Preface to Giles Corey’s The Sword of Christ, by Kevin MacDonald - The Unz Review (Text only)

Note: Giles Corey’s new book, The Sword of Christ, may be purchased here. Get it before it’s banned!

Giles Corey has written a book that should be read by all Christians as well as White advocates of all theoretical perspectives, including especially those who are seeking a spiritual foundation that is deeply embedded in the history and culture of Europeans. This is excellent scholarship combined with a very fluid writing style. He has thought deeply about all the issues confronting the peoples and cultures of the West.

 

Corey is well aware that contemporary Christianity has been massively corrupted. Mainline Protestant and Catholic Churches have become little more than appendages for the various social justice movements of the left, avidly promoting the colonization of the West by other races and cultures, even as religious fervor and attendance dwindle and Christianity itself becomes ever more irrelevant to the national dialogue. On the other hand, Evangelicals, a group that remains vigorously Christian, have been massively duped by the theology of Christian Zionism, their main focus being to promote Israel.

Until the twentieth century, Christianity served the West well. One need only think of the long history of Christians battling to prevent Muslims from establishing a caliphate throughout the West—Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, the Spanish Reconquista, the defeat of the Turks at the gates of Vienna. The era of Western expansion was accomplished by Christian explorers and colonists. Until quite recently, the flourishing of science, technology, and art occurred entirely within a Christian context.

Much of my scholarly interest has been to attempt to understand the people and culture of the West, resulting in my book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future. As I argue there, individualism lends itself to moral and ethical universalism which led to the religiously based eradication of slavery long before the rise of an elite hostile to Christianity itself. And White intellectuals in the nineteenth century attempting to understand their own moral universalism often attributed it to their racial origins.

Such individualism was not disastrously self-destructive. As Corey notes, “Christian universalism historically posed little to no danger to White survival because it was preached by Whites living in a world ruled by Whites; it was only in the multicultural Egalitarian Regime inseminated in the mid-twentieth century that Christian sacrifice was transformed into a call for racial suicide.” The individualist, Christian West was thus highly adaptive—until the rise of a hostile, Jewish-dominated elite bent on corrupting adaptive forms of Christian individualism in favor of a completely deracinated individualism, now accompanied by powerful religious, media, and academic voices preaching White guilt, often from a Christian perspective.

Instead, Corey advocates a revitalization of Medieval Germanic Christianity based on, in the words of Samuel Francis, “social hierarchy, loyalty to tribe and place (blood and soil), world-acceptance rather than world-rejection, and an ethic that values heroism and military sacrifice.” This medieval Christianity preserved the aristocratic, fundamentally Indo-European culture of the Germanic tribes. This was an adaptive Christianity, a Christianity that was compatible with Western expansion, to the point that by the end of the nineteenth century, the West dominated the planet. Christianity per se is certainly not the problem.

The decline of adaptive Christianity coincides with the post-Enlightenment rise of the Jews throughout the West as an anti-Christian elite, and Corey has a great deal of very interesting material on traditional Christian views of Judaism. Traditional Christian theology viewed the Church as having superseded the Old Testament and that, by rejecting the Church, the Jews had not only rejected God, they were responsible for murdering Christ. My view, developed in Chapter 3 of Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism is that traditional Christian theology was fundamentally anti-Jewish and was developed as a weapon which was used to lessen Jewish economic and political power in the Roman Empire. Here Corey describes the writings of the fourth-century figure, St. John Chrysostom, who has a chapel dedicated to him inside St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome as well as a statue outside the building. His writings on Jews are nothing less than scathing and reflect long-term tensions between Jews and Greeks in Antioch. And Chrysostom was far from alone in his hatred. For example, St. Gregory of Nyssa, also writing in the fourth century: “ [Jews are] murderers of the Lord, assassins of the prophets, rebels against God, God haters, . . . advocates of the devil, race of vipers, slanderers, calumniators, dark-minded people, leaven of the Pharisees, sanhedrin of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners, and haters of righteousness.” The traditional Church was certainly far from friendly toward Jews.

And although Protestantism was generally far more amenable to Jewish interests even before its current malaise, there certainly are exceptions. Here Corey emphasizes Martin Luther’s writings on Jews. Luther emphasizes Jewish hatred toward Christianity and their sense of superiority vis-à-vis Christians, seeing the latter as “not human; in fact, we hardly deserve to be considered poor worms by them.” But he is also concerned about Jewish economic exploitation and domination of Germans via usury—certainly the biggest complaint about Jews in traditional Europe. And he is repulsed by Talmudic ethics which promote very different moral codes for Jews and non-Jews.

However, much has changed since the origins of Christianity. In the contemporary United States, Christian Zionism has had a very large influence on Evangelical Protestantism whose theology departs radically from traditional Christianity, particularly with respect to the Jews. Corey has an excellent section on how Jews helped shape this new theology; it should be required reading for Christian Zionists because it would open their eyes to the sordid history of the movement. The result of such thinking is that Zionism has often become a vehicle of moral idealism in the minds of a great many gentiles, from Lloyd George to the present, who believe that the restoration of Israel is far more important than the fate of their own people.

