Counter-Currents
On the Necessity of Christianity:
A Response to Vox Day
Spencer J. Quinn
Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, Galileo before the Holy Office
1,485 words
It’s not often we find Vox Day making a mistake. In his recent post entitled “Mailvox: The Necessity of Christianity,” I believe Vox makes not one but two when he says that the ancient Greeks did not develop science, and that “any efforts to make America and Europe great are doomed unless they are centered around Christianity.”
Despite attributing these ideas to a reader of his named Stickwick and presumably quoting him, it’s not clear at what point in the post Vox started commenting, or if he did so at all. In either case, Vox seems to agree with these notions, and so opens himself up to rebuttal.
The ancient Greeks are often credited with the development of objective thinking, and with good reason. Compared with the Old Testament, which regards God mostly with fear and awe, Homer makes his gods very human, and indeed treats them almost light-heartedly. Remember how in The Iliad Achilles asks his mother to convince Zeus to take Troy’s side in the war? She agrees, but has to wait twelve days, since all the gods are away partying with the Ethiopians (Iliad, Book 1, lines 423-424). When Zeus returns, he promises to help the Trojans, but then gets in trouble with his wife Hera, who supports the Greeks.
Do we not see how the Greek gods are subject to the same psychology that men are? It takes an extremely non-egocentric (that is, objective) mindset to envision such a thing. The gods may have superhuman powers, but these powers are still subject to something greater; the rules of the universe, if you will. When Hera asks Aphrodite for a favor, Aphrodite responds, “My heart is urgent to do it, if I can, if it is a thing that can be accomplished.” (Iliad, Book 14, lines 195-196). This is from the Richard Lattimore translation. E.V. Rieu’s reads: “I shall gladly do what you ask of me, if I can, and if it is not impossible.” Note the similarity here: even the gods cannot do the impossible.
Only perhaps in the enigmatic Book of Job does the Old Testament approach this kind of separation of self from the universe. In most other cases, however, God is all-powerful and all-knowing. All knowledge comes from God and can only be revealed through the word of the prophets. Further, subservience and fealty to God must be absolute. “Do not follow other gods, gods of the people around you, for Yahweh your god is a jealous god; the wrath of Yahweh your god would blaze out against you, and he would wipe you off the face of the earth.” (Deuteronomy 6:15) Sure, the laws God bestows upon man are good laws and evince timeless wisdom, but for the most part the source of their goodness is revelatory, not rational. The reason for their observance is punitory, not (again) rational. There is no trial and error, no great figuring out of what works and what doesn’t. No axioms or proofs. “Because God says so” is all the proof a good Israelite would ever need. There are some exceptions, of course, such as in Deuteronomy, when God assumes a certain amount of skepticism on the part of His believers, and instructs Moses in how to tell a false prophet from a true one. But in the Old Testament, this is certainly not the norm.
By avoiding this kind of monolatry and by subjecting gods to the ironclad rules of the universe, the Greeks opened the door for a kind of learning that the human race had never possessed before: science. From the rigorous, formal logic found in Euclid’s Elements to the culture of free debate which spawned the greatest philosophers of the ancient world, to the abstract, deductive reasoning required to arrive at the idea that a number such as √2 can be irrational and therefore unknowable, the ancient Greeks made invaluable contributions to what we now call science. Here are a few examples:
- Archimedes’ principal of buoyancy.
- Herophilus’ identification of the human nervous system.
- Aristarchus’ discovery that the planets revolved around the Sun.
- Erasthones’ accurate calculation of the Earth’s circumference.
- Aristotle’s classification of whales as mammals and not fish.
While claiming that Christianity was necessary for the development of science is false, Vox’s reader is correct when stating that science was also developed by Christian Europe during the Renaissance and later. But this came second. The Greeks came first. And whether Christianity aided or impeded the fall of science after the Roman Empire or kindled its rebirth a thousand years later is an open and rather tricky question.
Christians did shut down Plato’s thousand-year-old Academy in Athens for being too pagan. Christian zealots did murder Hypatia, a brilliant female mathematician from Alexandria, in 415. Christian authorities also stood by Aristotle’s incorrect ideas for far too long, and consequently condemned Copernican doctrine in 1616. They also burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600. Whether they did so because Bruno professed that planets revolve around the Sun is unclear. In either case, murdering people for holding dissident views is hardly a way to foster the growth of science.
On the other hand, Christians were the ones who preserved Greek philosophy, mathematics, and science for over a millennium, especially in Constantinople. The Christian authorities were surprisingly even-handed with Galileo (insisting that he show both the Aristotelian and Copernican sides of the debate presented in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems). Furthermore, for the most part they didn’t interfere with the research of Bacon, Descartes, Kepler, Newton, and others who challenged the prevailing orthodoxy. That Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics, was an Augustinian monk should show that Christianity and science can peacefully coexist.
Christianity, as a benign, open-minded, monotheistic religion of hundreds of millions, deserves credit for allowing science to prosper under its watch for centuries. But whether it was a necessary condition for the development of science is another matter entirely.
Then there is this statement from Vox’s reader: “[A]ny efforts to make America and Europe great are doomed unless they are centered around Christianity.”
