Papal Verbal Flatulence

Jorge Bergoglio, who under the name Francis became the current pretender to St. Peter’s throne when its last occupant, a much sounder theologian than himself, the late Benedict XVI, resigned, gave an interview to 60 Minutes earlier this week.  I didn’t see the episode.   The last time I watched an episode of 60 Minutes Andy Rooney’s commentary was still the final segment.   Rooney was about the only thing that made the show watchable.  I have, however, since read transcripts of the interview as it has generated some controversy.  This is not surprising.  Bergoglio seems to suffer from a gastro-intestinal disorder that manifests itself in emissions from his mouth of gas that ought to be coming out the other end.

 

Bergoglio was asked about a number of current issues.   He gave abominable answers when it came to some matters such as the immigration invasion of the United States, passable if vague answers on certain other matters of international import, a surprisingly good answer on the ecclesiastical matter of the ordination of women, and a very strange have-it-both-ways answer on the Roman Church’s recent ill-advised foray into the world of same-sex blessings.

 

The interviewer, Norah O’Donnell, concluded her questioning by asking the Western Patriarch who mistakenly thinks he has universal jurisdiction what gives him hope.  His answer began with the single word “Everything” and ended with the following:

 

And people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.

 

This is what has caused all the fuss because the words in bold have been taken to be in conflict with the doctrine of Original Sin.  Original Sin is the doctrine that in the sin of our first parents the entire human race fell and became sinful a condition from which we are unable to extract ourselves making us wholly dependent for our salvation on the grace of God and the redemption provided by Jesus Christ.   Unlike doctrines proclaimed by papal decree or even by any of the post-Schism councils falsely regarded as ecumenical by the Roman Communion, Original Sin is a truly Catholic doctrine.   Its affirmation is implicit in the condemnation of the heresy of Pelagius by the regional Council of Carthage in 418 AD, later ratified by the General Council of Ephesus in 431 AD, that was received as the third ecumenical council by the pre-Schism Catholic Church.   It is essential to both Lutheranism and Calvinism and accordingly is emphasized in the confessions of those traditions.  In the Anglican formularies it is affirmed in the ninth of the Articles of Religion.   While contemporary online Eastern Orthodox apologists sometimes claim that their Church rejects it this is not the case.  What the Eastern Orthodox Church rejects is Original Guilt, the idea that human beings inherit not just a fallen nature corrupted by sin from their first parents but also personal culpability for the sinful act that produced the Fall. Original Guilt and Original Sin are related but different concepts that are often confused with each other in both the East and the West.   In the East it has often been assumed that Original Guilt is an essential part of the Western idea of Original Sin, for which reason the Eastern Orthodox usually refer to Original Sin sans Original Guilt as ancestral sin.   Since, however, what they affirm as ancestral sin is Original Sin as distinguished from Original Guilt, regardless of whether the latter is affirmed or denied, Original Sin is actually affirmed by both East and West. (1)

 

So, was what Bergoglio said heretical in the Pelagian way and in conflict with Original Sin?

 

If you take the offending words – the ones I highlighted in bold, which are repeated in his next sentence – alone, the answer is “not necessarily.”   If, by saying that people are fundamentally good, Bergoglio meant that sin and evil do not exist in themselves as things or substances in their own right, but only parasitically in things that are good, then he was right.   Indeed, if that is what he meant, he was not only right but expressing the essence of the classical Christian theist version of that to which Gottfried Leibniz gave the name theodicy, the vindication of God in the face of the problem of evil.   This is not what Bergoglio meant, but let us pursue this thought a little further before considering the banality that he actually intended.

 

God is good.   Indeed, not only is God good, He is Goodness itself at its purest and most perfect.   God created everything other than God that exists and everything that He created He created good.   Another way of putting it would be to say that in His grace He gave to all that He had made participation in created goodness which is a finite reflection of His own infinite goodness.   Every gift that He gave His creatures was a good gift.  To rational creatures, such as ourselves, He gave the gift of free choice.  As a gift from God, free choice was both good in itself, and the means to a greater good, the good of rational creatures freely choosing to trust, love, and obey God.   It is through our misuse of that good gift that evil entered into the world.  Evil, not having been created by God, has no substance of its own, no essence.  It does not exist in the most proper sense of the word.   It has neither form, that which makes a thing the thing that it is rather than some other sort of thing, nor matter, that which makes a thing an actual thing rather than merely the idea of a thing.   It is present in things which do exist, in the proper sense of the word, which do have form and matter, in the way a hole exists in a wall, not a hole that is put there by an architect so that a window may be placed in it, but a hole that somebody makes by taking a sledgehammer to it in a fit of anger.   It is a hole, in other words, where there is not supposed to be a hole.  It is an absence or deficiency.   What is absent, in the hole that is evil, is a kind of good.  It is not, however, the entirety of the goodness that was bestowed upon the created thing in which evil parasitically resides that is absent, because if the entirety of that goodness were absent, the thing itself would no longer exist, existence being the most basic gift of goodness that God bestows upon His creatures.

 

Peter Lombard explored this at length in the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth distinctions of the second book of his Sentences.   The sixth paragraph of the second chapter of the distinction reads “From the aforesaid, it is gathered and inferred that, if there is an evil will and an evil action, insofar as it is, it is good.  But does anyone deny that an evil will and an evil action exist?  And so an evil will or action, insofar as it is, is a good.  And insofar as it is a will or an action, it is similarly a good; but it is evil from this vice; this vice is not from God, nor is it anything.”(2)  Lombard is a particularly important authority on this matter as his Sentences are a bridge of sorts between Patristic and Medieval theology.  The Scriptures and the Church Fathers, especially St. Augustine were his source material, his Sentences provided the structure for Systematic Theology for centuries to come, being the textbook from which St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus, and basically every Western theologian of note from the thirteenth century until the Reformation studied. (3)  Also worthy of note in this context are the third paragraph in the fourth chapter of the thirty-fourth distinction:

 

