Reactionary Tory Principles and the Present Day “Right”: Part One

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system, the universe as a whole being the largest example of such a system, the level of entropy will increase over time. While this is technically a statement about energy moving from an ordered and usable state to one that is disordered and unusable, the popular understanding of the Law as saying that everything eventually breaks down is not wrong. Translated into poetry, William Butler Yeats’ lines “Things fall apart/the centre cannot hold/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (1) is a decent approximation.

That this Law is valid when applied to history ought, with certain qualifications, to be considered a fundamental reactionary principle. By history, of course, I mean the history of human civilizations, and one qualification is that the Law must be applied in a particular rather than a general sense. Speaking of any given civilization, the creative energy that was put into building it eventually runs out and the civilization enters into a period of decline. Those who are familiar with Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West will recognize in his theory of the life-cycle of civilizations – although he called them cultures – what the history of human civilization in general looks like when the Law of entropy is applied to each civilization in particular. The other qualification, is that, as with any other application of this Law including its original usage in physics, it is a property of fallen Creation which in no way binds the Creator. The decline of a civilization can be and often has been retarded and even turned around by a religious revival. This is why there is no essential conflict between the reactionary’s anti-Whig understanding of history as moving in a downward direction towards decadence, decline, doom, and destruction and his call to “turn back the clock.” Whether the reactionary recognizes it or not, the latter is really a call for religious revival, a call to turn back to God.

The opposite of this reactionary principle is the idea that the history of human civilization, apart from any divine input, is an exception to the Second Law and is constantly moving towards a higher order, greater freedom, and maximal human potential. This is the idea of progress to which all forms of modern thought subscribe in one form or another. The nineteenth century Whig interpretation of history which treated all of past history as one long preparation for liberal democracy was one well known version of the idea of progress. The neoconservative Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man was an updated edition of this version. As Eric Voegelin (The New Science of Politics, 1952) and George Grant (Philosophy in the Mass Age, 1959) observed this idea was produced by inappropriately transferring to the history of human civilization the attributes of God’s redemptive history which transcends the history of human civilization and culminates in the Kingdom of God. The result of this transferal is the substitution of the Kingdom of Man for the Kingdom of God and Grant, who pointed this out in his first major book, devoted the writing side of his career to contemplating the consequences of this substitution in the modern, technological, age.

A quick glance at the mainstream “right” today will tell you that it has entirely abandoned the reactionary principle in favour of some form of the idea of progress. In Manitoba our most recent provincial election just took place a day prior to the request for the dissolution of Parliament launching the next Dominion election. Provincially, the status quo was more or less maintained, with the majority of seats held by Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservatives. Note the adjective in the party’s title. During the campaign Pallister’s PCs – the initials are even more appalling than the adjective by itself – used “Moving Manitoba Forward”, previously used by the socialists, as their slogan and ran ads urging voters not to let Wab Kinew’s New Democrats turn back the clock. In this context, of course, turning the clock back does not mean a religious revival, a recovery of worthy elements of the ancient and Christian traditions that were lost or damaged in the transition to modernity, or anything else a reactionary would mean by the phrase but rather a return to the policies of the previous Greg Selinger government – huge deficits, high taxes, long emergency room wait times, and general mismanagement of the public health care system. It speaks volumes of the mainstream “right” in this province, however, that it would rely so heavily on the language of progress to sell its platform to the public.

There is also a growing right outside of the mainstream. If we compare it to the mainstream right on an issue by issue basis we find that overall it is much to be preferred to the mainstream right. In Canada today any stronger position against abortion than “I am personally against it, but I believe it is a woman’s right to choose” has been almost completely pushed into the non-mainstream right. Any position on immigration stronger than “we need secure borders and to enforce our border laws” such as the suggestion that legal levels of immigration are way too high was pushed out of the mainstream right in all Western countries decades ago. To say that selection of immigrants is the prerogative of the country admitting the immigrants and that Western countries need more prudence in exercising that prerogative because not all cultures are equally compatible with our own, although common sense and until about sixty years ago non-controversial, is now regarded by the entire left and the mainstream right as beyond the pale. Speaking these truths about immigration has become the signature issue of most of the various forms of the non-mainstream right.

This “right” too, however, seems incapable of speaking its truths in any language other than that of the left. Take the movement behind Brexit in the United Kingdom, the Make America Great Again movement that put Donald Trump into the presidency of the United States, and the movement represented by Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party here in Canada. All three of these movements are populist. Populism is a style of politics in a democratic state that involves appealing directly to “the people” and vilifying the governing elites. A populist conceives of the policies he promotes in terms of “the will of the people” and prefers direct democracy over representative democracy. Each of these aspects of populism is an obvious characteristic of each of the three movements that I have specified – even though, ironically, it is due to representative democracy having been given the upper hand over direct democracy in the constitution of the American Republic that Donald Trump is now their president.

Indeed, the association between the non-mainstream right and populism is such that many people today think of populism as being naturally and inherently right-wing. It is not. Populism’s natural home is on the left. The idea of “the will of the people” is the very fiction upon which the left was historically based. It is what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called la volonté générale and was incorporated by the French Revolutionaries into the sixth Article of their Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Indeed, the very concept of “the people” is a fiction, for it has no consistent meaning. When a republican speaks of “the people” he means all citizens of the republic, governor and governed alike. A populist, by “the people”, excludes the elite. A lot of leftists use “the people” to mean “the poor” and exclude “the rich”. Hitler, by “the people” meant German-speaking Aryans. “The people” can mean whatever the person invoking the name of “the people” wants it to mean and therefore it means nothing at all. It is an expression, like so many others in the leftist lexicon, which is defined not by its designation of a corresponding reality, but by its usefulness as a tool for justifying violence and seizing and exercising power.

By contrast, kings and queens do not traditionally speak of “the people” but rather “my people” or “our people.” This wording is clear and definite – it means the monarch’s subjects – and expresses the traditional relationship between sovereign and subject in which feudal allegiance and familial ties are connected, kings and queens being both the liege-lords of their realms and the fathers and mothers of their large extended family of subjects. A true man of the right, a reactionary, is always a royalist.

To our list of reactionary principles we can add that pure democracy is the worst form of government, and that direct democracy as opposed to representative democracy, is the worst form of democracy. These principles are the opposite of all modern thinking, which is what makes them reactionary, but they are demonstrable.

Imagine a group of twenty people. One of them, Bob, puts forward to the rest of the group, the proposition that another of their members, Joe, should be beaten, tortured, mutilated, and killed for their amusement. The proposition is debated and they decide to settle it by taking a vote. Fifteen vote in favour, five against. The outcome is rather rough on poor Joe, but it was a democratic decision, fair and square, majority rules.

While that example is rather absurd and extreme, it illustrates what is wrong with the popular modern thought that democracy is the ideal form of government. If, however, you were to make one slight adjustment to the illustration and have Bob put forward the proposition that since Joe, who is quite wealthy, has so much property, and the rest of them, who are rather poor, have so little, it is only fair that they confiscate Joe’s wealth and distribute it equally among themselves, you would no longer have a situation that would be highly unlikely to arise in real life but a small-scale depiction of what is called economic democracy or socialism.

This problem with democracy has been recognized since it was first invented by the Greeks in ancient Athens and is one of the reasons why Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle condemned democracy as the worst form of government. Alexis de Tocqueville described the problem as “the tyranny of the majority.” Modern thinkers believed that the solution to the problem was to combine democracy with liberalism – the idea that government is itself subject to the law and that the law must recognize the natural, inalienable, rights of the individual. When men like John Locke and John Stuart Mill first proposed this doctrine they saw it as a restraint on the power of government to oppress. Today, centuries later, we are surrounded by an abundance of examples of how the doctrine of liberalism can be the basis and justification of state oppression. To give but one, we are now living in a day when someone can get in trouble with the law for using the pronoun “he” to refer to someone born with a penis on the grounds that it violates the individual’s inalienable “right” to choose his/her/its/whatever own gender.

What is also apparent in our day and age is that while “the tyranny of the majority” is a problem unique to democracy, the tyranny of the minority over the majority is just as much an element of democracy as of an outright oligarchy. Interestingly, the best example of this is the very issue which the non-mainstream right insists on framing in leftist, populist, terms. The populist, nationalist, “right” is not wrong in saying that Western countries have had too much of the wrong kind of immigration and placing the blame for this on “the elites.” What they don’t seem to grasp is that the guilty elites are democratic elites qua democratic elites.

Every organized society will always have an elite. There will always be a minority in any society that steers and directs it. This is what Robert Michels called “the iron law of oligarchy” (Political Parties, 1911) and it is true of all forms of society, no matter how democratic they might be in theory, and it does not make a difference if the democracy is direct or representative. In a true direct democracy, where every single question of public policy would be decided by a popular referendum, the ability to persuade the majority to vote its way most of the time, would be in the hands of a minority, and they would be the elite. The elite that actually wields power is not necessarily the same as those nominally in charge. Thus in a representative democracy the elite may be those who have gotten themselves elected into public office or it may be a hidden minority who have the ability to control elected officials. The nature of the society has as much of an effect on the nature of the elite as the nature of the elite has on the nature of the society.

Bertolt Brecht’s poem The Solution (1959) was intended as a criticism of the Communist government of East Germany’s suppression of the uprising of 1953. The poem’s ironic conclusion “Would it not in that case be simpler/for the government/To dissolve the people/and elect another” has frequently been borrowed as a critical description of the motives behind Western governments’ liberal mass immigration policies. The criticism is apt, but my point is that it is only a democratic society that provides its elites with an incentive for trying to “dissolve the people/and elect another”. An oft-heard argument for democracy is that it allows us to periodically “throw the rascals out.” One can see the appeal in this but the flipside is that it gives the political class a motive to “do unto them, before they do unto you.”

