To begin with, however, what most needs to be emphasized are two crucial historical points. First of all, it is indeed ignorance---a criminal form of ignorance---that we are fighting. Secondly, its source can only be referred to as a “fresh spring” in an ironic sense. For the seemingly inexhaustible sewer from which this criminal ignorance emerged went into operation half a millennium ago, and actually began to be drilled even before the Incarnation of Christ Our Lord. And those drawing from it have ceaselessly spewed forth their destructive stupidities under the guise of providing an “obvious, unquestionable wisdom”, backed not by argument, but through the diabolical mockery, silencing, and physical suppression of their opponents.
Our Current Earthly Hell is the Inevitable Fruit of Modern “Freedom”
An effective “basic training” for the practical conduct of the warfare now upon us requires our full intellectual awareness of the cause and standard operating procedures of this criminal ignorance plunging us into our earthly hell. Contrary to some of the negative comments on my last installment, the Democratic Party proclivities of the majority of my fellow New Yorkers are not the sole source of their miseries. What we are witnessing today is the final maturation of the “fruit” of a revolutionary “tree” first emerging from the above mentioned sewer waters five hundred years ago; a fruit that all too many of us today, Catholics included, still---perhaps unwittingly---continue to devour with delight. Moreover, the “spilt milk” that one critic said that I was “crying over” is not a problem that only wicked New Yorkers are (in the words of another) “deservedly” suffering from. Everyone, guilty and innocent, is or is soon going to be suffering from this disaster, especially if we do not fix clearly in our minds the real character of the enemy we have to defeat.
The fruit from that sewer watered revolutionary tree, as many nineteenth and early twentieth century defenders of the reign of Christ the King so brilliantly taught, comes from a seed labeled “freedom”, planted in the muck by Luther and Calvin as a declaration of independence from the authority of the Mystical Body of Christ. This seed could not help but logically snowball into a universal call for “liberty” from all supernatural and natural truth, badly undermining the society in which we live in ways that we have often not wanted to open our eyes to see and unseal our lips to admit. Please bear with me as I develop the arguments of these great men further. For there is absolutely no point in moving onto the crucial, practical mobilization measures that we must tackle next if our heads are not screwed firmly on our shoulders first.
Here is the basic point they so cogently made. Luther and Calvin willfully wished “freedom” from the divine authority of the Church to support their individual understanding of Christianity. But that Church had allied itself with natural, Socratic philosophy to such a degree that in order to fight Roman Catholicism fully, logic demanded a willful demand for “freedom” from the clear dictates of rational wisdom as well. Finally, the logical perception that what was really being asserted here was the supremacy of the arbitrary willfulness of the proponents of “liberty” over anything standing in their way brought an insistence that each and every individual be “free” to break asunder all bonds of God and nature, all guidelines for thought and behavior blocking the fall of the passionate man into a completely nihilistic hell. Listen to the prophetic words of the thinkers in question.[1]
Having abolished the supernatural and returned to pagan rationalism, the modernizers could not stop there, and had to continue the demolition, first of all moral truths that serve as the foundation of the existence of all social order, then of the entire natural organic structure of society.
Starting with the words “I am free” and their newly found spirit of
independence, men began to believe in the infallibility of whatever
seemed natural to them, and then to call “nature” everything that is
sickness and weakness; to want sickness and weakness to be
encouraged instead of healed; to suppose that encouraging weakness
makes men healthier and happy; to conclude, finally, that human
nature {conceived of as sickness and weakness} possesses the means
to render man and society blissful on earth, and this without faith,
grace, authority, or supernatural community…since “nature” gives
us the feeling that it must be so.
The only wisdom that will remain is the wisdom of the individual to be ignorant of every essence, to deny all of the laws of logic, to fall into the abyss of complete ignorance in order to attain to the apex of perfect liberty.”
Is this not exactly what has happened to us? These nineteenth century counterrevolutionary Catholics would not have been at all surprised by the contemporary encouragement of five year old boys demanding to be accepted as girls, or the contempt expressed by trans-and post-humanists longing to become machines or animals for everything that they mock as the “currently human”. Nor would they have been stunned that this sickness unto death was blessed by “Catholic” Supreme Court Justice Kennedy through his proclamation in the case of Planned Parenthood versus Casey that: “At the heart of liberty is right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” For Kennedy’s whole environment had all too long and all too carelessly eaten of the fruit of the tree of modern freedom emerging from the sewer waters of Protestantism. Our whole society---not just New York---is getting what is deserves in consequence.
