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Tag: Transvaluation of all values

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On the Historicity of Jesus (book) Richard Carrier

Unhistorical Jesus, 7

Or:

How (((Luke))) transvalued an Aryan value

But even if we accede to that hypothesis, it then only confirms the same point: that Luke is not writing history, but myth. He or his sources are simply making everything up. His tales are told for their meaning and rhetorical effect, not because they were researched or came from witnesses. I’ll close with one more example of this, the Emmaus narrative of Luke 24, a resurrection-appearance tale found in no other Gospel and thus distinctive of Luke’s style of invention.

Here Luke tells the story of a man named Cleopas (along with an unnamed friend) who journeys by road from Jerusalem to nearby Emmaus, after they learn the corpse of Jesus has vanished. On the way, the resurrected Jesus appears to them (albeit in disguise) and explains the secrets of the kingdom (which happens to be a spiritual kingdom, not a physical one), then vanishes, and Cleopas recognizes who he was and goes on to proclaim what he was told. Conveniently, the name Cleopas means ‘tell all’, in other words, ‘proclaim’. The story thus has several telltale markers of myth: a name invented or selected for its meaning to the tale rather than any historical truth; an absurdly ahistorical narrative (never heard of from any earlier source [Mark or Matthew – Ed.]) of a disguised divine visitor; an unrealistic conversation with a complete stranger; a miraculous vanishing; and an all-too-convenient rhetorical purpose for all of it. This is the Vanishing Hitchhiker legend—ancient Roman style.

As it happens, the founding myth of Rome, then famously known everywhere and celebrated in annual passion plays, is almost the exact same story: a man named Proculus (archaic Latin for ‘Proclaimer’ or ‘He Who Proclaims’, thus not only again a fictional name designed for the story but essentially the same name as Cleopas) journeys by road from nearby Alba Longa to Rome, after the Roman people learn the corpse of Romulus has vanished; and on the way, the resurrected Romulus appears to him (not in disguise but this time in glorious form) and explains the secrets of the kingdom (literally: how to conquer and rule the world), then ascends into heaven (as Luke eventually has Jesus do as well), and Proculus recognizes who he was and goes on to proclaim what he was told. I’ve already demonstrated the extent to which the Gospels have borrowed this Romulan resurrection tale for Jesus (see Chapter 4, §1, and Element 47). Mark had already fashioned his passion account in light of it, and Matthew embellished it even more in accord. So it is not unexpected that Luke would take the same model further.

And indeed he has. Not only in the ways I have already pointed out in previous chapters but also here, in the tale of Cleopas on the road to Emmaus. lf we accept the identification of Luke’s intended Emmaus as the Ammaus mentioned by Josephus as a town nearby Jerusalem, then in both Luke’s narrative and the Romulan tale the Proclaimers are journeying from a city on a mountain to a city in a valley, roughly the same direction (east to west, like the sun), and roughly the same distance (seven to twelve miles).

But the changes are the point. While Proculus receives his gospel on the road to Rome, Cleopas receives his gospel on the road from Jerusalem: so while the old story suggests ‘all roads lead to Rome’, the new story suggests all roads lead from Jerusalem. While Romulus appears in awesome glory, befitting the awesome glory of Rome’s dominion and the very visible empire he promises, Jesus appears in disguise, hidden, just as the kingdom he promises is hidden, and which, like Jesus, becomes visible (and thus knowable) only in the communion of believers. Luke has thus transvalued the Romans’ founding myth: unlike the Romans, their resurrected hero promises a hidden spiritual kingdom originating from Jerusalem on high. And just as the glorious visage of Romulus is what confirmed to Proculus that what he said was true, so it is the powerful word of the gospel that confirms to Cleopas that what Jesus said was true. Luke thus rewrites the story to communicate how Christian values differ from mainstream Roman values. This is a classic hallmark of mythmaking. [1]

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[1] Pages 480-482 of Carrier’s book. Italics in the original but bold-type added by Ed. For more on the Romulus parallels and reversals in the Emmaus narrative see Arnold Ehrhardt, ‘The Disciples of Emmaus’, New Testament Studies 10 (January 1964), pp. 182-201, and Francis Gerald Downing, ‘A Rival to Romulus’, in Doing Things with Words, pp. 133-51.

Categories
Christian art Der Antichrist (book)

Suppers at Emmaus

In the previous thread on Christian art Berk said: ‘How and why the Italian Renaissance began to use Nordic faces in their paintings is not something I know, but it is a revolutionary act perhaps in resistance to the Christianity they faced’. I answered that maybe Nietzsche can help:

Is it understood at last, will it ever be understood, what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values: an attempt with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the more noble values…

Supper at Emmaus (1606, above) is a painting by the Italian master Caravaggio, housed in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, Italy. Caravaggio’s work had a formative influence on Baroque painting. I told my father a long time ago that the Baroque ‘was a betrayal of the Renaissance’. He got angry and didn’t seem to understand what I was saying.

Fra Angelico began painting 200 years before the above Supper in Emmaus was completed. If we compare the blond angels and even the blond Jesus and redhead Magdalene of Fra Angelico in my previous posts with the painting by Caravaggio, we clearly see the regression towards non-Aryan characters.

Non-Aryan characters are even more obvious in this other Supper in Emmaus of 1601, also of Caravaggio, which is not located in Italy but in the National Gallery of London. Notice how the face of Jesus in this picture is wider (that is, less Nordid) than the face of Jesus in the picture above.

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Eugenics Miscegenation Schutzstaffel (SS)

Great personalities defend eugenics, 10

by Evropa Soberana

The Nazis organised the SS, a military and biological elite that was destined to be the aristocracy of the New Order. In the picture, a formation of the SS Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, the most elite division of the SS. To enter the Leibstandarte it was necessary to measure 1.84 meters, be between seventeen and twenty-two years old, be Nordic and have a health of steel. For many years, no one who had the slightest physical defect, such as glasses or a dental filling, was allowed to enter the Leibstandarte.

 
The SS Doctrine

As an elite, the Nazis organised, within the NSDAP: the SS, guardians of the National Socialist idea, firmly indoctrinated and severely disciplined. The SS began to incorporate the flower and cream of all Germany (it was common for athletes or prominent scientists to be made SS), and they were laying the foundations of a social order based on the biology, genetics and will of the human spirit.

The SS in general attached great importance to good physical and mental condition and to the cleanliness of the lineage of extra-European influences. The conditions of entry remained very strict until the Second World War. In 1937, Hitler was proud that ‘we continue to admit only fifteen percent of the candidates who present themselves to the SS’. The discipline of these men was extremely severe and rigid, and the punishments even for minor infractions, brutal.

