Castle of los Mendoza, Spain
Tag: Spain
Lighthouse on the Spanish island of Menorca
Coca Castle in the Segovia province in Spain
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European beauty
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Franco, 2
The Spanish Republic was supported by a revolutionary ideology heading towards communism, and during that revolutionary phase the Catholic Church suffered great persecution by the Republic. This prompted the Vatican to make the first timid attempts to break the isolation to which Franco’s Spain had been subjected in the post-war period at the same time as the beginning of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union began to be perceived as the new enemy of the United States. But that was until 1953 because the Falange was anti-clerical, and the Vatican wanted nothing to do with anything that smacked of fascism. Only with Spain’s rapprochement with the United States could we say that Franco had won the war, as his country was thus able to emerge from the isolationist purgatory to which Spain had been subjected in the immediate post-war years.
The consolidation of Francoist Spain in the 1950s must be seen in this light: Franco was never an original ideologue. He never wrote a Mein Kampf. He was first and foremost a soldier, and wanted to organise Spain as if it were military barracks. That is why when he died there was no more Francoism. (Compare it with National Socialism. Despite all the propaganda bullshit that the White traitors and the Jews have been throwing at it, the National Socialist idea still lives on in the hearts of dissidents.)
The degeneration of Spain after the death of the caudillo wouldn’t have happened if the Falange, the single party, had been able to re-educate the young Spaniards with its fascist ideology. But in the late 1950s the Falange lost the internal struggle and the technocrats of Opus Dei gained influence. If Franco had respected the 1956 Falange initiative on who would succeed him after his death, instead of passing the mantle to Prince Juan Carlos, Spain wouldn’t have deteriorated so rapidly after 1975.
Franco’s decision to appoint Juan Carlos as his successor came as a bucket of cold water to the Falangists in 1969. But the real war had already been lost since 1945. Without the world Hitler and Mussolini dreamed of, young Spaniards were beginning to Americanise and Sovietise even while the Generalissimo was still alive. By the end of the 1960s, a university survey showed that more than 70 per cent of students were influenced by philo-Marxist or Christian democratic values, and only 10 per cent embraced the ideals of Francoism. These young people knew nothing of the trauma of the civil war. The American and Western European lifestyle had already seduced them through the great tourism that Spain enjoyed, as well as the degenerate music that tourists brought with them, such as rock music, not to mention the sexual liberation of the late 1960s.
Once crowned, Juan Carlos I of Spain handed over power to parliamentary democracy instead of exercising it as king. He is remembered for this role during the Spanish transition. A 1981 coup attempt failed and Juan Carlos supported the European Union and NATO (the aim of the failed coup was to bring back a Francoist regime in Spain by a group of civil guards). Juan Carlos must be remembered as one of those responsible for the implementation of the immigration laws that opened Spain’s borders to mass immigration. He can be considered an accomplice to the genocide of Iberian whites in Spain.
As in the rest of the western world, in the end the bad guys in our film prevailed. The moral of this story is that only the implementation of National Socialism, in all its purity, could save the Aryan: something the racial right in America is in no way trying to do, at least in an academic way at the moment (as I do in The West’s Darkest Hour).
A few years ago, a troll who used to troll this site made the observation that I, despite my origins, hardly talked about Francisco Franco.
First of all, as I recently recalled on this site, the history of Spain ceased to hold my attention ever since a 7th-century Visigoth king allowed their people to be infected by Christianity to the extent of overturning the old Gothic prohibition against mixing their blood with those from the Iberian peninsula who didn’t come from Germanic tribes. (The first emigrant Goths set out from some territory in present-day Sweden for what is now Poland and the mouth of the Vistula river, and ethnically replaced the inhabitants there.) Precisely because of such old miscegenation, ancient Hispania became Spain, about which Kenneth Clark told us in his famous TV series: ‘Some of the most offensive omissions were dictated by my title [Civilisation]. If I had been talking about the history of art, it would not have been possible to leave out Spain; but when one asks what Spain has done to enlarge the human mind and pull mankind a few steps up the hill, the answer is less clear. Don Quixote, the Great Saints, the Jesuits in South America? Otherwise she has simply remained Spain, and since I wanted each programme to be concerned with the new developments of the European mind, I could not change my ground and talk about a single country’. That happens when the Aryan mixes his blood, and the same can be said of the Portuguese.