From this it is gathered that, when man is called evil, nothing else is meant than an evil good.  Hence Augustine adds, in the same place: “What is an evil man, if not an evil nature, because man is a nature?  Now, if man is a good thing because he is a nature, what else is an evil man, if not an evil good? Yet, when we distinguish between these two things, we find that he is not evil because he is a man, nor is he good because he is iniquitous; but he is called good because he is a man, evil because iniquitous. And so each nature, even if it is defective, insofar as it is a nature, is good; insofar as it is defective, it is evil.” (4)

 

And the second paragraph of the fifth chapter of the same distinction which paragraph consists entirely of quotes from St. Augustine’s Enchiridion:

 

“And these two opposites exist at the same time in such a way that, if the good did not exist in which evil might exist, evil could not exist at all, because not only would corruption not have a place to stay, but it would have no source from which to arise, unless there were something that could be corrupted, because corruption is nothing other than the extermination of the good.  And so evils have arisen from goods, and cannot exist in anything other than good things.” “Therefore, there was no source at all from which an evil nature could arise, except from the good nature of angel and man, from which the evil will first arose.” (5)

 

Note that Lombard here is quoting the Church Father who led the battle for orthodoxy regarding Original Sin and the need for grace against the Pelagian heresy.  It is also worth noting that these distinctions follow immediately after the section (distinctions thirty to thirty-three) of this book that covers Original Sin and are the segue into the discussion of actual sin, i.e., sinful acts, that closes the book.

 

Of course, none of this is what Jorge Bergoglio had in mind.   He probably doesn’t know the difference between Peter Lombard, Vince Lombardi and Guy Lombardo.  I could imagine him, in the unlikely event that somebody were to read this essay to him, asking “Peter Lombard? Wasn’t he an American football coach?  Or the guy who used to sing Auld Lang Syne on the radio every New Year’s Eve?” except that I seriously doubt he knows who any of these men were.

 

No, Bergoglio was just being a liberal, a progressive, a leftist.  The third sentence in the quotation confirms that.  Here it is again “Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.”   That’s that heart about which the prophet Jeremiah said that it “is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9)   Or about which Jesus said “proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man.” (Matt. 15:19)  So no, he was not simply affirming that human nature, as created by God, is a good thing, in which sin/evil is present as a parasitical defect, as orthodox theologians have always taught.  He was affirming the liberal/progressive/leftist’s basic idea that the evils from which we suffer are not due to a moral defect in us but from defects in the structure of society.   If we could just get rid of economic/social/political disparity, if we could just eliminate poverty, illiteracy, or this-or-that other social ill, then everybody would finally be perfectly happy.   This never works because the ultimate cause of human suffering is not to be found in the organization of society, the distribution of its resources, or any of these other things, but in the human heart, in that very defect, Original Sin, which the Church affirms but which liberalism denies.   The Church is right and liberalism, including the liberal that the Cardinals of the Roman Communion have placed at the top of their hierarchy in the seat they wrongly claim to be vested with universal jurisdiction, is wrong.   The tragic consequence of liberalism’s error is that by denying that the ultimate cause of suffering is a defect in the human heart liberalism treats suffering as being treatable by political, social, and economic engineering, but since the ultimate cause of suffering is that defect in the human heart it is not so treatable and furthermore liberalism’s attempts to treat it by these means inevitably become, despite their denial that the problem is a defect in human nature, attempts to engineer better human beings, which attempts are doomed to fail and to fail in such a way as to increase rather than decrease human suffering.

St Peter in his first epistle advised his readers to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” (1 Pet. 3:15)   This is precisely what O’Donnell asked Bergoglio.   While Bergoglio may have succeeded to St. Peter’s local jurisdiction over the Church in Rome he has sadly not inherited the reason for the Apostle’s hope.   St. Peter went on to write:

 

Having a good conscience; that, whereas they speak evil of you, as of evildoers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ.  For it is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing. For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.  The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ: Who is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God; angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto him. (1 Pet. 3:16-22)

 

Bergoglio, in his answer said “everything” and mentioned human goodness.  He did not mention Jesus Christ.   That tells us everything we need to know about Bergoglio.

 

 

 

(1)    See the section on “Original Sin” in the fifth chapter of Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, first published in Russian in 1963, first published in English in 1983 by the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood.  The section in question can be found on pages 162 to 169 of the current (third) edition of the English translation, and the footnotes by the translator, Fr. Seraphim Rose, on the first and last pages of the section are particularly helpful and to the point, as is the final sentence in the proper text of the section “Thus original sin is understood by Orthodox theology as a sinful inclination which has entered into mankind and become its spiritual disease.”

(2)   Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 2, On Creation, translated by Giulio Silano, (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2008, 2013), 176-177.

(3)   A commentary on the Sentences was the thesis required for a Masters degree in Western Medieval universities.  St. Thomas Aquinas’ became his first published work.   Most of the extent writings of John Duns Scotus are his lectures at the universities of Oxford and Paris on the Sentences.

(4)  Lombard, op cit., 172-173, his quotation from St. Augustine is from the Enchiridion (Handbook).

(5)  Ibid., 173.

The Abandonment of Truth and the Fall of Civilization

Exactly when Medieval times or the Middle Ages ended and the Modern Age began has long been a subject of discussion and debate.   It will continue to be so, since the transition was not instantaneous but took place over an extended period that included any number of events which, depending the criteria being taken into consideration, could be identified as the turning point.   The question must, therefore, remain open, and for several decades now has taken the backseat to the questions of whether the Modern Age has ended, if so when, and what comes next.      Despite the temptation created by so many of the events of the current year having been presented to us in an apocalyptic framework, it is not my intention to address the latter set of questions here, other than to refer my readers to the interesting and persuasive discussion of such matters by the late John Lukacs in The Passing of the Modern Age (1970), The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (1993), and At The End of an Age (2002).    It is the transformation of Christendom into Western Civilization, a matter that touches on the questions pertaining to both the beginning and the end of the Modern Age that I shall be talking about here.    Or, to be more precise, I shall be discussing one aspect of that transformation.

 

Was the transformation of Christendom into Western Civilization the start of the Modern Age (one of the possible answers to the first question), the end of the Modern Age in both the sense of the purpose towards which that Age was directed and moving and in the sense that when it was accomplished the Age came to an end (if so this touches on the answer to all of the questions pertaining to the end of the Age), or was it simply one and the same with the Modern Age?