Jews have not stood by idly on this but have actively supported the Christian Zionism movement. I noted in a 2010 article on the delusional Pastor John Hagee:

Beginning in 1978, the Likud Party in Israel has taken the lead in organizing this force for Israel, and they have been joined by the neocons. For example, in 2002 the Israeli embassy organized a prayer breakfast with the major Christian Zionists. The main organizations are the Unity Coalition for Israel which is run by Esther Levens and Christians United for Israel, run by David Brog. The Unity Coalition for Israel consists of ~200 Christian and Jewish organizations and has strong connections to neocon think tanks such as the Center for Security Policy, headed by Frank Gaffney, pro-Israel activist organizations the Zionist Organization of America, the Likud Party and the Israeli government. This organization claims to provide material for 1,700 religious radio stations, 245 Christian TV stations, and 120 Christian newspapers.[1]

Corey notes that Hagee’s organization, A Night to Honor Israel, has donated over $100 million to right-wing causes in Israel over the years. He has been well rewarded financially for his efforts and is the recipient of numerous awards from Zionist organizations.

Christian Zionism is a fitting reminder of how humans, unlike animals, can be motivated by ideas, including ideas that are completely unrelated to believers’ real interests. These ideas may be disseminated by people who are only doing so for selfish reasons, such as the dishonorable Cyrus Scofield, whose annotated Bible has become central to Christian Zionism. Maladaptive ideas may also be disseminated by people who are utterly opposed to the legitimate interests of believers or even hate Christianity and the West in general. Here Corey discusses the role of Felix Untermeyer, a wealthy Jew, in promoting Scofield and his Bible. It was a religious ideology “with a new worship icon—the modern state of Israel,” and Corey does an excellent job showing how Christian Zionism is a radical departure from traditional Christian theology. I found the following passage quite stunning:

The heresy of Christian Zionism, using an arbitrary and self-contradictory literalist and futurist hermeneutic, contends that the Jews remain God’s chosen people, separate from and superior to the Church; indeed, they believe that earthly Jewish Israel will replace the Church, and that as such, “Christians, and indeed whole nations, will be blessed through their association with, and support of, Israel.”

Although Christian Zionism is far less influential than the Israel Lobby in furthering Jewish interests in the United States, it has certainly had some influence and creates a ready-made cheering section for wars in the Middle East on behalf of Israel. After all, other attitudes typical of Christian Zionists, such as opposition to abortion or pornography, have had much less traction with the current left-oriented establishment despite their powerful commitment to the state of Israel.

Religious thinking is by its nature unbounded—it is infinitely malleable. It is a dangerous sword that can be used to further legitimate interests of believers, or it can become a lethal weapon whereby believers adopt attitudes that are obviously maladaptive. One need only think of religiously based suicide cults, such as People’s Temple (Jonestown), Solar Temple and Heaven’s Gate. Mainstream Christianity from traditional Catholicism to mainstream Protestantism was fundamentally adaptive in terms of creating a healthy family life. It was compatible with a culture characterized by extraordinary scientific and technological creativity and standards of living that have been much envied by the rest of the world.

Corey has great material on Jewish perceptions of Christianity in the Talmud and on negative Jewish influences on culture in the present West, including pornography and the sexual revolution generally. As is so often the case with Jewish activism, the pornography movement has been motivated not solely by money but by hatred toward Christian morality and Christian family functioning. The results have been devastating: huge increases since the 1960s—the breakthrough decade of Jewish power—in all the markers of family dysfunction and poor child outcomes: lower marriage rates, higher births out of wedlock, higher rates of teenage pregnancy, precocious sexuality, high divorce rates, and unstable pair bonds. In other words, the Western family pattern of monogamous nuclear families based on strong husband-wife pair bonds has been under attack from Jewish dominated movements, the most noteworthy of which was psychoanalysis promising an idyllic future if only people would jettison traditional Christian constraints on sexuality. These negative trends in family functioning have been most pronounced among the lower social classes and thus have much less effect on high-IQ middle- and upper-income groups, including Jews as a relatively high-IQ group. The disaster in family patterns has fallen far more severely on the White working class.

Corey’s has an extended treatment of the corrosive effects of pornography, now extended to child pornography and legalized pedophilia as the “final frontier” in the sexual revolution. As in other areas, this starts out by advocating language that makes the activity more or less acceptable depending on the interests of advocates. In the case of pedophilia, the first step is to label them “minor attracted persons,” whereas in the area of free speech, we find labels like “hate speech”—even for speech that is reasonable and fact-based. If issues related to free speech are any guide, there will soon be articles in law journals arguing that pedophilia is normal and should not be punished, and eventually courts will begin to adopt this logic in particular cases. Already Supreme Court justices like Elena Kagan have signaled a willingness to curtail speech on diversity issues,[2]

 and this would be joined by the other liberals, which would mean that curtailing free speech on race is at most one Supreme Court appointment away. And when that happens, it won’t be long before it is embraced by conservatives. As Corey notes in the case of pedophilia, “We are presumably one Supreme Court ruling away from the National Review cocktail ‘conservative’ crowd celebrating pederasty as the next great achievement of individual liberty.”