Secondly, the Spanish Civil War was a war between Christians and neochristians. The influence of hardcore Stalinism, especially in the last years of the war, was considerable. Many secular neochristians, the famous international brigade of forty thousand volunteers, went to fight for the Republican side. None of them knew what had happened, and was happening, in the concentration and extermination camps of the Soviet Union, nor did they have any idea of the holocaust in the 1930s that was to be called Holodomor.
A Spaniard of that time wouldn’t have understood my position. Christianity was practically abolished during the Republic and I would have supported, for tactical reasons, Franco’s Catholic nationalists. How is it that someone who wants to see Christianity disappear sides with the enemies of the Republican cause? Because it was necessary to fight against the Red Front, which was then still influenced by the exterminationist Jews of the Soviet Union, and because atheistic neochristians are far worse, for our holy words, than ordinary Christians.
It is as simple as that.
And this is true even today. The Woke monster (already since the Spanish Civil War, which was also a feminist war on the Republican side, the word ‘progress’ was used) is even worse than the old-fashioned Christians not only on the American continent where I live, but in other parts of the West. As we have said many times on this site, the problem with atheistic neochristianity is that the universalist, egalitarian ethics not only remains but grows, like cancer, once traditional Christianity is abandoned.
The Christian ethics of equalising what is unequal—from Paul’s verse in Galatians, a mustard seed, to the great tree where birds nest, passing through the egalitarian ideals of the founders of the US, and the French Revolution—has been the archetype that has infected the white man’s soul since Constantine and the following emperors murdered the classical world. But, ironically, Christian ethics enter a state of final metastasis once the Christ archetype is removed from the equation, as in traditional Christianity Christians sublimated their need for sacrifice with the image of the crucified god of the Jews (now they simply sacrifice themselves, specifically, the fair race).
What is extremely striking about the thousands of volunteers who went to fight for Republican Spain in pursuit of the egalitarian archetype is that some of them were English, Swedish, Swiss and even German when Hitler was in power! How was it that they didn’t go to fight for Hitler to defend their race? The basic and fundamental reason that Germany lost the war is that this archetype, implanted in the Aryan psyche since Constantine, still possesses our soul. That’s why Nietzsche said that his philosophy would only be understood after the next great European war. And it is only until our century, when the triumph of the egalitarian archetype seems absolute in the West, that some old-fashioned Christians have begun to perceive how mad this final phase of metastasis is, e.g., in the political attempt to equalise trans people, who obviously suffer from acute psychosis, with normal people.
The fair race could only be saved by rebelling against the archetype that has been killing them for seventeen hundred years. Traditional Christianity can no more save us than it saved Spain, now a Woke country, after Franco’s death.
– For the context of these translations click here –
Mission and slaughter
Under Dagobert I, whose chief advisors included Arnulf, bishop of Metz, and Kunibert, bishop of Cologne, the paganism on the left bank of the Rhine was increasingly combated, and all the Jews in the kingdom were forcibly baptised.
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Editor’s note: This is where it becomes clearer than ever that white nationalists, most of whom have a positive view of Christianity, aren’t honest with themselves.
While it is true that The Northman film that depicts Vikings burning women and children alive isn’t to be believed, it is true that some ancient Scandinavians were brutal in preventing miscegenation, like the Visigoths who burned at the stake those who stained their blood with Mediterranean mudbloods. Christianity came to change things in Visigothic Spain: burning heretics rather than Goths who sinned against the holy spirit of their race. Now even Jews could mingle with Aryans if they only converted to Christianity! And not only Jews…
As long as the racial right in North America is reluctant to revise its history of Christianity, I will be pointedly denigrating them on The West’s Darkest Hour. The German Karlheinz Deschner continues:
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Dagobert also opened the mission of the Frisians, to which Bishop Kunibert had formally committed himself, with an edict imposing baptism. And just as the king fought in the south, west and north, and just as he fought the Basques, Bretons, Saxons and Frisians, he also invaded the first Slavic kingdom, the great kingdom of the Frankish merchant Samo, which stretched from the Erzgebirbe or Ore Mountains to the eastern Alps…
The only source, which recounts the genocide of the Bulgars, is found in Fredegar: ‘After their defeat the Bulgars were expelled from Pannonia: 9,000 men with women and children, who turned to Dagobert, begging him to take them into Frankish lands for a lasting settlement. Dagobert ordered the Bavarians to take them in for the winter, while he consulted with the Franks about what to do next. When they had been distributed among the various houses of the Bavarians, Dagobert ordered the Bavarians—after taking advice from the Franks—that each of them should kill the Bulgarians on a certain night with the women and children he had in his house. And the Bavarians carried it out immediately’. And of the 9,000 people, only 700 escaped the slaughter and fled across the Windisch to the Duchy of Walluc.