Each SS promised to marry (their wives automatically became SS women with the marriage, and enjoyed the relevant help) a woman of pure blood and have, if possible, four healthy children. Both this and the entire Lebensborn project were framed in the Nazi policies of positive eugenics, while the famous sterilisation of the defective ones was the negative eugenics.

However, the SS were not just a pack of stallions. They proved to be the toughest, trained, fanatic, brave, bold and faithful shock force of the entire World War II, starring true military feats unparalleled in the Eastern Front, and reaching the limits of human resistance in arctic temperatures and in hostile territory, against an enemy that represented an Asian, slave and oriental idea (Bolshevism), and that far exceeded them in number.

Due to its oath of fidelity and its sense of duty the SS was, along with the Luftwaffe and the submarines, the German military body that suffered the most casualties.

At the base of the SS ideological training we can see anti-Christian beliefs. One of the most radical SS commanders in this regard was undoubtedly Theodor Eicke, head of the Totenkopfverbände who initiated an aggressive anti-Christian campaign, during which many SS who clung to Jesus were expelled from the body.

Our Germanic ancestors followed the laws of selection as all healthy peoples whose intelligence and sensitivity had not yet been contaminated by false doctrines of piety. The false conception that the Church had of God denied the divine laws of Nature. The ecclesiastical teaching deliberately opposed the will of Nature.

Once it was preached to the peoples that God had died crucified for mercy of the weak and the sick, sinners and the poor, the unnatural teaching of piety and a false humanitarianism could promote the conservation of the congenital sick. It was considered a moral duty to care and favour mainly the sick, the overwhelmed unfortunates and the poor in spirit…

On the other hand, several hundreds of courageous young Germans fall every year victims of sport or competition, in the fight against ice, in the snow, in automobile races or by plane. No matter how large the number of these victims, no people on Earth have died from war, from bad harvests or as a result of a period of political recession. The peoples have only disappeared when the living substance that ensures their historical life, their blood, their race, have been exhausted. They only die, then, in the following cases:

  1. When the number of births falls due to the regression of the popular force, thus offering the possibility of being crushed by a qualitatively and quantitatively stronger neighbour.
  1. Through racial crossings that have taken away the inner harmony of an originally healthy people.
  1. By disregard of the laws of selection, which causes a decrease in the genetic heritage of value and leads to a reduction of the capacities and qualities in the population.

The death of a people is based, then, on an erroneous conception of life, and is due to the non-observance of the eternal laws of the Earth. Man has learned to despise the laws of life because he has lost the bond with Nature and life. (Notebook SS No. 3, 1939, ‘Why do Peoples Die Of?’ cited in The SS Order by Edwige Thibaut.)

 
The more a human group manages to dominate and transform the conditions of their area of life by establishing a culture faithful to the law of life, the more easily the individual manages to preserve and avoid elimination. The laws of selection and elimination, severe in origin, gradually disappear and are attenuated. The older a culture ages and reaches the state of late civilised times, the more it loses its vigour. She even produces the reverse process. Weak and sick individuals can thus survive and reproduce; different racial types are mixed. The creative law of the species no longer seems to act…

The most favourable case of the cultural relationship with the original biological natural selection appears when the objective of the second is continued with the first. Thanks to a keen perception of the law that governed the origin of their species, peoples like the Spartans resorted in their selections to the same principles of inflexible severity originally prescribed by Nature, even after having reached more hospitable territories. Other Nordic peoples, such as our Germanic ancestors, naturally obeyed the biological laws that governed the creation of their species…

The intrusion of Christianity in the culture of our Germanic ancestors has given birth to a form of selection that, from the beginning, was revealed hostile to our race and its laws of evolution. The elite of Christian priests chose appropriate and usable men for their purposes, but prohibited them from perpetuating and conserving the best racial heritage by forcing them into celibacy. (Notebook SS No. 7, 1942, ‘The Biological Sense of Selection’ cited in The SS Order by Edwige Thibaut.)

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Alexis de Tocqueville Egalitarianism Jesus

Western Christian Civilisation – terminal stage

Destruction by Thomas Cole ~ 1835-1836

I have said that white nationalism has developed a myopic diagnosis of white decline: the Jewish question. I have also complained that American white nationalists have not published Who We Are by Pierce, and sell it as a bestseller, to expand such myopic diagnosis into a more accurate worldview. He who introduces the history of the white race encounters patterns that cannot be seen in most nationalist websites.

One of the most conspicuous elements of this pattern is the history of Christianity. And I do not mean only the destruction of the classical world by Christian fanatics in the 4th and 5th centuries. I refer to the Zeitgeist born in the West after such destruction.

In today’s world of florid psychosis, it seems that the fashion to empower transgender people has nothing to do with the Christian Zeitgeist. But this is precisely where the nationalist perspective appears to me as myopic. A few months ago I wrote ‘On Empowering Birds Feeding on Corpses’, where I try to explain that the most psychotic aspects of today’s egalitarianism can be traced back to a 14th-century Franciscan movement that wanted to carry the message of Jesus, in all its purity, to medieval Italy.

The Church of Rome was not tolerant with the egalitarian faction that took the gospel to the letter, and ended up chasing the Fraticelli as heretics. (For an entertaining narrative of that historical drama read The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco: a novel as didactic about the 14th century as Julian by Gore Vidal depicts the 4th century.)

Nobody could have predicted in the Middle Ages that the latent Fraticelli ideals were going to have their historical opportunity once the power of the Church was removed. But that was exactly what happened, centuries later, with the French Revolution.

As the readers of this site already know, the egalitarian ideals of the Enlightenment, implemented by force during and after the French Revolution, were inspired precisely by the gospel message. It may seem incredible to say, but even the most anti-clerical Jacobins subscribed the commandments preached by the fictional character called ‘Jesus’, created by the Jewish and Judaizing Hellenic authors of the New Testament. (*)

If we compare what the West is currently suffering with cancer, we can say that the first cancer cells arose since, in the 2nd century, a faction of Judaism, which Julian would call ‘the Galileans’, began to infiltrate the Gentile world in the outer provinces of the Roman Empire. The infection came to power with Constantine and the Roman emperors who followed him, despite Julian’s best efforts in his brief reign.

The noble spirit of the Aryan managed to tame, in the Middle Ages, the most ethno-suicidal aspects of this Levantine cult that was even imposed on the northern barbarians by force. But it was not until the Reformation and Counter-Reformation when they murdered, again, the revived pagan spirit of the Renaissance when the holy book of the Jews began to be taken seriously, especially in the Protestant world.

Nothing could be more suicidal than worshiping the sacred book of the Jews, insofar as both the Old Testament and the Talmud are sworn enemies of the Gentiles, especially the white man because He represents the best of the Gentile world. But the worst of all happened when this virus mutated from its religious phase to its secular phase.