It is hardly a coincidence that radical, demographic transformation producing, mass immigration was introduced throughout the West in the 1960s – only a decade and a half after the end of the war in which the United States had emerged as the predominant power in the West. The United States, which had been led into the First World War by a President who wanted to “make the world safe for democracy” and who therefore insisted on driving the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns from their thrones paving the way for the rise of Hitler, was able after the Second World War to introduce radical democratic changes throughout the West whether by forced re-education in the former Axis countries, the bribery of the Marshall Plan re-building assistance among the European Allies, or the dependence of both upon the American nuclear arsenal as a deterrent against the threat of Soviet invasion. The Americanization of the West led almost immediately to the spread of liberal mass immigration. Here in Canada, Tom Kent, an important Liberal Party strategist in the days of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau and one of the men who spearheaded the radical changes to our immigration policy in the late 1960s, as much as admitted to the Brechtian motive of maintaining the Liberal hold on power by dissolving the old electorate when he said that it was done to break up “Tory Toronto.”

If the radical immigration the West has been suffering from for decades is due to what Christopher Lasch called “The Revolt of the Elites” and that revolt in turn is the result of the triumphant ascendancy of American-style liberal democracy in the post-World War II Western world (2) then the insistence of the non-mainstream right on using the left-wing language of populism, democracy and “the will of the people” to combat this kind of immigration seems like a major strategic error.

I must point out, before concluding this essay, that the preceding strong criticism of democracy is not a criticism of the institution of parliament. As noted above, the true reactionary right is royalist, but no king or queen has ever governed without a council of advisors, and the institution of parliament has been a part of royal government in Christendom for over a thousand years. Parliament as an institution is democratic, but not completely democratic, and its virtue, historically, was that it incorporated a form of representative democracy into royal government in a way that strengthened the latter while diluting the many negative aspects of the former. While this virtue has been greatly lessened by the triumph of Whiggism the problem is with the Whig principle not with the institution. The Whig principle is that parliament is the democratic safeguard against royal tyranny. The Tory principle – the reactionary principle - is the exact opposite of this – that in parliament royal authority is the safeguard against democratic tyranny. The Tory principle is the true one.

In Part Two, I shall, Deus Vult, consider the reactionary principle that religion is the foundation of civilization in opposition to the liberal idea that the secular retreat from religion is the foundation of civilization and we shall weigh the mainstream, neoconservative, right in the balance of this principle and find it wanting.


(1) From The Second Coming (1919).
(2) Lasch would presumably disagree strongly with my explanation. The full title of his final, posthumously published, book was The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1996).

Gnostics, Puritans, and the Left

Professor Bruce Charlton, whose writings I very much value and respect, took exception the other day to the meme that identifies the Left with Puritanism. Here is his opening paragraph:

I think it was perhaps Mencius Moldbug who originated the stupid idea - which I have seen repeated in hundreds of different versions - that the current, mainstream, politically correct Left are puritans.

This meme, it would appear to me, is an extreme oversimplification of a concept that can be found in Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, which was first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1952. I note, in passing, that this was twenty-one years prior to the birth of the man who writes under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug.

In the fourth chapter of The New Science of Politics, Voegelin traced the origins of the secular millennialism of modern mass political movements, i.e., the idea of ushering in a new Golden Age, back to an earlier revival of millennialist eschatology in the teachings of the twelfth century Italian theologian and monk, Joachim of Flora. He set this departure from Augustinianism in the context of a revival of Gnosticism, the largest family of heresies against which the orthodox contended in the early centuries of Christianity. Gnosticism was so named because it maintained that those initiated into its mysteries comprised a spiritual elite who possessed gnosis – detailed special knowledge about matters that are not spelled out in the Scriptures and orthodox Christian tradition. Since this “knowledge” often contradicted orthodox doctrine, Gnosticism was rejected as heresy by the orthodox. In the following chapter, Voegelin examined Puritanism as both an example case of revived Gnosticism and as the first revolutionary modern mass movement.

A very abridged version of Voegelin’s thesis is that sixteenth-seventeenth century Puritanism and twentieth century mass movements such as liberalism and Communism are all modern versions of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. The meme that Professor Charlton dislikes so much seems to be this same thesis simplified further and to the point of extreme inaccuracy.

The question then becomes one of whether this thesis is right or wrong. Professor Charlton goes on to say:

Of course there is a grain of truth, else the idea would have gone nowhere. The grain is that New Left is a descendant of the New England Puritans who emigrated from (mostly) East Anglia, became the Boston Brahmins, founded Harvard etc.

And this class, via various mutations including the Transcendentalists and their circle of radicals Unitarians, abolitionists, feminists etc) evolved into the post Civil War US ruling class; who were the fount of post-middle-1960s New Leftism.

This is true, but there is one glaring omission. For there to be a New Left there had to have first been an Old Left. When we bring that Old Left into the equation we find that there is a lot more than just a “grain” of truth to the identification of Puritanism with the Left. There is a sentence in Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs From Beyond the Grave that expresses this perfectly. Here it is in the recent English translation by Alex Andriesse of the first twelve books of the Memoirs, published last year by the New York Review of Books:

“The Jacobins were plagiarists; they even plagiarized the sacrifice of Louis XVI from the execution of Charles I” (p. 363 in the edition mentioned, this is found in the second paragraph of the fourth chapter of Book Nine).

The French Revolution was the well-spring of the Old Left. The revolutionary socialist movements of the nineteenth century all looked back to the French Revolution as their inspiration, the Communist League for which Karl Marx wrote his notorious manifesto began as a splinter group of the Jacobin Club that had perpetrated the French Revolution, and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, which introduced the plague of Communism to the world and became the pattern for all subsequent Communist revolutions, was itself patterned on the French Revolution. The French Revolution, in turn, was, as Chateaubriand said, an imitation of the Puritan rebellion against Charles I in the previous century.

The Puritan rebellion against King Charles inspired the Jacobin revolution against King Louis XVI, which in turn inspired all subsequent revolutions. This makes Puritanism the prototype of the revolutionary Left, just as Cromwell’s tyranny was the prototype of the French Reign of Terror and the Soviet and other Communist totalitarian regimes. While it was Puritan actions that the Jacobins and later leftists were imitating, theology similar to that of the Puritans also played a role in the French Revolution, if not as large of a one as in the rebellion in England. William Palmer observed that Jansenism, a heretical movement within the Roman Catholic Church that had a similar predestinarian theology to Calvinism, had become so strong in pre-Revolutionary eighteenth century France, that it was able to resist Rome’s attempts to suppress it, and, indeed, that it had successfully used the French Parliament to thwart the king’s efforts to uphold orthodoxy. (A Treatise on the Church of Christ, Vol I, London, J. G. & F. Rivington, 1838, pp. 324-328) Granted, this happened in the reign of Louis XV fifty years prior to the Revolution but Puritan efforts to turn the English Parliament against their king had also begun long before the accession of Charles I. It is also worth noting that Jean-Paul Marat, the Jacobin pamphleteer whose bloodthirsty words incited the September Massacres, the mass murder of prisoners in which the non-juring Roman Catholic priests were especially targeted and which can be regarded as either the precursor to or the first stage of the Reign of Terror, was raised in a family that had a very similar theology to that of the Puritans. His mother was a Huguenot and his father was a convert to Calvinism.

Not only is it an indisputable historical fact that Puritanism was the root of the tree of leftism, from which the trunk of Jacobinism sprung, which in turn produced the branches of socialism, Communism, etc. it is also true that political correctness, the element of the New Left that is most often said to be Puritanical, is derived from a Bolshevik practice with a Jacobin antecedent based upon a Puritan precedent. Political correctness as we know it today began on Western academic campuses in the 1960s and spread from there throughout the rest of Western culture. It began as the insistence upon the use of racially sensitive language but quickly expanded to include demands for language that is sensitive in other areas as well. There were, of course, a host of other demands which accompanied these, but the defining essence of political correctness is the insistence upon the use of language that has been stripped of anything that might be perceived as offensive on racial, sexual, etc. grounds. In this the New Left was, consciously, I would argue, imitating the Soviet phenomenon that was the basis of the "Newspeak" depicted in George Orwell's 1984. The Jacobin antecedent of Bolshevik Newspeak, can be seen in the date of the Great Reaction when the Reign of Terror ended and its architect Robespierre was condemned to die by his own guillotine. This date on our calendar is the 27th of July but we remember it historically as the Ninth of Thermidor. Why? Because the Jacobins imposed a completely new calendar upon France, in which years were counted from the deposing of King Louis XVI, and consisted of twelve months which, since they also started from that date did not correspond to the ones on our calendar and were given funny sounding names like Messidor, Thermidor, and Fructidor. The Puritan precedent for this was their insistence on referring to the days of the week as the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. rather than by their usual names, which the Puritans objected to on the grounds of their pagan origins. Orthodox Christians can understand and to varying degrees sympathize with the Puritans' reasons for doing this - less so, with their abolition of Christian holy days - but this was the seed from which the Jacobin calendar which grew into Bolshevik Newspeak and has gone to seed in the New Left's political correctness sprang.

Now let us consider what Professor Charlton finds specifically objectionable in the “Left are Puritans” meme. Here is his explanation:

OK. But to call the New Left puritans is something only a non-Christian could do, for at least two very obvious reasons.

1. A puritan is very religiously Christian, and believes that this should permeate every aspect of social and personal life.

2. A puritan advocates that sex be confined to (a single, permanent) marriage. In other words, a puritan rejects the entirety of the post-sixties sexual revolution.

Since Leftists are not Christian, and since they are (in theory and in practice) sexual revolutionaries; the idea that Leftists are puritans is wrong.