Given the exhaustive summary of the negative effects of pornography—including neurological impairments related to impulsivity and lessened interest in familial relationships of love and nurturance—it is horrifying indeed that “sixty percent of boys and thirty percent of girls were exposed to pornography in early adolescence, including ‘bondage, rape, and child pornography’, and another which concludes that children under ten years old now account for over twenty percent of online pornographic consumption.” This definitely was not happening when I was growing up in the 1950s, prior to the deluge. I agree with Corey’s conclusion, “We have conclusively established that Jewish leadership and participation was instrumental in and a necessary condition of the pornographic war that has struck at the most sacred foundation of the West, the family.” As Freud famously said, “we are bringing them the plague.”

Corey has an excellent and exhaustive section on Jewish ritual murder—an absolutely convincing presentation on a topic that, like so much of Jewish history, is a minefield for serious scholars. As he notes, “There are … hundreds of accusations and cases of Jewish ritual murder, each just as sadistically depraved as the last, involving barrels of nails, crucifixion, decapitation, spit-roasting, stoning, and a litany of other barbaric evils; we could fill entire volumes with the accounts of each of these innocent lives so cruelly taken from this world.”

 

This is a topic that I have never written about, although I was somewhat familiar with Blood Passover, Ariel Toaff’s book on the topic. As to be expected, Toaff’s book was condemned by the activist Jewish community and he was pressured into publishing an apology, promising to prevent distribution of his book, etc. However, we should not be surprised to find that such practices occurred. Ritual murder is an extreme manifestation of normative Jewish hostility toward the surrounding society which is an important facet of the entire subject. The eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon was struck by the fanatical hatred of Jews in the ancient world:

From the reign of Nero to that of Antoninus Pius, the Jews discovered a fierce impatience of the dominion of Rome, which repeatedly broke out in the most furious massacres and insurrections. Humanity is shocked at the recital of the horrid cruelties which they committed in the cities of Egypt, of Cyprus, and of Cyrene, where they dwelt in treacherous friendship with the unsuspecting natives; and we are tempted to applaud the severe retaliation which was exercised by the arms of the legions against a race of fanatics, whose dire and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but of human kind.[3]

The nineteenth-century Spanish historian José Amador de los Rios wrote of the Spanish Jews who assisted the Muslim conquest of Spain that “without any love for the soil where they lived, without any of those affections that ennoble a people, and finally without sentiments of generosity, they aspired only to feed their avarice and to accomplish the ruin of the Goths; taking the opportunity to manifest their rancor, and boasting of the hatreds that they had hoarded up so many centuries.”[4]

As I noted in an article titled “Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the Soviet Union,” “Hatred toward the peoples and cultures of non-Jews and the image of enslaved ancestors as victims of anti-Semitism have been the Jewish norm throughout history—much commented on, from Tacitus (“they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies”[5]) to the present.”[6] Toaff brings out the revenge motive: “In their collective mentality, the Passover Seder had long since transformed itself into a celebration in which the wish for the forthcoming redemption of the people of Israel moved from aspiration to revenge, and then to cursing their Christian persecutors, the current heirs to the wicked Pharaoh of Egypt.”

Hatred and revenge were clearly on display in the early decades of the Soviet Union, a period in which around 20 million people were murdered. From “Stalin’s Willing Executioners,” a review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century:

There can be little doubt that Lenin’s contempt for “the thick-skulled, boorish, inert, and bearishly savage Russian or Ukrainian peasant” was shared by the vast majority of shtetl Jews prior to the Revolution and after it. Those Jews who defiled the holy places of traditional Russian culture and published anti-Christian periodicals doubtless reveled in their tasks for entirely Jewish reasons, and, as Gorky worried, their activities not unreasonably stoked the anti-Semitism of the period. Given the anti-Christian attitudes of traditional shtetl Jews, it is very difficult to believe that the Jews engaged in campaigns against Christianity did not have a sense of revenge against the old culture that they held in such contempt. …

Slezkine seems comfortable with revenge as a Jewish motive, but he does not consider traditional Jewish culture itself to be a contributor to Jewish attitudes toward traditional Russia, even though he notes that a very traditional part of Jewish culture was to despise the Russians and their culture. (Even the Jewish literati despised all of traditional Russian culture, apart from Pushkin and a few literary icons.) Indeed, one wonders what would motivate the Jewish commissars to revenge apart from motives related to their Jewish identity. …

Slezkine’s argument that Jews were critically involved in destroying traditional Russian institutions, liquidating Russian nationalists, murdering the tsar and his family, dispossessing and murdering the kulaks, and destroying the Orthodox Church has been made by many other writers over the years. …

The situation prompts reflection on what might have happened in the United States had American Communists and their sympathizers assumed power. The “red diaper babies” came from Jewish families which “around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is.”[7] … It is easy to imagine which sectors of American society would have been deemed overly backward and religious and therefore worthy of mass murder by the American counterparts of the Jewish elite in the Soviet Union—the ones who journeyed to Ellis Island instead of Moscow. The descendants of these overly backward and religious people now loom large among the “red state” voters who have been so important in recent national elections. Jewish animosity toward the Christian culture that is so deeply ingrained in much of America is legendary. As Joel Kotkin points out, “for generations, [American] Jews have viewed religious conservatives with a combination of fear and disdain.” And as Elliott Abrams notes, the American Jewish community “clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts.”

