Counter-Currents
3,462 words
Translated by R. G. Fowler1
Norwegian translation here
If there is a fact that cannot fail to impress all persons who seriously study the history of Christianity, it is the almost complete absence of documents regarding the man whose name the great international religion bears, namely Jesus Christ. We only know of him from what is told to us in the gospels, i.e., practically nothing, for these miscellanies, if prolix in their descriptions of the miraculous facts they concern, give no information at all about his person, and, in particular, about his origins. Oh, we have in the four canonical gospels a long genealogy going back from Joseph, the husband of the mother of Jesus, as far as Adam! But I always ask myself what interest this can have for us, given that elsewhere we are expressly told that Joseph has nothing to do with the birth of the child. One of the numerous “apocryphal” gospels—rejected by the church—attributes the paternity of Jesus to a Roman soldier distinguished for his bravery and thus nicknamed “The Panther.” This gospel is cited by Heckel in one of his studies of early Christianity.2 The acceptance of this point of view, however, does not entirely resolve the very important question of the origins of Christ, for it does not tell us who was Mary his mother. One of the four canonical gospels tells us that she was the daughter of Joachim and Anne when Anne was past the age of maternity; in other words, she was herself born miraculously—or she was quite simply a child adopted by Anne and Joachim in their old age—which does not clarify matters.
But there is something much more troubling. They have recently discovered the records of an important monastery of the Essene sect, situated scarcely thirty kilometers from Jerusalem. These records deal with a period extending from the beginning of the first century before Jesus Christ to the second half of the first century after him. There is already talk, seventy years before him, of a great Initiate, or a Spiritual Master—the “Master of Justice”—whose return one day is awaited. Of the extraordinary career of Jesus, of his innumerable miraculous healings, of his teaching during three whole years in the midst of the people of Palestine, of his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, so brilliantly described in the canonical gospels, of his trial and crucifixion (accompanied according to the canonical gospels by events as impressive as an earthquake, the darkening of the sky for three hours in the afternoon, and the veil of the temple rending itself in two), not one word is said in the scrolls of these ascetics—eminently religious men, whom such events would have to interest. It seems, according to these “Dead Sea Scrolls”—I recommend to those who take interest in this matter to read the study which has been published by John Allegro in the English language3—or else Jesus did not produce any impression on the religious minds of his time, as avid for wisdom and also as well informed as the ascetics of the monastery in question appear to have been, or else . . . he simply did not exist at all! As troubling as it may be, these findings should be placed before the world public, and in particular the Christian public, after these recent discoveries.
In that which concerns the Christian church, however, and Christianity as an historical phenomenon, and the role that it plays in the West and in the world, the question has much less importance than it would seem at first. For even if Jesus had lived and preached, it is not he who is the true founder of Christianity as he is presented to the world. If he truly lived, Jesus was a man “above Time” whose kingdom—as he himself said to Pilate, according to the gospels—is “not of this world,” whose entire activity, entire teaching, tended to show, to those whom the world did not satisfy, a spiritual path by which they can escape, and find, in their interior paradise, in this “Kingdom of God” which is in us, the God “in spirit and in truth” whom they seek without knowing.4 If he had lived, Jesus would never have dreamed of founding a temporal organization—and, above all, not a political and financial organization—such as the Christian Church so quickly became. Politics did not interest him. And, detesting riches, he was a determined enemy of any mixture of money in spiritual affairs, which certain Christians have, rightly or wrongly, seen as an argument that proves that, contrary to the teaching of all Christian Churches (except those which absolutely negate his human nature [For example, the sect of the Monophysites]), he did not have Jewish blood. The true founder of historical Christianity, of Christianity that we know in practice, which has played and will play a role in the history of the West and the world, is neither Jesus, whom we know not at all, nor his disciple Peter, whom we know was Galilean and a simple fisherman in station, but Paul of Tarsus, whom we know was 100% Jewish in blood, in disposition, and in his heart, and, what is more, Jewish in education and a “Roman citizen,” as so many Jewish intellectuals today are French, German, Russian, or American citizens.