I would say that this could be true, but is not necessarily true. It would require a different, more militant kind of Christianity than what we have now. Today’s Christian authorities, who offer to remove crosses in churches so as not to offend visiting Muslims, are not going to cut it. Nor is Pope Francis’ muted and frankly lame response to the beheading of a French priest which took place in July 2016. By the same token, a return to certain pagan religions could possibly do the trick. The Greeks and Romans were pagans during their glory periods. Perhaps we’re just a few temples to Mars away from evicting most non-whites from our countries and making them great again. Then again, when the British Empire and the United States were at their greatest, they were Christian nations run by serious, believing Christians. So who knows for sure?
This is a tough topic, but one thing I do know is that your modern-day liberals and Leftists are effectively Christians without Christ. You can draw a direct line from some of the egalitarian teachings of Christ (“If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant of all.” Mark 9:35) to the Utilitarianism of Bentham (who looked to “the greatest good of the greatest number”) and the radical leveling of society promoted by Marx. It’s not the only line you can draw, of course, but it is a strong one, one that the Left relies upon quite a bit these days. And what makes this so frightening is that the modern Leftist, as directed by Bentham and Marx, completely denies the spiritual aspects of Christianity. For a Christian, we may not be equal on Earth, but we are all equal in the eyes of our Lord God. The Leftist, however, denies the existence of God but takes the Christian idea of spiritual equality and applies it to the real world, where people are indeed unequal, and then enforces it with worldly means. And without God or the Devil waiting for us when we die, many Leftists aren’t too concerned about ethics.
Since modern Leftism is really a perversion of Christianity, we can mostly let Christianity off the hook for the decline of the West. However, if Christianity is to be relied upon to help make America and Europe great again, it must follow the Left back into the fallen world and engage it with the same worldly means the Left uses every day to bully the Right. Only, Christians should never lose their sense of spirituality, and they should always exhibit open-mindedness and tolerance to new ideas, just like they did when science had its second great awakening under their auspices.
Note: My main source for the first half of this article is a book called Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science by Alan Cromer (Oxford University Press, 1993).
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29 comments
We need a new religion, and I say that as an Atheist. Religion is a fundamental part of peoples’ communuties, and if you don’t have an explicit one, you’ll have an implicit, such as Leftism, which is by any means right now a kind of Religion.
For the new religion, Virtues vs Vices would be nice, and a patheon of “old gods” representing natural forces and the universe too.
But why Virtues vs Vices, you say? Well, because that’s a battle being fought in our minds since forever. If a Religion is a mechanism of social improvement, let’s address the issues directly.
I’m attracted to Pantheism as a philosophy, but it’s largely agnostic on the question of vices and virtues. Something like pantheism, with a traditional set of Western (not Christian) values would be useful.
http://www.pantheism.net/beliefs
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“The Intervention Theory,” watch Loyd Pye on Youtube. He convinced me when he showed the fused 2nd and 3rd DNA strands– that did not happen by accident. Read Loyd Pye’s books, more importantly, read Zacaria Sitchin’s books, watch his videos on Youtube. There is your new religion, we have more Annunaki genes in our make-up than the other races, and the thesis will be they should not be diluted, or destroyed, but preserved.
Regarding the ancient Greeks and science, Lucio Russo in his book ‘The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn’ argues that during the Hellenistic period the Greeks were doing genuine science. They were learning about nature via systemised practical investigation. For example, Archimedes was both a theorist and an inventor/engineer.
https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Revolution-Science-Born-Reborn/dp/3540203966/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1490123980&sr=1-2-fkmr0&keywords=the+first+scientific+revolution+greece
It is also notable that science did not progress in the Classical era as one would expect. Helmut Koester writes in History, Culture and Religion of the Hellenistic Age:
“Even an unbiased observer cannot help but see the developments of the Roman period as a decline in scholarship and science. Creative research came to an end in the 1st century BCE. Its place was taken encyclopedias and collections of the results of the scholarly work of former generations and by uncritical popularizations written solely for entertainment (IFL Science, deGrasse Tyson?). Superstitious opinions became widespread again, and views were revived that had been shown to be inaccurate by the scholars of the Hellenistic period. In mathematics no new discoveries were made during the Roman imperial period, but the achievements of previous mathematical scholarship were preserved and passed on through compendia.”
I cannot see any obvious reason for why this was the case. Maybe the Romans were simply more concerned with practical affairs than the Greeks.
I doubt Vox would stick by such an assertion that the Christians, not the Greeks, developed science. The statement is absurd on its face. The early Christians functioned like the Taliban desecrating all pagan “science” and philosophies. When the Protestants returned to the Biblical text, they revived the practice of Taliban Iconoclasm.
The monasteries of the Western Roman Empire did not preserve any of the Greek manuscripts. Oddly enough, the Greek works were preserved by the Muslims. Not until the Crusades, did Europe rediscover its cultural and scientific heritage by recovering the Arabic manuscripts of the Greeks. Science was revived by the recirculation of Greek and Roman manuscripts by translating Arabic sources. “The Recovery of Aristotle” occurred in the 13th century along with many other Greek texts.
This reintroduction of the Greeks spurned on the renaissance and the “development” of science that Vox attributes to Christianity, when it was in reality a move away from Christianity towards the Greeks. The entire trajectory of science’s development has paralleled the fall of Christendom, which opened up space for scientific pursuits.
The ultimate irony here is that the Bible and Christianity are a perversion of Greek thought and influence. Russell Gmirkin’s new book “Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible” proves how the OT was constructed in 270 B.C. by the Jews at the Library of Alexandria based on the Greek manuscripts stored there. They were primarily influenced by Plato’s writings on how to establish a fanatical people that would survive by instilling in them Divine origins. See http://russellgmirkin.com/newest-plato-book.