As the quote from neocon Elliott Abrams—and much else—indicate, this fear and loathing continues into the present. Consistent with what we know of the psychology of ethnocentrism, a fundamental motivation of Jewish intellectuals and activists involved in social criticism has simply been hatred of the non-Jewish power structure perceived as anti-Jewish and deeply immoral—Susan Sontag’s “the white race is the cancer of human history,” which was published in Partisan Review, a prominent literary journal associated with the New York Intellectuals (a Jewish intellectual movement), is emblematic.

As I write this in the summer of 2020, we are experiencing what feels like the end game in the Jewish conquest of White America. Because Jews have become a hostile elite with a powerful position in the media and educational system, Jewish attitudes in the 1950s that the U.S. is an “awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society” are now entirely mainstream and the cancel culture that we see now is indeed directed most of all toward White red state voters, particularly in the South. Cancel culture started with toppling Confederate monuments, but of course it didn’t stop there, so now statues of the Founding Fathers are being destroyed and there are demands that statues dedicated to Christian religious figures be removed. Jews in particular havedemanded the removal of a statue of King Louis IX of France because of his attempt to curb Jewish moneylending in the interests of his people and for burning 12000 copies of the Talmud.

 

The Cathedral of Notre Dame burning, April 15, 2019. Much of the cathedral was built during the reign of St. Louis.

This hatred won’t end if and when Whites become a minority. Jews were responsible for the 1965 immigration law that opened up the United States to immigration from all over the world, and they have energetically worked to make alliances with these immigrant groups who are encouraged to hate White America and often adopt anti-White rhetoric almost as soon as they arrive because they can see the political advantages of doing so.

This won’t end well. As I concluded in my recent book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition:

I agree with Enoch Powell: “as I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”[8]

 All the utopias dreamed up by the Left inevitably lead to bloodshed—because they conflict with human nature. The classical Marxist Utopian vision of a classless society in the USSR self-destructed, but only after murdering millions of its own people. Now the multicultural utopian version that has become dominant throughout the West is showing signs of producing intense opposition and irreconcilable polarization.

Given the very large Jewish involvement in these projects consequent to the Jewish rise to elite status throughout the West, the big picture is that the thrust of Jewish power has been to create societies envisioned as being good for Jews, inevitably advertised in idealistic, morally uplifting, humanitarian terms [to appeal to the evolutionary psychology of individualism where social ties are based on belong to moral communities rather than communities based on kinship ties]. Historically, such projects have typically not ended well and have resulted in massive social upheavals. It would thus not be surprising if current social divisions result in a movement characterized by anti-Jewish overtones. …

All of the measures of White representation in the forces of social control will continue to decline in the coming years given the continued deterioration of the demographic situation. At this point, even stopping immigration completely and deporting illegals would not be enough to preserve a White America long term.

The left and its big business allies have created a monster. Whites have to realize that if they do nothing, they will be increasingly victimized and vilified in the coming decades as the monster continues to gain power. Better that any blood be shed sooner rather than later.

 

What happened in the early decades of the Soviet Union is a chilling reminder of what can happen when an alien hostile elite seizes control of a country.

I agree entirely with Corey’s conclusions and recommendations for a revival centered around the adaptive aspects of Christianity—the aspects that produced Western expansion, innovation, discovery, individual freedom, economic prosperity, and strong family bonds. A Christianity that is adaptive in the evolutionary sense of survival and reproduction and fundamentally cognizant of the mistakes of the past.

We must not tolerate subversion. Liberalism must go; we cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the Enlightenment. We cannot afford to countenance any further anti-American, anti-family, anti-White speech, and this should be reflected in a new Constitution. Just as conservatism was not enough, the United States Constitution was not enough, with gaps that left it gaping wide for judicial “interpretation.” For another thing, we must circle the wagons and inculcate the männerbund, restraining our individualism at least for the time being. For another, we must return to our Lord and Savior. A nation without faith can have no guiding light, no purpose, no drive, no Mission. Izaak Walton, writing of his friend John Donne’s last days, described the body “which was once a temple of the Holy Ghost and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust.” His last line: “But I shall see it reanimated.”

Kevin MacDonald, August 9, 2020

Notes

[1] Kevin MacDonald, “Christian Zionism,” The Occidental Observer (March 12, 2010).