The first thing to be observed in response to this is that the meme which equates leftism with Puritanism is clearly not meant to be understood as saying that Leftists are like Puritans in every detail. Nobody is suggesting that today’s politically correct, woke, social justice warriors walk around in seventeenth century costume with flat topped hats, ruffed doublets, and buckle shoes, speaking Shakespearean English. It is rather a lazy, shorthand, way of saying “the present day left resembles its ideological ancestor Puritanism in such and such specific characteristics.” All that is being asserted is that in some aspect(s) of today's Left, traits of its distant Puritan ancestors have reasserted themselves in an identifiable manner. This cannot be negated merely by pointing out other areas in which the New Left and Puritanism do not resemble each other or even are the exact opposite of each other.

It could be argued that the differences so outweigh the similarities as to make any focus on the latter unwarranted. This could lead to an interesting discussion on essence and distinction. If the things Professor Charlton states here about the Puritans are of the essence of Puritanism, its sine qua non, without which there can be no Puritanism, as the Professor seems to think, this would, of course, be a strong argument in his favour. I would point out, however, that neither of these things is distinctive of Puritanism. Both could also be said, with equal truth, about orthodox Anglicans and Roman Catholics who were the Puritans' opponents in the conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The meme that compares Leftism to Puritanism must be based upon something that is distinctive to Puritanism as opposed to Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism otherwise it would make no sense and indeed would likely never have existed – a meme would have compared Leftists to Christians in general instead. Can something that is not distinctive of Puritanism be said to be essential to it>

It seems to me that Professor Charlton is operating under a fundamental misunderstanding of Puritanism's reputation. When the present day Left with its political correctness and its zeal for banning such things as guns, single-use plastics, furs and fox-hunting, soft drinks, etc. is described as being Puritanical the comparison is based upon the Puritans' legendary reputation for being dour, gloomy, repressive, Mrs. Grundy-type busybodies, with sticks stuck permanently up their backsides, perpetually nagging and harassing people with a never-ending list of does and don'ts and basically sucking all the happiness out of life like joy-killing vampires. It would appear from Professor Charlton's arguments that he is under the impression that this reputation arose out of their sexual ethics. It is, perhaps, inevitable that this impression would arise and become the natural assumption in our post-Sexual Revolution permissive age but it is without historical basis. The ethic that says that sex, meaning sexual intercourse, should be confined to a single, permanent, marriage was not distinctive of Puritanism but was held and taught by orthodox Anglicans and Roman Catholics as well. Indeed, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, on this matter “the Old Religion was the more austere.” It cannot, therefore, be the source of the Puritans’ reputation.

The Puritans earned their reputation, not by being sticklers for the basic rules of Christian ethics, but for adding and multiplying other rules, ones which often pertained to small, petty, matters, and which had no basis in the Holy Scriptures and were mostly foreign to the Christian tradition. Take their extremely rigid approach to Sunday keeping for example. Christians, since Apostolic times, have met on Sunday, the first day of the week, in commemoration of the Resurrection, for prayer, teaching, and the Eucharist. This tradition is based upon the precedent set by the practice of the Apostolic Church as recorded in the Book of Acts rather than by Scriptural ordinance in the way keeping the Sabbath, Saturday, had been enjoined upon Israel in the Old Testament. This is in keeping with the doctrine of Christian liberty on such matters that was determined at the Jerusalem Council and emphasized by St. Paul throughout his epistles. Early in Christian history it became common to speak of Sunday as the “Christian Sabbath” and to apply the concept of a “day of rest” to it, but orthodox Christianity wanted to avoid repeating the mistake of the Pharisees, the post-Maccabean Revolt sect within the laity of Second Temple Judaism that tried to promote holiness in national Israel by creating a hedge of auxiliary commandments around the Torah which they interpreted so rigidly that they condemned our Lord for performing healing miracles on the Sabbath. The Puritans, however, went much further than the Pharisees for while the Pharisees’ extra rules were at least extrapolated from the actual prohibition in the Fourth Commandment – “thou shalt do no work” - the Puritans’ rules for Sunday were based on the non-Scriptural “thou shalt have no fun.” They forbade all recreational activities on Sundays and wanted the law to enforce this ban. How can this be an example of believing that Christianity “should permeate every aspect of social and personal life” when it is difficult if not impossible to conceive of an attitude further removed from the teachings of Jesus Christ and His Apostles regarding the Sabbath than this?

In this one example we have seen how the Puritans a) imposed a new prohibition that did not belong to ancient Christian tradition and had no basis in Scripture which it completely contradicted in spirit, b) specifically targeted people’s engaging in harmless recreational activities and enjoying themselves, and c) demanded that their new rule be backed by the power of the state. That is the Puritans’ bad reputation in a nutshell. Sexual ethics had nothing to do with it.

Nor was this the only example of this sort of thing. For those who still think it a stretch to compare the politically correct New Left to the Puritans let us not forget that it was Cromwell’s Puritans who launched the original War on Christmas – and on Easter and every other Christian high holy day as well. It is difficult to reconcile a ban on the holy days which make each year a commemorative and celebratory journey through the events of Christ’s earthly ministry from His Incarnation through His Ascension with a desire for Christianity to “permeate every aspect of social and personal life.” Richard Hooker, who thoroughly refuted the shallow theological justification they gave for taking this position decades before they were in a position to enforce it saw their true motives as being economical – less holy days meant more days to make money – although one cannot help but notice that the holy days the Puritans especially objected to were the seasons of celebration that bring joy and mirth into people’s lives.

Nowhere in the world, outside of England during the brief period of Cromwell’s dictatorship, was Puritanism’s influence greater than in colonial English-speaking North America, especially New England, and that influence has been lasting. From the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, itinerant preachers travelled across North America holding special revival services. The preaching in these services was evangelistic and revivalistic, meaning that it called upon unbelievers to become Christians and upon lukewarm or backslidden Christians to repent and practice their faith more seriously and more fervently. Such preaching was also very moralistic and the revivalists in their sermons targeted a long list of sins that one would have a difficult time identifying as such from the Scriptures – playing card games, smoking tobacco, dancing, attending theatrical plays, etc. While other movements, such as the Wesleyan holiness movement, contributed to all of this, its Puritan roots can hardly be denied. Puritan preachers played a leading role in the first wave of revivalism, the Great Awakening, and the non-conformist and dissenting sects that the Puritans had founded were the primary denominations, other than the Methodists, involved in the revivals. The preaching against dancing and the theatre certainly goes back to the Puritans – who infamously shut down London’s theatres, including William Shakespeare’s old Globe Theatre, in 1642 – and while the same cannot be said for every one of these extra-Scriptural “sins,” the general idea behind them all, that something that brings earthly pleasure to people should be suspected of being sinful and probably outright banned, is clearly derived from the same assumptions that led to the original Puritan ban on Sunday recreational activities which, as King James and King Charles both noted in their royal proclamations opposing such bans, amounted to complete bans on recreational activities for the majority of the people.

The revivalist movement often combined its moralism with support for social reform causes that would have been considered progressive in their own day. There is one example of this that is particularly interesting in light of what we are discussing. In the nineteenth century, revivalists became the driving force behind the mislabelled Temperance Movement – mislabelled because “temperance” is the name for the virtue of self-control and implies moderation – by preaching that all consumption of alcoholic beverages in inherently sinful. This is the traditional view of Islam not of Christianity. Indeed, not only does this create a new “sin” not identified as such in the Scriptures it flatly contradicts the Scriptures, Old and New Testaments, including the teachings, commandments, and example of Jesus Christ and His Apostles. The original Puritans had not gone this far – to quote C. S. Lewis “they were not teetotallers; bishops, not beer, were their special aversion” - but there is obviously a reason why within Christendom this movement only ever caught on among the non-conformist sects of North America. After a century of activism, the Temperance Movement succeeded in getting Prohibition – a ban on the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol - passed in both the United States and the Dominion of Canada. As an experiment in moral and social engineering it was a notorious failure.

The Temperance Movement was inseparably intertwined with the suffragette movement, the first wave of feminism that was lobbying to extend the voting franchise to women, and both movements achieved their goals almost simultaneously. The victory of the suffragettes proved more lasting than that of the Temperance Movement and it laid the foundation for the second wave of feminism a few decades and another World War later. The second wave of feminism was as intertwined with the Sexual Revolution as the first wave was with the Temperance Movement. Had Puritanism not laid the foundation for the kind of revivalism that spawned the Temperance Movement, the suffragette movement would never have had the latter to join forces with and may have been less successful in its own goal, and thus failed to pave the way for second wave feminism and the Sexual Revolution.

I have belaboured this point long enough. The people who once locked a man in the stocks for kissing his own wife on his own threshold when he returned from a long sea voyage on Sunday earned their well-deserved reputation for being legalistic killjoys and the fact that they claimed religious motives for doing so in no way invalidates a comparison with the secular ban-happy left-wing control freaks of our own day. Especially when we remember that these schismatic enthusiasts, who objected to the liturgical affirmation of the Nicene Creed but demanded that clergy be made to subscribe to every iota of Theodore Beza’s interpretation of Calvin’s Institutes, who started with a Korah-like rebellion against the Apostolic ministry of the Church and ended by stretching forth their hand against God’s anointed king and shedding his blood, were the original inspiration for the Jacobins and Bolsheviks.

Perhaps we should dust off our copies of Eric Voegelin and give him another read. Anyone who has studied early Church history knows that some of the Gnostics were ascetics who preached and practiced a very austere morality whereas others were hedonistic libertines. These opposite extremes in ethics and behaviour were both derived from the same heretical starting point. It is not so surprising, if Puritanism is revived form of Gnosticism, that it would evolve into a movement with both a permissive and a censorious streak. I will close with C. S. Lewis’ amusing description of progressives who combine both of these traits from a book that came out the same year as The New Science of Politics. In the very first paragraph of the The Voyage of the Dawn Treader we are introduced to Eustace Scrubb and his parents. The latter, whom Eustace addresses by their first names presumably at their own encouragement and whom we find out in the next book in the series send their son to an extremely progressive school called Experiment House that is co-educational, discourages reading the Bible, and is not in any way conducive to any real learning, are the progressives in view:

They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.