Historical Christianity—which is not at all a work “above Time,” but altogether a work “in Time”—is the work of Saul, called Paul, that is to say, the work of a Jew, as Marxism came to be more than two thousand years later. Let us examine the career of Paul of Tarsus.
Saul, called Paul, was a Jew and, what is more, an orthodox Jew at the same time as he was educated, a Jew imbued with the consciousness of his race and the role the “chosen people”—which they became according to the covenant of Jaweh—play in the world. He was a student of Gamaliel, one of the most reputed Jewish theologians of his time—theologian of the school of Pharisees, precisely the one which, according to the gospels, the prophet Jesus, whom the Christian church later on elevated to the rank of God, had quite violently combated for its arrogance, its hypocrisy, its habit of splitting hairs and putting the letter of the Jewish law before its spirit—before, at least, what he believed to be its spirit; it is not said whether Saul had not had, on this subject, a different idea than him. Moreover—and this is very important—Saul was an educated and self-conscious Jew born and raised outside of Palestine, in one of those cities of Roman Asia Minor that had succeeded Hellenistic Asia Minor and had retained all its characteristics: Tarsus, where Greek was the “lingua franca” of everyone and where Latin became, likewise, more and more familiar, and where one recognized representatives of all the peoples of the Near East. In other words, he was already a “ghetto” Jew, possessing, beyond a profound knowledge of the Israelite tradition, an understanding of the world of the “Goyim”—the non-Jews—which later on became of great value for him. He thought, without any doubt, like every good Jew, that the “Goy” is only to be dominated and exploited by the “chosen people.” But he knew their world infinitely better than the Jews of Palestine, in the midst of whom had emerged all the first believers of the new religious sect from which he was destined to form Christianity such as we see it.
It is said in the “Acts of the Apostles” that there was at first a ferocious persecution of the new sect. Did the adherents of the latter not scorn the Jewish Law in the strict sense of the word? Did the man who is recognized as the founder, and who is said to have returned from the dead, this Jew whom Saul himself had never seen, not give the example of his non-observance of the Sabbath, of his neglect of the days of fasting, and other strongly blameworthy transgressions of the rules of life from which a Jew should not depart at all? One may say the same of a mystery that bodes nothing good, hovering over the story of his birth, that he was perhaps not at all of Jewish origin—who knows? Why not persecute any such sect, when one is an orthodox Jew, student of the great Gamaliel? He had to preserve from scandal the observers of the Law. Saul, who had already given proof of zeal in being present at the stoning of Saint Stephen—one of the first preachers of the dangerous sect—continued to defend the Jewish Law and the tradition against those he considered to be heretics, until it finally dawned on him that there was a better—a much better—way of operating, precisely from the Jewish point of view. This he recognized on the road to Damascus.
The story, as the Christian church wishes it to be told, is that he suddenly had a vision of Jesus—whom he had not, I repeat, ever seen “in the flesh”—whose voice he finally heard say to him: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?,” which voice he could not resist. He had, moreover, been blinded by a dazzling light, and he felt himself thrown to the ground. Transported to Damascus—at least according to the same account in “Acts of the Apostles”—he was recognized by one of the faithful of the sect which he had come to combat, the man who, after restoring Saul’s eyesight, baptized him and received him into the Christian community.
It is superfluous to say that this miraculous account cannot be accepted as it is told except by those who share the Christian faith. It does not have, like all accounts of its type, any historical value. Those who, without preconceived ideas, seek a plausible explanation—probable, natural—of the manner in which these things have happened, cannot be content. And the explanation, to be plausible, must give an account not only of the transformation of Saul into Paul—of the implacable defender of Judaism into the founder of the Christian church as we know it—but also of the nature, the content, and the direction of his activity after his conversion, of the internal logic of his career; otherwise put, the psychological connection, more or less conscious, between his past anti-Christianity and his great Christian work. Every conversion implies a connection between the past of the convert and the rest of his life, a deep reason, that is to say, a permanent aspiration of the convert that the act of conversion satisfies, a will, a permanent direction of life and action, of which the act of conversion is the expression and the instrument.