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2010/03/12/kevin-macdonald-christian-zionism/

[2] Kevin MacDonald, “Elena Kagan: Jewish Ethnic Networking Eases the Path of a Liberal/Leftist to the Supreme Court, The Occidental Observer (May 20, 2009).

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2009/05/20/elena-kagan/

[3] Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol.1, ed. J. B. Bury (London: Methuen, 1909), 78.

[4] Quoted in W. T. Walsh, Isabella of Spain: The Last Crusader (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1930), 196.

[5] Tacitus, The History 5, 4, 659.

[6] Kevin MacDonald, “Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the USSR.” Review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. The Occidental Quarterly, 5(3), 65–100, 93–94.

[7] This quote comes from Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, Chapter 3.

[8] “Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech,” The Telegraph (November 6, 2007).

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html

https://www.unz.com/article/preface-to-giles-coreys-the-sword-of-christ/ 

bionic mosquito: The Church and Violence -(More history! -CL)

Knights and Chivalry, a video by Ryan Reeves

Given the warring nature of society during the early Middle Ages, especially in the regions of today’s France, and the not uncommon attacks against non-warring peasants, the Church stepped in to address this via a series of actions and decrees.

The first tactic was to scold the knights.  This evolved eventually into a meaningful and formal attempt, captured under the banner of the Peace and Truce of God.  it was not an avenue to bless fighting; it was designed as a means to curtail the fighting that was in any case occurring.

The Peace of God

The Peace of God or Pax Dei was a proclamation issued by local clergy that granted immunity from violence to noncombatants who could not defend themselves, beginning with the peasants (agricolae) and with the clergy. The Synod of Charroux decreed a limited Pax Dei in 989, and the practice spread to most of Western Europe over the next century, surviving in some form until at least the thirteenth century.

Further protections would be offered, regarding women and children, the theft of farm animals, protection of church property, etc.  The penalty for violations could rise to excommunication.

Its origins coincided with the failure of the last Carolingian rulers to keep order in West Frankland, and the accession of Hugh Capet, founder of a new dynasty in 987.

This was a popular movement, as the discussions involved many people in large, open fields, and not merely a discussion amongst the bishops and nobles.  Saints’ relics were brought from the region; the warriors would then swear an oath on the relics in the presence of the crowds.  Paul Collins would write, in The Birth of the West:

The biggest threat to those breaking the peace was the use of relics and the bodies of the saints to frighten warlords with curses of from the afterlife if they engaged in warfare.

Those who refused to keep the peace were excluded from Mass and Communion, refused forgiveness of sin, and denied church burial in consecrated ground, which effectively condemned them to hell.

Tom Holland would add, from his book Millennium:

Fearsome were the sanctions proclaimed against any horseman who might subsequently go back upon his word.  A lighted candle, extinguished by the fingers of a bishop himself and dropped into the dust, would serve to symbolise the terrible snuffing out of all his hopes of heaven.  “May he render up his bowels into the latrine.”

The movement gained momentum around the millennium anniversary of Christ’s death – assumed 1033.  Such popular movements, however, did not instantly transform the nobility.  Many historians traditionally looked at the movement as a failure:

That traditional view, however, by concentrating on the failure of the movement to accomplish its quasi-messianic goals, misses the indirect impact it had. More recently historians accord a central place to the Peace in the transformations of European culture in this period, a period often characterized as the birth of Western (as opposed to Mediterranean) civilization.

The lack of a coercive force behind the demand for peace may have been what moved European culture and tradition:

For without recourse to force, it had to depend on more fundamental cultural activity: building a wide and powerful social consensus, developing courts of mediation, educating a lay populace, high and low, to internalize peaceful values.

In other words, don’t look to the state (or king) to enforce a proper cultural view; the only way to transform a culture is to transform the culture.  This had many follow-on effects: it awakened the populace to the possibility of self-organization; it Christianized the nobility, leading to a chivalric code (with more on this shortly); it gave authority to the Church, giving it space as a major player in the political and social life of the time; it opened up a dialogue on the true meaning of Christianity.

The Peace of God evolved to include the idea that the shedding of a Christian’s blood was the shedding of Christ’s blood.  This had ramifications for the peace internally, but also toward views regarding those on the outside – primarily Muslims.

Through its high moral vision and its appeals to communal action, the Peace of God furthered the peaceful organization of a violent society.

And this, I think is key: the society was violent; the Church led action to curb this violence.  That heaven on earth was not achieved is almost irrelevant; that the culture was shifted toward considerations of peace is both valuable and without doubt.

It was during this period, and in no small part to the sentiment behind the Peace of God despite the lack of consistent application, that the individual was discovered.  Returning to Collins:

Individuality here refers to a sense of self-awareness, personal identity, and moral responsibility.  It also involves spirituality.  As Morris says, “A sense of individual identity and value is implicit in a belief in a God who has called each man by name.”

It was Christianity that identified the individual, and this well before the Enlightenment or even the Renaissance.

The Truce of God

The Truce of God, or Treuga Dei came in 1027, the result of another council meeting this time in Normandy.  The Truce of God is after a temporary suspension of hostilities, unlike the Peace of God, which is intended to be perpetual.