Thoughts on the Times

Smoking Stupidity

The solons who govern the city of Winnipeg in which I reside have, in their inscrutable wisdom, ruled, that as of April 1st, no one is to be allowed to smoke in outdoor patios where food and beverages are served. Although set to come into effect on April Fool’s Day, sadly, this fascist bylaw, is no joke. This latest and most absurd assault, in the neopuritan war on tobacco, is, like previous ones, based on the myth of harmful and deadly second-hand smoke. Undoubtedly, many if not most of the dingbats championing this ban are the same people applauding the federal Liberals’ decision, also coming into effect this year, to legalize the recreational smoking of the flowers and leaves of non-industrial hemp. Tobacco smoking can over time be damaging to the health of the body. The risk is much higher for cigarette smokers than for those who smoke tobacco the way God intended it in pipes and cigars, although this distinction and difference means nothing to the Mrs. Grundys of the Winnipeg City Council. Cannabis smoking damages the health of the mind. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Heed my advice if you wish to stay sane;
If you smoke, smoke Old Toby and not Mary Jane.

Remember S. Charles, King and Martyr

Yesterday was the Feast of King Charles the Martyr, murdered by the regicidal and heretical, Puritan sect 369 years ago. The December 2017 edition of the American Region Edition of SKCM News, the Magazine of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, contains this item:

BBC History magazine has published a seventeenth-century recipe for drinking chocolate. Charles I enjoyed the beverage, but Oliver Cromwell banned it, deeming it sinful. (p. 3)

Yet further evidence, as if more were needed, that Puritanism is evil. In addition to being Pharisees, the Puritans were also Philistines and in the Interregnum, they broke up King Charles’ impressive collection of art and sold most of it off. The Telegraph reports that with the help of the Royal Martyr’s namesake, the present Prince of Wales, the Royal Academy of Arts has reassembled the collection for the first time in almost four centuries, for a special show commemorating the Academy’s 250th anniversary.

Some Quotes from a Church Father

St. Irenaeus was a second century Church Father. He was born and raised in Smyrna, in what is now Turkey, when St. Polycarp, who had been the disciple of St. John the Apostle, was bishop there. Later he served, first as presbyter (priest) then as bishop, in what is now Lyon in France. He is most remembered as a defender of Apostolic orthodoxy against the various Gnostic sects that taught that the God of the Old Testament Who created the heavens and the earth was an inferior deity, the Demiurge, and not the Father of the New Testament. Eric Voegelin argued, in The New Science of Politics, that in Calvinist Puritanism, Gnosticism had been revived and had evolved into the spirit of the Modern Age.

St. Irenaeus wrote a five-book treatise against the Gnostics which in Latin is titled Adversus Haereses. The first book outlines the teachings of several varieties of Gnosticism, focusing primarily on the Valentinian sect. In the second paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of this book can be found this remark about a different Gnostic sect, the followers of Saturninus:

Many of those, too, who belong to his school, abstain from animal food, and draw away multitudes by a feigned temperance of this kind.

Later, of yet another Gnostic sect, the Encratites, he writes:

Some of those reckoned among them have also introduced abstinence from animal food, thus proving themselves ungrateful to God, who formed all things. (I.28.1)

Sadly, there has been a great deal of ignorance of and indifference to the Patristic writings among Western Protestants for the last century or so which perhaps explains the revival and popularity of the Gnostic heresy of vegan vegetarianism in our day and age.

A Quote From Our Friends Down Under

The Australian traditionalist and reactionary group Sydney Trads, in its “The Year in Review: 2017, Year of the Hate Hoax, the Heckler’s Veto and the Persecuted ‘Oppressor’”, included the following:

2017 was the year of Schrodinger’s ethnicity: Whites apparently exist as an identifiable category if they are being attacked, mocked, ridiculed or blamed for something, but also do not exist as a legitimate category of self-identification when a representative defends their interests as a group.

That is liberalism’s essential self-contradiction on race all summed up in a nutshell. Nicely done.

Justin Trudeau’s Nightmare

In the 1860s, the Fathers of Confederation formed a new country out of the provinces of British North America, giving it the title of Dominion and the name of Canada. The new country was to be a federation of provinces, with a parliamentary government modeled after the Westminster parliament, under the monarchy shared with Great Britain and the rest of the British Empire. The Fathers of Confederation looked to the federal system to overcome the difficulties of British Protestants and French Catholics living together in one country and to the monarchy as the source of continuity and unity, envisioned the evolution of the British Empire itself into a federation in which Canada would play a senior role, and tried to protect their country from the gravitational pull of the republic to their south with a national economic program of protective tariffs and internal trade facilitated by the construction of a transcontinental railroad. From that time to today, the Liberal Party of Canada has been the anti-Confederation party, the party that has sought to belittle the accomplishments of the Fathers of Confederation and Canada’s Loyalist heritage, to line the pockets of its financial backers through increased trade with the United States up to the point of continental economic integration, to weaken our parliamentary constitution and give autocratic power to the Prime Minister and Cabinet, to replace our traditional national symbols with ones of their own manufacture and to seriously undermine our traditional Common Law rights and freedoms. The Liberal Party found out in 1891 and again in 1911 that presenting their naked agenda to Canadians at election time was a losing strategy and evolved the strategy of pandering and grievance mongering that worked much better for them in the twentieth century. The strategy consists of telling identifiable groups that the Old Canada of Confederation had treated them unfairly but that if they would give their support to the Liberals, the Liberals would fix the situation and give them a bag of taxpayer-supplied goodies.

At first it was French Canadians that Liberals focused on, telling them that all the Britishness of the Canada of a Confederation was an unfair reminder of their defeat at the Plains of Abraham. This was nonsense – French Canadians knew full well that the protection of the British Crown had secured their language, religion, and culture for them when the Puritan Americans had wanted to take them away from them and their leaders were fully involved in the Confederation talks, helping shape the Dominion. The Liberal strategy had an unintended consequence – the emergence of the Quebec nationalist separatism that threatened to divide the country.

When this happened the Liberals adjusted their strategy. They now told a broad, “rainbow coalition” of different races, religions, and ethnic groups that they had been unfairly “excluded” from the Old Canada of Confederation, but would receive redress in the New Canada of the Liberal Party. To ensure that the coalition was as large as possible they revamped the immigration system, bringing in the race-neutral points system of 1965 as our “official” immigration policy, but this was merely a cover for their true policy of exploiting the loopholes to the points system (the largest of these being “family reunification”) to make Canada as ethnically diverse as possible as quickly as possible. They, of course, silenced anybody who pointed out the obvious drawbacks to this by calling him a “racist.”

This was done largely during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau. Now, in the premiership of Justin Trudeau, the Liberal coalition has been expanded to include minority sexual orientations and gender identities as well.

This strategy has always been a divisive one, first pitting French Canadians against English Canadians, then pitting a coalition of racial, religious, and ethnic minorities against European Christian Canadians, and maximizing diversity in total disregard to the fact that this is the way to generate ethnic and racial strife and conflict rather than harmony. It has been quite clear for some time now that the Liberal coalition cannot hold together for long. Earlier in the premiership of the second Trudeau it seemed likely that the breaking point would be between Muslims and the alphabet soupers, both of whose causes the Prime Minister was loudly, vehemently, and recklessly championing despite the obvious contradiction between the two. Now, however, a different fracture has become evident.

Earlier this month, the Prime Minister shamelessly turned the occasion of a young Muslim girl in Toronto, Khawlah Noman’s, claim that she had been attacked by a man who cut her hijab with scissors, into an opportunity to grandstand, get his name and picture in the press yet again, and lecture Canadians about how horribly “Islamophobic” we all are. It later turned out that, like the vast majority of highly publicized “hate crimes”, the incident was a hoax and had not occurred after all. Those who have been waiting for Trudeau to return to his taxpayer-funded soap box and eat crow have been listening to crickets chirp and watching the tumbleweeds drift by ever since.

This weekend, however, protests were held all across Canada by the Asian communities of cities such as Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Regina. It turns out that it was an Asian man whom the girl had falsely accused – a detail that was not widely reported by the press as it conflicts with their narrative in which bigotry and bigotry-inspired-violence are the exclusive domain of white, heterosexual, Christian males. The protests were aimed at Trudeau, insisting that the hoax, and his gullible swallowing it without waiting for a full investigation, constituted a “hate crime” against them. While I have little sympathy for the protestors, as their claim that they were being scapegoated and discriminated against is ludicrous seeing that the school division, the federal and provincial governments, the leaders of the opposition, and the news media all went out of their way to avoid drawing attention to the fact that the girl had accused one of their ethnicity, there is something deeply satisfying in seeing Trudeau’s coalition fall apart, and its members turn on him.

The Other War On Christmas

The war on Christmas, as that expression is usually understood, denotes the recent North American phenomenon in which progressive forces, in the name of diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism and all those other words which serve little other purpose than to hide the spirit of Stalinist totalitarianism behind a smiley face, have sought to re-brand Christmas into a generic “holiday season”. This war is conducted on many fronts and with varying degrees of intensity, ranging from the replacement of the traditional “Merry Christmas” greeting with “Happy Holidays” or something similar to the more heavy-handed attempts by lobby groups and civil liberties organizations to drive nativity scenes and any other Christmas imagery that has a direct and obvious connection to Christianity from the public square. Back in the 1990s, Peter Brimelow and John O’Sullivan began a war against Christmas contest in National Review, to see who could find the most outrageous example of an attempt to suppress the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and put a cheap generic imitation in its place and Brimelow has continued this tradition on his immigration reform website VDare. VDare has done an excellent job of documenting this sort of thing and so we will here turn to look at the other war on Christmas, i.e., that conducted by those who consider themselves to be the faithful, against Christmas, in the name of what they consider to be a sound interpretation of the Bible.