Now, given all we know of him and above all of the course of his career, there is only one profoundly fundamental will, inseparable from the personality of Paul of Tarsus in all the stages of his life, which can furnish the explanation for his “road to Damascus,” and this will is the one that serves the old Jewish ideal of spiritual domination, complementing and crowning that of economic domination. Saul, orthodox Jew, self-conscious Jew, who had combated the new sect insofar as it constituted a danger to orthodox Jewry, could only renounce his orthodoxy and become the soul and the arm precisely of this dangerous sect, after having understood that, recast by him, transformed, adapted to the exigencies of the vast world of the “Goyim”—the “Gentiles” of the gospels—interpreted, as he did, in the manner of giving, as said later on by Nietzsche, “a new meaning to the ancient mysteries,” it could become for centuries, if not forever, the most powerful instrument of the spiritual domination of Israel, the way by which it realizes, the most certainly and in the most definitive manner, the “mission” of the Jewish people, which was, according to him, as according to every good Israelite, that of ruling over the other peoples, subjecting them to a complete moral enslavement while exploiting them economically. And the more moral enslavement is complete, the more economic exploitation—it goes without saying—flourishes. It is only this prize that merits the pain of repudiating the rigidity of the ancient and venerable Law. Or, to speak a more trivial language, the sudden conversion of Saul along the road to Damascus is explicable in a completely natural manner solely if one allows that he suddenly appreciated the possibilities which nascent Christianity offered him for profit in the moral domination of his people, and which he had thought—in a stroke of genius, it might be said—“How I have taken the short view in persecuting this sect instead of serving mine come what may! How foolish I have been to attach myself to the forms—the details—instead of seeing the essential: the interest of the people of Israel, of the chosen people, of our people, of us Jews!”
The whole subsequent career of Paul is an illustration—a proof, to the extent that one may propose to “prove” facts of this nature—of this ingenious change of course, of this victory of an intelligent Jew, a practical man, a diplomat (and when “diplomat” is said in connection with religious questions, deception is meant) over the orthodoxly educated Jew preoccupied above all with the problems of ritual purity. From the day of his conversion, Paul, in effect, abandoned himself to the “Spirit,” and went where the “Spirit” suggested, or rather ordered, him to go, and spoke, in every circumstance, the words that the “Spirit” inspired in him. But where did the “Spirit” “order” him to go? To Palestine, among the Jews who still took part in the “errors” which he had publicly abjured, and who seemed to be the first to have title to the new revelation? Not on your life! He was quite careful! It was in Macedonia, as it was in Greece and among the Greeks of Asia Minor, among the Galatians, and later among the Romans—in Aryan lands: on the whole, in non-Jewish lands—that the neophyte went forth to preach the theological dogmas of original sin and eternal salvation through Jesus crucified, and the moral dogma of the equality of all men and of all peoples: it was in Athens where he proclaimed that God had created “all the nations, all the peoples, of one and the same blood” (“Acts of the Apostles,” chapter 17, verse 26). With this negation of the natural hierarchy of races, the Jews, had nothing to do—they who have, at all times, in their conception of the world, overturned this hierarchy to their profit. But it was (from the Jewish point of view) very useful to preach, to impose on the “Goyim,” to destroy their national values that had, up to that point, made them strong (or, rather, to simply hasten their destruction; for since the fourth century before Jesus Christ, they were already crumbling under the influence of the “hellenized” Jews of Alexandria). Without a doubt, Paul also preached it “in the Synagogues,” that is to say, to Jews, to whom he presented the new doctrine as the fulfillment of the prophecies and the messianic expectation; without a doubt, he said to these sons of his people, as to the “God fearers”—to semi-Jews, like Timothy, and to the Jewish quarters which were abundant in the Aegean seaports (the same as in Rome)—that Christ crucified and resurrected, whom he announced, was none other than the promised messiah. He gave a new meaning to the Jewish prophets, just as he gave a new meaning to the immemorial mysteries of Greece, Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor: a meaning that attributes a unique role, a unique place, a unique importance to the Jewish people in the religion of non-Jews. It was for him nothing but a means to the end of assuring for his people the spiritual domination of future ages. His genius—not religious, but political—consists in having understood this.