It confirmed permanent peace for all churches and their grounds, the monks, clerks and chattels; all women, pilgrims, merchants and their servants, cattle and horses; and men at work in the fields. For all others peace was required throughout Advent, the season of Lent, and from the beginning of the Rogation days until eight days after Pentecost.

More days were added to the list, until only about 80 days per year were available for fighting. 

From William Ward Watkin: the long sweep from Constantine’s reign until the close of the Hundred Years’ War cannot be considered a period of peace, but a period of seeking peace – to include a search for just causes of war and also establishing a just peace.  Early churchmen expressed that “justice is a quality of the will of God.”

“It is the Divine will which gives to each man his Jus (strict law), for it is the good and beneficial Creator who grants men to seek to hold, and to use what they need, and it is He who commands men to give such things to each other and forbids men to hinder their fellows from enjoying them.”

The feudal system, contrary to the stereotype, was a system of reciprocal obligation: the serf owed duty only as long as the noble kept his oath to the serf.  Yes, the serf was tied to the land – so was the noble; it was an agrarian society, after all.  The serf, unlike slaves before or after, could own and accumulate personal property and could leave it for his heirs.

From about the ninth century through the thirteenth, Christian civilization came into full flower.  While every region had its cultural differences, the over-riding clarity and purpose was one aimed at Christianity. 

In the middle of the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas would challenge the Truce of God, holding that it was lawful to wage war for purpose of safeguarding the commonweal on holidays and feast days.  Yes, there was still fighting – this is the human condition.

Yet, it was the time of the building of the greatest cathedrals: a generation before saw Chartres as well as other cathedrals in France.  From Watkin:

We find civilization at one of its extreme high levels in philosophy, in religion, and in creative construction.  No age has followed which approached it.

Chivalry

As mentioned, the Peace and Truce of God only had a limited effect – the Church had no physical means by which to curb the violence.  Therefore, the Church then sought to direct the desire of violence to something more noble: the chivalric code, a code of honor, developed by poets and writers affiliated with the Church.  Listen to the women; they will not send you off to senseless war but to a cause more noble.

Returning to Reeves: The key figure in developing the chivalric code is Chrétien de Troyes, in the twelfth century.  He was a chaplain, or pastor, in the area of Champagne in France.  He writes stories of King Arthur, including Perceval and the Holy Grail: seek the Church, seek the sacraments; this was the more noble undertaking for the knight.

He also added the story of Lancelot of the Lake, Lancelot who fell in love with King Arthur’s wife Guinevere.  He seeks to win Guinevere’s respect by doing good.  These stories were written not in Latin, but in the common vernacular.  This made it accessible to a larger portion of the knight class.

Hence, chivalry was not a result of male patriarchy or oppression of women; this is reading history backwards, from our time looking back.  Instead, the chivalric code sought to elevate women to a position of soft authority over the warrior instinct of the men.

There were other authors and works as well – written independently and without knowledge of the other works: the anonymously authored poem Ordene de chevalerie; the Libre del ordre de cavayleria, written by Ramon Llull; the Livre de Chevalerie of Geoffroi de Charny.  While differing in detail, they combine to show a way of life where the military, the nobility, and religion combine.

Conclusion

It is easy to point to the history of Christianity and find untoward behavior; we are all human after all.  Yet, every time one digs a little deeper, one finds that it was through Christianity that such behavior was tempered.

Epilogue

The Hundred Years’ War, along with the Black Death, fundamentally terminated this progress.  This long war was between the two powers – France and England – that were most centralized, most consolidated.  In its wake, nationalism grew while the commonality of a Christian culture receded.

In earlier times, the king’s powers were limited by the law – the old and good law or the common law.  This changed to a position where the king was the law.  Here is where one can begin to see a state in our understanding of the word.

World War One was the culmination, the final blow, the suicide of the West.

http://bionicmosquito.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-church-and-violence.html 

Matt's Musings: The Wicked Decided That The West Needed To Change

Satanic Feminism Series - Part One

How did our Western Culture become what it is today? Let’s wind back a little bit in time. You are in the 15^th Century, the West is Christendom. No, not everyone in Europe is a pious Christian, but many, many are. The Church, being both the structure of leadership and the people, are an integral part of the culture. All aspects of life are informed by the Scriptures and the long body of tradition of past saints understanding of those Scriptures. Christianity has advanced from its origins in the outskirt Roman province of Palestine to being the dominant religion in the regions of the ancient Roman Empire and beyond. There are churches in Briton and there are churches in the deserts of Arabia, as far as the eye can see and more. In virtually all of Europe kings reign under the assumption that they will face the King of Kings, Jesus, who is considered the true ruler of Europe. This is Christ’s kingdom, Christ’s dominion; Christendom. Indeed, this supremacy of the Christian Church in the West has existed for many centuries and would remain for many centuries. Any philosopher who would propose a system of thought would have to contend to some degree with Christian thought and writings. The Church truly did stand alongside kings, indeed in some ways over them.  