The roots of this other war on Christmas go back to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. The Reformation began as a response to corruption in the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Leo X had authorized a campaign in which indulgences would be offered in return for funds that would go to the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica. This crass effort to sell the grace of God, offended Dr. Martin Luther of the University of Wittenberg, who challenged not only the vulgar indulgence peddling of Johann Tetzel, but the theology that lay behind the very idea of indulgences, on the grounds of the Pauline doctrine of justification by grace through faith, and, when summoned by the Church to defend himself against charges of heresy, insisted that it is to the Holy Scriptures, as the written Word of God, that the teachings and traditions of the Church must be held accountable.



Dr. Luther had nothing against Christmas, or against most of the traditions of the Church for that matter, but the ball he started rolling picked up momentum which carried it much further than he had ever intended. The Reformation divided Western Europe, in which nation-states had begun to develop in the earlier Renaissance period. Of these, for the most part those with a Latin-based language, like French, Italian, and Spanish, remained Roman Catholic while the national churches in the northern states, with German-based languages, tended to follow one or the other of the Protestant Reformers. There were Protestants, however, who were convinced that Luther, Calvin, and even Zwingle had not gone far enough, who condemned Christendom and its traditions and institutions as hopelessly corrupt, denouncing both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant national churches and who formed sects in which only those whom they considered to be pure in doctrine and lifestyle were welcome, regarding their own sects as God’s elect remnant, and everyone else as being corrupt.



Protestant sectarianism continued to develop further and further away from the mainstream of Christian tradition and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, radical Protestant sects developed, like the Rutherfordian Russellites and the Armstrongists which went so far as to reject Nicene Trinitarian orthodoxy itself, generally reviving one or another of the ancient heresies in the process. Both the Russellites and the Armstrongists condemned Christmas as a pagan invention of the “Catholic Church” which in their view was a counterfeit church created by Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.



This same anti-Christmas view had developed in radical Protestantism much earlier than this, however, by individuals who did not go so far as to reject the Trinity. In the sixteenth century, many of the English Protestants who had introduced moderate reforms in the Church of England during the reign of Edward VI, fled to Switzerland during the reign of the Catholic Mary, and there became much more radical in their Calvinism. When these returned to England, during the reign of Elizabeth I, who had restored the Edwardian reforms, they found these did not go far enough to please them. They demanded that every practice and institution from the pre-Reformation tradition of the Church for which they could not find a text in the Holy Scriptures commanding or authorizing its use be removed from the Church as superstition and popery. Against these fanatics, who came to be known as Puritans, the theologian Richard Hooker, defended the Elizabethan Church of England in his eight volume Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, arguing that the Church was at liberty to retain whatever traditional practices and institutions were not explicitly forbidden or condemned in the Holy Scriptures, a view far more compatible with the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty than that of the Puritans, although the latter liked to think of themselves as the champions of Christian liberty against a “legalistic” Church. When neither Elizabeth I, nor her Stuart successors James I and Charles I, were willing to give in to their demands, they became increasingly seditious and in the 1640s their rebellion against King Charles I broke out into the English Civil War. They captured the king, had him put on trial before a Parliament from which all but their own supporters had been removed by military force, and executed him. They installed their general, Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of Britain, whose tyrannical regime lasted until his death in 1658, shortly after which the crown was restored to Charles II.


During his mercifully brief dictatorship, Cromwell sought to remove everything that brought the slightest amount of colour, light, and earthly happiness into people's lives. He banned games and amusements on Sundays - the only day of the week people were not working from dawn to dusk, stripped the churches of ornamentation and beautiful organ music, forcing everyone to listen to horrible extra long sermons all Sunday morning, shut down theatres, and outlawed Christmas as pagan.

What was Cromwell's problem? Dr. Seuss once speculated concerning a fictional character who bore a remarkable resemblance to Cromwell "It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small." In the case of the real-life, seventeenth century Grinch, Cromwell, whatever role his head and shoes might have played, the problem was that his heart, soul, and spirit had been shrunk, frozen, and killed by a form of extreme Calvinism that combined a Pharisaical spirit regarding religion with a philistine attitude to culture in what was the most repulsive and vile, hell-spawned theology to claim the name of Christianity in vain, until theological modernism began to be spewed forth from the German schools of higher criticism and the North American "social gospel" movement in the nineteenth century.


Unfortunately, the spirit of Cromwellian Puritanism has survived in the misguided zealots who come out every year at this time to inform us that the first five verses of Jeremiah 10 condemn Christmas trees, even though anyone with an IQ over thirty can see that the reference to removing a tree from the forest and decking it with silver and gold is describing the construction of an idol, not something that is purely celebratory and decorative in purpose and function. They also like to remind us that December 25th was the day in which the Romans celebrated the birth of Sol Invictus at the conclusion of the pagan festival of lights, Saturnalia, concluding through some leap of reasoning that it was therefore pagan and idolatrous for the Church to have set the feast day celebrating the birth of the Son of the Living God on this same day. This sort of reasoning, however, would also condemn St. John the Apostle for introducing Jesus as the "Logos" in his Gospel. The idea of the Logos, the Divine Word or Reason, comes right out of pagan Greek philosophy. As the Hellenized first century Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria pointed out, there was a parallel concept in the "memra", the personalized Word or Wisdom of God of the Targum, the Aramaic rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures, and it is quite in keeping with the New Testament concept that Christ abolished the division between Jews and Gentiles in establishing His Covenant and His Church, to understand the Logos of the Gospel to draw from both the Greek and Jewish antecedents. Interestingly, the Jews then, as now, also celebrated a "Festival of Lights", around the winter solstice, commemorating the rededication of the Temple, after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabean revolt that ensued. Jesus, according to the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John, went to Jerusalem for this festival, also called the Feast of the Dedication or Hanukkah, even though this feast would be regarded as extra-scriptural by Puritan theology which does not accept the First and Second books of Maccabees as Holy Scriptures. If there is nothing wrong with St. John synthesizing the Greek logos and the Jewish memra in his doctrine of the pre-incarnate Christ as the Word Who was in the beginning with God, and Who was God, and through Whom all things were made, then there is nothing wrong with the Church deciding to celebrate the birth of God's Son, at a time of year which coincides with both the Roman and the Jewish festivals of lights. Indeed, it seems most appropriate.

There is a connection between the two wars on Christmas in that Puritanism, as Eric Voegelin pointed out, was an early stage of the modern revival of Gnosticism, of which the progressive liberalism of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries are later stages. You can read all about that in Voegelin's The New Science of Politics. The original Gnostics, I would note, were the anti-Christs that St. John referred to in his epistles, who denied the doctrine of Christ, specifically the Incarnation, which, of course, is the theological event commemorated in Christmas. The war on Christmas, in its Puritan and progressive liberal forms, is ultimately a war on the Apostolic doctrine of Christ as defended and articulated by the orthodox in the Trinitarian confession of the Council of Nicaea.

So, let me conclude by wishing you all a very Merry Christmas in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Fruit and Nuts

I read Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels when I was in my early teens and before I had watched more than a couple of the film series that was inspired by the books. Thus I had read Thunderball before I watched either of the two film versions of it (the second film version, which like the first starred Sean Connery as 007, was Never Say Never Again). (1) I was disappointed, therefore, to discover that my favourite part of the book had been omitted from both films. In the story’s primary plotline Bond is sent to recover two atomic bombs that had been stolen by Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his terrorist organization SPECTRE. If you have seen either of the films you will recall that before even receiving this assignment, Bond had stumbled across a clue while he was hanging out at a health spa, breaking the rules and seducing the nurses.

What is not mentioned in either of the movies is the reason why Bond was at the spa to begin with. In the novel, however, this is spelled out at great length in a hilarious secondary plot that leads into the main story. Bond has just undergone his annual physical examination and, while the report indicates he is in prime condition, M, director of the British Secret Service is not satisfied. He, having just come back from a health retreat with all the fanaticism of a new convert, summons Bond into his office and gives him a lecture about eating right and his smoking and drinking habits and then sends him away for a mandatory stay at the health spa. The cab driver who takes him there comments on how odd it is for someone of Bond’s age and health to be going to a place that caters to a clientele of old men with bad backs. While Bond seems to utterly disregard the rules of the spa during his stay, he too comes away from the spa as a convert. He quits drinking, cuts back on his smoking, even switching to a lighter, filtered brand of cigarette, and subsists on a diet of yogurt, Energen rolls and other health foods. He is now so full of pep and energy that he drives his housekeeper, his secretary, and everyone else around him crazy. This all comes to an end when the blackmail message from Blofield arrives. Bond is summoned into an emergency meeting where M, who has already reverted back to his old habits offers him a smoke, and replies with a “Humpf” when Bond says “Thanks sir. I’m trying to give it up”. Having been made aware of the crisis and given his assignment, he returns home and orders his housekeeper to cook him up a real breakfast of bacon and eggs and hot buttered toast (“not wholemeal”), and is subsequently back to normal.

I have always read this as an excellent satire of health fanaticism, although it is apparently inspired by an actual clinic that Fleming himself had attended. Eight years before the publication of Thunderball, C. S. Lewis had mocked health fanatics in the first paragraph of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third of the Narnia books by suggesting that the reason the character of Eustace Scrubb was initially so disagreeable was because of the progressive, forward thinking, advanced views of his parents, who were among other things, teetotalers, non-smokers, and vegetarians.