But it is not solely in the plan of the doctrine where he can show a disconcerting suppleness—“Greek with the Greeks, and Jew with the Jews,” as he himself said. He has a sense of practical necessities—and impossibilities. He who was at first so orthodox, is the first to oppose completely the imposition of the Jewish Law on Christian converts of non-Jewish races. He insists—against Peter and the least conciliatory group of the first Christians of Jerusalem—on the fact that a Christian of non-Jewish origin does not at all require circumcision or the Jewish laws concerning diet. He wrote for these new converts—half-Jews, half-Greeks, Romans of dubious origin, Levantines from all the parts of the Mediterranean: for all of this world without race, with which he served as the intermediary with his Jewish people, immutable in their tradition, and the vast world to conquer—where there does not exist, for them, the distinction between that which is “pure” and that which is “impure,” where they are permitted to eat anything (“all that which can be found in the market-place”). He knew that, without these concessions, Christianity could not expect to conquer the West—nor the Jews expect to conquer the world by means of the conversion of the West.
Peter, who was not at all a Jew of the “ghetto,” still did not understand at all the conditions of a non-Jewish world and did not see things from the same point of view—not yet anyway. It is because of this that it is necessary to see in Paul the true founder of historical Christianity: the man who made the purely spiritual teaching of the prophet Jesus the basis of a militant organization in Time, the goal of which is nothing but the domination of the Jews over a morally emasculated and physically debased world, a world where the mistaken love of “man” leads straight to the indiscriminate mixing of races, to the suppression of every national pride, and, in a word, to the degeneration of man.
It is time that all the non-Jewish nations finally open their eyes to this reality of two thousand years. May they understand the striking present day situation and react accordingly.
Written in Méadi (near Cairo), 18 June 19575
Notes
1. Originally published as Paul de Tarse, ou Christianisme et juiverie (Calcutta: Savitri Dêvi Mukherji, 1958). Translated from the French by R. G. Fowler, with thanks to M. L., J. P., and D. O.
2. Savitri may be referring to Ernst Haeckel, who mentions Pandera in his chapter on “Science and Christianity” in his The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900), 328–9.
3. Savitri may be referring to any one of the following volumes by John Allegro: The Dead Sea Scrolls (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1956), The Mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed (New York: Gramercy, 1956), or, if it was published by the time of the essay’s composition, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of Christianity (New York: Criterion, 1957). In Pilgrimage, Savitri refers to another book on early Christianity by Gerald Massey, The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ (Springfield: Star Publishing Company, n.d.). See Savitri Devi, Pilgrimage (Calcutta: Savitri Devi Mukherji, 1958), 332.
4. In The Lightning and the Sun (Calcutta: Savitri Devi Mukherji, 1958), Savitri makes a threefold distinction between men “above Time,” “in Time,” and “against Time.” Men above Time are visionaries and prophets who orient themselves by truths that transcend the present world. They are, therefore, impractical when it comes to changing the present world. Men in Time are entirely creatures of the present world. Therefore, they are more capable of attaining worldly success. Men against Time orient themselves by truths that transcend the present, yet they are capable of operating within the world to advance the cause of truth. Savitri offers the Pharaoh Akhnaton as the paradigm of the man above Time, Genghis Khan as the paradigm of the man in Time, and Hitler as the paradigm of the man against Time.
5. In May of 1957, Savitri sailed to Egypt en route to India. She stayed in the Cairo suburb of El-Maâdi in the home of Mahmoud Saleh, a Palestinian Arab and Nazi sympathizer. Saleh was a friend and neighbor of Nazi exile Johannes von Leers (1902–1963), a former German university professor and member of the SS who had been employed by Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda and was later employed by the Nasser government as a specialist in Zionist affairs. Savitri spent a good deal of her time in Egypt in Leers’ company. See Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, The Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 176–9. Savitri relates some of the events of her stay in Egypt in Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess: or the true story of a “most objectionable Nazi” and . . . half-a-dozen cats (Calcutta: Savitri Devi Mukherji, n.d. [actually published in England circa 1965]), 97–99.