This Christendom was not perfect, it was not the millennial reign of Christ, though there were perhaps many churchmen who expected it to lead into that. But it was truly a golden age of enquiry, of discovery, of extension of the Church. As with other golden ages, it had it’s draw backs, but it was a time where Europeans were ardently working out how to live as Christians in this fallen world, not just as individual churches, or even Christian movements, but as a whole society. Paganism was in many ways both overcome and receding, though it would feed into different aspects of church life, Islam was a threat in various parts of Christendom, but it was being managed, and Judaism, a long and indeed original opponent of the Church, was mostly situated outside the West in the Eastern lands of Europe. Christian thought had been given a chance to flourish and show what it could do.

Despite what you have been told, intellectual thought was flourishing. Universities, founded in the 12^th century were dedicated to higher education, and unlike eastern academies, were places of innovation.[1] Scholars did not just hand down received wisdom, they investigated new and exciting avenues of knowledge.

The first two universities appeared in Paris and Bologna, in the middle of the twelfth century. Then, Oxford and Cambridge were founded about 1200, followed by a flood of new institutions during the remainder of the thirteenth century: Toulouse, Orléans, Naples, Salamanca, Seville, Lisbon, Grenoble, Padua, Rome, Perugia, Pisa, Modena, Florence, Prague, Cracow, Vienna, Heidelberg, Cologne, Ofen, Erfurt, Leipzig, and Rostock.[2]

These were the institutions where science was born.[3] Contrary to much modern propaganda which portrays this era as a dark age, it was actually an age where progress was being made in many of the scientific disciplines that would make our modern world possible. 

This is because scientific enquiry was part of the culture of these institutions. Building on the work of the ancient Greeks, rather than just preserving it, brilliant men made much progress on various aspects of the scientific body of knowledge.

Then came Bishop Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), who argued that “whether a man is on earth, or the sun, or some other star, it will always seem to him that the position he occupies is the motionless centre, and that all other things are in motion.” It followed that humans need not trust their perceptions that the earth is stationary; perhaps it isn’t. From here it required no leap in the dark to propose that the earth circles the sun.[4]

The rest as we know is history.

The popular view is that in this age political philosophy was a suppressed art, but really from Bede to Aquinas, from William of Ockham to Nicholas of Susa, and more, there were brilliant men writing about, theorizing, and teaching about philosophy and law and how society should be structured. As, Tierney has shown, the great thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, built on the foundation of Roman law and Scripture to develop advanced philosophies of law.[5] Our society stands on the shoulders of intellectual giants from this era, more than most westerners know. Ideas like natural rights, liberty, justice for all, and all manner of other philosophical topics were being investigated. As Rodney Stark says, “So much progress took place during the so-called Dark Ages that by no later than the thirteenth century, Europe had forged ahead of Rome and Greece, and ahead of the rest of the World as well.”[6] This is a significant achievement.

I don’t want to oversell my case, it was not heaven on earth, many aspects of science and medicine were in their infancy, it was still a very violent era. But it was a kingdom based on the principle that on earth as it is in heaven, with different expressions varied among the nations, and definitely the 20^th century, the era of “secular liberal democracy” has more blood on its hands than any other era, outside of maybe the Mongol conquests. The Church was an integral contributor and facilitator of much of this advancement. It was not the stark overlord suppressing innovation, it was the shepherd creating green pastures for it to be nourished. Remember it was churchmen who started universities, not secular free thinkers.   

Fast forward to the now decadent 21^st century and the Church is a marginalized character in Western society. It still hold’s influence, but rarely any real power. The Church that in the 11^th century under Pope Gregory VII was able to make Henry IV, heir of Charlemagne, wait in the cold barefoot for three days is a shadow of its former self.[7] Indeed, if you speak to many Christians they don’t want the Church to have political power. It is common for Christians to say something like this: “Do you want to return to the witch burnings of Middle Ages, the Church persecuted many people, it is better for the state to be non-religious, or at least secular in its approach to religion.” I know this position well, because I have engaged with many well-meaning Christians who held it, in fact it used to be my position.  

One of the unavoidable aspects of growing up in a particular culture, is that you find it hard to critique it honestly. It is hard to critique a culture when you are given your tools by that culture. It is for this reason, that as the son of an Englishmen, who grew up in the thriving former British colony of Australia, that I was a big fan of English Imperialism (and by extension American imperialism). I was a big fan of the secular culture that I believed Australia had successfully forged. I was a big believer in absolute free speech, and absolute religious tolerance which I held to be part of the success of the West. I was a big fan of many aspects of our culture on which I have now heavily qualified my views, or have completely flipped on. Why is that?

Because history shows that much of our Western culture has been degraded and deliberately so. There are many ways to demonstrate this. I was once asked by a maths teacher to give a statistical demonstration that egalitarianism is bad for the Church, I showed him that in 100% of egalitarian societies the Church had drastically declined in the last century. One, even ten examples are correlation, but 100%? This goes beyond correlation, it points to a reason why the Church struggles in modern society. And this makes complete sense, as egalitarianism is neither taught or encouraged in the Bible, indeed it is absolutely rebuked (see here). If something is rebuked in scripture, it stands to reason that such a thing, if employed by the church would have a terrible effect. But he did not find this argument convincing, because he wanted detailed demographic statistics, not just historical trends.