These books appeared shortly after World War II which, if those who believe we are living in a “post-modern” era are correct, is the prime candidate for the event that signaled the end of the Modern Age. If the Modern Age is thought of as a project that had as its goal the replacement of Medieval Christendom with secular, democratic, liberal nation-states then this project was more or less completed around the time of the war. This is directly related to the fact that health fanaticism was becoming such a nuisance that it became a major object of satire.

Orthodox Christianity does not include elaborate dietary laws, of the sort that Judaism and Islam have, but rather takes a libertarian approach to the matter of food and drink. The development of this approach can be seen in the New Testament beginning with Christ’s statement that it is that which comes out of the heart and not that which enters the mouth that defiles a man, to St. Peter’s vision in which the animals the Old Testament forbade the Jews to eat are declared clean, to the ruling of the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, to St. Paul’s explanation of Christian liberty in his epistles. What the Christian church enjoins upon its members is something much more difficult than merely following a checklist of what you can and cannot eat and drink. Building upon an ethical foundation lain in both the New Testament and classical philosophy it encourages the cultivation of virtues, habits of good behavior that are typically characterized by the traits of balance and moderation. The Anglican catechism, for example, in the section which explains the Christian understanding of the Ten Commandments “according to their spirit and purpose as our Lord teaches in the Gospel” includes as part of our duty to our neighbour the following “To keep my body in temperance, soberness, and chastity”. Temperance, as used here and in the New Testament where it is described as a fruit of the Spirit, means self-control and moderation.

The cultivation of virtue and character is the work of a lifetime and a path that lies between two ever present temptations. One of these is the temptation to give up and give oneself over to habits of excess. The other is the temptation to substitute a list of rules and to keep adding to it until you are buried under it. These temptations are never succumbed to in isolation from each other. Thus, when the North American descendants of the Puritans substituted a prohibition against the consumption of alcohol for Christianity’s traditional exhortation to sobriety a perverse culture of drunkenness began to develop.

Likewise, as the post-Christian Western world began to develop extremely unhealthy eating habits, such as the consumption of large amounts of fast food, pre-packed processed food, and junk food the health nuts began to crawl out of the woodworks, each with his own long list of what you should and should not eat. These lists frequently contradict each other - one health nut will prohibit fat, another will tell you to eat lots of fat and avoid carbohydrates, one will tell you to eat your food raw, another to eat it cooked, etc. What they have in common is that none of them recommend anything as simple as a balanced diet, and indeed one of the oldest versions, a pre-Christian pagan doctrine that was resurrected in the nineteenth century under the new name of vegetarianism for the new scientific era, prohibits the consumption of one of the major food groups entirely. Its most extreme adherents, vegans, prohibit the consumption of two of the major food groups while self-righteously proclaiming their moral superiority over everybody else.

Health nuts often believe that they have some special knowledge, that the medical establishment is conspiring to suppress and keep from the general public, which provides the secret to better health and a longer life. This resembles the doctrine of gnosis from which the Gnostics, the early enemies of apostolic authority and orthodoxy, derived their name. This too points to the Modern Age’s revolt against Christendom and Christian orthodoxy as the genesis of these ideas. Eric Voegelin argued that the very concept of a “Modern Age” had its origins in Gnostic eschatology and it is significant that he identified Puritanism, the extreme form of English Protestantism in which many of these lifestyle prohibitionist movements have their roots, as a form of Gnosticism.

As the Modern Age progressed and the Western world moved further away from orthodox Christendom, more and more of these legalistic health and lifestyle movements popped up. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the teetotal movement, vegetarianism, and sects that teach that Christians are required to eat kosher. It is not at all surprising that with the near completion of the secularization of the West by the end of World War II, the number of such movements exploded. I think the response of Ian Fleming and C. S. Lewis to these sorts of people – mockery, derision, and satire – is the right one, at least so long as they are merely an annoying, nagging, nuisance. When they try to enlist the government, which in the interest of reducing the cost of socialized medicine often seems inclined to listen to them, to compel us by law to conform to their wishes, it is a different matter and we should actively combat this sort of health tyranny. Otherwise, let us attempt to cultivate the virtues of self-control, moderation, and balance, which will do far more for our health than to follow the latest health fad, peddled by a bunch of fruits and nuts.




(1) Interestingly, Fleming had originally written Thunderball as a screenplay and adapted it into the novel, which was then in turn re-adapted into the movie versions.

How the Gnostics Destroyed Civilization

The New Science of Politics: An Introduction by Eric Voegelin, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1952, 1987, 193 pp.


Eric Voegelin was born in Germany and educated in Austria where he began his career as a university professor. After the Anschluss of 1938, in which the Third Reich annexed Austria, he fled the Nazis and ended up in the United States where he continued to teach political science. Unlike many refugees of that era, his experiences with Nazism did not make him sympathetic to Marx and Communism. Throughout his career he condemned both movements and was highly critical of his academic colleagues whose liberal and progressive views seemed to blind them to the evils of Communism. What all of these ideologies – Nazism, Communism, liberalism – have in common is their modernity and Voegelin became an able and outspoken critic of modernity.

Voegelin was a prolific author. His most laborious literary project, was his Order and History, a multi-volume work in which he traced the development of civil order throughout Western history. He is more widely remembered, however, for a small book which began as a series of six lectures sponsored by the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation, which he gave at the University of Chicago in 1951. The transcriptions of these lectures, with a new introduction, were published by the university a year later, under the title The New Science of Politics.

The New Science of Politics was a very influential book among English-speaking conservatives in the second half of the Twentieth Century. One of the slogans William F. Buckley Jr. made popular among young American conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s was “don’t immanentize the eschaton”. This slogan, which means “don’t try to create Paradise on earth”, is an allusion to a passage in Voegelin’s book. While Buckley was disseminating Voegelin’s terminology, the ideas in The New Science of Politics influenced such conservative thinkers as Russell Kirk in the United States, and George Grant in Canada. British conservative Michael Oakeshott, in his review of The New Science of Politics for the Times Literary Supplement, described it as “one of the most enlightening essays on the character of European politics that has appeared in half a century” and said that it was a book “powerful and vivid enough to make agreement or disagreement with even its main thesis relatively unimportant”.(1)

So what is this important book actually about?

If you are already familiar with what we usually refer to when we talk about “political science” then the title may mislead you. (2) It is not about comparing, contrasting and categorizing different systems of political organization. Right at the beginning of his introduction Voegelin made it clear that he considers this kind of political science to be a “degradation of political science to a handmaid of the powers that be.” (p.2) This is the kind of political theorizing, he said, that takes place in periods of stability. True political science, “the science of human existence in society and history”, he claimed, is developed in a period of crisis. “In an hour of crisis, when the order of a society flounders and disintegrates, the fundamental problems of political existence in history are more apt to come into view than in periods of comparative stability.” (pp. 1-2) He identified three major crises - the Hellenic, Roman/Christian, and Western - and the major political philosophers these crises produced – Plato/Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Hegel, respectively. Here, the theme of this book crosses over with that of his Order and History, the first volumes of which were released a few years after The New Science of Politics and which he was obviously working on at the time he gave these lectures and wrote the introduction.

The title of the book, therefore, refers to a restoration of political theory, which he was quick to tell us means “a return to the consciousness of principles, not perhaps a return to the specific content of an earlier attempt.” In other words, adopting the specific formulas of Plato, St. Augustine, and Hegel is not the answer, the principles embodied in such theories need to be reformulated to be accessible to us today. Why did he think this was the case?

Much can be learned, to be sure, from the earlier philosophers concerning the range of problems, as well as concerning their theoretical treatment; but the very historicity of human existence, that is, the unfolding of the typical, in meaningful concreteness, precludes a valid reformulation of principles through return to a former concreteness. (p. 2)

The above quote raises the interesting question of the similarities and differences between the thought of Voegelin and Leo Strauss. Voegelin and Strauss were both émigrés, who fled from German speaking areas of Europe during the Nazi era, to pursue academic careers in political science in the United States. Both were fierce critics of modernity who drew heavily upon classical antiquity and particularly the thought of Plato. Strauss, however, in his criticism of modernity, focused upon the problem of relativism which he believed to be the fruit of historicism. Historicism is the idea, associated especially with Hegel, that historical context is of foremost importance for the understanding of people, their civilizations, and their ideas. In Voegelin’s critique of modernity, however, a very different problem than relativism and historicism takes centre place, that of Gnosticism. We will shortly look at what Voegelin meant by Gnosticism, for it is a major theme of the book we are considering. As for historicism, Voegelin’s idea that the historical nature of human existence makes it necessary for the principles of political order to be reformulated for the present era bears a certain resemblance to it. Although it would be a digression to pursue the matter much further here, historicism is a subject of debate which keeps popping up in discussions of Voegelin’s thought, and he has been interpreted both as an historicist and as a Straussian anti-historicist (3).

Voegelin said that this reformulation of political principles had been underway for about a half a century in several different disciplines. This book was not an attempt to undertake that reformulation but to introduce it. Voegelin devoted the introduction to his book to an explanation of why such a reformulation was necessary. This explanation is as interesting as the main discussion of his book. “A restoration of political science to its principles implies that the restorative work is necessary because the consciousness of principles is lost.” (pp. 3-4). This consciousness was lost, he argued, because of positivism, by which he means not “the doctrine of this or that outstanding positivist thinker” – such as Comte – but “the intention of making the social sciences ‘scientific’ through the use of methods which as closely as possible resemble the methods employed in sciences of the external world.” (p. 8). The centuries in which positivism developed were centuries of tremendous discovery and achievement in the physical sciences. The positivists, perhaps understandably, concluded that the methodology which produced such impressive results in the physical sciences would have similar results in other branches of knowledge as well. Voegelin traced the development of this idea through three stages. In the first stage, positivism’s elevation of method over theory brought about an accumulation of facts regardless of their relevance. In the second stage, even relevant facts were interpreted in a perverse manner because positivism’s dismissal of theory eliminated the foundational principles for a sound interpretation and thus they were replaced with “the Zeitgeist, political preferences, or personal idiosyncrasies”. (pp. 9-10) He gave as examples of this, works by men who insisted upon reading modern political movements and phenomena into thinkers and events of the ancient past. In the third stage, the positivists began to speak of “value-judgement” and “value-free” science. This terminology came from the positivist belief that only facts about “the phenomenal world” could be discussed objectively, a belief which dismissed the “classic and Christian science of man” as a subjective collection of “value-judgments”. Classical and Christian ethics and politics were nothing of the sort, Voegelin objected, and while the goal of a “value-free” science was useful against the intrusion of personal preferences into science, when it was used against classic and Christian metaphysics it was destructive of science itself, and led only to relativism.