Likewise, the New Testament is a product of Hellenistic thought and influence, albeit flipped on its head to serve the needs of the unwashed masses and slaves of the Roman Empire.
We certainly do not need Christianity to survive and restore Western Civilization, what we need is the survival and restoration of Western man. Does focusing on Christianity help? Perhaps, but not in its current from. Christianity has fully imbibed anti-white egalitarianism and does more harm than good. We should welcome any Christians into our ranks, but if Christianity is to be restored, it will be based on the revival of Western man and white nationalism. Its current iteration has become hostile to the survival of Europeans.
My convictions are that Christianity will continue its demise as people become more secular and are put-off by its anti-whiteness. I’m not against reviving Christianity, far from it. But if it does occur, it will be a radically different Christianity that defends white nationalism rather than attacking it.
The Muslims preserved very little pagan knowledge. Vast majority was saved by the Byzantium empire. Western invaders in 12th century crusade rediscovered it when they saved Constantinople. A few minor and irrelevant commentaries is what the Muslims preserved. Many priceless manuscripts are still to be found on mount Athos.
Completely agree with this article need to rediscover our pagan heritage. I suggest ‘Christians as the Romans saw them’ for an overview of the disdain Christian dogmas was held in including its many fallacies.
Orthodox Church is slightly different as it is centred much more closely on the Greek platonic texts the Roman Catholicism.
“The Muslims preserved very little pagan knowledge.”
This disregards, I believe, the key role of such thinkers as Al Farabi, Averroes, and Avicenna in the continuation and reintroduction of Western philosophy. Of course, it might well be argued that they preserved this knowledge, not through Islam so much as despite it—the anti-philosophical tendency in Islam has always been marked, as is clearly shown in the influence of Al-Ghazali—but I do not believe it can be denied that most of the principle philosophers in the classic Greek tradition, during the period between the death of Boethius and the work of Aquinas, were born to Islamic societies.
There is no question that many of the works of antiquity were preserved in the Byzantine Empire, and were disseminated into Europe after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. But a large part of this dissemination came into Europe also thanks to the Arabic scholarly tradition, via Spain and Sicily.
There is a long article about this on Gates of Vienna. Most ancient Greek authors were translated directly from greek sources and originally translated in Arabic by Jews or Christians. There were a fee rogue Muslims who were interested in Greek learning but no consistent tradition.
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.ie/2007/10/islam-christian-europe-and-greek.html?m=1
Many thanks for the link, Mr. Ryan; I have read some ways into the article, and find it most informative. I shall certainly dedicate the time necessary to finishing it.
I cannot help but agree with your main point; the hostility of Islam toward Western traditions is nothing new. I would qualify this only with the observation that, despite the difficulties the “few rogue Muslims” experienced for their philosophizing, it is indubitable that they were educated into philosophy, which means there was some kind of “Western tradition” in the Islamic world, particularly in the Abbasid Caliphate. This tradition, to be sure, was never embraced without scruple, and it was certainly doomed to end as it did, dismantled and oppressed by the hardened maturity of Islam itself. Yet it remains stRiki-Eiking to me that, for a brief few centuries, there was comparative ferment in certain parts of the Middle East, and, as you point out, in the Byzantine Empire, even while the heart of Christendom had fallen into a most profound amnesia regarding its own classical heritage.
This is pertinent to Mr. Quinn’s article above: Christianity, when it rules by its own lights, does not appear to favor the true Occidental tradition, any more than Islam does.
I think that this text is very lenient with Christianity. This faith certainly didn´t contribute in nothing on the development of science. What make science to develop was the white race, as you showed remembering the contributions of the Greeks.
The ambition of europeans to have all the knowledge of nature seems to be a very distinctive character of whites. Because this, I have fear of a white-asian mixed race. I´m not so sure if Asians have the hunger for the knowledge as whites.
Thank you for this much needed rebuttal.
“One thing I do know is that your modern-day liberals and Leftists are effectively Christians without Christ.”
This cannot be overemphasized.
Leftism is essentially Christianity minus the vertical dimension.
Universalism, humility, self-sacrifice, the original sin and the resulting guilt+shaming, an agglutinating “love” as a central value, it’s all there.
Except now, the perfect justice and fulfillment of the Kingdom of God can only come on the horizontal plane, i.e. in mundane societies. All the spiritual energy that would have been directed upwards centuries ago, is now trapped on the material level, effectively the only one recognized in post-modern culture.
It is as if, deprived of that vertical dimension, the spiritual energy of Europeans had overloaded their brains, burned their circuits, made their minds feverish and feeble, warped and deluded. It gave them visions of a different sort.
Instead of applying their faculty of imagination to picture the higher realms so that the human soul can be motivated to orient its efforts toward them even from within the flesh, that same faculty is now used to evoke the ever receding marvels of childish utopias.
Rather than the seeds of a rebirth, it would be far easier to argue that Christianity always contained the seeds of the West’s downfall, since it channels the typical European preoccupation for strong moral principles, and at the same time makes no differentiation between whites and non-whites. Insiders and outsiders are defined on the basis of beliefs (ideas), not of abilities and identity (genes).
Therein lies, in a nutshell, the whole fallacy of libertarianism that Greg so brilliantly refuted at the London Forum.
It is not Christianity that made Europeans great; rather, Christianity was made great by Europeans. To confirm the truth of this statement, one need only reflect on what the teachings of Christ would have developed into if his messengers would have taken the road to China, instead of heading to Europe.