The Western world of today is nothing but an ideological heir to the ideals of the Enlightenment. The so-called enlightened philosophers did not greet Reason, to use the language of the time, and much less the French revolutionaries. Those who truly began to greet Reason since the twilight of the Greco-Roman world were the eugenicists that we have been advertising in my most recent translations of Evropa Soberana. Only they broke away from the Christian dogma that ‘All men are equal before the eyes of God’, or the neo-Christian or secular version of the gospel, that ‘All men are equal before the law’.

The crux is that ‘All men are equal before the law’ has mutated, since the 1960s, as All men and women are ontologically equal: the final or end-stage cancer that currently kills the West.

As the Cassandra named Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw, the virus of equality always demands more equality. It is like a meme that multiplies itself to the absurd. And the absurd has come today not only with the demand that we must consider transgender people our equals, but trans children as well. But per Tocqueville’s observation this last metastasis won’t end with trans children! There are already Western countries that have legalised zoophilia and, in some of them, there are proposals to legalise pedophilia and even necrophilia…

Through this final metastasis, this runaway egalitarianism, the West is already sentenced and it will die. There’s no question about it. Or to say it more precisely, Western Christian Civilisation, which is in its terminal stage, will die soon as a conservative Swede predicted.

But the point is that everything had its origin in the radical message of Jesus: a message that seemed sublime to me at sixteen but that, at sixty, I see it as Semitic poison for the white man. As I said in ‘On Empowering Birds Feeding on Corpses’, the season of the horse of Troy of which Pierce wrote, that is to say the complete inversion of Aryan values into Gospel-inspired values, has finally arrived.

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(*) Whoever believes that Jesus was not a literary creation, but a man of flesh and blood, would do well to familiarise himself with the work of Richard Carrier.

Categories
Arthur Schopenhauer Egalitarianism Eugenics Madison Grant

Great personalities defend eugenics, 3

by Evropa Soberana

 
Christian domination

In the Middle Ages, through persecution resulting in actual death, life imprisonment and banishment, the free thinking, progressive and intellectual elements were persistently eliminated over large areas, leaving the perpetuation of the race to be carried on by the brutal, the servile and the stupid. It is now impossible to say to what extent the Roman Church by these methods has impaired the brain capacity of Europe. (Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race).

The coming of Christianity plunged classical philosophy into centuries of near-oblivion and clashed with the established and ancient European belief in the inequality of men. Spreading first among the slaves and lowest classes of the Roman empire, Christianity came to teach that all men were equal in the eyes of a universal Creator God, an idea that was totally alien to older European thought which had recognized a hierarchy of competence among men and even among the gods.

Opposing the traditions of classical philosophy and scientific enquiry, Christianity introduced the concept of a single, omnipotent “God of History” who controlled all the phenomena of the universe with men and women being creations of that God. Since all men and women were the ‘children of God’, all were equal before their Divine Maker! Faith in the church’s interpretation of supposedly prophetic revelations became more important than scientific or philosophical enquiry; and to question the church’s view of reality came to be perceived as sinful. (Eugenicist Roger Pearson, ‘The Concept of Heredity in the History of Western Culture’, Part I).

Primitive Christianity represented an atrocious trauma for the West and the European collective unconscious. It swept away the teachings of the classics and only very slowly could Europe recover, step by step, re-conquering and gathering the scattered pieces of wisdom that had been hers and that suffered destruction at the hands of fanatic parasites, poisoned by the desert dogma virus.

The Church had a foreign and anti-European concept of God, taken directly from the Bible. When the early Judeo-Christians taught that God had incarnated in a Jew who died at the hands of the strong (the Romans) for the ‘salvation’ of the weak and sinful—the slaves, the sick, the criminals, the prostitutes, the excrement of the Roman streets and throughout the Empire—, they were laying the groundwork for an atrocious trauma from which European man has never recovered.

In fact, under more modern forms (‘solidarity’, ‘humanitarianism’, ‘equality’, cowardice, sedentary lifestyle, herd mentality, servility, pacifism, conformism) almost all modern Westerners drag variations of such Christian ballast. In the above image, the crucified Christ by Velázquez, the talent of a great Spanish painter was wasted with a strange anorexic, passive and masochistic Jewish idol, instead of some triumphant pagan god.

European populations, especially Celts, Germans, Balts and Slavs—who had always been instinctively governed by eugenic principles—were suddenly engulfed in a misunderstood humanism, which had fermented in the crowded and dirty cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. Christianity frustrated any eugenic, biological and pro-natural possibility for centuries and centuries, so we should not be surprised at the shortage of eugenic testimonies in that era.

In Christendom heretical groups such as the Cathars, the Templars, the alchemists, the old Masons, the Rosicrucians, certain religious orders (orders that accumulated knowledge, such as the Franciscans, Benedictines, Cistercians) and, of course, the Renaissance, could have meant a great change for Europe and a flip-flop for the Church had it not been thwarted by Protestantism, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War (1618-1638).

This war meant the end of the paganising alternative, the fall of the Holy Empire and the death of a third of the total German population, inaugurating a repulsive period of plagues, famines, religious hysteria, internal wars and witch hunts that devastated the Germanic European layers of better biological quality (Huguenots, Quakers) until Christian authority started to lose strength and credibility in favour of even more dangerous dogmas: the ‘Enlightened’ dogmas.

Therefore, if there is anything salvageable from the Middle Ages it is, undoubtedly, the ‘other’ Middle Ages of castles, knights, troubadours, crusaders and princesses. Three institutions deserve mention: the cavalry, the nobility and the Holy Empire.

When the descriptions of the great characters of the time are read or someone examines the skeleton of a prominent king, there is nothing but awe: Emperor Charlemagne (742-814) measured more than two metres; Roland, his paladin, was also described as a giant; the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada (1015-1066) measured seven feet, that is, approximately 2.10 metres; the redhead Sancho VII the Strong (1194-1234), king of Navarra, measured even more; Jaime I the Conqueror (1208-1276), king of Aragon, was described as a giant, and the same goes for the first Crusade kings of Jerusalem.

All these men were, in addition to heroes of their time, giants of genetics belonging to a practically extinct lineage—but likely to be resurrected by an appropriate selective bio-politics. As the Spanish author Enrique Aynat wrote, ‘The Nobility, like it or not, has natural causes. It was born from the primitive inequality of talents and characters. It has remained a sought and conscious selection, set by an institution. The Indo-European had naturally accepted ,without coercion, the superiority of the Nobility knowing that it had left families that, both physically and morally, represented the summum of the selection’ (Eugenesia, Editor’s translation).

Roger Bacon (1214-1294) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626).