Catholic Thinkers and the Reign of Terror of the Criminally Insane
Catholic counterrevolutionary thinkers also pointed out that even though the radical disciples of Luther almost immediately understood where the logic of liberation was headed, Christendom as a whole nevertheless only slowly proceeded down the pathway that the principle of modern freedom dictated. Why should this have been the case? Partly because the Catholic Church continued to fight it, but also due to the behavior of the “useful idiots” of the Revolution: first of all, the original Evangelical Protestant leaders---honestly horrified by what they heard the radicals saying---and then the manifold supporters of Liberalism under all of its many names, “Conservative” included. Luther and Liberals of all types would not abandon the cry for “freedom”; they simply did not want it to apply to any “liberty” going beyond the boundary point they arbitrarily set for it, always making appeals to “traditions” and a “common sense” their principle undermines, and ultimately to willful force to try to prevent radical logic from wreaking any havoc they illogically considered to be “unacceptable”.
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None of this has stopped the progressive march of the nihilist beast. Each assertion of the need for greater freedom on the part of more radical forces has eventually been successful. No wonder. Their more moderate “fathers” have always felt guilty regarding the superior logic of their “sons”. And these radical children of darkness step-by-step used more raw physical force against their “fathers” than they themselves were prepared to unleash to defend their “moderation” and arbitrary limitation of “freedom” to what they liked alone.
In the final analysis, modern “freedom” only has physical “force” as its final argument, with the triumph of the strongest, most ignorant, most crazed, most willful force over wisdom, the common good of society, and the true liberty of the Christian man ultimately ensured. Modern “freedom” guarantees the handing over of the control of society and the mass of the population to the hands of the criminally insane, who then give free rein both to their mindless ideological passions as well as the more “traditionally” mindless power and money fueled passion for plunder.[2]
No, there is no more unity for this destructive demon. The mind was
liberated, through freethinking, from the yoke of a God who speaks to
man; through individual criticism, from the yoke of reason; through
Popular Sovereignty, from that of any authority; through the right to
suicide, from the yoke of all fear. Any society—the communion of the
soul with God in the Church, of the people with their prince in the
polis, of a wife with her husband in the family, of the body with the
soul in the individual—is devastated any time social bonds are
measured against the impulse of a passion, against a “right”, against a
desire for pleasure. Each society is devastated in its primary governing
entity. It is thrown into the hands of crazed men whose will is
arbitrary. This is the ultimate consequence of the Protestant principle of
independence.
Force. Let us say it straightforwardly. Let us repeat it with daring.
Force is the only social instrument left to the Protestant who wishes to
be logical. And since the sole means of salvation becomes a right in
society, “right” in Protestant society is the same thing as “force”.
Having arrived at this last stage, impotent to pronounce a word that is not incoherent or to take a step that is not rendered criminal through injustice and criminality, error no longer has any other support on the earth than the appetizing bait of the interests and the brutality of force.
This nineteenth century Catholic warning of the coming triumph of the criminally insane was seen by them as first fulfilled through the radicalism of the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, which thankfully was brought to a conclusion through still at least somewhat vigorous counterrevolutionary action. It was victorious again in the radical tyranny of Communism, and is lunging towards success through that radicalism of the contemporary Democratic Party that is indeed wreaking the havoc in my City that stimulated my earlier “crying over spilt milk”. But the radical “sons” of “modern freedom” were born and nurtured by the “fathers” of mainline Protestantism, English Liberalism, and American Pluralism, both Liberal and Conservative, all of whose more “moderate” cultivation of this tainted fruit shaped a “nice and easy does it” route down which the madmen could stroll to mastery, with more peaceable souls blissfully unaware of their coming doom.
The Age-Old Diabolical Wisdom of the Criminally Insane
Our current mixture of the criminally insane, ideological as well as power and money hungry in character, are rapidly tightening the chains of slavery upon us. The social authorities of Church and State that somewhat protected us in the past are now so poisoned by the fruit of the tree of modern freedom that they have generally gone over to the enemy. To borrow the phrase of Winston Churchill after the Munich Conference of 1938, the children of the light that comes from heeding the wisdom of God and nature “have suffered an unmitigated defeat” at the hands of a mindless, passion-filled, maniacal, pseudo-intellectual, piratical elite.