The spiritual landscape at the time of Christ and then the Roman Empire was a clusterfuck of bizarre cults. Christianity was the one to emerge as the One True Faith in Europe precisely because it so deeply resonates with the European soul, with its strengths and, unfortunately, its weaknesses.
If a European rebirth were to be catalyzed by a religious movement, then it would have to be one that CORRECTED the Europeans’ weaknesses rather then EMPHASIZING them – first and foremost, weak ethnocentrism.
Universal laws for the natural world = science.
Universal laws for bipedal mammals = white genocide.
And isn’t it ironic that these horizontal, godless Christians are once again maintaining their power by rejecting a fact-based view of reality, censoring and denying the facts that contradict their dogma? Let’s not forget that the leftist worldview is not simply based on childish illusions, it is based on outright LIES, lies that are protected and drilled into the minds of the new generations with the full power of the Left’s apparatus.
The way out of this mess is not shuffling the cards in the religious deck, abandoning a dogmatic cult to restore its predecessor; it is once again drawing up the courage to put the daring and unbiased investigation of reality, whether through dialogue or through physical measurement and experimentation, before comforting fantasies. And use what we find to MAKE OURSELVES great again, and greater than ever, rather than pleading to a parental figure for mercy and salvation.
Before, during and after Christ, the heart of the West was always Prometheus.
The Christian at heart looks at psychometric data and crime statistics and says, “I cannot entertain these wicked thoughts; it’s a sin.”
The Promethean at heart looks at them and says, “I can use this to advance my knowledge, my freedom and my power”.
If the European soul wakes up from this pseudo-spiritual nightmare born in the rotting brain of Christianity, the next time we steal fire from the gods, we shall erect a mighty wall of flames between our civilization and those who would destroy it.
One argument against this view is that the moralizing tendency is inherent in man, and to a greater extent perhaps in Europeans. Wherever Christianity spread, it had put to rest the primordial practice of ritual sacrifices within a few decades. In their place came the vivid story of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice. In our secular culture, that image is no longer present, and the inherent feeling of guilt finds new outlets in the wildest caricatures.
And this drawing of lines, from Christ to Marx to modern liberals and leftists also reveals a stunning ignorance of the history of Protestantism in Europe. When considering the modern offspring of Christianity, somehow only varieties on the left are mentioned. That is rather weak I have to say.
It is nice to be here in the Athenaeum with such fine, rational company. Every commentator has something interesting to say, particularly Mr. Windsor. What a difference from the scat-throwing comment threads of so many websites!
My two cents’ worth: The translator of the Iliad was Richmond Lattimore (as in the capital of Virginia), not “Richard” Lattimore. The human eye “scans” for meaning and if the beginning and end of a word match the mind’s expectations, the mind skips over the middle part. I spent years referring to “Richard” Lattimore myself. Imagine my surprise to find his actual first name jump out at me, hidden in plain sight all along. Scholars, let this be a warning.
Civic Nationalism = “I believe thusly”
Christianity = “I believe thusly”
another option = “my nation (extended family) first”
To contrast the Old Testament with the Greeks and thereby condemn Christianity is a bit of a straw man argument. The Old Testament, by itself, is Judaism. Christianity emerged, in the Greek world, as a kind of synthesis of Greek thought and certain elements of the Old Testament. The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles make clear that Christ was mostly rejected by the Jews, and that this new faith (which Augustine said was not new at all, but was the sophia perennis) was for the Gentiles. The Catholic Church has always, until Vatican II, maintained that the Jewish pact with God was invalidated by the incarnation of Christ.
What the Church found useful in the Old Testament was 1) monotheism, as opposed to polytheism, 2) the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, as opposed to emanationism or eternalism, and 3) the identification of God with Absolute Being, when God speaks to Moses and identifies Himself as “I am Who Am.” From this, Thomas Aquinas identified this God of the OT with the unknown God that Aristotle deduced from his observations of nature. I admit, I myself am puzzled at how the tribal deity of the OT can be equated with the supreme Being which Catholic theology speaks of. As Ezra Pound said, the God of Dante has nothing to do with the God of the OT. But part of the reason this happened is that, until the Gutenberg press and the Protestant reformation, almost no one read the Bible. Priests and monks read it, and the Church told them how to interpret it. The God of Christianity is the God of Aristotle and Greek philosophy, the unmoved mover, the first principle. That this God is interpreted as equivalent to the Jews’ Yahweh does seem problematic, but I think that for most of the history of Christianity, this was not really the case.
As for clinging to the Ptolemaic universe and condemning Galileo, I won’t go into it here, but for anyone who is interested, there is an excellent discussion of it in H.J.A. Sire’s Phoenix From the Ashes: The Making, Unmaking, and Restoration of Catholic Tradition. He also discusses the sorry state of the contemporary Church, which is every bit as problematic as Mr. Quinn notes in this article.
Nice article Mr. Quinn
You write following sentence:
” Christian authorities also stood by Aristotle’s incorrect ideas for far too long, and consequently condemned Copernican doctrine.”
What are you referrring to here? The philosopher Edwarad Feser makes a very powerful case that while Aristotle’s astronomy and physics were indeed incorrect, his metaphysics based on the idea of the 4 causes, including final causation as the “cause of causes” is correct and that the Western World took a huge step backwarad by adopting the Mechanistic World view beginning essentially with Descartes. This new world view threw out the final cause and allowed only efficient causation or Humean Constant Conjunction.