Roger Bacon was an English Franciscan friar greatly ahead of his time. A compulsive scholar, in his work he wrote treatises on grammar, physics, optics, mathematics and philosophy. He was even interested in the manufacture of gunpowder and the situation and size of celestial bodies.

Long before Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo and the Renaissance, Roger Bacon foresaw the invention of flying devices and steamboats, and in his detailed optical studies he anticipated the possibility of designing artefacts such as microscopes, telescopes and glasses. Along with his revolutionary alchemical experiences, all this was considered suspicious of heresy in his time and he became imprisoned. Roger Bacon died forgotten and fell out of favour.

Three centuries later, natural philosophers like Bruno and Francis Bacon rehabilitated Bacon’s reputation and portrayed him as a scientific pioneer.

Although it seems innocuous, the phrase by Francis Bacon I quote below is inconceivably heretical. It suggests that man is subordinate to Nature and the same principles can be applied to animals.

Naturam non vinces nisi parendo (‘You will not master nature unless you obey it’).
 

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Note of the Editor: I have redacted the above passages because in the original text there is confusion between Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon. Even today, with their anti-Nordicism and Christian ethics, white nationalists are not obeying Nature. (As to his Christian ethics, see what I said about Greg Johnson this Monday.)
 

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Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) was a lawyer, statesman, a friend of Erasmus and an English writer known for his Utopia where he disguised his ideas of state leadership under the science-fiction genre.

In Utopia there is a eugenic policy very similar to the Spartan, where the couple should, first of all, look naked to find out what kind of person they married in terms of genetic qualities. Thomas More criticised such an idea to escape the possible religious repression, but what he does is expose it to the public eyes. He would be beheaded for refusing to recognise King Henry VIII as head of the Church in England. For that reason alone the Catholic Church canonised him.

In choosing their wives they use a method that would appear to us very absurd and ridiculous, but it is constantly observed among them, and is accounted perfectly consistent with wisdom. Before marriage some grave matron presents the bride, naked, whether she is a virgin or a widow, to the bridegroom, and after that some grave man presents the bridegroom, naked, to the bride.

We, indeed, both laughed at this, and condemned it as very indecent. But they, on the other hand, wondered at the folly of the men of all other nations, who, if they are but to buy a horse of a small value, are so cautious that they will see every part of him, and take off both his saddle and all his other tackle, that there may be no secret ulcer hid under any of them, and that yet in the choice of a wife, on which depends the happiness or unhappiness of the rest of his life, a man should venture upon trust, and only see about a handsbreadth of the face, all the rest of the body being covered, under which may lie hid what may be contagious as well as loathsome. (Utopia, published in 1516).

William Penn (1644-1718). A member of the Puritan religious society of the Quakers, he emigrated to America for religious persecution in Britain and founded the province, now a state, of Pennsylvania. Many of the political principles he adopted there laid the foundations for the subsequent American Constitution. Penn represented the old Puritan English race, considered as foundational for the United States. He was held in high regard by the later American eugenicists that we will see later.

Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs, than of their children (Reflections and Maxims, 1693).

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), an English economist and demographer, was the first to point out that the world’s population grew faster than resources grew; that overpopulation was a danger, that natural resources were limited and that man was bound to hunger, conflict and epidemics if he did not behave responsibly as to his reproduction, hence the expression ‘Malthusian catastrophe’.

It does not, however, by any means seem impossible that by an attention to breed, a certain degree of improvement, similar to that among animals, might take place among men. Whether intellect could be communicated may be a matter of doubt: but size, strength, beauty, complexion, and perhaps even longevity are in a degree transmissible…

As the human race, however, could not be improved in this way, without condemning all the bad specimens to celibacy, it is not probable that an attention to breed should ever become general; indeed, I know of no well-directed attempts of this kind, except in the ancient family of the Bickerstaffs, who are said to have been very successful in whitening the skins and increasing the height of their race by prudent marriages, particularly by that very judicious cross with Maud, the milk-maid, by which some capital defects in the constitutions of the family were corrected. (‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’, 1798).

Frederick the Great (1712-1786), King of Prussia, an example of strategic-tactical genius, top-notch politician and one of the most brilliant military commanders of all time, colonised the East with German peasants and pushed Prussia into the category of a European superpower. At his death he had laid the foundations of what in the 19th century would become the Second Reich.

It is unpleasant to see the work that is taken under our harsh climate to grow pineapples, bananas and other exotic fruits, while dealing little with human prosperity. At any event, man is more important than all bananas together. He is the plant to cultivate, which deserves all our attention because he represents the pride and glory of our country.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), politician, inventor, scientist and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His ideas about freedom, finance, banking and independence opposed him to the great powers of his time. In a letter to a doctor, Franklin observed:

Half the lives you save are not worth saving, as being useless, and almost all the other half ought not to be saved, as being mischievous. Does your conscience never hint to you the impiety of being in constant warfare against the plans of Providence?

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a German philosopher who was influenced by Plato, Hinduism, Buddhism, Goethe and who in turn influenced Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler himself. Schopenhauer attached great importance to the will as a universal force, restored dignity to Nature, spoke about the importance of the species, denied the validity of Christianity and made important criticisms of the faulty tenets of Western civilisation; criticisms that led him to defend eugenic policies.

If we now connect the conviction we have gained here of the inheritance of the character from the father and the intellect from the mother with our earlier investigation… we shall be led to the view that a real and thorough improvement of the human race might be attained to not so much from without as from within, thus not so much by instruction and culture as rather upon the path of generation.

Plato had already something of the kind in his mind when in the fifth book of his Republic he set forth his wonderful plan for increasing and improving his class of warriors. If we could castrate all scoundrels, and shut up all stupid geese in monasteries, and give persons of noble character a whole harem, and provide men, and indeed complete men, for all maidens of mind and understanding, a generation would soon arise which would produce a better age than that of Pericles. (The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II).

The English imperial aristocracy. The British ruling class that took England to very high levels of glory during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries is considered of Germanic heritage, owing its blood mainly to Anglo-Saxons and Normans. Its system of upbringing and selection, as its militaristic orientation, was admired even by Nazis such as Günther, Darré, Hitler, Rosenberg and Savitri Devi who saw in the Anglo-Saxon countryside the repetition of Germanic ideas that continued alive in North America and Australia. Their mentality is summed up in the maxim ‘To breed, to bleed, to lead’.

As examples of the nation that gave birth to eugenics, we see here two members of the British ruling class, so reminiscent of the Roman patricians. Left, Charles George Gordon (1833-1885), famous for victorious campaigns in China and Egypt, and for being killed as governor of Sudan during the Mahdi rebellion. Right, Reginald Dyer (1864-1927), a veteran of endless campaigns in India, Pakistan, Burma and Afghanistan. In his time he was criticised by some (‘bloodthirsty madman who murdered hundreds of innocents’) and praised by others (‘he avoided the killing of whites throughout India’).