 

Christendom is a word that can be used in a narrower or a wider sense.   Let us take it here in its fullest sense of civilization that takes the Christian faith as its foundation and organizational principle.   It is essentially the generic version of what American Russian Orthodox hieromonk, Fr. Seraphim Rose, described in its Eastern Orthodox form when he wrote “that the principal form government took in union with Christian Truth was the Orthodox Christian Empire, wherein sovereignty was vested in a Monarch, and authority proceeded from him downwards through a hierarchical social structure” (Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, 1994, 2018, p. 28).    Obviously, by the end of the Second World War, one of the time-markers for possible ends of the Modern Age, this had been replaced by liberal, secular, democratic, Western Civilization, in all but the most outward, nominal, sense.   At the deepest level, of course, the transformation had been accomplished much earlier than this.

 

What this suggests, of course, is that, paradoxically, all three options in the complex question in our second paragraph can be answered in the affirmative.

 

While the question of when exactly the transformation of Christendom into Western Civilization began must remain open, like the related question of when the transition into the Modern Age began, it is certain that the radical epistemic revolution belongs to the earliest stages of the transformation.   By radical epistemic revolution, I mean the fundamental shift in how we conceive of what we know and how we know it that involved a repudiation of both tradition and divine revelation as evidentiary paths to knowledge and which introduced so drastic a change in the meaning of both reason and science as to constitute a break from what these things had been since classical antiquity.     The consequence of this revolution for Christian Truth was that it was removed from the realm of knowledge and reassigned to the realm of a “faith” which had itself been radically redefined so as to bear no resemblance to St. Paul’s “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1) but to be almost the very opposite of this.   Clearly this was a most significant event in the breaking of the union between civilization and Christian Truth.

 

In my last essay, in which I talked about the increasing confusion with regards to basic logical concepts that has occurred in a period that has also seen dogmatic authority increasingly assigned to “science” despite this contradicting the non-authoritarian nature of science in both pre-Modern and Modern meanings, I mentioned the paradox of the fact that the removal of tradition and divine revelation from the realm of evidence which thus emptied that realm of all but the kind of evidence which historians and courts rely upon and the kind which scientists rely upon should have tipped the balance in favour of reason in the ancient debate about the priority of reason versus evidence but has seemingly had the opposite effect of elevating one particular form of evidence over reason and the other remaining form of evidence.   It also needs to be observed, with regards to the dogmatic, authoritative, voice now ascribed to “science”, that in the most obvious cases of this, actual empirical evidence has itself been trumped by something else.   In the anthropogenic global warming/climate change “crisis” of recent decades and the Wuhan bat flu “crisis” of this year, in both of which we have been told that we must accept a drastic reduction in human freedom and submit to totalitarian measures and group-think in order to avert a catastrophe, dissenters have been told to “shut up and listen to the science”, but the “science” in question has largely consisted of computer model projections, which have been granted a bizarre precedence not only over reason, such as the questioning which provokes the “shut up and listen to the science” response, and non-empirical evidence, such as the historical record on the world’s ever-changing climate which directly contradicts the entire alarmist narrative on this subject, but even empirical evidence as this has until recently been understood, observations and measurements made in either the real world or the laboratory.   Since plenty of this sort of empirical evidence joins non-empirical evidence in supporting reason against these narratives, we are in effect being told that we must set both reason and evidence aside and mindlessly obey orders backed only by the fictional speculations of an artificial “intelligence”.   Anyone still open to the evidence of tradition and divine revelation, will find in Scriptural descriptions of the effects of idolatry upon the minds of those who practice it, an ample explanation of this phenomenon.

 

That tradition and divine revelation became vulnerable to being forced out of the realm of evidence can in part by attributed to their having been set against each other in the period that produced the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.   Both sides share the blame here.   The papacy and its adherents at their worst placed such an emphasis on tradition that they sometimes gave the impression that they had elevated it over divine revelation and thus were inviting a response similar to that given to the scribes and Pharisees by the Lord in Matthew 15:1-2, emphasis on verses three and six, whereas the more radical elements of the Protestant Reformation went so far in the opposite direction as to contradict such New Testament affirmations of tradition as I Corinthians 11:2 and II Thessalonians 2:15 and 3:16.   It is beyond the scope of this essay, of course, to offer a full resolution of this conflict.   I shall simply point out that by divine revelation I mean what theologians call “special revelation”, which is distinct from “general revelation” such as that described by St. Paul in Romans  1:19-20.   General revelation or natural revelation, is God’s revelation of Himself in the natural order of His Creation, and is the source of such truth as can be found in all human tradition.   Special revelation, is God’s salvific revelation of Himself in His Covenants, His written Word, and ultimately in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.   When Christianity makes claims of exclusivity, such as “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no man cometh to the Father but through Me”, these rest upon special revelation.   When Christianity acknowledges truth in other religions, this is on the basis of the general revelation that informs all traditions.    See the essays by C. S. Lewis in the first section of God in the Dock (1970), and the book Christianity and Pluralism (1998, 2019), by Ron Dart and J. I. Packer for a more extended discussion of these matters.   Special revelation, because of its role in the ordu salutis, comes with promises of divine protection against corruption (Matthew 5:17-18, for example) that are obviously not extended to general revelation (see the larger context of the Romans passage cited above), which would seem obviously to place the primacy on special divine revelation, without eliminating the epistemic value of either human tradition in general or the particular Apostolic tradition affirmed in Scripture in the aforementioned Pauline references.

 

The turning of divine (special) revelation and tradition against each other facilitated the rise of rationalism which attacked their now divided house and excluded them both from the realm of reason, evidence, and knowledge.   That this having ultimately led to evidence taking primacy over reason in an ongoing discussion/debate which began prior to Socrates seems counterintuitive is due to the reasons mentioned above, however, it seems more inevitable when we consider what is asserted about Jesus Christ in the first verse of the Gospel according to St. John.   “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”    The word rendered Word in the English of this verse is Logos, the word from which logic is derived.   It does indeed mean “word” in the sense of the unit of speech that is the basic building block of sentences, although it can also mean “sentence” in certain contexts, or even “speech” in general.   It also, however, can mean thought, in the sense of calculation, judgement, evaluation, and basically everything suggested by the word “reason”.   This personification of reason and ascription to it of divine status would have been familiar territory to the Greek thinkers of the day, as just such a thought had long been a dominant theme in Greek philosophy.   

