240 words
In this three-part video series, David Yorkshire of Mjolnir Magazine visits Stift St. Peter in Salzburg, which is a multi-faceted monastic complex dating originally from the end of the seventh century after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and founded by St. Rupert. What a good place, then, to talk about how and why Christianity swept through the Roman Empire, replacing the various forms of Pagan worship. In the first video, David talks a little about the edifice itself, before examining a text by the Roman historian Sallust, writing before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, whose De coniuratione Catilinae presents a good picture of the moral vacuum in Rome, which Christianity would come to fill, and the reasons for it. Strangely, or perhaps not so, Sallust also seems to be describing the present day . . .
In the second video, David wanders through the cemetery as he turns to the eighteenth century Whig liberal historian Edward Gibbon for a critical look at his version of why Christianity was so successful in taking over Rome, as told in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
In the last part of the trilogy, Dave enter the catacombs to draw our conclusions and offer a critique of both Christianization and Edward Gibbon’s classical liberal philosophy in order to draw lessons for our own time, both for Rightists and Western societies at large. Please subscribe to the Mjolnir YouTube channel!
8 comments
It is odd though that when Christianity was at its strongest Jews were kept at bay and invading Muslims were defeated in battle after battle.
Actually, it was a combination of paganism, folk traditions and Christianity that allowed Europe to become truly great. The Enlightenment destroyed both.
Christianity provided an identity and a sense of community to the ‘diverse’ and deracinated masses of people who had been conquered, uprooted, forcefully brought together and mixed within the borders of the Roman Empire.
Latins and other Italic tribes, Iberians, Greeks, Gauls, North-Africans, Germans, Dacians, Jews, Syrians, Egyptians, all lost their native political loyalties and independence and were forced to become the ‘diverse and multicultural’ Roman citizenry.
Christianity emerged to fill the void. The Christian-community with its the drama, defiance and martyrdom of opposing the Roman authority, and the Christian-identity (with its drastic distinctions, boundaries, between “Christian” and “pagan”, an idea borrowed from the Jews, for whom religion and nation was one and the same thing) served as a substitute for these lost political loyalties (to tribe or city-state) and for the lost political dimension of the ethnic-identity. Christianity had to be “universal”, it had to address to the losers of the globalist Roman Empire, and it had to be antagonistic to the Roman order. That was the very reason for its success. It had to deal not with an organic nation, with a defined ethnic identity and culture, but with a melange of incongruous people, of many ethnic-cultural backgrounds, who had become isolated, powerless, alienated and who yearned to have again a community to belong to and to sacrifice for, and a common culture to relate to.
Once the Roman Republic disintegrated (1st century BC), and the Roman citizenship was extended to all people (tribes, cities) of Italy (and later to many others outside Italy and finally to everybody under Rome’s rule), the new entity, the empire, became just a huge administrative machine. A political-entity with a paid, professional, army to defend its borders and to preserve the order within those borders but a political entity without a political nation on whose loyalty it could count. Some attempts to solve this chronic problem were made, like the divinization of the emperor, but did not work. However, as the Christian communities multiplied, grew and interconnected throughout empire, it became all too natural to adopt Christianity and promote it as the state-religion since it promised to solve the very problem of the unity of the empire.
I wouldn’t mind seeing what you wrote turned into a full-fledged article, yours is an interesting point of view.
If “pagan” means something like “superstitious rural person”, than one must ask: are 21st century American Evangelicals, in fact, the real pagans?
The “pagans” of the present system are those race-realists and ethnic-nationalists who dissent from the kumbaya-vision.
America has always had this problem of not being really a nation and it has always had its ‘coping strategies’ similar to the modern political correctness in order to deal with the problem. See bellow a link to an article “Is America American ?” written 100 years ago (1920) by Lothrop Stoddard.
You can read in it about the double-standards or about the white-Americans having that “curious form of faith which can be defined as believing in what you know it is not true and which amazes the foreign observer because he does not understand the dire necessity which impels it.”
https://archive.org/stream/worldswork41gard#page/200/mode/2up
Pagan does not mean “rural person”, this is a linguistic misconception pushed by Rousseauans.
“The religious sense is often said to derive from conservative rural adherence to the old gods after the Christianization of Roman towns and cities; but the word in this sense predates that period in Church history”
Christianity may have been helpful to Europe’s development at one point, but now needs to be replaced with a national faith specific to each country. There could also be a general European faith to which we all subscribe. It was a Roman program created for the Jews, and then placed on Europe in the 4th century to control us better (see Joseph Atwill’s “Caesar’s Messiah”). On and on, we spin our wheels thinking about how to get organized and funded. Like the Jews, if we actually had a religion that was about our own people and nation(s), then we’d succeed. Problem is we’d need a nationalist government to implement a new reformation. Please research Jakob Wilhelm Hauer’s “German Faith Movement” that Hitler ruined.
Comments are closed.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.