Categories
Catholic Church Eugenics Galileo Galilee Neanderthalism

Great personalities defend eugenics, 1

by Evropa Soberana

‘The worst form of inequality
is to try to make unequal things equal’.

—Aristotle

‘Equality is a slogan based on envy’.

—Alexis de Tocqueville

Editor’s note: In the preface below the author says: ‘…before the Earth and Nature react violently to the uncontrolled proliferation of a lower, sick and bloated human kind, which has become a malignant tumour for the planet’.

These words are key to understanding what I have been calling ‘the extermination of the Neanderthals’, and I hope that the abridged translation of this long essay, published six years ago in Spanish and that I will be translating this month, sheds light on the subject.

 

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What we have here, which extends the previous Introduction to eugenics, is a compilation of great characters defending the eugenic mentality. Therefore, I should not be held responsible for what others said: I only present the quotes and I offer my comments to give an idea of the variety of opinions among the pro-eugenicists.

Some of the concepts by the people mentioned in this essay are certainly outdated, and it is clear that I do not approve of everything that is said here. For example, great advances have been made through genetic engineering: wonders over the most primitive methods advocated here by some authors. But they are worth, in any case, as a curiosities, especially in these times, when the biggest problem on the planet—overpopulation—threatens to unleash tremendous natural and artificial catastrophes that will result in unnecessary deaths of innocent beings.

What is eugenics? It comes from the ancient Greek eu (good) and ygenes (birth): ‘well born’ or ‘the birth of the good’. Wikipedia defines eugenics as ‘applied science or biosocial movement that advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic makeup of a population’.

Eugenics means biological socialism, biopolitics, a new social engineering based on logic, biology, genetics, compliance with the natural laws of life, and the will to grow in harmony with both: the planet and the creatures that populate it. Eugenics is the will of a gardener who tries that the species does not become a field where weeds grow in disorder, but a garden where, thanks to the intervention of a higher intelligence, weeds are ripped and beautiful and fruitful plants cultivated: sharing harmony between them, being kind to the holy ground on which they germinate and grow, and to which they owe their very existence. It is the will to improve man or, preferably, to overcome it, since it is already known that man is an imperfect being whose creation is incomplete.

Eugenics, in short, is the instinct to carry forward the evolution of the species and create the Overman.

There’s nothing new under the Sun. From the Neolithic, man found ways to domesticate animals that were biologically useful for him by providing good milk, meat, eggs, wool, etc., and dedicated himself to raising them with care to improve the quality of their herds generation after generation. The same happened with plant varieties, especially with cereals. In each generation, the old farmer prevented the non-useful varieties of his flock or crop from reproducing, and instead he tried to ensure that the best specimens had a prolific offspring. Thus, their crops and their herds were improving little by little.

If, by such methods, larger bulls, more nutritious wheat or more fertile hens could be obtained, why would they not be able to obtain more intelligent, brave and stronger human beings? Is the body of man not subject to the same laws as those governing wild animals?

Unfortunately, this mentality, which was applied to livestock and crops, was not applied to man, and the conquest of better living conditions, as well as the adoption of unnatural habits and diets, relaxed natural selection triggering the degeneration of civilised man.

Eugenics speaks of the need to prevent (negative eugenics) the multiplication of undesirable mutations in the human genome (as blindness, deformity, varied congenital diseases, mental retardation, the progress of crossbreeding, Down syndrome, etc.) by prohibiting their reproduction before it is too late for the species and before the Earth and Nature react violently to the uncontrolled proliferation of a lower, sick and bloated human kind, which has become a malignant tumour for the planet.

On the other hand, it is necessary to favour (positive eugenics) the propagation of the best-equipped human specimens, to give them the evolutionary advantage. This especially refers to birth, sports training, food, outdoor life, the cultivation of mental and will faculties, general culture and health.

In the eyes of the species, any method is legitimate to achieve such goal, from in-vitro fertilization, pre-natal diagnosis or embryo selection, to advanced engineering, surgery and genetic therapy techniques that are just around the corner. If this is not done, it is precisely because Western Civilisation is governed by people who do not care at all about the destiny of race, civilisation and humanity. What moves them is the immediate economic benefit and short-term success.

The West is dying and what is paramount for us is an authoritarian and socialist System in which the regeneration of race and biological quality will regain strength to balance the planetary unbalance that, currently, is inclined towards the proliferation of a human type of zero quality.
 

Introduction

We might think that Galileo was not the first man of the European post-classical era to rediscover that the Earth revolves around the Sun. There was access before to the classical works, and I sincerely believe that in the Middle Ages many sages knew the truth. But none had the courage to publish it for fear of the Church and the word ‘heretic’, all capable of ruining his career and even ending his life in a bonfire, to the sound of the applause of the common peoples. A clique of Pharisees, representative of an obscurantist idea, exercised control over a ‘God-fearing’ flock, keeping them forever in darkness, stripping them of their old traditions to replace them with the Bible and reign as one-eyed kings in a world of the blind. Galileo, like others, was forced to recant under penalty of being burned as a heretic.

Well, today we have:

• A new Church: the pro-globalist system.

• New unquestionable dogmas: the ‘politically correct’, ‘equality’ at all costs, feminism, globalisation, multiculturalism, rebellion against anything that is well constituted, hatred of the superior, individualism and the desire not to offend bloodsucking and whining parasites.

• A new Inquisition: the media, NGOs and globalist lobbies, Jews, homosexuals, feminists, pro-third-worlders and democrats, among others.

• We have new heretics: revisionists, ‘ultra-rightists’ and dissenting scientists.

• New untouchable taboos: genetic engineering, the ‘holocaust’, racism, Nazism, fascism, anti-Semitism, male chauvinism, homophobia… and eugenics.

• New witch hunts: scandals and trials against notable dissidents or any suspect of ‘racism’ or patriotism.

• New repentant pioneers in the style of Galileo, such as the scientist and gifted Englishman James Watson, who retracted his ‘racist’ phrase in 2007, under penalty of being burned at the stake in the media. As in the case of Galileo, time will demonstrate the truthfulness of his words, and posterity will honour as true those words he muttered under his breath: And yet it moves.

• We have new bonfires: ostracism, defamation, conviction, imprisonment, boycott and even direct physical aggression.

• We have the usual Pharisees: great magnates of finance and the media, progressives and ambitious politicians who would sell their brother for money and notoriety.

• And a new Satan, Antichrist or Lucifer: Hitler.