 

Heraclitus of Ephesus, who is otherwise best known for his view that constant change is the defining characteristic of the world – “you never step in the same river twice” – introduced the concept of the Logos into Greek thought.  Logos, to Heraclitus, was a divine, rational principle that governs the world of flux and brings order and meaning to what otherwise would be chaos. In the first century, the Hellenizing Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, had famously equated the Logos of Greek thought with the personified Wisdom in Jewish Wisdom literature. The eighth chapter of the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament is the canonical example of this personification of Wisdom, and the Wisdom of Solomon, one of the disputed books of the Septuagint, is a book long example of the same, possibly originally written as expansion of or commentary on the chapter in Proverbs.  Even prior to Philo there had been a tradition in Jewish thought somewhat parallel to the Greek Logos, represented primarily in the Targum (a translation, or more accurately number of translations, of the Old Testament into Aramaic, along with midrash or exegetical commentary on the same, also in Aramaic), in which the personified Memra acts as the messenger or agent of God.   

 

There was one huge difference between Philo’s synthesis of Greek and Hebrew thought on this matter and St. John’s.   For Philo the Logos was not God, per se, but a divine intermediary between God and Creation, roughly the equivalent of the Demiurge, albeit the benevolent Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus not the malevolent Demiurge of the Gnostic heretics.   For St. John, the Logos was both with God, and was identical to God.    The lack of a definite article preceding Theos in the final clause of the first verse of the Gospel does not mean that a diminutive or lesser divinity is intended.   Since the clause joins two nouns of the same case (nominative) with the copula, and Theos is the noun that precedes the copula, its anarthrous condition indicates that it functions grammatically as the predicate rather than the subject (E. C. Colwell, “A Definite Rule for the Use of the Article in the Greek New Testament”, Journal of Biblical Literature 52, 1933).   Even if this were not a recognized grammatical rule, St. John’s intention could hardly be clearer, as his Logos, identified in the fourteenth verse as Jesus Christ, repeatedly makes statements employing the Greek equivalent of YHWH in such a way as to unmistakably identify Himself as God.   Indeed, this makes St. John’s use of the Greek philosophical term for the divine principle of reason that makes reality orderly in a way that evokes the first chapter of Genesis with its repeated “and God said…and it was so”, transforming what had been “without form and void” into that which “was very good”, a much more powerful embrace of reason than Philo’s.    See Calvinist philosopher Gordon H. Clark’s The Johannine Logos (1972) for a fuller discussion of this.  This is why the rejection of Christian epistemology, which affirms both special revelation and tradition, and embrace of a rationalist epistemology that removes both from the realm of evidence – although done in the name of reason and hence the term “rationalist” – must inevitably assign reason a much lower place than it had occupied in a worldview that acknowledges the Divine Logos.

 

The elevation of empirical evidence over historical evidence was also an inevitable consequence of the same epistemological revolution.   The reason for this is that the special revelation and tradition which were banished from the realm of evidence, each have a unique relationship with one of the two evidences allowed to remain.   When special revelation and tradition were sent into exile, the hierarchical relationship between the two was also rejected, leading to the inversion of this hierarchy for the corresponding two evidences.

 

Empirical evidence or science – real empirical evidence, mind you, not the computer generated, pseudoscientific, fiction masquerading under its name today – corresponds with tradition.   Here, I mean tradition in the generic sense of “that which has been passed down” (tradition comes from the passive perfect participle of the Latin trado, the verb for handing over or passing on) rather than the content of any particular tradition.   Tradition’s chief epistemic value is that it is the means whereby that which has been observed, deduced, and otherwise learned and known in the past is made available to those living in the present so that each generation does not have to re-invent the wheel so to speak and discover everything afresh for itself.   Apart from this, human knowledge could not significantly accumulate and grow.   As mentioned briefly above, with regards to Romans 1, the truths of general or natural revelation which are passed down in tradition are susceptible to corruption, but it is also the case that living traditions are flexible and self-correcting.   That this, and not the rigid inflexibility that rationalists falsely attribute to it, is the nature of tradition, was an insight that was well articulated by Michael Oakeshott (see the title essay and “The Tower of Babel”, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 1962).    While true science’s value is primarily utilitarian rather than epistemic – “science is always false, but it is often useful” as Gordon H. Clark put it – the merits of tradition as described in this paragraph overlap to a large degree those which scientists would ascribe to their vocation and methodology.   In the best sense of the word, science is itself a particular tradition, which has been accumulating natural knowledge and correcting itself since Thales of Miletus.

 

Special revelation, on the other hand, is connected to historical evidence.    This can clearly be seen in both Testaments.   The Old Testament is primarily the record of God’s revelation of Himself through a Covenant relationship established with a particular people, Israel, in a particular place, the Promised Land, over a specific era of time stretching from the period of the Patriarchs, from whom the people were descended, to the partial return from their exile in Babylon at the beginning of the Second Temple period.   Even the portions of it which are not strictly historical narrative in literary genre fit in to that history.   This is most obviously the case with the prophetic writings, which contain divine warnings given to Israel and sometimes the surrounding nations, in connection with events described in the historical record, but even in the case of the Psalms of David, many of these can be tied to specific events in that historical king’s life, as they collectively are tied to his life as a whole.