The main reason for the unprecedented carnage was probably ‘the annihilation of the Bulgarian ruling class’ (Stórmer). In principle, this had nothing to do with the ‘mission’ but with an Ostpolitik or Eastern policy, which in turn had a lot to do with a ‘mission’.
‘Mission, Catholicisation and the healing of souls appear in the 5th-6th centuries in close connection with the Frankish king, with the deputy duke of Bavaria and the Frankish aristocracy in the west and east’, writes Kari Bosi after narrating the great slaughter, and adds: ‘It is no accident the name of the last great Merovingian king Dagobert I who pursued a vigorous Ostpolitik strongly emphasised in the Lex Baiuarium… It is known for the close collaboration between Dagobert and St. Amandus’.
Moreover, it is known that the rex torrens was considered a saint like other murderers of entire populations, such as Charlemagne or Charles ‘the Great’. And finally, it is known that St. Amandus reproached King Dagobert, ‘something that no other bishop dared to do’, with capitana crimina for very serious crimes; although these crimes, which one saint reproached another saint for, were less about the sexual life of the sovereign than about his violent actions.
(Left, Dagobert’s tomb at Saint-Denis, remade in the 13th century.) But that was an exception. For nothing prevented the old chroniclers from comparing Dagobert, the great beheader, the initiator of the Bulgarian slaughter and an unscrupulous man in general, with Solomon, the rex pacifica, and exalted as ‘benefactor of the churches’ (ecciesiarum largitor), as ‘most vigorous nourishing father of the Franks’ (fortissimus enutritor francorum) who brought peace to the whole kingdom and won the respect of the neighbouring peoples; which also doesn’t prevent us from reading: ‘He filled all the surrounding kingdoms with fear and terror’ (Liber Historiae Francorum). Nevertheless, or precisely because of this, the ‘great’ Merovingian king, the friend of the monks, Dagobert, who died after a brief illness on 19 January 638-639, still lives on today especially in France, as the bon roi Dagobert (the good king).
Compared to the neighbouring country to the north, I consider Latin America the continent of the blue pill. There is nothing in MSM that resembles, say, Tucker Carlson. One has to search social media to find the voice of an Argentine, Agustín Laje, and his YouTube channel: a kind of Latin American Tucker who in the Spanish-speaking MSM would be inconceivable.
Here we see him with his colleague Nicolás Marquez and their book about the new left. Laje and Márquez debunk gender ideology and in their activism they travel to Spanish-speaking countries. Gender ideology is the equivalent, in this part of the continent, to anti-racism north of the Rio Grande. (Since whites are already an extreme minority on this side of the river, the next levelling battle is to denigrate the male versus the female.)
Vox is a Spanish political party founded in late 2013. Its president is Santiago Abascal. Vox is the party of the right in Spain: a more conservative right than the caricature that the Republican Party has become in the US today.
But Vox’s folk, Laje and the new Spanish-speaking right are limited to criticising the third feminist wave. Although the Spanish and Latin American media call them ‘ultra-rightists’ and fachas (fascists), they are actually progressive. Their criticism of feminism is not radical at all. Like Andrew Anglin, we not only reject the third wave that Vox rejects, but the first and second feminist waves, as can be seen in the sidebar book on Beth’s pretty boobs.