So we can affirm, without any fear of exaggeration, that exactly the same thing is happening today as in the Middle Ages with the Church. If history teaches us anything, it is that history repeats itself and that, in times of taboos, science just cannot advance. Modern society, in full biological regression, and poisoned by junk genes, criticises the taboos of the remote past: but it seems to forget that these taboos have been replaced by new taboos. The only objective of this sinister levelling, anti-evolutionary and egalitarian front remains the same for millennia: to frustrate man on his way to reach deity.

Even stripping the issue of passion and idealism, eugenics seems an issue from the logical and objective point of view—so logical that we can only wonder what kind of person could oppose it. Why, then, is there so much opposition to an issue as extremely urgent and necessary as eugenics? We can attribute it to two reasons:

1.- Two millennia of cultural Judeo-Christianity and its derivatives.

2.- The ignorance and the very low physical, mental and moral quality of a good part of the modern population thanks to the annulment, for centuries, of natural selection, the persecution of freethinkers, the depletion of the best blood in wars, the mania to help the worst rather than the best and, thanks to a deliberate praise of vulgarity and mediocrity in the media—which is nothing more than a new form of Christianity—, the glorification of the miserable, the mediocre and the downtrodden.

In contrast to this anti-evolution, no one can deny that the vast majority of men who today are considered to be great personalities supported eugenics. The intention of this essay is to ‘cheer up’ a bit those who would defend pro-eugenic measures and to see that millennia of history support them. Also, that people are more aware of the world of science, because progress and interesting debates are taking place which show that there are very prepared people who realise what is happening.

Unfortunately, modern science is heavily intervened by the official System. Funds are granted to investigate only matters that can result in a direct economic benefit in the short term, which clearly cuts off hopes of research paths, perhaps more arduous, but that in the long term produce more important benefits. Humanity has to get tired of being ruled by greedy clowns, simple and vulgar desert merchants who only think of seeking new twisted financial deals and new markets to sell useless goodies.

But there will come a day when scientists will stop investigating various creams and silicones to patch the disgusting worn-out bodies of old paranoid women, and will direct their efforts to improve the genetic inheritance of the human being so that in the future he will never need ‘amending’ it again. The day will come when doctors will stop striving in the search for medicines and prolonging, through aberrant methods, the lives of terminal patients with a broken body, instead dedicating their energies to the creation of a human type who doesn’t need any medicine.

The so-called ‘scientific community’—made up of scientists who are servile to the official system, crying lackeys of the ‘politically correct’, possessed by dubious ambitions and eager to climb the ladder—attacks those who speak out dissident ideas about the mainstream dogma even if that someone is their best ‘colleague’.

But the truth, Pharisees, is not changed because the truth is forever. Like the Phoenix, that great truth that is the law of human inequality and the need to cultivate the best and place reproductive limits on the worst will emerge again. In fact, it is an open secret in the minds of many doctors and scientists of what in the future will be the most important science of all: the science of man and of life. A day will come when these heralds of truth will come to light proclaiming their teaching and warning:

Civilisation has made human beings degenerate, and it is necessary to undertake radical emergency measures to reverse this sinister process, or we will become a weak, involved, inferior, pathetic, vulnerable, sickly, effeminate and, above all, harmful to the planet and unable to overcome adversities. We will be a filthy and gelatinous species that will crawl between machines. And that is when Nature will go for us. On the other hand, ‘race’ is much more than ethnic-anthropological features. It is the biological quality of the lineage. It must be strong and bright to withstand the tension to which life subjects it.

Just as the paradigm revolution from geocentric to heliocentric worldview, in future times the truths defended by the dissidents will be considered obvious certainties, and those who once stupidly tried to rebut them will be ashamed for having done it: as the Church is ashamed for having denied that the Earth revolves around the Sun. And in the same way that Christian obscurantism was finally overwhelmed by a Renaissance that the Church was unable to contain, we too, even in this most decadent age, are headed towards the definitive Renaissance of the ancient Indo-European spirit.

Thus, the old Nazi approach of 1933 has not been refuted or satisfactorily answered by the System, which has limited itself to pouring demagogic defamations on National Socialism but never trying to refute its arguments.
 

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Editor’s note: To the list above in bold-type I would add:

A new God or Divine Trinity: the ideology of the equality of Race, Gender and Sexual orientation.

The new god of whites reminds me of a film located in the 5th century in Britannia, in which the island’s natives spoke of ‘the new god of the Romans’, referring to the Christian trinity.

Categories
Deranged altruism New Testament Old Testament Racial right

Morgan vs. Ryckaert

 
Franklin Ryckaert: Racism= harming people of another race because of their race. Race realism = realizing that races are inherently different and avoiding risky situations with people of other races.

Robert Morgan: Or in other words, racists do what ‘race realists’ would do if they had the courage.

 

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Editor’s note: Franklin Ryckaert exemplifies what is wrong with white nationalism and the alt-right.

Per the Old Testament and the Talmud, Jews must exterminate the Gentiles.

Per the New Testament, Gentiles are commanded, instead, to love the Other including Jews and non-whites.

White nationalists and alt-righters don’t obey the Führer. They obey the Jew who wrote the New Testament: prolefeed for us Gentiles.

It is just that simple.

Whites are condemned to become extinct unless they transvalue Ryckaert’s et al values back to pre-Christian mores. But nationalists won’t do it. They’re self-righteously addicted to their (((drug)))…

Categories
Newspeak

The word ‘racism’

First of all, Hadding Scott wrote an article about how, in the late 19th century, the term originated without the derogatory meaning with which it is used today (see Scott’s article: here).
 

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The critique of language is the most radical of all critiques.

If we don’t uproot from our vocabulary the Newspeak of the anti-white West—keep in mind that when all great European civilisations were at their apex the word ‘racism’ didn’t exist—, we won’t even be able to start discussing the issues.

According to George Orwell, the objective of Newspeak is social control. ‘Newspeak’ is propagandistic language characterized by neologism, euphemism and the inversion of customary meanings.

The 4th century of the Common Era, during the reign of Theodosius, witnessed the consolidation of power of the bishops in the Roman Empire after the premature death of Julian the Apostate. Those unconverted to the new religion became second-class citizens. A new word was coined, ‘pagan’ to label the adept of the millenarian Hellenic culture. Once created the Newspeak those stigmatised as ‘pagans’ were persecuted (see the masthead of this site: here).

If we translate the term racist back to Oldspeak, just as ‘pagan’ only really meant the common adept of classical culture, we will see that ‘racism’ is a code word for ‘pro-white’. But after the Second World War it has been weaponized to become a term that induces guilt among whites.

Detecting this psyop together with other epithets is pivotal in the process of de-brainwashing whites. Besides the most obvious words—‘Islamophobe,’ ‘xenophobe,’ ‘transphobe,’ etc.—, below appears a short sample of Newspeak terms translated back to Oldspeak:

‘Affirmative action’ – Blacks stealing our jobs.