23 comments
A counterfeit could not possibly have the kind of power that Christianity had. To say that the Jews corrupted Christianity is one thing, but this is a proposition of whole other magnitude. Also if just a Jewish plot, why did they try to crush the new Religion? And if just a Jewish Plot, why did the Church take measures to keep the Jews in line? Or was Paul so clever that he didn’t tell the Rabbis in order not to ruin the whole Plan?
I think it is safe to say that Savitri was not a Christian yet like Hawkins she is determined to prove it a false religion. The mystery is why these people who reject Christianity are often more obsessed with it, albeit in a negative way, than most Christians are. Paul may not have seen his God in the flesh as Savitri was keen to point out, but neither has any Odinist seen Odin in the flesh and that doesn’t seem to bother anyone!
For someone to make such a fuss out of Paul’s alleged Jewishness Paul of Tarsus, whom we know was 100% Jewish in blood, in disposition, and in his heart, and, what is more, Jewish in education and a “Roman citizen,” as so many Jewish intellectuals today are French, German, Russian, or American citizens I think her passion would have been better directed to the identity theft alluded to in Rev 2:9 and 3:9
I suppose now that CC is going to feature Savitri from time to time I am going to have to read her writings. I guess that is one way of increasing sales.
That square thing after “increasing sales” is supposed to be a smiley face???
The boastful words of the jew Marcus Eli Ravage seem to agree with what Savitri says regarding Christianity being THE jewish conspiracy.
“You accuse us of stirring up revolution in Moscow. Suppose we admit the charge. What of it? Compared with what Paul the Jew of Tarsus accomplished in Rome, the Russian upheaval is a mere street brawl.”
“If you really are serious when you talk of Jewish plots, may I not direct your attention to one worth talking about? What use is it wasting words on the alleged control of your public opinion by Jewish financiers, newspaper owners and movie magnates, when you might as well justly accuse us of the proved control of your whole civilization by the Jewish Gospels?”
“Our tribal customs have become the core of your moral code. Our tribal laws have furnished the basic groundwork of all your august constitutions and legal systems. Our legends and our folk-tales are the sacred lore which you croon to your infants. Our poets have filled your hymnals and your prayer-books. Our national history has become an indispensable part of the learning of your pastors and priests and scholars. Our kings, our statesmen, our prophets, our warriors are your heroes. Our ancient little country is your Holy Land. Our national literature is your Holy Bible. What our people thought and taught has become inextricably woven into your very speech and tradition, until no one among you can be called educated who is not familiar with our racial heritage.”
In the end, her mode of reasoning is no different than that of any 19th century liberal protestant theologist that tries to “rationally explain” and “de-mystify” the gospel. Then add Nietzsche to it, and there we go. I find it always a bit curious how “rationalizing” people all of a sudden can turn who believe in things like actual re-incarnations of Hindu Gods. Savitri Devi is a fascinating eccentric, but beyond that there is not much depth.
This is downright silly:
“How I have taken the short view in persecuting this sect instead of serving mine come what may! How foolish I have been to attach myself to the forms—the details—instead of seeing the essential: the interest of the people of Israel, of the chosen people, of our people, of us Jews!”
Assuming the epistles of Paul are just part of a clever Judaistic strategy and nothing else is absurd . These speak of a true and unique religious persuasion of the strongest kind. Who cannot perceive this is like a deaf man to music. The break between Judaism and Christianity that followed St. Paul has dimensions that cannot be underestimated for the course of Western history. And for the fate of the Jewish people as well. The subsequent antagonism between the two, leading to Christian “antisemitism” and Judaic “anti-christianism”, was not a mere rivalry between sects, but one with secular consequences. One could argue that the demystification of the New Testament since the 19th century has re-“judaized” Christianity: Christ not the “Son of God”, Christ not resurrected, Christ a mere rabbi, the Gospel reduced to humanist/altruistic ethics etc.
Columbian catholic “reactionary” Gómez Dávila said: “Take Christ away and Christianity becomes the root of all modern heresies.”