The pendulum has swung so much to the left that liberals such as Argentina’s Laje and Márquez, and those of Spain’s Vox party, are seen as conservative. They are not. See what I recently said about Vox in La Hora Más Oscura. In the case of Laje, in minute 21 of this interview with a woman, the Argentine says that the male rapist should face life imprisonment. Note that Laje is hated by the mass of feminists because they mistakenly see him as macho. If Laje and those of Vox weren’t, to some extent, conquered by the anti-male hysteria of our days, they would say that the woman who falsely accused a man of rape would also be sentenced to life imprisonment.
But they don’t say that: our new Orwellian laws only punish males.
The so-called conservatives are liberals, and this applies not only to Vox and Laje but to Tucker and Sean Hannity (the latter interviewed a transexual man not long ago). There are no exponents of true conservatism in the media, neither in the English-speaking world nor in the Spanish-speaking world. And by the way, we are not conservatives but racists.
It cannot be repeated or emphasised enough: intolerance, religious or philosophical, is characteristic of devotees of ‘man’ regardless of any consideration of race or personality. As a result, it is the real racists who show the greatest tolerance.
No doubt racists demand from their comrades in arms absolute fidelity to the common faith. This is not ‘intolerance’; it is a question of order. Everyone must know what they want, and not adhere to a doctrine and then make reservations about it. Whoever has objections to formulate—and above all, objections concerning the basic values of the doctrine—has only to remain outside the community of the faithful, and not to pretend to be the comrade of those with whom he does not share faith entirely. No doubt also the racist is ready to fight men who act, and even who think, as enemies of their race. But he does not fight them in order to change them, to convert them. If they stay in their place, and stop opposing him and his blood brothers, he leaves them alone—for he is not interested enough in them to care about their fate, in this world or into another.
In the third Book of his Essays, Montaigne laments that the Americas were not conquered ‘by the Greeks or the Romans’, rather than by the Spaniards and the Portuguese. He believes that the New World would never have known the horrors committed to converting the native to a religion considered by the conquerors to be the ‘only’ good, the only true one.
What he does not say; what, perhaps, he had not understood, is that it is precisely the absence of racism and the love of ‘man’ that are at the root of these horrors. The Greeks and Romans—and all ancient peoples—were racists, at least during their time of greatness. As such they found it quite natural that different peoples had different gods, and different customs. They did not get involved in imposing their own gods and customs on the vanquished, under pain of extermination.
Even the Jews did not do this. They so despised all those who sacrificed to gods other than Yahweh, that they were content—on the order of this god, says the Bible—to exterminate them without seeking to convert them. They imposed on them the terror of war—not that ‘spiritual terror’ which, as Adolf Hitler so aptly writes, ‘entered for the first time into the Ancient World, until then much freer than ours, with the appearance of Christianity’.[1] The Spaniards, the Portuguese, were Christians. They imposed terror of war and spiritual terror on the Americas.
What would the Greeks of ancient Greece have done in their place, or the Romans or other Aryan people who would have had, in the sixteenth century, the spirit of our racists of the twentieth? They would undoubtedly have conquered the countries; they would have exploited them economically. But they would have left to the Aztecs, Tlaxcaltecs, Mayans, etc., as well as the peoples of Peru, their gods and their customs. Furthermore, they would have fully exploited the belief of these peoples in a ‘white and bearded’ god, civiliser of their country, who, after having left their ancestors many centuries before, was to return from the East, to reign over them—their descendants—with his companions: men of fair complexion. Their leaders would have acted, and ordered their soldiers to act, so that the natives effectively take them for the god Quetzalcoatl and his army.[2] They would have respected the temples—instead of destroying them and building on their ruins monuments of a foreign cult. They would have been tough, sure—as all conquerors are but they would not have been sacrilegious. They would not have been the destroyers of civilisations that, even with their weaknesses, were worth their own.
The Romans, so tolerant of religion, have on occasion persecuted adherents of certain cults. The religion of the Druids was, for example, banned in Gaul by Emperor Claudius. And there were those persecutions of the early Christians, which we talked about too much, without always knowing what we were saying. But all of these repressive measures were purely political, not doctrinal—not ethical. It was as leaders of the clandestine resistance of the Celts against Roman domination, and not as priests of a cult which might have appeared unusual to the conquerors, that the Druids were stripped of their privileges (in particular, of their monopoly of teaching young people) and prosecuted. It was as bad citizens, who refused to pay homage to the Emperor-god, the embodiment of the State, and not as devotees of a particular god, that Christians were persecuted.