 

This is all the more the case with the New Testament.   The New Testament presents us with God’s ultimate revelation of Himself, both to the people with whom He had established the Old Covenant and promised a New, and to all the peoples of the world, in the Incarnation of His Son “and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”.    The story of God’s Incarnational revelation is told in the form of history – events about specific people, in identifiable places, at identifiable times, attested to by witnesses.   We are told that the Virgin Birth, the event shortly to be commemorated at Christmas, occurred in the reign of Augustus Caesar, when Herod the Great was king of Judea, and Cyrenius was governor of Syria, and that it took place in the city of David, Bethlehem.    The baptism of Jesus by His cousin John the Baptist is the event that signaled the beginning of His public ministry.   We are told that John the Baptist’s own ministry began in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judeau, Herod Antipas was tetrarch of Galilee, and Annas and Caiaphas were high priests.   The locations of Jesus' most significant miracles are identified, and the events of the final week of His public ministry are related in great historical detail – His dramatic entry into Jerusalem, His teaching in the Second Temple, His betrayal by Judas for thirty pieces of silver, His Last Passover Supper with His Apostles, His arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, His first, illegal, trial before the aforementioned high priests and the Sanhedrin, His second, official, trial before the aforementioned Roman governor, the mob turning against Him, His torture by the Roman soldiers, His crucifixion between two thieves at the hill of Calvary, and His burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.    Real places, real people, real events.   As St. Paul would say to Festus a few years later, “the king (Agrippa) knoweth of these things, before whom also I speak freely, for I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from him; for this thing was not done in a corner.”   The same St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, would set forth the evidence for the crowning event of God’s Incarnational revelation of Himself in history, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, citing eyewitness after eyewitness.    The Resurrection is not something to which evidence of the empirical sort can speak, but the historical evidence for it is overwhelming. (1)  

 

In the Christian epistemic hierarchy special revelation which takes place in and through history ranks higher than tradition of which science at its best is a particular example.   The abandonment of Christian epistemology early in the transformation of Christendom into Western Civilization involved a repudiation of both special revelation and tradition as well as the ranking between the two.  Even though considered in themselves, a strong case could be made for the superiority of historical evidence over empirical evidence – the latter consists of observations made in artificially controlled situations to test hypotheses and so cannot be counted upon to have epistemic value, to speak truth about reality, things as they are in themselves, even when they have the utilitarian value of helping us to manipulate things to our own use, and so when it comes to determining truth about reality, the empirical must count as merely one form of testimony among the many that make up historical/legal evidence, as it is in standard courtroom practice, and is therefore logically subordinate to the larger whole of which it is a part – this has resulted in science being elevated over other forms of evidence, over tradition of which it is a particular example and thus logically subordinate to the general form, and over reason.    Science, which belongs at the bottom of the epistemic totem pole and is essentially magic that works (see C. S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man”, the third lecture/essay in the book of the same title), has been raised to the very top of the pole.  

 

This elevation of science over all other evidence, all other traditions, and reason itself goes a long way to explaining how people who are scientists only in the sense that they speak the technical language of some branch of science or another have managed to substitute baseless predictions spat out by some machine for actual empirical evidence and ascribe to these the kind of authority that properly belongs to special revelation.   They have put this false science to the use of frightening people into giving up their basic rights and freedoms in exchange for protection against one Bogeyman or another and are thus laying waste to what little remains of the civilization that was once Christendom.    This demonstrates just how fundamental to civilization is its account of reality and truth.

(1)  In his essay “Myth Became Fact”, C. S. Lewis spoke of this historicity of the Christian story as the distinguishing point between it and pagan myths with similar elements, and thus described the significance of the Incarnation in this way: 

 

Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens ‐ at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other.

 

It was precisely this consideration, that the Christian message was a “true myth”, as put to him by J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, which had brought Lewis to Christian faith.  His interpretation here, of the Incarnation transcending myth by presenting us with a “myth which is also a fact” comes after, of course, his explanation of the meaning and value of myth qua myth, for which explanation I refer you to the essay as a whole which can be found in God in the Dock.

Raining on the Socially Distanced Parade

A paradox of the times in which we are living is that while the masses have been complying with this unwarranted and unjustifiable - and, apart from openly totalitarian police-states like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, unprecedented - near total suspension of our basic rights and freedoms out of an attitude of irrational fear, a surprisingly large number of people who do not typically display herd-mentality and go along with the crowd have supported the same measures out of an equally irrational optimism. They have seen silver linings in the clouds of this lockdown that frankly are not there.

I can think of several individuals, for example, who have acclaimed the pandemic as the end of globalism. Some of these are the "small is beautiful" type. These people are all about localism - the family farm, the ma and pa shop, the small town, buying locally, and the like. The Christians, especially the Roman Catholics, among them place a lot of stress on the doctrine of subsidiarity. These are the kind of people who like to quote writers like E. F. Schumacher, Wendell Berry, and Kirkpatrick Sale. If they are particularly religious they also like to quote G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and if they are particularly politically incorrect, the Vanderbilt Agrarians, the Twelve Southerners. Others who hail the end of globalism are the nationalist types who don't like open borders, mass immigration, the exportation of manufacturing jobs, foreign aid, and all of the ancillary evils attendant upon these major ones. These are the sort of people who if they live in the republic south of our border form the support base of Donald the Orange. I have a great deal of sympathy for both groups. I largely agree with the first group in what they stand for - small businesses and communities, etc., while dissenting from their tendency to imply that "small is beautiful" translates into "big is necessarily bad and ugly." I largely agree with the second group in what they are against, although I am not a nationalist in the proper sense of the term. I would distinguish between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism is the natural love of home and family grown to embrace one's country and its traditions, institutions and people. Nationalism is an ideology that first appeared in the American and French Revolutions based on Enlightenment notions of popular sovereignty and has been, in my opinion, a force for evil.

I have seen members of both groups speak of the global lockdown in response to the pandemic as the end of globalism, but there seems to be little in the way of fact to support this. Indeed, there is an abundance of evidence that would point to the opposite conclusion. The pandemic certainly illustrates several of the follies of globalism. The folly of depending too much on foreign producers for essential goods, and especially the medical supplies that we need the most in a pandemic that might interrupt their availability, is one obvious one, That of outsourcing manufacturing to such a degree that the domestic economy becomes largely dependent upon service-type industries of the sort that are most vulnerable to epidemics, pandemics, and the draconian overreach of public health authorities is another. This does not mean that we are likely to take these lessons to heart. The anti-pandemic measures are hardly anti-globalist. While international travel has been temporarily curtailed, international trade is still going on. It would be impossible to build a strong, domestic, production sector to replace international trade under the conditions of the lockdown. The corporations that have become giants through globalism have all jumped on the lockdown bandwagon. The tech corporations that sprung up in the most recent stage of globalism were the first to do so. Apart from the politicians, these companies are the single largest source of the inane, mindless, nauseating, propaganda about being "apart together" and similarly nonsensical drivel that we are bombarded with on an hourly basis.