I think this line Savitri Devi’s thinking leads to nowhere, though there is a partial truth in it. Where would our “two thousand years” of occidental magnificence be without Christianity, or rather what European peoples made of it (or was it the other way around?). Look at the heights of our culture, Bach, Dante, Michaelangelo, the cathedrals, Shakespeare etc. Nothing of this would have been possible without the cultural background of Christianity, which has manifested historically in very complex and manifold forms. Christianity indeed infected and wounded the partly relcutant, partly sympathetic Germanic substance, but the result of this conflict was the pearl in an oyster. The European nations were MADE in the furnace of Christianity. This is how we entered HISTORY and rose to a global force and to historical significance. This is how we became PEOPLES. Before that our ancestors would have been of a mere ethnological interest.
And even today, what do those of Judaic persuasion instinctively hate and fear more? What is their favoured target of cultural wars? Paganism or Christianity? They are not the least afraid of Wotan in the Woods, but a mere cross in a classroom will do. Our occidental fate is tied closely to Christianity, whether we like it or not. As it is dying, we are dying too. We killed our God, now we are following him. I do not think a reversal to pre-christian paganism is possible. Only in the sense of a vague “spirituality”, with mere anecdotical consequences. But the Ancient Gods will hardly return. They gave way for something greater long ago. Heidegger said, “only a God can save us now.” But Gods appear as they wish and cannot be “made”, invented or forced.
“They are not the least afraid of Wotan in the Woods, but a mere cross in a classroom will do.”
What do you think a pagan swastika would do in a classroom?
Point taken!
The value of Christianity seems rather ambiguous. A lot of Jewish ideology was imported through the Bible into our culture. On the other hand, the Jesus movement appears as such a fundamental threat and undermining of this very Jewish ideology that Jesus had to be murdered.
And to add insult to injury to the Jews, Jesus followers claimed that God had confirmed his mission by the resurrection. In fact, him whom the Jews had rejected and murdered was their Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed by God. This means an utter divine rejection of the Jews, and in this sense the New Testament is maybe the most anti-semitic book possible.
Furthermore, the influence of Greek and Germanic culture on the development of the Church was enormous, so that she moved more and more away from Jewish ideology.
On the whole I think the influence of Christianity rather good, especially during the Middle Ages. Feudalism was quite a good system, not to mention the ghettos.
Christianity becomes problematic if it renounces Greek theology, replaces Jesus the glorious Christ with a poor Jewish rabbi and tries to dig up its Jewish roots. But the mediaeval Christian knights seem quite admirable.
An important source for the suspicions and hate towards Christianity is of course Nietzsche. But his view of Christianity is that of the 19th century pietism of his father with its emphasis on pity and passivity, not the Teutonic Knights. Besides, pity is only a weakness if it keeps you from doing what is just. Pity for a wounded comrade on the contrary will give you the fierceness to continue fighting.
So although I am not a Christian I have a great respect for the Church as a glorious western institution. If it was good enough for my ancestors, I am not going to contest its value.
It is indeed true, Petronius, that the past 2,000 years haven’t been an unintentional, minor sidetrip. Right or wrong, that’s where we have been and are still at.
So just call yourself a Cultural Christian and you’ve covered all the bases and can be done with it. Works for me.
@ “If there is a fact that cannot fail to impress all persons who seriously study the history of Christianity, it is the almost complete absence of documents regarding the man whose name the great international religion bears, namely Jesus Christ. We only know of him from what is told to us in the gospels, i.e., practically nothing…”
We actually know quite a few things about Yeshu.
I also read Allegro’s book that Devi advertizes and found it a little silly. If you want to read secular approaches on the historical Yeshu I would chose Morton Smith’s 1978 Jesus the Magician. Using Rudolf Bultmann’s criterion—what runs exactly counter to the synoptics’ theology has a good chance of being historical—, on page 27 Smith describes a realistic picture of who might have been the historical Yeshu:
This coherent and credible account is broken in the gospels into half a dozen fragments. The historical Yeshu probably got in trouble with the Jewish establishment and they managed to get him killed. Of course, Smith doesn’t swallow the claims of miracles as genuine paranormal manifestations, or the resurrection stories which are obviously later aggregations to the original story.
I find Bultmann’s criterion far more convincing, even for atheists, than Allegro’s claim that Yeshu the magician, in the sense of an itinerant preacher performing (pseudo) miracles, didn’t exist.