That elite has managed to achieve its---hopefully temporary---triumph perhaps most effectively through its “voice”; a voice that claims to be the voice of “wisdom”---particularly “scientific wisdom”. Its effectiveness in making its boast is owed to its application to all of the many, omnipresent forms of modern media of the unfailingly powerful but diabolical methodology invented by those age-old, pre-Christian, utterly fraudulent claimants to possession of wisdom that we know of as the Sophists. The voice of our criminally insane---the Faucis, the Cuomos, and their allies in the press, television, radio, and on the Internet---is a sickening Sophist voice.
Plato calls the diabolical Sophist key to success a “knack” for appealing to basic appetites while ignoring entirely the question of whether they ought to be indulged in the first place, like that of a cook in a fast-food restaurant. The Sophist knack was one for identifying a nerve that leads directly to an individual’s or an entire people’s deepest desires and fears. Once detected, that nerve is touched incessantly, the target audience being provided with a formula for satisfying or alleviating the raw passion in question, clothed in an arrogant assertion of the indisputable authority of the wise man offering an unquestionably “practical”, technical solution to the appetite addressed. The formula, drilled in with liturgical regularity, is expressed through easily digestible slogans---such as, “you are all going to die from this virus”---and symbols---the muzzle one must wear lest sudden death overtake the fool rejecting it.
Why would the Sophist want to develop this “knack”? He does so to satisfy his own raw, unquestioned desires for power and wealth, or those of more powerful or wealthier men whose purposes he uncritical favors in exchange for sharing their fame and loot. Does he know that there are other “wise men” expressing disapproval of this baptism of the status quo passions of a world steeped in error or sin? Many Sophists do. But their “knack” shows them that the self-questioning, the weighing of diverse kinds of evidence, and the testing of various hypotheses favored by the children of light is wearisome to the average person on the hunt for a quick fix. They mock the “lunatics” and “losers” who do not grasp at the “obvious” and “practical” truth. They warn the man in the street that any doubts aroused---about donning the mask, gloves, face shields, and goggles---will have dire consequences---“you are going to die if you listen to these dangerous fools!!!---should he dawdle in his decision. And if that is not enough to win the day then the strength of his powerful allies can be relied on to shut the troublemakers up and guarantee the victory of true “scientific wisdom”.
Can This Bath In Any Way Refresh Us?
If only I could find the citation of the Czarist officer mentioned at the start of this installment of Letters From Hell, I would be able to state more confidently what he hoped to gain from his own revolutionary bath in Soviet insanity. Nevertheless, I am pretty sure that it was not anything particularly exalted; merely, his hope that, despite the horrific crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Communist Party in its blind ignorance of the laws of God and nature, its forceful willfulness would nevertheless be the tool for making “Russia” militarily strong again.
However, anyone striving to be a child of the light can bring good for himself out of this tightening Reign of Terror of the criminally insane, but diabolically “wise”. He can rid himself of any and all temptation to eat the fruit of the tree of modern “freedom”. He can fight with the true “liberty of a Christian man”, formed by solid supernatural and natural wisdom. He can, if armed with the proper spiritual and intellectual tools, expose the meaningless slogans and anti-scientific “science” of his criminal overlords. He can move closer to transformation in Christ as he battles an earthly enemy that can do nothing other in the final analysis but help the supporter of Faith and Reason along his path to eternal life with God while he damns himself to eternal punishment.
Are we in the “end times”? That judgment I cannot make, at least until the “signs” are as clear as the Gospels indicate. What I do know is that we are in the “end times” of a Revolution built on the modern concept of “freedom”. Its fruit cannot ripen any further. Will the Revolution destroy us before it destroys itself in a battle against God and Nature that it cannot ultimately win? We must not face the hard times ahead asking questions of that kind. We have to enter into battle in the spirit of Gideon, with the knowledge that the support of God is a more suitable arm than the number of mortals going into action in His name. And if shaped by a knowledge of supernatural and natural wisdom more solid than before, we can look for allies without the fear of compromising the truth, in the way that my favorite and repeated passage from Ernst Jünger indicates:
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.”—On the Marble Cliffs, XX.
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[1] Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, La Civiltà Cattolica, “Ordini rappresentativi”, i, 6 (1851), 497-498; “Lo Stato e la Patria”, I, 7(1851), p. 45; Libertà ed Ordine, I, ii (1850), 632.
[2] Taparelli, La Civiltà Cattolica, “Il protestantesimo”, 1, 2 (1850), 265; “Ordini rappresentativi”, i, 5 (1851), 412; “Il protestantesimo”, i, 2 (1850), 406.