It is the small businesses that are being hurt the most by the lockdown measures. Here in Manitoba, the provincial government began lifting some of the restrictions this week. Restaurants with outdoor patios, for example, are now allowed to seat patrons in them, albeit at what the health fascists deem to be a safe distance. Presumably, the next step will be to re-open dining rooms at a reduced seating capacity. Towards the end of the week, however, the provincial restaurant association announced that up to seventy percent of the province's restaurants do not have sufficient funds to re-open without further government assistance. Obviously, this is not referring to the large chains, the franchises of which have mostly remained open for take-out, delivery and drive-thru. It refers to the restaurants that have had to close entirely, the bulk of which are the smaller, family-owned, local-flavour type.

While the Dominion government has promised assistance to small businesses, that assistance bears a resemblance to the wooden horse that Odysseus advised the Greeks to construct as a "gift" for Priam of Troy. Last month, for example, Captain Airhead announced a new program in which small businesses could apply for government backed interest-free loans of up to $40, 000, a quarter of which might be eligible for loan forgiveness, that is, it would not have to be repaid. To qualify, however, businesses have to pass a "values test" like the one that was imposed on employers seeking to hire students under the Summer Jobs program a few years back. Each business must attest that it:

does not promote violence, incite hatred or discriminate on the basis of sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion, culture, region, education, age or mental or physical disability

While it is reasonable that the government not offer funds to groups that "promote violence" or "incite hatred" in the way normal people understand these words to mean, "discriminate" is another matter. Any caterer who would prefer to opt out of catering a same-sex marriage on the basis of religious convictions, would be regarded by the Liberals as someone who "discriminates" on the basis of "sexual orientation" and disqualified. Furthermore, as the Liberals made obvious the last time they imposed this test, they consider opposition to the idea that a woman has the right to murder her unborn child to be discrimination on the basis of sex. That the test is internally incoherent and self-contradictory, being itself an example of religious discrimination against evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, traditional Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, conservative Jews and Muslims, and other groups that dissent from liberalism in the same ways, is of no consequence to the Liberals who impose it.

Captain Airhead does not have to impose such a test on large corporations. They have all been promoting this same radical agenda for years. It is only the small, especially family-owned, businesses that are disproportionately affected by the government lockdown measures, who are being told to go against their conscience to obtain assistance.

It is not only anti-globalists who have been displaying a counter-factual optimism. There are also those who have tried to find a spiritual silver lining in all of this. Their argument goes something like this: before the pandemic, we lived rushed, materialistic, lives, and now, thanks to the lock down, we have time to slow down, reflect, and meditate, and this is a good thing.

This is an argument which would have some merit if this were, in fact, how people were using their "at home" time, rather than binge-watching Netflix and checking for updates on the pandemic every ten minutes. Even if this were the case, however, this would be one small positive to weigh against a whole lot of big negatives when measuring the pandemic response on a spiritual scale.

The reality of the matter is that this lockdown has a strong spiritual component and it is entirely one of darkness rather than light. True spirituality is never private. Personal contemplation and meditation have their place, but it is supplementary to the communal faith and worship of the Church and not a substitute for it. The closing of the Churches for over two months, beginning in Lent and including Holy Week and Eastertide, could only have been thought up by the devil himself. While the sale of the dangerous, mind-altering, toxin marijuana has been deemed an "essential service", the Sacramental presence of the life-bringing body and blood of our Lord and Saviour has been denied to the faithful. Virtual Church is no substitute for the "assembling of ourselves together" that we are commanded not to forsake. Churches that have tried to offer more than this, while still complying with the physical distancing regulations, such as by holding "drive-in" services where everyone remains in their car in the parking lot, have been fined or threatened with fines, by power-tripping policemen, by-law enforcers, and health bureaucrats. Telling people that they must accept virtual substitutes not only for Church but for all other forms of community for a long and indefinite period of time is a form of spiritual murder. People were already spending too much time glued to their smartphones even before the pandemic.

Worse, there is definitely a spiritual aspect to the "we are all in this together" mantra that is almost universally being chanted to generate a false sense of community in support of totalitarian State measures that keep real communities apart. It is a dangerous counterfeit spirituality. True spirituality arises out of truth, not out of a manufactured consensus in which we all agree to shut off our brains and blindly follow the rules of the public health authorities, no matter how irrational they may be. A true spiritual revival in a time such as this would be marked by a call to repent of our sins and turn in faith to the True and Living God. The empty-headed, optimistic spirituality of the "we are all in this together" crowd is more of the "When the Moon is in the Seventh House/And Jupiter aligns with Mars/Then peace shall guide the planets/And love shall steer the stars" (1) kind.

The widespread acceptance of all of this brings to mind what the Lord predicted about the Great Deception in His Olivet Discourse in the twenty fourth chapter of the Gospel According to St. Matthew.. Similarly, all of the talk from the politicians, World Health Organization and Bill Gates about a mandatory vaccine, brings to mind a parallel passage. This is Revelation 13:16-18 territory. The Russian Orthodox hieromonk, Fr. Seraphim Rose, in his Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1975) examined this sort of counterfeit spirituality when it was first becoming popular, and saw in it what appeared to be the beginning stages of the deception of the Antichrist.

We may not be seeing the final fulfilment of these ancient prophecies, but yet another in the long line of precursors leading up to that final fulfillment. Nevertheless, take heed. On the day when the Lord returns to judge the quick and the dead, having surrendered all of your freedoms in panic and embraced the counterfeit spirituality of the mindless mob will bring no commendation. If all of this talk of a mandatory vaccine and implanted records becomes reality, then beware. It may very well come done to a choice - refuse the vaccine and lose your livelihood, take the vaccine and lose your soul. (Rev. 14:9-11).