The problem of course is Paul. Curiously, I exchanged a couple of letters with Smith right before he died and in a longhand letter he told me that Hyam Maccoby was a liar. Though I believe he was referring to Maccoby’s silly book on Jesus as a zealot revolutionary, I still believe that Maccoby has something to say about the historical Paul.
I read The Myth Maker: Paul and the invention of Christianity in 1987 and it convinced me that Paul was probably not a Jew. A fascinating read, in spite of the fact that like Smith I don’t like the author.
Bultmann! There we go. Devi argues similarily like a 19./20th century liberal protestantism.
Yes, as Petronius says: you can’t create a Religion. As an Esotericist, Savitri knew this in her better moments, but apparently she got carried away by her polemics and intense bitterness against everything modern, everything that was leading to the destruction of our Race. I certainly sympathize with her in this but I cannot follow her down this road. Christianity has much too substance, both spiritual and cultural, to be dismissed so cavalierly.
As far as her book, she may have actually believed that Hitler was a fore runner of Kalki. She was serious about Hinduism, and the doctrine of the Avatars and Cycles is a big part of mainstream of Modern Hinduism. It may all sound fantastic to us – and certainly her desire to lay India at the feet of Hitler was so since he did not consider them Aryan anymore – but she was exactly this kind of Beautiful Fanatic. This is the Faith that lead her to preach in a ruined Germany and sustained her when she was caught and thrown in prison.
“The European nations were MADE in the furnace of Christianity. This is how we entered HISTORY and rose to a global force and to historical significance. This is how we became PEOPLES. Before that our ancestors would have been of a mere ethnological interest.”
Utter nonsense. What about pagan Greece, Alexander the Great, the Roman empire, the Aryans of the Vedas and Zoroastrianism, the Norsemen of the Edda?
Whatever there is of value that has come of Christian culture in the West is a consequence the re-interpretation of Christian myth in Aryan terms during the Middle Ages.
Christianity has had many faces throughout history. It seems to me that the sort that Nietzsche attacked is rather that which followed after people stopped actually believing in God and the saviour Jesus Christ etc. The resentment PC secular kind we view today. A shrunken Christianity leftover without God, reduced to absurdly universalist altruistic ethics. “White guilt” syndrome is some kind racialized original sin, without a chance of forgiveness (and that is a difference too). (Holocaustianity and its implications is clearly a Jewish religion, a secular version of the Old Testament Jehova. Here too, its an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, down to many generations, and thou shalt have no other God beside me. )
For example, in times when actual belief was at its peak, Christians did anything else but turn the other cheek to Muslim and other invaders. Remember the great Christian defenders of the West, such as Martell, Diaz, Hunyadi, Sobieski etc. Maybe Codreanu and Franco, each in their own ways, were the last exponents of that spirit. If we had a similar belief today things would look far better for us. Europe’s big problem is that is has lost that universal faith that created it in the first place. In the 19th century Nationalism and modern Imperialism followed to replace it. One can view both National Socialism and Communism as movements that tried to install a new secular faith. Liberalism in a way is a sort of secular religion too, but indeed one to serve primarily an opiatic purpose, as James Burnham has pointed out.
Spengler predicts a “second wave spirituality” in the age of cesarism. I cannot see a resurrection of Christian belief coming. The rise of Arabic Islam we view today might be such a wave: a century ago it seemed that it had put to a historical sleep forever. Now it is alive and kicking again.
Petronius,
Ditto. And thanks for mentioning [Bernal] Díaz. Excerpts of his True Story on the Conquest of Mexico (some of which I’ve translated directly from his 16th century magnum opus) should appear sooner or later at CC.
@ “I cannot see a resurrection of Christian belief coming.”
Nor do I. And I’d love if O’Meara commented on this thread, since his recent comment in the Heidegger thread (“any nationalist movement not formally… pro-Christian hasn’t a chance in hell”) is just the opposite of what I believe: that Christianity, as a dying star, has now reached its red giant phase (liberalism) and we will see how later in this very century it shrinks into a white dwarf.
I was thinking of Rodrigo, not of Bernal… El Cid!
