan Revolt (36 CE)

The Samaritans rebelled against the Romans. The rebels were ruthlessly massacred by order of the Roman Procurator.

The First Jewish-Roman War (66-73 CE)

Jews were massacred by Romans throughout the war; 97,000 enslaved. It was the first of three major Jewish revolts against the Romans. It resulted in the destruction of the Holy Temple and a devastating depopulation of the Jewish population as the massacre wiped out a large percentage of their population. (Again, compare Titus’ deeds with what Donald Trump did a couple of months ago in what remains of that temple.)

Bar Kokhba revolt (132-136 CE)

Decisive Roman victory. The Romans enslaved many Jews of Judaea, massacred many Jews, suppressed Jewish religious and political authority, banned Jews from Jerusalem, and renamed and merged Judaea into the Syrian Palestine province. The war meant another devastating depopulation of the Jewish population.

If white nationalists, so overwhelmed by Judeo-Christian ethics, are not committing ethnic suicide how do you explain that they are not celebrating such victories?

Titans, 3

Food for thought from chapter 3 of March of the Titans: The Complete History of the White Race:
 

Europe and the Middle East—equally advanced around 5000 BC

The existence of an original civilisation on the continent of Europe which predated the civilisations in the Middle East, has to a large degree been ignored by traditional history writers, particularly those who wrote during the dominant Christian Era in Europe.

This was largely because of a biblical Judeo-Christian bias which held that all civilisation started in the Middle East (the biblical Old Testament deals exclusively with events in the Middle East, and conventional wisdom during the Age of the Church held that the Garden of Eden was in that region).

Categories
Antiochus IV Epiphanes Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 5

Below, translated excerpts from the first volume of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”)

 
The Church and the Maccabees
 
Mattathias, the first rebellious leader of the Maccabees, was a priest and assassin whose name means “gift of Yahweh”, of the family of Asmon. Possessed by the “religious zeal” in the traditional biblical way, he killed an Israelite who by order of the royal commissioner intended to celebrate a sacrifice to idols.

Judas Maccabeus generalized the guerrilla struggle and purified the Temple, where he had found “the abomination of desolation” (Daniel 12, 11) imposed by Antiochus Epiphanes; he also nailed the head of the enemy general Nicanor on the gate of the citadel: an event that is still being celebrated today [by Jews] by means of a fixed holiday of the calendar.

Yohanan Hyrcanus (reigned 135-103) undertook great military campaigns, as they had not been known since the time of Solomon. Thus he Judaized by the force of arms the provinces of Idumaea and Galilee. But we should not believe that these were vulgar campaigns of expansion or ambition for power; they were “particularly religious wars called holy wars” (R. Meyer).

Hyrcanus also ravaged Samaria, a region that disappears completely from political history in the Christian era. Samaria, which had been the capital of the kingdom of Israel, enlarged with great splendour by King Amri, always rivalled Jerusalem. The Samaritans, a hybrid people in the middle of Palestine between Jew and idolater, were hated by the Jews more than any other.

Few of the Maccabees died of natural death: Judas Maccabeus, in the field; his brother Jonathan, killed; Simon, murdered; Hyrcanus II, grandson of John Hyrcanus I, executed by Herod, the ally of the Romans; Aristobulus II, poisoned; his son, executed, as well as his brother and the last Asmonean prince. Also the daughter of Alexander, Mariamne, married in the year 37 with Herod, died victim of palatial intrigues, like the mother, Alexandra and their children. “The reign of Herod was, to a great extent, a time of peace for Palestine” (Grundmann).

At the head of these conflicts, imperialist wars, civil wars and various atrocities shines the star, historical or not, of the seven “Maccabean brothers,” seven heroes of the “holy war.” It is thus that these Maccabees deserve not only to be “revered by all,” according to Gregory of Nazianzus, a doctor of the Church, but: “Those who praise them, and those who hear their praise, should better imitate their virtues and, spurred by this example, rise to the same feats. ”

It is a typical opinion. The most famous doctors of the Church rival among each other in praise of the (supposed) proto-martyrs of the insurrection, those “Maccabean brothers” who, according to St. Augustine, “before the Incarnation of Christ already fought for the Law of God to the point of giving their own lives,” or who “erected the magnificent banner of victory,” according to John Chrysostom.

They became symbols of the ecclesia militans and remembered in the three oldest martyrology lists. Once converted the synagogue of Antioch that housed the supposed sepulchres in a Christian church; once transferred their precious “relics” to Constantinople, then to the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincola and to the church of Maccabees in Cologne and celebrated in Germany and France, they are venerated: especially in the Rhine and Rhone valleys. (Below, what are believed to be the Maccabees’ relics.)

The existence of Christian saints before Jesus Christ can only seem absurd to anyone who does not know the Catholic mentality, the sceptical in earnest who insists on taking logic as the sole foundation of any reasoning.

Pagan saints… and holy wars. In the two great insurrections of the first and second centuries, the practice of “holy war” returned with all its savagery and cruelty, with its apocalyptic follies. The “battle of the last days” against the idolatrous Rome searched for, no less, “the Messianic Kingdom of God.”