If in the sixteenth century Indo-European conquerors, faithful to the spirit of tolerance which has always characterised their race, had made themselves masters of the Americas by exploiting the indigenous belief in the return of the white god, Quetzalcoatl,[3] there would have been no resistance to their domination, therefore no occasion for the persecution of the kind I have just recalled. Not only would the peoples of the New World never have known the atrocities of the Holy Inquisition, but their writings (as for those who, like the Mayans and Aztecs, had them) and their monuments would have survived.
And in Tenochtitlan, which over the centuries had become one of the great capitals of the world, the imposing multi-storey pyramids—intact—would now dominate modern streets. And the palaces and fortresses of Cuzco would still be admired by visitors. And the solar and warlike religions of the peoples of Mexico and Peru, while evolving, probably, in contact with that of the victors, at least in their external forms, would have kept their basic principles, and continued to transmit, from generation to generation, the eternal esoteric truths under their particular symbolism. In other words, they would have settled in Central America and in the former Empire of the Incas Aryan dynasties, whose relations with the conquered countries would have been more or less similar to those which they formerly had maintained, with the aristocracy and the peoples of India, the Greek dynasties who, from the third century BC to the first after the Christian era, ruled over what is now Afghanistan, Sindh and Punjab.
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Note of the Editor: William Pierce’s Who We Are was published after Savitri Devi’s book. She didn’t grasp the full meaning that the Aryans of India would, over many centuries, succumb to what happened to the Iberian Europeans in a few centuries: interbreeding with the Indians. Since Savitri was female, because of her yin nature she couldn’t see tremendously yang issues, like what Pierce tells us about extermination or expulsion.
The yin wisdom of the priestess (her loyal Hitlerism, something that Pierce lacked) must be balanced with the yang input of the priest (an exterminationist drive, something that priestess usually lack).
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Unfortunately, Europe itself in the sixteenth century had long since succumbed to that spirit of intolerance which it had, along with Christianity, received from the Jews. The history of the wars of religion bears witness to this, in Germany as well as in France. And as for the old Hellenic-Aegean blood—the very blood of the ‘ancient world’, once so tolerant—it was won in the service of the Roman Church: represented, among the conquerors of Peru, in the person of Pedro de Candia, Cretan adventurer, one of Francisco Pizarro’s most ruthless companions.
I will be told that the cruelties committed in the name of the salvation of souls, by the Spaniards in their colonies—and by the Portuguese in theirs (the Inquisition was, in Goa, perhaps even worse than in Mexico, which is not little to say!)—are no more attributable to true Christianity than to Aryan racism as understood by the Führer, unnecessary acts of violence, carried out without orders, during the Second World War, by some men in German uniforms. I am told that neither Cortés nor Pizarro nor their companions, nor the Inquisitors of Goa or Europe, nor those who approved their actions, loved man as Christ would have wanted his disciples to love him.
That is true. These people were not humanitarians. And I never claimed they were. But they were humanists, not in the narrow sense of ‘scholars’, but in the broad sense: men for whom man was, in the visible world at least, the supreme value. They were, anyway, people who bathed in the atmosphere of a civilisation centred on the cult of ‘man’, whom they neither denounced nor fought—quite the contrary! They were not necessarily—they were even very rarely—kind to humans of other races (even theirs!) as Jesus wanted everyone to be. But even in their worst excesses, they venerated in him, even without loving him, Man, the only living being created, according to their faith, ‘in the image of God’, and provided with an immortal soul, or at least—in the eyes of those who in their hearts had already detached themselves from the Church, as, later, to those of so many list colonialists of the eighteenth or nineteenth century—the only living being endowed with reason.
Note of the Editor: Left, a monk pitying and loving a conquered Amerindian (mural by Orozco in Mexico).