(1) "Aquarius", from Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, 1967, lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni, music by Galt MacDermot. I have always sort of assumed that Rado and Ragni were satirizing the extreme flakiness of hippie spirituality in this song. Others appear to take it seriously.

My Point of View

Today is January 1st, the first day of the year according to the civil calendar. In the liturgical year it is the octave day of Christmas and hence the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord. For as long as I have been writing essays and making them available to the public, I have chosen this as the day for an annual essay summarizing my political and religious beliefs. This is in honour of the late Charley Reese, who was a syndicated op-ed columnist who had a similar practice, maintaining that writers owed their readers this sort of full disclosure.

First, I will say that I am a Canadian. I was born in Canada, raised in Canada, and have lived my entire life so far in Canada, in the province of Manitoba. I grew up on a farm in southwestern Manitoba and, after graduating from Rivers Collegiate Institute, studied theology for five years at Providence College and Theological Seminary, as it was called at the time, in Otterburne in southeastern Manitoba. I have lived and worked since then in the provincial capital of Winnipeg.

I use the old political label "Tory" to describe my political views. This term is most commonly used today to refer to adherents of the Conservative Party but I do not use it in this partisan sense. I have little love for any political party. I detest the Liberal Party for what it has done to my country, and the NDP for the views they espouse which I consider to be both insane and evil, but hold the Conservative Party largely in contempt for not being true to Tory principles. When I was growing up, people who wished to indicate that they held conservative political convictions without necessarily supporting the Conservative Party called themselves "small-c conservatives." I prefer "Tory" because most "small-c conservatives" are actually neoconservatives, that is, people whose "conservatism" contains nothing except the beliefs of the liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, except a highly favourable view of American militarism. Tory was the name of the party that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fought for the constitutional rights and privileges of the Crown and for the established Church of England with its Apostolic hierarchy and ministry and reformed doctrine and practice against Puritans, Whigs, levellers, and other such radicals. The Tory Party was reorganized into the Conservative Party in the early nineteenth century. My preference for the label Tory is to indicate my greater sympathy with the views of Lord Falkland, John Evelyn, the Earl of Clarendon, Sir Robert Filmer, Dean Swift, Dr. Johnson, James Boswell and Colonel Sibthorp, than with those associated with the Conservative Party at any point after this reorganization.

As a Tory, I am a royalist and a monarchist, rather than a republican or democrat. Monarchism is the belief that political sovereignty is the property of the single individual who is the representative head of the state, and royalism the belief that this office is best handed down as an inheritance through a line of natural succession rather than filled by popular election. This goes against the Modern notion that government derives its legitimacy from being chosen by the governed, but it is based upon the ancient idea that authority, the right to lead, should be supported by power, the ability to compel, but that true authority cannot be based on power. Democracy is a form of government based on power - the power of numbers or mob rule - and is thus the mother of all tyranny. Dictators, tyrants. despots - whichever term you use to refer to those who are in a sense monarchs, but who are in no way royal - derive their power from their ability to manipulate the masses and control the crowds. That is what real democracy looks like. I believe in the Westminster Parliament system, not because it is "democratic", but because it is a way, that has evolved through centuries and has stood the test of time, of harnessing this kind of power into the support of government that has the natural royal authority of the king or queen at its head. Put another way, I believe in the institution of Parliament rather than the ideal of democracy.

Furthermore, as a Tory, I believe that order and freedom are complementary rather than opposing forces. There can be no true order without freedom and no true freedom without order. When revolutionaries attack the traditional order they do so in the name of freedom, but when they have torn the old order down they replace it with a false, new order in which there is little freedom, and far less than in the old order. I believe that the classical liberal idea that the natural state of mankind is to exist as individuals outside of organized society, that such a state is one in which freedom is absolute but insecure, and that individuals create societies by voluntarily contracting to give up a portion of their absolute freedom to gain security for that which they retain, is completely false. The natural state of mankind is to live together in families, communities, and societies, to exist apart from such is an unnatural state, and freedom can only be found in the order of family, community and society. Furthermore, since order is hierarchical, and freedom only exists within order, the idea that freedom and equality go together is also completely false.

Self-described conservatives believe in defending Western Civilization from its detractors and against enemies who would subvert it from within or attack it from abroad. That is all well and good, and I, probably more often than not, would agree with them about those detractors and enemies. Most of these, however, are neo-conservatives who think of "Western Civilization" only in terms of Modern liberalism, democracy, capitalism, and secularism. They subscribe wholeheartedly to the Whig Interpretation of History and the only positive good they can see in the pre-Modern past is what can be interpreted as leading up to Modern liberalism. I, as a Tory, disagree with this perspective very much, and would say that the largest part of what is worth defending in Western civilization is the heritage of the ancient civilizations of classical Greece and Rome and especially the Christian civilization of pre-Modern Christendom. Neoconservatives look back on World War II and the Cold War through the lenses of a sort of Manichean dualism and see them as conflicts between the good side of Western Civilization in the Modern sense of liberal, secular, capitalist democracy and the bad side of the rival totalitarianisms of Nazism and Communism. From my Tory understanding, however, I strongly agree with what T. S. Eliot argued in The Idea of a Christian Society and which was also the entire point of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy and a number of speeches by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that liberal, secular, capitalist, democracy springs from the same Modern well as Nazism and Communism and we must look to traditions older than this to find something worthy of the honour of being called civilization. In the post-World War II era, and even more so the post-Cold War era, the Tory must be more of a reactionary, a label that I learned to embrace from the example of the late, great, historian John Lukacs, than a conservative.