‘Anti-Semitism’ – The belief by gentiles that Jews may be criticized like any other group.

‘Civil rights’ – Untermenschen and spoiled white women have more rights than Übermenschen in the New World Order.

‘Diversified workforce’ – Much fewer white males are to be hired or promoted.

‘Disadvantaged’ – Unqualified and can’t speak English, German or another Aryan language, so give them money.

‘Equal treatment and opportunity’ – Fewer opportunities for the Aryan folk.

‘Historic grievances’ – White people ended slavery, human sacrifice in the American continent and cannibalism in tribal societies.

‘Homophobia / gay bashing’ – The healthy revulsion by Lot for Sodomite or Gomorrahite behaviour.

‘Human Rights Commissions’ – Inquisitions denying free speech. Thought Police that enforces liberal political doctrine.

‘Immigration’ – Race replacement. Genocidal levels of immigration.

‘Interracial relationship’ – White women having non-white babies. Also called racial engineering or soft genocide of white people (just see the ads advertising mixed couples throughout the city of London!).

‘Misogynist’ – Anyone who disagrees with the racially-suicidal empowerment of the feminists.

‘Multicultural enhancement’ – Destroy all European cultures.

‘Politically correct’ – Fines and/or jail for anybody not sufficiently ‘woke’ and following the New World Order.

‘Respect and tolerance’ – Surrender. ‘Tolerance’ for millions of immigrants means demographic genocide for whites.

‘Culture of Hate’ – Anything pro-white.

‘Woman’s choice’ – Abortion and genocide of millions of white babies.

Nevertheless, and despite all that has been said above, ‘racism’ might be a term mostly used not by our enemies but by us! (Tom Metzger’s tactic). Hadn’t values been inverted by Christianity and its bastard son, liberalism, racist attitudes would be considered a great virtue, as Nietzsche saw:

Gotzen-Dammerung-coverChristianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, privilege: it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity—the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against ‘race’: the undying chandala hatred is disguised as a religion of love.

If the transvaluation of values advocated by Nietzsche were to take place throughout the West, ‘racism’ would be considered the greatest of virtues. Therefore—

Umwertung aller werte!

Categories
Catholic religious orders Darkening Age (book) Horace Libanius Ovid

Darkening Age, 25

Bosch, The Last Judgement
(detail) 1500-05

Editor’s note: Regarding the view of Robert Morgan in the previous post, I disagree in the sense that it is unclear what would have happened to technology if the Third Reich had emerged triumphant. As the bad guys won the war, the use of technology in the West is self-destructing for the fair race.

It is true what Arthur Kemp says: that the use of non-whites after the Aryan conquests has been the primary cause of the decline of empires, due to the eventual miscegenation. But we live in a time when whites have become passionately ethno-suicidal, and that can only be explained by the texts linked in the sticky post. The history of Christianity, one of the two DNA axes of Aryan suicide according to the POV of this site, should be analysed with the same eagerness as white nationalists analyse the Jewish question.

When I talk to the white people, say, with whom I have spoken in England, I see an injured self-image to the degree that it evokes the mass psychosis, in a sector of the population, right after the triumph of Constantine. I refer to the Christian hermits and ascetics whose movement would eventually evolve into monastic orders. The mass psychosis, so well depicted by Hieronymus Bosch, had to do with the introduction of a fear that did not exist in the Greco-Roman world. I refer to the fear of eternal torment: something that, occasionally, persists even on the internet sites of southern nationalists in the US.

To understand what is happening to the white man it is necessary to realise that Kevin MacDonald and his followers fail to diagnose the origin of this tremendous collective guilt. Jews only thrive because of it. That’s why it is essential to tell what really happened to the Aryan psyche after the crushing triumph of Constantine. In chapter 14 of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:

 

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If you had travelled to the great cities in the eastern empire, to Alexandria and to Antioch, in the fourth and fifth centuries, then long before you came to a city itself you would have seen them. At dawn, they emerged from caves in the hills and holes in the ground, their dark robes flapping; their faces gaunt and pale from hunger, their eyes hollow from lack of sleep. As the cocks began to crow, while the city beyond was still slumbering, they gathered in the monasteries and hills beyond and, ‘forming themselves into a holy choir, they stand, and lifting up their hands all at once sing the sacred hymns’. An impressive sight – and an eerie one, their filthy, emaciated figures a living rebuke to the opulence and bustle of urban life below: a new, and newly strange, power in the world.

This was the great age of the monk. Ever since Antony had set out to the desert to do battle with demons, men had flocked after him in imitation. These men were the ideal Christians; the perfect renouncers of all those sinful pleasures of the flesh. And their way of life was thriving: so many had gone out since Antony that the desert was described as a city. And what a strange city this was. You wouldn’t find bathhouses and banquets and theatres here. The habits of these men were infamously ascetic. In Syria, St Simeon Stylites (‘of the pillar’) stood on a stone column for decades, until his feet burst open from the continual pressure. Other monks lived in caves, or holes, or hollows or shacks. In the eighteenth century, a traveller to Egypt had looked up into the cliffs above the Nile and seen thousands of cells in the rock above. It was in these burrows, he realized, that monks had lived out lives of unimaginable austerity, surviving on almost no food and only able to drink by letting down buckets on ropes to draw water from the river when it was in flood.

What was a monk at this time? In the fourth and fifth centuries, the now-ancient tradition of monasticism was only in its infancy and its ways were still being formed. In this odd and as yet uncodified existence, monks turned to the wisdom of their famous predecessors to know how to live. Collections of monkish sayings proliferated. Self-help guides of a sort – but a world away from Ovid. What is a monk? ‘He is a monk,’ wrote one, ‘who does violence to himself in everything.’ A monk was toil, said another. All toil. How should a monk live? ‘Eat straw, wear straw, sleep on straw,’ advised another revered saying. ‘Despise everything.’ Athletes of austerity, these men mortified their flesh in a hundred ways on a thousand days. One monk, it was said, had stood upright in thorn bushes for a fortnight. Another lived with a stone in his mouth for three years, to teach himself to be silent. Some, nostalgic for the tortures of past persecutions, draped themselves in chains and clanked round in them for years…

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many of the empire’s urban, urbane men found this new breed of men who shunned the civilized life baffling to the point of repellent. To the Greek orator Libanius, monks were madmen, ‘that crew who pack themselves tight into the caves’ and who then ‘claim to converse with the creator of the universe in the mountains’. Their fasts were fiction, he said. These men weren’t starving themselves: they didn’t not eat; they just didn’t grow or buy their own food. When no one was looking, he said, they scuttled into the temples of the loathed pagans, stole those sinful sacrifices and ate them instead. Far from being ascetics they were ‘models of sobriety, only as far as their dress is concerned’. Their vicious and thuggish attacks on the temples weren’t done out of piety, said Libanius. They committed them out of pure greed…

The modern mind would tend towards a more clinical (albeit anachronistic) conclusion: many of these men must have been profoundly depressed.