They worshipped him, despite the atrocities they committed against him, individually or collectively. And, even if some of them, in the secrecy of their thoughts, did not revere him more than they did love him, not granting him, if he was only a ‘savage’, neither soul nor right soul—after all, there were Christians who refused to attribute to women a soul similar to their own—this does not change the fact that the ‘civilisation’ of which they claimed, and of which they were the agents, proclaimed the love and respect for every man, and the duty to help him access ‘happiness’, if not in this earthly life, at least in the Hereafter.
It has sometimes been maintained that any action undertaken in the colonies, including missionary action, was, even without the knowledge of those who carried it out, remotely guided by businessmen who did not have them in sight, only material profit and nothing else. It has been suggested that the Church itself was only following the plans and carrying out the orders of such men—which would partly explain why it seems to have been far more interested in the souls of the natives than in those of the conquering chiefs and soldiers—who, however, sinned so scandalously against the great commandment of Christ: the law of love. Even if all these allegations were based on historical facts that could be proven, one would still be forced to admit that colonial wars would have been impossible, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (and especially perhaps in the nineteenth), without the belief, then generally widespread in Europe, that they provided the opportunity to ‘save’ souls, and to ‘civilise savages’.
This belief that Christianity was the ‘true’ faith for ‘all’ men, and that the standards of conduct of Europe marked by Christianity were also for ‘all’ men—the criterion of ‘civilisation’—was questioned by no one. The leaders who led the colonial wars, the adventurers, soldiers and brigands who waged them, the settlers who benefited from them, shared it—even if, in the eyes of most of them, the hope of material profit was in the foreground less as important, if not more, than the eternal salvation of the natives. And whether they had shared it or not, they were nonetheless supported, in their action, by this collective belief of their distant continent, of the whole Christendom.
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Note of the Editor: That is very true. For example, in the last decades of his life my very Catholic father became obsessed with the biography of a 16th-century Spanish monk who made several trips from the Old to the New World to protect the rights of the Amerindians; so much so that my father dedicated his magnum opus, La Santa Furia (Holy Wrath), to him. This is a composition with three series of woods, six horns, three trumpets, four trombones and tuba, two harps, piano and timpani, percussion instruments among which were some pre-Hispanic, as well as a solo vocal quartet, a sextet of men and a choir mixed with four voices: 115 choristers in total and 90 orchestral musicians: a one-hour symphonic work that can be watched on YouTube:
It was precisely my father’s behaviour—cf. my eleven books in Spanish—that prompted me to repudiate not only Catholicism but Christian axiology, becoming a true apostate of Christianity. Savitri concludes:
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It is this belief which—officially—justified their wars which, if they had been waged in the conditions in which they were waged, but solely in the name of profit, or even security (as had been the wars of the Mongolian conquerors in the thirteenth century), would have seemed ‘inhuman’. It was such conquest that, still officially, defined the spirit of their conduct towards the natives. From there this haste to convert him—willingly, by force or using ‘bribes’—to their Christian faith, or to make him share the ‘treasures’ of their culture, in particular to initiate him to their sciences, while making him lose all contact with his own.
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[1] Mein Kampf, German edition of 1935, p. 507.
[2] Or, in Peru, for the god Viracocha. The Peruvians had initially called the Spaniards Viracochas.
[3] Or Viracocha in Peru.
Christianity does not belong to the church! It might have once, but certainly not since the American and French Revolutions. Secularisation rarely opened doors to atheism—more often, it made the Jewish creed reborn in fierce anti-Aryan liberalism where the empty idea of money trumps the sacred matter of blood and soil. Only in Germany did Jesus die—and yet, he resurrected in 1945, in the unholy spirit of anti-racism, anti-discrimination, of egalitarian idealism that draws no distinction between the Aryan and the Negro, dead and alive, living and a rock. A faith so crudely nihilistic nobody dares to believe its malice—and yet, it permeates the entire sick body of Europe!—cf. the essay ‘The Red Giant’.
Editor’s note: This recent comment by Adûnâi on The Unz Review doesn’t mean that he has earned the privilege of commenting here. It only means that what drives me to continue with these instalments of Karlheinz Deschner’s Christianity’s Criminal History is the red giant, a nova that’s engulfing the West: Christianity in its secular form.
For the context of Deschner’s work see: here.