Voegelin began the first lecture by pointing out that while political science studies man in his historical societies, human society does not wait for political science to tell it how to understand itself. Human societies interpret themselves by means of symbols, and these symbols are an integral part of those societies. The political scientist must therefore deal with two sets of symbols – the symbols whereby the societies he studies interpret themselves, and the symbols of political science. The two sets of symbols are not identical but there is a large amount of overlap and part of the process of developing political theory is clarifying the meaning of the symbols a society uses to understand itself.

One of those symbols is that of “representation”. Western countries have representative governments and when most people are asked what this means point to those governments being elected to represent the people. Some details, such as whether the chief executive is directly elected or elected by the parliament, whether election is territorial or proportional, and the presence or absence of a non-elected constitutional monarch, do not affect a Western government’s being considered representative.

The meaning of “representation” becomes cloudier, however, when the example of the Soviet Union is considered. The political institutions of the USSR were defined in the Soviet constitution as representative institutions similar to their Western counterparts. Yet the USSR was not regarded as being a legitimate representative government by Western democrats because its people had no “genuine choice”. The Communist response was that only a Communist Party monopoly could truly represent the people because all other parties represented special interests.

Rather than deciding which of these viewpoints is correct, Voegelin summarized the points on which there is general agreement – that representation means that government is in some way responsible to the popular will, that true representation does not automatically exist just because government institutions are representative in design, and that parties have something to do with government being more or less representative.

He then moved on to point out that if the government of the USSR was not truly representative in this sense, it was undoubtedly representative in another sense. Governments represent their societies by acting on their behalf, both internally in passing laws which receive general obedience and externally through their military actions. All governments, even the Soviet government, are representative governments in the sense that they act for their societies on the historical stage. Political societies come into being, Voegelin said, through a process he calls articulation, in which rulers become the representatives of the society who are constitutionally empowered to act for the society in the sense of making decisions on its behalf. This kind of representation, he called existential representation to distinguish it from the earlier kind of representation which he called elemental representation. It is existential representation that is of use to the theorists of political science. Voegelin concluded the lecture with the observation that if a government which is representative in the elemental sense fails to be representative in the existential sense it will soon be replaced by a government that is representative in the existential sense.

In his second lecture, “Representation and Truth”, Voegelin introduced two other kinds of representation. In existential representation governments represent their societies by acting for them in history, but societies can also be regarded as themselves representing an order which transcends themselves. In this kind of representation, societies regard themselves as being small-scale representations of the cosmic order. Voegelin demonstrated how cosmological representation dates back to the earliest human empires and how the rulers of these societies, as the existential representatives of societies that themselves represent the cosmological order, were regarded as representatives of truth and their enemies are regarded as representatives of falsehood.

Just as there are different kinds of representation, however, so there are different kinds of truth, and in the period between 800 and 300 BC a new truth in rivalry to the cosmological truth represented by the empires broke out across the ancient world, whose representative was the theorist. This was the period which saw Confucius in China, the Buddha in India, the prophets in Israel, and the tragedians and philosophers in Greece. The “dynamic core” of this new truth, Voegelin said, could be found in Plato’s statement from The Republic that “the polis is man written large”. Voegelin called this the anthropological principle, that a political society “should be not only a microcosmos but also a macroanthropos”. (p. 61) There are two sides to this principle, first that a society will reflect the kind of men who comprise it, and second, that a society ought to represent the true order of the soul. It is the mature man’s experiences with the transcendental, with God, in his psyche, that produces this order within the soul, and so the anthropological principle is supplemented by the theological principle. The theorist clarifies and explains these experiences.

There are different kinds of truth then, the cosmological truth represented by the ancient empires, and the anthropological truth represented by the tragedians and theorists. There is also, Voegelin added at the beginning of the third lecture, soteriological truth, represented by Christianity. In the metaphysics of the Greek theorists, man through his psyche reaches towards God. In Christianity, God, in the incarnation of the Logos, reaches towards man. Voegelin explained how the implications of this truth unfolded in the history of Rome. The Roman republican constitution provided insufficient representation as Rome became a vast empire covering the Mediterranean world. Therefore a new office had to develop to represent the entire earthly world ruled by Rome. In the Roman republic, wealthy and influential patrons conferred favours on clients in return for loyalty. Out of the most powerful patrons, came the princeps who sometimes formed alliances with each other and other times feuded with each other. Out of the princeps arose the triumvirates, then the rivalry of Octavian and Anthony, and finally the triumph of Octavian left him as Augustus, the emperor, who would represent in himself all the peoples of the empire. The oaths of loyalty, which patrons demanded of their clientele, were now demanded of the entire empire, at first upon the installation of a new empire, then, in the reign of Caligula, annually. Reforms were made to the civil religion to place the standing of the emperor on a firmer representative foundation – he was declared to be the earthly representative of the highest god. But who was the highest god? This was a period of synergism, in which the religions of the various peoples controlled by Rome were mixing. Philo, the Jewish philosopher, borrowed the metaphysical concept of the one supreme God, who governed the world through lesser deities the way the Great King of Persia ruled his empire through his satraps, and applied it to the God of the Jews. Eusebius, then borrowed Philo’s arguments and incorporated them into Christianity, pointed to the fact that the Incarnation had occurred during the reign of Augustus, who had established the Pax Romana which facilitated the spread of the Gospel throughout the world. Constantine, Eusebius argued, had brought what Augustus had begun to its final fulfillment by converting to Christianity, and so becoming the representative of the true God. For a time in the fourth Century, the Empire believed Christianity to be the solution to its existential problem, but the alliance was precarious and doomed to fail once the orthodox Church developed the symbols of trinitarianism. When Rome was sacked by Alaric in the early fifth century, pagans blamed Christianity for the fall of Rome. St. Augustine, in refuting their arguments in the Civitas Dei, clarified the Christian view, that there are two spheres of representation, the empire and the church, and that only the latter represents God and His transcendent order, that the empire being merely the representative of temporal man.

This idea, that the empire is the representative of temporal man, while the church is the earthly representative of the eternal, was the orthodox Christian view that prevailed for centuries following the fall of Rome. Voegelin dubbed the process whereby this viewpoint was achieved de-divinization which he defined as:

The historical process in which the culture of polytheism died from experiential atrophy, and human existence in society became reordered through the experience of man’s destination, by the grace of the world-transcendent God, toward eternal life beatific vision. (p. 107)

The subject of his last three lectures, was the modern crisis of representation brought about by the re-divinization of political society. Re-divinization did not mean a return to pagan polytheism, however. Its source lay within Christianity itself, in ideas that the orthodox church had condemned as heretical.

There was tension in the early church, due to Christianity’s origins in Jewish messianism, between the expectation of the Parousia (Second Coming of Christ) to establish the Kingdom of God on earth and the idea of the church as the ongoing earthly representation of Christ. The eschatology – vision of final perfection – of early Christianity evolved from an “eschatology of the realm in history”, in which final perfection would be achieved on earth, in history to an “eschatology of transhistorical, supernatural perfection”, in which final perfection awaited the believer in the beatific vision, in a supernatural realm, outside of history. The earlier eschatology would pop up periodically in response to persecutions but the latter eschatology became the orthodox view because it was more compatible with the idea of the church as the earthly representative of the Kingdom of God. Despite this, the church included the Revelation of St. John within the canon, but St. Augustine in the Civitas Dei was able to reconcile the two by interpreting the millennial reign described in Revelation as the reign of Christ in the church.

Then, in the twelfth century, came Joachim of Flora. Joachim used the symbols of the Trinity to develop an idea of history. It consisted of three ages, the Age of the Father beginning with Abraham and the Age of the Son beginning with Christ would be followed by an Age of the Spirit upon the appearance of a new leader who Joachim believed would appear around 1260 AD. In the Age of the Spirit, Joachim believed, there would no longer be a need for the church as the earthly representative of Christ because everything necessary for spiritual perfection would come to each person directly without sacramental mediation.

This idea became the foundation of modernity. It was reinterpreted in several different ways – as the humanist division of history into ancient, medieval, and modern, the positivist idea of the scientific succeeding the theological and metaphysical, the Marxist view of history progressing from primitive to final perfect Communism through the class society, and the National Socialist concept of the Third Reich.

The Joachitic/modern eschatology has to be understood in contrast with the traditional, Augustinian, Christian orthodox view. In the latter, there are two histories, the profane history of political societies and the sacred history in which Christ came and established His church. The latter is part of transcendental history, which includes events in the supernatural realm. Transcendental history, including sacred history, moves towards the telos of final perfection. Profane history does not, it merely awaits its end. Joachim, therefore, in his conception of a third age in which perfection would be achieved on earth, assigned to profane, earthly history a meaning which belongs to transcendental history, and so created the fallacy that history has an eidos – a form that gives meaning. In other words he “immanentized” – brought into the earthly realm, “the eschaton” – the final perfection of the supernatural realm. This is what Voegelin meant by the technical phrase for which he is most remembered.