I was wondering if you have heard of or read Feser and what you think of this idea.
The argument over the genealogy of science seems to me misplaced. I would rebut that science, understood as a body of theoretic and practical knowledge almost totally unbound by any moral or social law, is neither Christian nor Greek; it is a purely modern phenomenon which we owe almost exclusively to the emergence of modern philosophy, and the moral, economic, and political transformations following therefrom. The conflict between Christianity and antiquity was not a conflict over science, but rather over the social order itself: but neither original Christianity nor classic antiquity would countenance the form of society which today rules in the West, and which is the unique precondition for modern science.
Our contemporary science is, furthermore, deeply problematic, both in its method, its epistemological status, and its practical and moral consequences. So far as I know, the profoundest problems with modern science have yet to be adequately articulated in modern philosophy. To arbitrate between paganism and Christianity on the basis of which is more favorable to science, when the very problem of science itself has not been resolved nor even acknowledged, is a little like attempting to prepare a garden suitable for a certain plant, the nature of which we little know, and which might in the end prove to be an invasive and noxious weed.
Giordano Bruno was burned not because he though planets revolved around the sun.
Not only did he postulate the stars in the sky were suns with (possibly populated) worlds around them, he dared to work out the theological implications.
Science was allowed to continue along the lines to be delimited by (the jesuit) Descartes and Kant, separating body from soul, phenomenon from noumenon, and science from theology. Ivory-tower scientists are allowed to study the splitting of particles to their hearth’s content, and Jesus still died for your sins. Isn’t that great?
Some religious traditions can be bound with empiricism to re-make the unified world-view lost to us since the time of the ancient greeks, but christianity is not one of them. Nor can any abrahamic cult, as it applies to non-abrahamic people.
Thank you for an excellent series of comments. I would add the following: from my own perspective, and my own decisions in regard to the question brought to light here, I am definitely adverse to any rejection of religious orientation within the necessary structuring and restructuring of a conservative, anti-Marxist, anti-Liberal platform. I think that the issue can be exposed and opened to some degree if one considers the ‘essential make-up’ of persons. What I mean is the following: I identify as a Platonist and also as a Johannine Christian. Or, to put it another way, this description is one that provides a way to understand a particular orientation.
The ‘Johannine Christian’ definition allows for a relationship to and an understanding of metaphysics just as, in John, the eternal Logos is referred to. I have been interested in the work of the Catholic E. Michael Jones who bases much of his platform on the Catholic notion of ‘Logos’ and it seems to me that with this we certainly can understand how Christian thinking became intermeshed with Greek rational categories.
I would suggest that there is, in truth, no way to separate out this Greek Christian-philosophic rationalism and it also seems obvious to me that, despite modern Jewish critical platforms, there is no way to separate out of the Occidental tradition what has come to it through Judea. Thus, the ‘Catholic manoeuvre’ becomes interesting: to see Greek Cristianity-Catholicism as an absolute supersession of the Jewish traditions.
To the degree that Jews then operate within Christian and Occidental categories and in this sense overtly and outrightly serve the Occident, they have a place. But this essentially means to convert. And conversion means to renounce Judaism with its core of secretive, undermining Talmudism. To the degree that they do not give themselves over, consciously and also definitively, to the service of Occidental Logos is the degree that they remain adversaries. This is a bit binary and yet I think it is relatively sound. Any comments/corrections/additions would be welcome.
There is certainly a branch of Traditionalist Catholicism which is now and can be an ally within the anti-Liberal movement. It seems important to me to define, at the outset, what we are opposing. That in itself is a detailed and demanding endeavor. But in doing that one inevitably returns to traditional, foundational and thus *truly conservative* categories.
In my perhaps simplistic view, this means that one discovers again, and gives energy to, those definitions which arise out of notions of philosophical ‘Being’ and that which opposes non-intellectual, sentimental and emotional ‘Becoming’. Traditionalism thus seems to me to be, in essence, a metaphysical position.
While I do understand that there may be many Alt-Rightists and Nouvelle Droitistes who hold to atheistic or agnostic positions, I wonder if an insistance that the solution to hyper-liberalism will come strictly out of atheistic and theo-rejectionist positions? Theological categories are so interwoven into the European soul that I do not see this as a realistic possibility.
In my own case, I am working to get a better grasp of Thomistic categories through a more profound study of original Catholicism. That includes Edward Feser, Etienne Gilson, as well as the very traditionalist branch within Catholicism which very certainly holds to notions of ‘dispensation’ through Logos. It is very hard for me to relate to Catholic ritual forms and yet metaphysically there is a great deal of soundness to it.
Again, any comments to what I have written would be welcome.
Mr. Bright, there are many points in your post which merit consideration. I limit myself to a single paragraph of what you wrote:
“While I do understand that there may be many Alt-Rightists and Nouvelle Droitistes who hold to atheistic or agnostic positions, I wonder if an insistance that the solution to hyper-liberalism will come strictly out of atheistic and theo-rejectionist positions? Theological categories are so interwoven into the European soul that I do not see this as a realistic possibility.”
I was curious first of all what you intend by “atheistic and theo-rejectionist positions.” Do you mean to ask if an atheist as an atheist can oppose hyper-liberalism, or do you mean to ask if a society of atheists can be anything other than hyper-liberal? I trust it is clear that these are two distinct positions: atheism in a thinking man might manifest itself in decidedly different ways than atheism in a mass of largely unreflective individuals.