The Conversion of Reccared I as recreated by
Antonio Muñoz Degrain, Senate Palace, Madrid.
CHAPTER 6
The Conversion of the Visigoths to Catholicism
No other country in the Western world experienced such a profound and lasting transformation by Christianity as Spain. —Willliam Culican
After the defeat of Poitiers (507) at the hands of Clovis, the great Toulouse kingdom collapsed completely and the Visigoths, almost entirely expelled from southern France, concentrated in Spain, where they had conquered one province after another. From 473 they were owners of the entire peninsula, except for the small Swabian kingdom in the northwest and the Basque territories of the Bay of Biscay. Its new capital was Toledo, which supplanted Toulouse…
Liuvigild, the last Arian king of the Visigoths, certainly reinforced the power of the crown. He improved the monetary system, and revised the laws, filling in deficiencies and eliminating superfluous aspects. He was the first German prince who founded cities, the most important of which he called Reccopolis, after his son Reccared (in the upper reaches of the Tagus). During his eighteen-year reign he re-unified the Visigothic kingdom, which was crumbling. Even St. Isidore of Seville, who attributes Liuvigild’s successes to the favour of fate and the bravery of his army, admits that the Goths, until then reduced to a small corner in Spain, came to occupy most of the territory. ‘Only the error of heresy obscured the reputation of his bravery’. That was naturally the decisive point: ‘the pernicious poison of that doctrine’, the ‘deadly plague of’ heresy’.
Full of the fury of Arian infidelity, he persecuted the Catholics and exiled most of the bishops. Liuvigild deprived the churches of their income and privileges and through terror he drove many into the Arian pestilence and won many more without persecution with gold and gifts. In addition to other heretical depravities, he even dared to re-baptise Catholics, and not only lay people but also members of the priestly state.
In reality, and in the face of radically intolerant Catholicism, since it had already established itself in the Visigothic kingdom, Liuvigild carried out a proven policy of detente. During his reign many Arian monasteries were founded and many churches were built. The king personally endowed Abbot Nanctus and his monks from Africa with real estate. Moreover, he theologically compromised with the Catholics through certain concessions in Trinitarian doctrine…
Editor’s Note: After five pages of describing fights, Deschner writes about how the tide turned from Arianism to Catholicism, and he concludes:
Finally, the Goths who—Bishop Isidore writes— had drunk so thirsty and so long retained the ‘pernicious poison of heresy’, ‘thought of the salvation of their souls, freed themselves from the deeply ingrained and by the grace of Christ reached the only beatifying faith, which is the Catholic faith. Hallelujah!’
At the III Council of Toledo, held in May 589 (see painting above), and whose worthy preparation was preceded by a three-day fast, ordered by the king, part of the Arians went to the victor’s field. The king declared Catholicism the official state religion and began by uprooting Arianism quickly and completely: destroying its ecclesial organisation, excluding the Arians from all public office, and burning their sacred books…
At the same time that Reccared, together with the bishops, put an end to Arianism in Spain, he also turned the Church into an instrument of oppression as had never happened before in the history of the Goths. All Christian opposition disappeared, the Arians were forbidden from any public office, all Arian ecclesiastical property passed to the Catholic bishoprics and celibacy was imposed on the converted clergy.
Conversions were also reached by force. Some within the Arian episcopate, such as the obstinate prelate of Mérida, Sunna, met their death in exile. Catholicus nunquam ero, it seems that Sunna responded to Reccared’s demands for conversion. ‘I will never become a Catholic, but in the faith in which I have lived I want to live also in the future, and I will gladly die for the faith that I have maintained since my youth!’
Many Arian bishops embraced Catholicism just as in Liuvigild’s time many Catholic clergymen had joined the Arian national Church. Then began the alliance of the State with the Catholic Church, what Bishop John of Biclaro* calls the renovario, the attitude of the christianissimus imperator. According to the old Catholic tradition, Reccared ordered the immediate burning of all Arian Bibles and doctrinal writings in Toledo, in the public square. ‘Not even a single Gothic text was left in Spain’ (Thompson).
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(*) John of Biclaro attended council of Toledo where Reccared converted to the Catholic faith, represented in the painting above.