Categories
Christendom Racial right

Greg Johnson

“Greg, you do good sermons. Perhaps you missed your calling.”

—Johnson’s fan

Swedenborgian Church (San Francisco, California)

It’s true what I said earlier today: that in a dispute between White Nationalists I don’t take sides—because I am not a WN. But I’d like to rephrase what I already wrote on December 2012 about Johnson:

Take note of what he said in a 2010 lecture at the Swedenborgian Church of San Francisco. The lecture was “outed” in the WN community, much to his embarrassment. At the Swedenborgian meeting Johnson said:

“What most inspired me was his [Emanuel Swedenborg’s] discussion of the life of Christ and the meaning and the mystery of that… Swedenborg gave us the means to understand that mystery.”

After quoting Scripture Johnson asked, “What does it mean to say that ‘God is with us’?” and went into a theological peroration where he added:

“…a child was born. A child that somehow was the God of eternity. This unique incarnation is the great mystery. It is the conundrum of theologians and metaphysicians. Why was Jesus born? Why did God become man? Swedenborg claims that this was not part of Plan A… Jesus was Plan B… because of certain contingencies that [should not have] happened.”

Johnson then used autobiographical vignettes mentioning his childhood and his father to illustrate “Plan B,” presumably what God felt obliged to do when mankind fell into the original sin. He even mentioned the word “salvation.” At some point Johnson seemed to endorse the infinitely monstrous belief that it’s within God’s freedom to send us to Hell. (As an aside, see my piece on eternal damnation: here.) After speculating on the Second Coming, Johnson finished his lecture with an “Amen” and the Swedenborgians started to pray.

Listen this audio to hear, in Johnson’s own voice, his traditional homily. It sounds like the Catholic doctrine I was taught as a kid before my First Communion.

Johnson has been both a critic of Christianity on his webzine, and a pious Christian at his church in San Francisco. He literally had it both ways before his activities with the Swedenborgians were outed. As to his other persona, take note of what Johnson commented on The Occidental Observer:

[Christianity] did undermine racial exclusivity for nearly 2,000 years. Racial and subracial differences were no bar to marriage, as long as both parties were Christian.

And on another WN forum:

Christianity will not be dead until its secular offspring, liberal universalism, is dead as well. But you know that, don’t you? Christian fanatics are precisely the ones who believe that blood differences don’t matter.

See my brief collection of anti-Christian comments authored by Johnson: here. Even today, five years after I wrote the above, Johnson still can’t see that misleading both his WN readership and his church was wrong.

Categories
Julian (novel) Literature

Julian, 2

As to yesterday’s London terrorist attack I agree with Hunter Wallace that “There is nothing new to add here” (at any event, remember that only the news that I consider important will be mentioned at the Addenda). More important is to hammer on our view that the religion of our parents means white genocide. In the first pages of Julian we see a dramatisation of how ancient intellectuals dealt with a hostile takeover of their Hellenic culture by a cult of Levantine extraction:

 

Youth

I

Libanius to Priscus

Antioch, March [A.D.] 380

Yesterday morning as I was about to enter the lecture hall, I was stopped by a Christian student who asked me in a voice eager with malice, “Have you heard about the Emperor Theodosius?”

I cleared my throat ready to investigate the nature of this question, but he was too quick for me. “He has been baptized a Christian.”

I was non-committal. Nowadays, one never knows who is a secret agent. Also, I was not particularly surprised at the news. When Theodosius fell ill last winter and the bishops arrived like vultures to pray over him, I knew that should he recover they would take full credit for having saved him. He survived. Now we have a Christian emperor in the East, to match Gratian, our Christian emperor in the West. It was inevitable.

I turned to go inside but the young man was hardly finished with his pleasant task. “Theodosius has also issued an edict. It was just read in front of the senate house. I heard it. Did you?”

“No. But I always enjoy imperial prose,” I said politely.

“You may not enjoy this. The Emperor has declared heretic all those who do not follow the Nicene Creed.”

“I’m afraid Christian theology is not really my subject. The edict hardly applies to those of us who are still faithful to philosophy.”

“It applies to everyone in the East.” He said this slowly, watching me all the while. “The Emperor has even appointed an Inquisitor to determine one’s faith. The days of toleration are over.”

I was speechless; the sun flared in my eyes; all things grew confused and I wondered if I was about to faint, or even die. But the voices of two colleagues recalled me. I could tell by the way they greeted me that they, too, had heard about the edict and were curious to know my reaction. I gave them no pleasure.

“Of course I expected it,” I said. “The Empress Postuma wrote me only this week to say that…” I invented freely. I have not of course heard from the Empress in some months, but I thought that the enemy should be reminded to what extent I enjoy the favour of Gratian and Postuma. It is humiliating to be forced to protect oneself in this way, but these are dangerous times.