Supposing that it is the second position you intended, and not the first, I would make a few comments. Wherever the secular state has succeeded, liberalism has developed apace. The very idea of a secular state is the invention of classic liberalism, and it is difficult to avoid the impression that this relation between secularism and liberalism is but a milder expression of the historical connection between atheism and communism. It would appear then that hyper-liberalism is the inevitable proclivity of any socially entrenched and generally diffuse atheism.
Atheism was historically and unequivocally tied to the political left until the advent of Nietzsche. Nietzsche introduced, not to say invented, the idea of an atheism of the right; but simultaneously, he was the first philosopher (as opposed to theologian) of the modern period to take religion seriously. He was the first to note the fundamental social and psychological importance of religion, the first to critique the secular foundations of the modern state. The atheism of the right thus prepares the way for a new public piety.
This allows us to rephrase the question: the question at root is one of hierarchy. Supposing, as seems to me quite reasonable, that religion has a necessary role in any traditionalist society: does this mean that religion ought to be the unequivocal master of society, and its principles the overriding guides of the social order? Putting the question into the language you have proposed, Mr. Bright: at the apex of society, ruling over the public illusions in which most people necessarily live, are we to prefer the principles derived from “Theological categories” of Catholicism, or from “Greek rational categories” of philosophy?
Thank you for your comment Mr Leonard. It has been a part of my understanding that ‘classical liberalism’ came about within and as a result of, or perhaps I should say within the matrix of, a generally religious culture. That is to say a culture schooled within the categories of European thinking. But I would say the word ‘thinking’ needs to be clarified since it seems to me that when we speak of a man’s ‘thinking’ we really speak of a man’s *way of being*. My basic idea, and the core of my understanding, is that Occidental man can be understood as an amalgamation of a set of influences: that of the Judaic, that of the Greek and the rationalistic, that of the Roman, and then the Alexandrian which is both a real place where all these influences were blended, but also a symbol of what is blended to create, in my lingo, ‘the Occidental soul’ and person.
Because I do not see how any of these, shall we say, *zones* or *poles* can be disentangled, and for this reason assert that a given person is a combination of all of them, and that indeed our very selves have been created through long historical endeavor and fashioning, it seems to me a necessary and intelligent position to define and redefine what each of these poles means. To put it in ultra-simple terms ‘Judea’ represents revelation without the intecession of the rational tool; Greece represents an extreme of rationalism and of course ratiocination; Rome represents the necessary structure and organization of society and the channeling of both revelatory idea and rational idea into and onto the manifest plane. Alexandria represents the place, inner or outer, where all these influences meld.
With this in mind, and when one thinks on and imagines ‘atheism’, and quite especially the unique variety of it that one picks up in some philosophical discourse, through the media, and on the Internet (a popular atheism which is a very strange and complex animal), I suppose that I see it as a departure from well-groundedness in our own traditions. In order to think in such terms one has to be a person ‘divided from himself’ in an historic, psychological, and certainly a literary sense. I realize that my observations are somewhat partisan here and I accept this but also aknowledge it as a potential fault. But the question I have, and one I assume many people like us have, is: How did this descent into destructive hyper-liberalism come about? How would one describe it? What are the elements of this *destruction*? As an example, and I am quite weak in this area, but it has been proposed that it was the First and the Second World Wars that have dealt a severe blow, and perhaps a fatal blow, to Europe. It seems to me that here one encounters a certain ‘spiritual death’ or the death of ‘will’. I call this ‘fracturing’ and then I notice that the *fractured individual* begins to speak (ie to become visible, to assert himself). The voice of atheism, if I can say it like this, is a reaction to the fracturing of the European self.
Therefor, to recover oneself, to recover identity, is what must be the essential project. In my reading of the Nouvelle Droite, and the Alt-Right, and Traditionalism, et cetera, this is in essence what I have come to. But how would that be described in tangible and not merely allusive terms? To me, I would say that on one very real level one is attempting to recover something that is in essence invisible and by that I mean *metaphysical* or non-manifest. According to rather strict theological doctrine this is what stands behind ‘intellectus’: an intelligibility outside of manifestation and in the realm of ‘being’. I am sure that you capture what I am getting at.
Personally, I do not think that there is nor should there be a separation between rational methods and whatever is meant when we allude to the revelatory ανδ that which comes to us through poetic metaphor and an epiphany of being and out of Being. Ι do not exclude mystical revelation as an important mode of being. But I am aware that I am speaking about my own method, or my own *way of being*. I cannot myself, and I do not wish to, create a cleavage between ratiocination in a strict Aristotelian sense and that which comes to me (or *to us* if I refer to ‘Europe’ in the sense I have) through relationship to and meditation on laden metaphors and potent symbols.
Many thanks for a most stimulating response, Mr. Bright. Once more there is too much that I would like to say in reply, so I will restrict myself to the essential. I mention in passing that I believe I have better understood your position on atheism. You are critiquing, as you say, “popular atheism,” and I could not agree more with your analysis of that ideology as being simultaneously the result and the agent of fragmentation. I am also at least sympathetic with your brief theological, or perhaps better say metaphysical, remarks. But though I suspect we might have a worthwhile conversation on what follows from any critique of contemporary atheism, that seems to me less pressing than the question of Occidental identity to which you have so rightly directed our attention.