Starvation was one of the most popular of monkish mortifications – no special equipment was required – but it was also one of the hardest to bear. One monk fasted all day then ate only two hard biscuits. Another lived from the age of twenty-seven to thirty on just roots and wild herbs, then for the next four years on half a pound of barley bread a day and some herbs. Eventually he felt his eyes going dim while his skin became ‘as rough as a pumice stone’. He added a little oil to his diet, then went on as before until he was sixty, to the awe and admiration of his fellow monks. There had been asceticism before – but this went further. Others, like ruminants, lived on all fours, browsing for their food like animals. In some ways hunger helped: a famished monk would be less beset by the demons of fornication or anger than one with a full belly. ‘A needy body,’ as one put it, ‘is a tame horse.’ But thoughts of food became an obsession with these men. In their reading of the Fall, the apple that Eve gives to Adam is not seen as a symbolic representation of sex; it is seen as nothing more, or less, than an apple. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs made monkish flesh.

The monks tormented themselves by what they put on their bodies as much as what they put in them. Some chose to dress in woven palm fronds instead of any softer fabric. To wear the usual coarse monkish habit was regarded, in this extreme world, as being ‘foppishly dressed’. Others, under the desert sun, tortured their skin with abrasive hair shirts. Another dressed in an extraordinary leather costume (that would in a later era have different connotations) that left only his mouth and nose exposed. To be pleasing to the Lord, a monk’s clothes must, it was said, be an offence against aestheticism: a habit should be tatty rather than smart, old rather than new, mended and re-mended and mended again. Anything less was vanity. A monk’s clothes should be such that, if he threw his habit out of his cell for three days, no one would steal it. The monks’ self-sacrifice was unquestionable; their smell must have been unspeakable.

If this sounds like a life lived on the edge of sanity, it was. In the searing heat of the desert day, reality shimmered, flickered and thinned. One monk saw a dragon in a lake; another slew a basilisk. Another saw the Devil himself sitting at his window. Demons appeared then vanished like smoke; meditating monks turned into flames. Watch one monk as he prayed and you would see his fingers turn into lamps of fire. Pray well and you might yourself become all flame. Demons teemed around monks like flies around food. One monk was beset by visions of rotting corpses, bursting open as they decayed. Alone for weeks, months on end in their cells, with nothing more than ageing hard bread to eat and an oil lamp to look at, monks were plagued by more tempting visions of sex, and food, and youth. Some monks lost their minds – if they had ever been in full possession of them. When Apollo of Scetis, a shepherd who later became a monk, spotted a pregnant woman in a field, he said to himself: ‘I should like to see how the child lies in her womb.’ He ripped the woman open and saw the foetus. The child and the mother died.

The reasons for these peculiar practices are hard to fathom. One theory is that Christian domination of the empire had brought many gains; but one of its great losses was that it had become considerably harder to be made a martyr by unsympathetic Roman governors. Deprived of the chance to die in one terrible, glorious, sin-erasing show, these men instead martyred themselves slowly, agonizingly, tormenting their flesh a little more every hour, thwarting their desires a little more every year. These practices would become known as ‘white martyrdom’. The monks died daily in the hope that, one day, after they died, they might live. ‘Remember the day of your death,’ advised one monk. ‘Remember also what happens in hell and think about the state of the souls down there, their painful silence, their most bitter groanings, their fear, their strife, their waiting…’ A terrible enough plight, but the monk had not finished yet; he concluded his cheering list with: ‘the punishments, the eternal fire, worms that rest not, the darkness, gnashing of teeth, fear and supplications…’

Carpe diem, Horace had said. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will be dead for eternity. The monks offered an alternative to this view: die today and you might live for eternity. This was a life lived in terror of its end. ‘Always keep your death in mind,’ was a common piece of advice: do not forget the eternal judgement. When one brother started to laugh during a meal, he was immediately reproached by a fellow monk: ‘What does this brother have in his heart, that he should laugh, when he ought to weep?’ How should one live well in this new and austere world? By constantly accusing yourself, said another monk, by ‘constantly reproaching myself to myself.’ Sit in your cell all day, advised another, weeping for your sins.

A hint of desert isolationism started to find its way into pious city life, too. In John Chrysostom’s writings, contact with women of all kinds was something to be feared and, if possible, avoided altogether. ‘If we meet a woman in the market-place,’ Chrysostom told his congregation, herding his listeners into complicity with that first-person plural, then we are ‘disturbed’. Desire was dangerously easy to inflame. Women who inflamed it were not to be relished as Ovid had relished them, but eschewed, scorned and denigrated in writings that made it abundantly clear that the fault of the man’s desire lay with them. In this atmosphere a group of fashionable women with their low-cut necklines were not praised as beauties but excoriated as a ‘parade of whores’.

Eventually, clerical disapproval was reinforced by law. Pagan festivals, with their exuberant merriment and dancing, were banned… If anyone declared themselves an official in charge of pagan festivals then, the law said, they would be executed. John Chrysostom jubilantly observed their decline. ‘The tradition of the forefathers has been destroyed, the deep rooted custom has been torn out, the tyranny of joy [and] the accursed festivals have been obliterated just like smoke.’

Categories
Der Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Theology

The Antichrist § 17

How can anyone still defer to the naïveté of Christian theologians these days when they decree that the development of the idea of God from the ‘God of Israel’, the god of a people, to the Christian God, the epitome of all goodness, counts as progress?

But even Renan does this. As if Renan had the right to naïveté! The opposite is what strikes the eye. When the presuppositions of ascending life, when everything strong, brave, domineering, and proud is eliminated from the idea of God, when he sinks little by little into the symbol of a staff for the weary, a life-preserver for the drowning, when he turns into the God of the poor, the sinners, the sickly, when the predicates of ‘saviour’ and ‘redeemer’ are the only ones left, the only divine predicates: what does this sort of transformation tell us?, this sort of diminution in the divine?

Of course: this will increase the size of ‘the kingdom of God’. God used to have only his people, his ‘chosen’ people. But then he took up travelling, just as his people did, and after that he did not sit still until he was finally at home everywhere, the great cosmopolitan, – until he had ‘the great numbers’ and half the earth on his side.

Nonetheless, the God of the ‘great numbers’, the democrat among gods, did not become a proud, heathen god: he stayed Jewish, he was still the cranny God, the God of all dark nooks and corners, of unhealthy districts the world over! His empire is as it ever was, an empire of the underworld, a hospital, a basement-kingdom, a ghetto-kingdom… [Editor’s bold-type above]