In Spain nobody would call “Diaz” to El Cid. You’d have to say Díaz de Vivar.
Pushing early Christianity to subvert Rome is consistent with how Jews operate. They usually push whatever ideas are most destructive to the host without considering the potential long-term consequences for Jews. If they did it, they could not possibly have anticipated that Constantine would eventually declare Christianity Rome’s official religion thus setting the table for the 1500 years of hostility to Jewry.
Once it took hold, Christianity withstood attempts at Jewish subversion for over 1000 years.
Christianity, like Marxism, is a Jewish Golem that eventually escaped Jewish control.
Having read The Lightning and the Sun many times, one can see Devi’s main problem with Christianity was in the realm of its values, not so much its metaphysics. What she called the superstition of “man” she felt pervaded Christianity. This superstition had a number of facets to it. As Savitri Devi put it:
She had an aristocratic conception of Nature in which the best i.e. the healthy, survived at the expense of the unhealthy, which obviously contradicts Christian help and aid toward the sick and the lame. This is a view similar to the one that the Spartans, Romans, Vikings etc. had in which the merciless selection of the healthy elements over the unhealthy is embraced as part and parcel of Nature’s truth. Her conception as an aesthetic one, went as far as placing a healthy tree above a handicapped person. She was no fan of the ‘dignity of man’ at all. The Jews, who preached for the ‘rights of man’ and ‘equality of all men’,
Devi felt were preaching statements at odds with Nature, and were therefore an anti-Nature/anti-Life force.
What I feel scared and scares most people about National Socialism is its refusal to recognize the ‘rights of all men’ . When people see that Swastika they think ‘evil’ because they know it stands for that pagan morality, in which the healthy survive and where men are regarded as unequal, which has been termed evil for a millennia or so. I don’t think the fact that Nazism is white people engaged in pro-white activity is the terrifying aspect of Nazism to your average layman, rather it’s that combined with the repudiation of christian ethics in favor of an aristocratic conception of race.
Joseph: She had an aristocratic conception of Nature in which the best i.e. the healthy, survived at the expense of the unhealthy, which obviously contradicts Christian help and aid toward the sick and the lame. The Bible is concerned with nations and individuals that are unhealthy in regards to their religion. A caring attitude to the spiritually sick carries over into caring for the physically sick and lame.
Caring for the sick and the lame is not to be confused with today’s policy of breeding unhealthy people at the expense of the healthy.
I laugh to myself, I a former Jew and now an Orthodox Christian, when I read these kinds of articles.
It’s just the same old “debunking” of the Christian Church by separating Jesus Christ from His apostles Who established the Church that He said he would set up THROUGH the apostles — St Paul being the CHIEF of the apostles.
The historical record is that Christ chose St Paul when he was persecuting the Church to “be a chosen vessel” to “bear the Gospel” to “kings and nations.” All of this is recorded with painstaking detail in St Luke’s Book of Acts which follows the 4 Gospels.
St Paul then risked his life many times, especially with regard to the hostility of the Jews, since he renounced any ties to the Judaic system proclaiming that “all was dung” – that is, Judaism –compared to being a “new creation in Christ,” that is, a “Christian.”
A Church was to be set up, NOT a “teaching” … NOT “moral” platitudes.
This was the mission that Christ sent his apostles, INCLUDING St Paul, to do.
“I will build My Church through your confession of Me,” promised and instructed Christ to his 12 apostles, “and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it,” as 2000 years of European history with countless Churches, Cathedrals, and Monasteries throughout the continent and Great Britain, prove.
And only a return to The Church, the only stable and lasting UNIFYING component of society, will save and preserve a White Europe.
+Brother Nathanael Kapner
Former Jew, NOW Orthodox Christian
Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR)
Christianity will never save the white nations from their current dissolution, because it is the root of that dissolution. Christian universalism paved the way for its secularized form, Enlightenment humanism, which in turn gave birth to cultural relativism, etc. Christian universalism, which has always been the reason for its appeal with the masses, is intrinsically incompatible with racial consciousness. The very fact that a “former” Jew is defending Christianity brings the point home with sufficient clarity.
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