I did not lecture yesterday. I went straight home. I am now living in Daphne, by the way, a charming suburb which I prefer to Antioch proper because of the quiet. As I get older, I find that the slightest sound in the night disturbs me and, once awake, I have difficulty falling asleep again. You can imagine how intolerable my old house in the city became. You remember the house; it was there that I gave the reception for the Emperor Julian when he…

But I forget. You were not there, and you were much missed! My memory plays me odd tricks these days. Even worse, I tend to mislay the notes I jot down as reminders, or (terrible confession!) when I do find them, I am often unable to decipher my own handwriting. Age spares us nothing, old friend. Like ancient trees, we die from the top.

Except for occasional lectures, I seldom go into town, for the people, though my own, distress me with their loud voices and continual quarrelling, their gambling and sensuality. They are hopelessly frivolous. Nights are made day with artificial light, while nearly all the men now use depilatories, which makes it difficult to tell them from women… to think how I once eulogized this city! But I suppose one must be tolerant, recalling that the Antiochenes are the victims of a demoralizingly sultry climate, the proximity of Asia and of course that pernicious Christian doctrine which asserts that a sprinkling of water (and a small donation) will wash away sin, again and again and again.

Now, my old friend, as I sit here in my study surrounded by our proscribed friends (I mean those books of Greece which made the mind of man), let me tell you what thoughts I had last night—a sleepless night not only because of the edict but because two cats saw fit to enliven my despair with the noise of lust (only an Egyptian would worship a cat). I am weary today but determined.

We must fight back. What happens to us personally is not important, but what happens to civilization is a matter of desperate concern. During my sleepless night, I thought of various appeals that might be made to our new Emperor. I have a copy of the edict before me as I write. It is composed in bad bureaucratic Greek, the official style of the bishops, whose crudity of language is equalled only by the confusion of their thought. Not unlike those celebrated minutes of the council at—where was it? Chalcedon?—which we used to read aloud to one another with such delight! Carefree days, never to come again. Unless we act now.

Priscus, I am sixty-six years old and you are, as I recall, a dozen years older than I. We have reached an age when death is a commonplace not to be feared, especially by us, for is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying? And are we not true philosophers who have nothing to lose but that which in the natural course we shall surrender in any case, more soon than late?

I have already had several seizures in recent years which left me unconscious and weakened, and of course my chronic cough, aggravated by an unseasonable wet winter, threatens to choke me to death at any time. I am also losing my sight; and I suffer from a most painful form of gout. Therefore let us, fearing nothing, join forces and strike back at the Christians before they entirely destroy the world we love.

My plan is this. Seventeen years ago when you returned from Persia, you told me that our beloved friend and pupil, the Emperor Julian, had written a fragment of memoir which you had got hold of at the time of his death. I have often thought to write you for a copy, simply for my own edification. I realized then, as did you, that publication was out of the question, popular though Julian was and still is, even though his work to restore the true gods has been undone.

Under the Emperors Valentinian and Valens we had to be politic and cautious if we were to be allowed to go on teaching. But now in the light of this new edict, I say: an end to caution! We have nothing but two old bodies to lose, while there is eternal glory to be gained by publishing Julian’s memoir, with an appropriate biography to be written by either or both of us. I knew his quality best, of course, but you were with him in Persia and saw him die.

So between the two of us, I his teacher and you his philosopher-companion, we can rehabilitate his memory and with close reasoning show the justice of his contest with the Christians. I have written about him in the past, and boldly. I refer particularly to the eulogy I composed just after his death when, if I may say so, I was able to bring tears even to hard Christian eyes.

Shortly afterwards, I published my correspondence with Julian. Incidentally, I sent you a copy and though you never acknowledged this gift, I do hope you found it interesting. If by any chance you did not receive it, I shall be happy to send you another one. I kept all of Julian’s letters to me over the years, as well as copies of my own letters to him.

One can never rely on the great keeping one’s letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange. Finally, I am at work on an oration to be called “On Avenging the Emperor Julian”. I mean to dedicate this work to Theodosius.

Let me know as soon as possible if you concur in my plan. I repeat: we have nothing to lose. And the world has much to gain. By the way, as a sign of the times, there is now a Latin Academy at Antioch, with a heavy enrolment. It is enough to chill the blood. The young men are deserting Hellenic studies for Roman law in the hopes of government preferment. My own classes are still large but many of my colleagues are literally starving to death. Recently, a student (Christian, of course) most tactfully suggested that I, Libanius, learn Latin! At my age and after a life-time devoted to Greek!

I told him that as I was not a lawyer there was nothing I needed to read in that ugly language, which has produced only one poem and that a depressing paraphrase of our great Homer. I hope after so many years of silence between us that this letter finds you and your admirable wife, Hippin, in good health. I envy you your life at Athens, the natural centre of our universe. Do I need to add that I will of course defray any expenses you might incur in having Julian’s memoir copied? The price of copying, luckily, is less at Athens than here at Antioch. Books always cost more in those cities where they are least read!

Added: An old rumour has just been confirmed. The Great King of Persia, Sapor, is dead at last. He was over eighty and reigned most of his life. A strange coincidence that the king who struck down our beloved Julian should die just as we are about to restore his memory. I was once told that Sapor had read my Life of Demosthenes and admired it. How marvellous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself. Let us make Julian live again, and for all time!