So far as what you call your “basic idea,” I am quite with you: it would be foolish and violatory, not to say completely insane, to attempt to subtract from the Occident any one of the primary influences which have produced it. I seem to perceive, however, an element in your thought which I might call fatalistic. You appear to suggest that, because we are the heirs of this particular heritage, and because there is no means of cleanly separating out this or that tributary part of our heritage, therefore we must accept the manifold of what we are as a kind of unitary necessity. Supposing this is a fair assessment of your position, I would challenge it on two grounds.
Let me explicate my first ground thus: we find ourselves in our present straits thanks, not, certainly, to some foreign influence which has impinged itself onto the West from outside of the West, but rather to some element in the heart of the West itself which has taken unhealthy and tyrannical command of our destiny. We must then comprehend that element, and we must understand what permitted its ascent. But it is clearly not enough to comprehend it: we must also master it or alter it. Therefore we cannot merely accept the manifold of what we are; we must also strive to sculpt it, in order to escape the crisis to which that very manifold has brought us.
This leads to my second point. Now, your assertion is well taken: we are in desperate need, here and now, of rediscovering that Occidental identity which we have somehow lost or forgotten. So far as society is concerned, nothing is more urgent. But a paradox quickly emerges from these investigations: Occidental man is distinguished in part by his striving, his ability and his willingness to change course and to morph his own essence; key part of his identity is his ability to mold his identity through will, through art, through rationality. In reclaiming our identity, we are to some extent reclaiming, not a fixed quality, but an open question. This protean aspect of the Occident could perhaps express itself most forcibly in the very act of rediscovering the Occident, even as occurred classically during the Renaissance; it might be that the Occident is able, in this moment of crisis above all, to work upon itself as artist upon material. To that extent it would be not only a mistake, but a denaturalization of our very identity, to accept all the aspects of the Occidental soul as simply ineluctable, simply given.
You yourself suggest something along these lines, I think, when you say “it seems to me a necessary and intelligent position to define and redefine what each of these poles mean.” Redefinition means altering what has already been once defined; it is an act of reinterpretation, of revaluation. Reinterpretation or revaluation is a necessary part of the work we are presently attending to. Our Occidental identity, to be discovered, must first be invented.
Hello again, excuse the delay.
I thought to ask you to expand further on what you wrote here:
“Let me explicate my first ground thus: we find ourselves in our present straits thanks, not, certainly, to some foreign influence which has impinged itself onto the West from outside of the West, but rather to some element in the heart of the West itself which has taken unhealthy and tyrannical command of our destiny. We must then comprehend that element, and we must understand what permitted its ascent. But it is clearly not enough to comprehend it: we must also master it or alter it. Therefore we cannot merely accept the manifold of what we are; we must also strive to sculpt it, in order to escape the crisis to which that very manifold has brought us.”
It is certainly true that it is imperative to get a grasp on the first element you mention. How do you conceive of that?
What I find is that just about everyone (everyone who thinks that is) has some idea about ‘what ails us’ and what has brought about the conditions of the present when they are bewailed. It seems true that it is among those who read at Counter-Currents, and among the *serious* New Rightists that we are not celebrating the present as a grand success, but rather are reacting to it. Reacting to the damage it has done us, or what it has subtracted from us. We are complainers in this sense but I think this means we are also idealists. Only one who feels some loss or lack can hone his sense of longing and desire to create.
There are a few different possibilities, I have thought. One is that we will not succeed in having much effect on the present trajectory of events, which at times seem to be careening out of control. As Guillaume Faye has said we may have to enter catastrophe and suffer it before it can happen that the historical moment will act on us like a hammer on an anvil. His view is rather pessimistic and not at all improbable.
If this is so I think it places emphasis on the inner man. Inner development, inner understanding, self-protection. And if we are to speak of the Christian traditions it is impossible to exclude the salvific element which is, fundamentally, the dominant feature of Christian anthropolgy. Put another way, if one excludes that from a conversation on Christianity and its influence, one is not actually speaking of Christianity. (I am not sure if I would define the *salvific* in traditional, otherworldly ways, but rather that which brings a man back into his power as a man capable of dealing with the present and its challenges. So, and please excuse me if this seems too much a leap or too outlandish, but the notion of a Spiritus Sancti comes to the fore, in my mind at least, when one imagines a people recovering it spiritual and social and self-defining power. I would be interested in hearing any of your thoughts on such matters).
Some describe the Christian influence as the source of a good deal of the present problems. A weakening, a feminine softening of the will, et cetera. How do you see these things?
I feel that my thoughts today are a bit disparate but there you have it.
Spiritus Sanctus is the proper declension.
Even before all the examples mentioned there are the presocratic philosophers such as Thales and company who arguably took the first scientific steps against superstition. I contend the Jewish problem will not be solved until we overcome the christian problem. We cannot fight with two hands tied behind our back and a faith that deracinated a people from its blood. Growing materialism and nihilism might be the price we have to pay before a new healthy spirituality rises to take its place and one that aids us in our goals and is not alien and subversive.
“a faith that deracinated a people from its blood.”
Maybe you missed the part where something like 50% of Whites abandoned Christianity FIRST, then only AFTER became deracinated. Or the part where the Christian religion became heavily infiltrated and subverted by jews, homos, and others, then only AFTER Christians began to cuck hard. Maybe you missed the part where jews gained control of the media and academia, and defamed, denigrated, blasphemed, minimized, and banished Christianity at every turn.