This fallacy, although seemingly elemental, cannot be explained by stupidity or dishonesty. It comes, Voegelin said, from the drive for certainty about the meaning of history and one’s own existence. Orthodox Christianity assigns this meaning to the transcendent God and calls upon people to exercise faith. When faith breaks down, men cannot fall back upon the pre-Christian pagan culture which is no longer around. Instead they fall back upon an alternative experience to faith which provides them with certainty. This alternative experience is gnosis – the experience claimed by the chief rivals of orthodoxy since the beginning of Christianity. Modern Gnostic experience takes several forms – Voegelin gives examples of intellectual, emotional, and volitional varieties – and these experiences “are the core of the redivinization of society, for the men who fall into these experiences divinize themselves by substituting more massive modes of participation in divinity for faith in the Christian sense.” (p. 124) Joachim’s view of history arose through a combination of the Gnostic drive for certainty with a search for meaning in the growth of Western civilization. The “growth of gnosticism” is the “essence of modernity”, and the immanentization of the eschaton into the meaning of history as movement towards a teleological end – whether that end is specified as in utopianism or not – is the progressive interpretation of history. Since this idea makes salvation itself something to be achieved by men within the temporal sphere it is not surprising that it results in impressive accomplishments – but “the death of the spirit is the price of progress” which is what Nietzsche meant when he declared God to have been murdered. (p. 131)

In the penultimate lecture, Voegelin discussed how Gnosticism, which had been slowly growing throughout the Middle Ages, burst on the scene around the time of the Reformation, and he gives the Puritans in England as a case example of this revolutionary aspect of Gnosticism. He begins by referring to the analysis of Puritanism found in the first book of Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity where Hooker describes the methodology by which the Puritans developed a popular following through condemnations of the upper classes and established order, which caused these to be identified with evil and falsehood, and the Puritans themselves with virtue and truth, among their hearers, and how they gave this following a sense that they as an elect remnant, were the sole possessors of the truth. The Puritans claimed Scriptural authority, but their use of the Scriptures consisted of quoting select verses out of context and ignoring the interpretive rules developed over a millennium and a half of Christianity. They claimed to believe in freedom of interpretation, but actual freedom of interpretation would have led to chaos if practiced and would have undermined their arguments against church tradition, because it too is an interpretation of Scripture. To prevent critical challenges to their doctrine they developed certain devices. The first was an authoritative interpretive tool which would preclude the need to refer to the interpretive tradition (Calvin’s Institutes). The second was a taboo on the “instruments of critique”, which at the time meant classic philosophy and scholastic theology, a taboo which was devastating to Western intellectual culture to the extent that it was followed.

Voegelin then turned from Hooker’s analysis of Puritanism, to Puritan literature itself and demonstrated a number of parallels between Puritanism and the primary Gnostic revolutionary movement of his own day, Marxist-Leninism. Both movements used apocalyptic terminology to describe themselves as a kingdom of light engaged in battle with a kingdom of darkness, over which their victory was assured. The new age would be brought about with the help of God – or the dialectics of history – but not without armed revolt on the part of the forces of light. The details of the new order to come are vague, but it will be universal in extent. In each case “the revolution of the Gnostics has for its aim the monopoly of existential representation” which will not be accepted until after a war between “two universal armed camps engaged in a death struggle with each other.” (p. 151) In this “Gnostic mysticism of the two worlds”, Voegelin detected “the pattern of the universal wars that has come to dominate the twentieth century.”

The Puritan revolution in England demonstrated the threat Gnostic revolutionaries pose to the public order, and therefore revealed a need for the a theoretical restatement of that order. Thomas Hobbes developed such a restatement in his Leviathan, the “great and permanent achievement” of which was to have clarified that “public order was impossible without a civil theology beyond debate” (p. 159) but Hobbes himself fell into the Gnostic trap by asserting that through the spread of a new truth, a constitution could be made eternal, “abolishing the tensions of history” (p. 160).

In the final lecture, Voegelin examined the implications of Hobbes’ insight into the necessity of a civil theology. He first recapped the history covered in the preceding lectures. Christianity could function as the civil theology of Western civilization as long as the church was the predominant civilizing factor – since that ceased to be the case, Gnosticism, at first using Christian terminology then later explicitly anti-Christian, has rushed to take its place. This has brought Western civilization to a point of crisis. The totalitarian movements of the twentieth century are the final destination towards which Gnosticism as a civil theology is headed. There is reason, however, to hope that its influence will soon be broken. The traditions of classic philosophy and orthodox Christianity are still alive, and in the dangers posed by Gnosticism as a civil theology, its self-defeating nature can be seen. By immanentizing the eschaton, Gnosticism has confused the real world with the dream world, which causes it to make mistakes in action. It responds to threats in the real world with magic operations that work only in the dream world:

[D]isapproval, moral condemnation, declarations of intention, resolutions, appeals to the opinion of mankind, branding of enemies as aggressors, outlawing of war, propaganda for world peace and world government, etc.(p. 170)

The end result of all of this nonsense will be that either Gnosticism will bring about the physical destruction of Western civilization through a series of wars and revolutions, or reality will shatter the Gnostic dream.

Voegelin next briefly discussed the varieties of Gnosticism, two of which were “antagonists in battle on the world scene” (p. 174) at the time he was writing, and diagnosed the threat to the West in that conflict (the Cold War) as coming not from the military strength of the Communists but from the “paralysis and self-destructive politics” (p. 175) of the Gnostic dream. He then analysed Hobbes’ response to the manifestation of Gnostic revolution in Puritanism. If the Puritans immanentized the eschaton, Hobbes’ solution was to do the exact opposite, to make the existential order the society into the truth which it represented. For all its genius, this too is inadequate and Voegelin concluded his analysis of Hobbes’ symbols, by pointing out that Leviathan “adumbrates a component in totalitarianism which comes to the fore when a group of Gnostic activists actually achieves the monopoly of existential representation in a historical society” so that, ironically, “the Leviathan is the symbol of the fate that actually will befall the Gnostic activists when in their dream they believe they realize the realm of freedom.” (pp. 186, 187). He then concluded the lecture, and the book by pointing out that the symbol of Leviathan had arisen in English society in response to Puritanism, and that England and America were the societies which were most resistant to Gnostic totalitarianism because they experienced Gnosticism when it was at an early stage and were thus able to preserve as national institutions “the institutional culture of aristocratic parliamentism as well as the mores of a Christian commonwealth” (p. 188), providing them with a “glimmer of hope” in the present crisis.

So, after this extensive summary of Voegelin’s book, what can be said in response to it?

While there are obviously elements which are out of date, such as the references to the particular circumstances of the Cold War, it is remarkable how much of this book is still relevant today. Perhaps this should not be surprising considering the nature of its subject matter, fundamental political theory rather than political issues, and the author’s rejection of the positivist’s elevation of method over relevance. The Gnosticism that Voegelin wrote about is still with us today and the “end of the Gnostic dream” which he suggested was “perhaps closer at hand than one ordinarily would assume” (p. 173) is nowhere in sight, but his prediction that Gnosticism’s confusion of dream and reality would result in constant wars accompanied by constant talk of peace has been born out. At the end of his first lecture, after making the point that existential representation in which a government acts as decision-making representative of its society on the stage of history is more fundamentally important than elemental representation (a democratic constitution) Voegelin said:

Our own foreign policy was a factor in aggravating international disorder through its sincere but naïve endeavour of curing the evils of the world by spreading representative institutions in the elemental sense to areas where the existential conditions for their functioning were not given. (p. 51)

Following the end in 1989-1991 of the conflict between the USA and the Soviet Union which was the original historical backdrop to these lectures, the USA announced, during her first war with Iraq, the dawn of a “New World Order” in which a coalition of free countries, led by the United States, would police the world against “aggressors” like Saddam Hussein (remember what Voegelin had to say about the magic operations Gnostics who had lost the distinction between the real and dream world engaged in). Following the events of September 11, 2001, the USA renewed its commitment to the Wilsonian policy of spreading democracy with a vengeance. She entered into two major wars and several smaller conflicts with the goal of democratizing the Middle East. At the cost of billions of dollars and countless lives, America brought herself to the brink of bankruptcy, only to watch these countries use the democracy she had brought them to vote in jihadist and Islamic theocratic governments. Voegelin’s observation seems more timely today than in the day he first made it.

Interesting, Wiliam F. Buckley Jr. was an enthusiastic supporter of both American wars on Iraq, although he later admitted the second one to be a mistake. Perhaps if he had absorbed more of Voegelin’s theory in addition to his lingo he would not have made this mistake.

Voegelin’s lectures, however, were not intended as a guide to practical political decision making but as an introduction to political theory and the idea of representation. Perhaps, the most important things to glean from this introduction, are not lessons but questions. If modernity is derived from an ultimately Gnostic view of a third realm or age in history, what then is the significance of the fact that the Modern Age is now widely believed to be over? What is the relationship between the relativism and nihilism of the “post-modern” era and the Gnosticism of the Modern Age? If the various movements of Gnosticism each sought the “monopoly of existential representation in a historical society” what does the post-modern rejection of all meta-narrative mean for the future of representation? If the classic philosophers were correct in believing that the political society represents first the order of the cosmos and then the order of the soul in man and if Christian theologians were correct in believing that the transcendent order of God to be represented on earth by the church, while the political society represents the temporal order of man, what form will these truths take in a world that has passed through Gnosticism and the nihilism of post-modernism?

(1) The review, entitled “The Character of European Politics”, which appeared in the August 7, 1953 issue, was originally published anonymously, but Oakeshott is identified as the reviewer in the online historical archives of the Times Literary Supplement, http://www.tlsarchive.com

(2) Dante Germino, in the foreword to the 1987 edition, tells us that the original title of the lectures was “Truth and Representation”.

(3) The correspondence between the two political philosophers was translated and edited by Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper and published by the University of Missouri Press in 1993 and 2004 under the title Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964.