Well, I am not going to get deeply into historical statistics in this series, what I am going to do is point to historical trends, historical designs of certain individuals and movements,  and then compare what was, to what now is, and ask this simple question: is our culture now more like the Christian one that proceeded us, or like the Satanic one that sought to push us in a new direction? I think the answer is resounding; we live in Satandom. Conclusively, unequivocally, this is demonstratable, and I am going to demonstrate it with this series.

But I want to go beyond just proving this, I want to show you in this series that our culture was deliberately, cleverly, and systematically subverted, much of that which we call virtuous today was considered the utmost of wickedness not very long ago. Today we consider a woman who sends her children to child-care a strong independent woman, not so long ago this sort of woman would have been challenged by polite society. Today we consider abortion a right, not so long ago it was considered the utmost of wicked crimes. Today we consider a man who sends his daughter off to war a progressive, indeed even conservative men brag about this, not so long ago this man would not have been considered a man. Today we consider many things to be virtues which as I said would have been considered the utmost wickedness not so long ago.

The usual answer to this by moderns and post-moderns, is that we have progressed, and because we have progressed we are therefore superior to those who came before us. I refer to this as modern supremacy, the idea that an idea or people is superior by virtue of it’s existing in current year. C.S. Lewis called this chronological snobbery. But this is foolish, current year does not equal better, it’s just a reference to placement in time.

Especially not if we are aware of this: the Bible is a vital column underpinning true Western society. It is common for modern Australians, and other westerners, to be ignorant of this fact, but the Bible is one of the cornerstones of Christendom and our entire heritage.

For example, Faxneld, author of Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture[8], writes:

Of course, Genesis 3 is a central story in our culture even pertaining to matters that do not relate to gender. R. W. L. Moberly asserts about the fall narrative: ‘No story from the Old Testament has had a greater impact upon the theology of the Christian Church and the art and literature of Western civilisation.’ Tryggve Mettinger views the issue at stake to be ‘whether the two humans will respect the line of demarcation between themselves and the divine world’, since [w]isdom (knowledge) and immortality are divine prerogatives’. The hubris theme is, in fact, recurrent throughout the chapters of Genesis. For example, we see it again in the Tower of Babel story (Gen. 11:2-9), where mankind tries to construct a tower reaching in the heavens and is punished by God, who creates the different languages so that men can no longer understand one another and cooperate on this blasphemous building project.

In other-words a foundational aspect of Western society is knowing our place in relation to God, and Genesis 3, and Genesis 11, and other biblical accounts, have played a vital role in making this a foundational idea. This is the reason why since Constantine, kings and emperors could not get away with claiming to be divine, and is a big part of the reason that historically Western men led the Church, the political structures, and other aspects of society. If a Western king forgot his place in reference to God, the rest of society would shout: know your place! Indeed, this shout was led by the Church. And men are reminded by Genesis 3 that when the first man neglected his duty to lead, this led to the fall of humanity into doom. A powerful warning!  

Of course, wicked elements in the West knew that to change the West, foundational passages like this needed to be subverted. Hence Paxneld also tells us,

Nineteenth-century feminists often felt they somehow had to deal with male chauvinists’ use of the story in Genesis 3. One way of doing so, which seems to have been quite widespread, was to turn the tale on its head, making Eve a heroine and the serpent benevolent. The present study tells the history of how this type of tactic – a counter hegemonic interpretation, or counter reading – was also used to subvert various other aspects of the mythology of woman as Lucifer’s confederate.[9]

Paxneld’s work explains how western society was successful subverted, and I want to share with you what I have been learning on that very subject, with the help of Faxneld and other works.

We live in a Satanic era. The Devil is the ruler of this world, and hence we should expect him to have a level of supremacy in the culture of the fallen world. But there are degrees to which his evil can be pushed back. The West of the past is an example of that push back, the West of today is an example of how clever the Devil is in gaining back ground.

Over the next few months I will share more of this story, and look at how we can fight back. We who believe in Christ are called to stand against evil, and those who don’t, well even many of them are waking up to just how evil, evil is. Evil must be resisted. Deus Vult!

References

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[1] Stark, Rodney, 2006. The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Chapter 2.

[2] Ibid. Chapter 2.

[3] Ibid. Chapter 2.

[4] Ibid. Chapter 2.

[5] Tierney, Brian,  1997. The Idea of Natural Rights. William B Eerdmans. p.27.  

[6] Stark, Rodney. The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success . Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Chapter 2.

[7] Philip Schaff, 1988, History of the Christian Church: Volume V, The Middle Ages A.D. 1049-1294. William B. Eerdmans: Michigan. pp47-59.

[8] Per Faxneld, 2017, Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Oxford University Press: New York. pp35-36.

[9] Ibid. pp72.

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