Black Legends and the Light of the World:

The War of Words with the Incarnate Word

 

John C. Rao, D. Phil., Oxford

Associate Professor of History, St. John’s University
 

 

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Brief Synopsis, Introductory Quotations, and Table of Contents

 

Black Legends and the Light of the World is a thematic discussion of the whole of Church History, based upon the Roman Forum Summer Symposia at Gardone Riviera in Italy (1993-2011).  This work has three purposes: first of all, to explain the successes of Catholic Christendom as the product of faithfulness to the fullness of the message of the Incarnate Word to the individual and society; secondly, to connect Christendom’s historical failures to a painful, recurring, clerical and lay Catholic willingness to believe rhetorical “word merchants” who either blacken that world-changing teaching, or reduce it to a harmless caricature of itself; and, finally, to demonstrate the essential unity of such misleading, rhetorical word merchandizing in its unending, disruptive, all-out war against the substantive natural and supernatural correction and transformation of man offered by the Word---from the age of the Sophists to that of Global Pluralism.

 

“Christ said ‘I am the Truth’. He did not say, ‘I am custom’.”

          -Pope St. Gregory VII, citing Tertullian

 

“There are times when an elevated spirit is a true infirmity. No one  understands it. It even passes for a kind of mental limitation.”

       -Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe

 

“Now battle had to be joined, and therefore men were needed to restore  a new order, and new theologians as well,

to whom the evil was  manifest from its outward phenomena down to its most subtle roots;

then the time would come for the first stroke of the consecrated sword, piercing the darkness like a lightning flash.

For this reason individuals had the duty of living in alliance with others, gathering the treasure of a new rule of law.

But the alliance had to be stronger than before, and they more conscious of it.”

-Ernst Jünger, Auf den Marmorklippen, XX
 

 

Table of Contents

 

Introduction:

On Weaponry and Terrain............................................................................1

 

Chapter One 

First Blood....................................................................................................15

 

Chapter Two

The Attack of the Word................................................................................27

 

Chapter Three

The Turbulent Battle for a Christian Imperial Order..................................56

 

Chapter Four

The New Ascent of Mount Tabor...............................................................117

 

Chapter Five

Counterattack and Resistance on the Cheap...............................................171

 

Chapter Six

The War of All Against All or the Peace of the Reinvigorated Word.........247

 

Chapter Seven

The Global Battle for Nature: Modern Naturalism

and the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo................................................313

 

Chapter Eight

The Naturalist Revolution, the Implosion of the GCSQ, 

and the Troubled Beginnings of the Ninth Crusade...................................375 

 

Chapter Nine

The Ninth Crusade: Retrenchment and Renewed Assault.........................429

 

Chapter Ten

Firestorm in the Kingdom of the Word.......................................................496

 

Chapter Eleven

When the Salt Loses its Savor: 

Mindless Rout and Voluntary Enslavement to the Words.........................573

 

Epilogue

My End is My Beginning...........................................................................631