In your Deuteronomy quotation, God is named “Yahweh”. Where does that word appear in any traditional English, Latin, or Greek translation of the Bible? On Bible Gateway.com, a cursory search only brought it up in the “Names of God” version of the “Bible”.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+6%3A15&version=NOG
The “Names of God” “Bible” was originally published in 2011 by Baker Publishing. They also publish a “Tree of Life” version:
https://www.biblegateway.com/versions/Tree-of-Life-Version-TLV-Bible/#vinfo
“The Tree of Life Version (TLV) speaks with A DECIDEDLY JEWISH FRIENDLY VOICE—a voice like the Bible authors themselves—to recover the authentic context of the Bible and the Christian faith.”
The “Names of God” “Bible” contains commentary by Ann Spengler:
http://www.annspangler.com/about/
“Another incredible surprise is that, though I am single, I became the mother to two beautiful daughters, Katie and Luci, who were both born in mainland China.”
Here is information on other “Bible” versions with the “true name of God”.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Sacred_Name_Bibles#Transliterated_Sacred_Name_Bibles
“Transliterated Sacred Name Bibles
The following versions are Bibles which systematically use some transliteration of the Tetragrammaton (usually “Yahweh”) in both the Old and New Testament, as well as a Semitic form of the name of Jesus such as Yahshua or Yeshua. These Bibles apply this to both the names of the Father and Son, both of which are considered to be sacred.[17]
The New Testament of our Messiah and Saviour Yahshua (1950)
Holy Name Bible (1963)
Restoration of Original Sacred Name Bible (1970)[18]
The Sacred Scriptures Bethel Edition (1981)
The Book of Yahweh: The Holy Scriptures (1987)
Sacred Scriptures, Family of Yah Edition (2000)
The Word of Yahweh (2003)
Hebraic Roots Bible (2009, 2012)[19]
The Restoration Study Bible (2011), published by Yahweh’s Restoration Ministry and using the King James Version. Available online. [20]
Names of God Bible (2011, 2014), edited by Ann Spangler and published by Baker Publishing Group.[21] The core text uses the God’s Word translation and the print edition has divine names printed in brown and includes a commentary. The text is also available online at BibleGateway.com. In a review published online,[22] this version has been praised for its “attention to detail”, but it is noted that the translation only presents “the most significant names and titles of God” in their original forms and therefore some ‘names of God’ are not treated in the same way: for example, Mighty One (Avir) which appears in Psalms 132:2 and 132:10 and a total of 23 times (most referring to God) in the Old Testament is not highlighted.
The Holy Bible – Urim-Thummim Version (2001)[23]”
None of these was published before 1950. Please explain to me why these “true names of God and Jesus” were apparently lost to all the Christian scholars, theologians, and historians, and to European man in general, throughout something like 1500 years of Christian dominance of the West and the world at large. Why weren’t we able to “discover” or translate these names for God until 1950? Why is it that they are only becoming popularized now, when it is abundantly clear that the Church has been (((subverted)))?
And why are people like you, ostensibly “White nationalists” who should be interested in the truth, parroting what are almost surely jewish lies?
“By avoiding this kind of monolatry and by subjecting gods to the ironclad rules of the universe,”
So “gods” are WITHIN the universe… Just another type of being, subject to the same laws we are, living within the boundaries of the same “box” in which we find ourselves. Modern science has told us that the universe has a “boundary”. What is outside that boundary? If the “gods” are within it, aren’t they just limited, “created” beings?
Physical science, or ‘natural philosophy’ as it used to be called, did not suddenly revive during the Renaissance. Western science really has its roots in such Scholastics as Roger Bacon and William of Ockham, who propounded the clear division between experimental science and philosophy (including theology and metaphysics) that continues to this day. This is indeed a Christian invention, as Christian as you can get. It is unique to Christianity. It’s as a result of this distinction that speculative pursuits such as alchemy and astrology were dispensed with as serious disciplines, and distinguished from the technical apparatus that we retained as chemistry and astronomy.
It’s true that Archimedes knew some physics and the Egyptians must have been tremendous engineers. But they did not establish any tradition of experimental science and they did not put philosophy and natural philosophy into separate and independent spheres. You can cherry-pick little “discoveries” from the Classical Greeks—Archimedes’s buoyancy principle, Aristotle’s observation that whales are more like harbor seals than eels—but this is very thin stuff, and does not amount to a coherent, continuing tradition of experimental inquiry like what we’ve had in the West since the High Middle Ages. I suggest that if that they had had such a tradition—if like Christian scientists Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton they refused to regard reality as a mysterious jumble of magical phenomena—then the Greeks might well have made it to the moon two millennia before we did. It’s not as though they lacked the brainpower.
Significantly, this discussion of science and Christianity does not even touch upon any Christian doctrine. Christian philosophers, theologians, and scientists (some were all three) are wholly neglected. No Descartes here, or Thomas Aquinas, or Teilhard de Chardin. Weirdly, the allegorical, mystical Book of Job is brought in for no reason at all except to set up a straw-man argument that the God in the Old Testament was one crazy dude. That point is arguable, but it has nothing to do with Christianity.
As a side note, Giordano Bruno was not burned at the stake for scientific exploits but for his theological teachings. (Significant here because he was not some layman, but a Dominican friar.) Similarly, Galileo got himself in trouble with the Holy See not for discovering moons of Jupiter but for ridiculing prelates.
Mine is a very different argument from Vox Day’s, but in his basic point he is correct.
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