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 15th 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 12th 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 20th 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 21st 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 11th 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
[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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