Therefore, while as a Tory I share the anti-socialism of soi-disant conservatives, indeed, in what I would say is a stronger form, I do not share their enthusiastic pro-capitalism. Conservatives' objection to socialism is that it doesn't work, that it places all of a nation's resources under the control of incompetent administrators, robs people of incentives and makes them into de facto slaves, and promises abundance to everybody but delivers instead the misery of long line-ups for one's pitiful ration of the most basic goods and services. All of this is true, but from my perspective the real reason socialism deserves condemnation is that it is the vice of Envy, second only to Pride as the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, hypocritically wearing the mask of the highest theological virtue, Charity or Christian Love. As for capitalism, I find it difficult to be enthusiastic for the great engine of change, which has been driving people out of the countryside and into big, ugly, sprawling cities for over two centuries now, uprooting communities, dividing families, replacing woods and meadows with cement and asphalt and teaching everybody to value everything in terms of its utility or, worse, its sale price. Yes, I am aware that of all the ideological systems of the Modern Age, it is liberal capitalism that actually delivers the material progress they each promise. My question for those who think that this is sufficient to answer the above criticism is whether or not this material progress is worth the cost. Two thousand years ago, Someone asked "what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" and warned that "ye cannot serve both God and mammon." Oswald Spengler said that the Western Civilization of the Age of Progress possessed a Faustian soul. Perhaps it is time that we look past the happy ending Goethe gave to his version of the Faust legend and remember how Christopher Marlowe originally ended his great tragedy.

I began contemplating the hubris of modernity long before I encountered the concept of "chronological snobbery" that so poignantly captures its essence in the writings of C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield. The realization that we have developed an unhealthy habit of ascribing too high a value to scientific explanations of the world, treating as dogmatic truth what is at best plausible speculation, without questioning the materialist presuppositions that have increasingly biased the entire scientific process, and ignoring the obvious fact that science's primary value to mankind, its utility in harnessing nature to serve his will, is independent of whether its hypotheses are later verified or proven false, helped me, to overcome the stumbling blocks that science classes unwittingly placed in the way of accepting the Christian faith that was still, at the time, albeit in a somewhat watered down form, taught in the early grades of the public schools, at least in the rural parts of Canada where I grew up. When I was fifteen, I, in the lingo of evangelicalism, accepted Jesus Christ as my Saviour and was baptized about a year and a half later. Aware that mainstream denominations had been infiltrated by a form of Modern unbelief that pretended to be faith while coming up with clever ways to explain away the authority of the Scriptures and the articles affirmed in the Apostles' Creed in their literal sense, I spent the early years of my Christian faith in dissenting sects where this was not so much a problem. As my faith matured, and I came to appreciate the richness of liturgical worship, the unsurpassed affirmations of the Christian kerygma in the ancient ecumenical Creeds, that a right understanding of the Scriptures can hardly be a matter of private interpretation since prior to the relatively recent invention of the printing press and spread of literacy it was not possible for every believer to have his own copy to read for himself, that studying only or even primarily the theologians of the last five centuries and bypassing the Church Fathers of the first five centuries of the Christian age is a sure way to fall into serious error, and the importance of the three clerical orders and the sacramental ministry established in the New Testament, I was confirmed in the Anglican Church. I have in no way abandoned my contempt for the kind of thinly disguised unbelief that explains away the deity, Virgin Birth, and bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ as these have traditionally and literally been understood and retain my conviction that, in the words of Dr. Bob Jones Sr. "whatever the Bible says is so" and have become, therefore, a sort of fundamentalist High Churchman.

I am well aware of the fact that those who follow the spirit of the present age will find my views, religious and political, to be highly offensive. This does bother me and since this type are so eager to take offense at thoughts and words that do not conform to the current fashion I take no small amount of delight in so giving it. It saddens me greatly to see the extent to which this spirit of fashionable progressivism has pervaded my own country, the Dominion of Canada, which was originally built upon the solid foundation of Honour and Loyalty in conscious rejection of the path of severing ties to the past and rushing headlong into the future. I have been watching, over the last half of a decade, as all across Western civilization increasing numbers of people have, in an expression taken from the most boring movie trilogy I ever slept through, been "red-pilled", that is to say, had their eyes opened to the fact that what we have been told to think about race, nation, ethnicity, immigration, sex, gender, sexual/gender orientation/identity and similar matters for a couple of generations now is all a pack of ridiculous lies. While I find this somewhat encouraging, have very much enjoyed watching the bien pensants of the left break down into raving hysterics over it, and would like to see more of this in Canada, I also see reason for caution. There is too much populism among the red-pilled and not enough deep reflection on how the lies they are rejecting are the result of a downward trajectory that began when Western Civilization entered the Modern Age by stepping away from the order of Christendom in which, as Fr. Seraphim Rose put it "Orthodox Christian Monarchy is government divinely established, and directed, ultimately, to the other world, government with the teaching of Christian Truth and the salvation of souls as its profoundest purpose."

Happy New Year
God Save the Queen!

Election Time Grumbling

During the last Dominion election, four years ago, I made the remark that the three major parties were offering us a choice between the Dragon, the Beast and the False Prophet. After the election I added that the False Prophet had won. I think the last four years have justified that assessment rather well.

To make the above joke about the last election, of course, required speaking as if a misconception, that has lamentably become almost universal in Canada, were in fact true. Dominion elections are not about who the next Prime Minister will be. They are about who the next Parliament will be. You and I do not vote for the Prime Minister. We vote for who will be the Member of Parliament for our constituency. The job of our Member of Parliament is to represent our constituency, the portion of the country that includes the neighborhood in which we live. If our MPs remembered that their job, first and foremost, is to speak in Parliament on behalf of the constituencies that elected them – the places and the people living in those places whether they voted for or against the winner, they would do that job much better. Note that if we were to adopt the electoral reform that the Liberals promised four years ago, mercifully reneging on that promise, this would not help our MPs to do that job better, but rather hinder them from doing it. Proportional representation would make for a more partisan, more ideological Parliament. Only fools would want this, which is why proportional representation is so popular. The eponymous principle of Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule, the first in his Sword of Truth fantasy series and the last before these books achieved the unachievable and became an exposition of Ayn Rand’s ideas even more tedious and tiresome than her own, is “people are stupid” and this is absolutely correct. But I digress. In an election, we choose the representatives for our constituencies, these make up the next Parliament, and the person who becomes Prime Minister, who leads the government in the sense of the Cabinet, the Crown Ministers who carry out the actual day-to-day administration of the Queen-in-Council, is the person who has the most support in Parliament. That we have come to treat every Dominion election as a nation-wide plebiscite on who would make the best Prime Minister is an unwelcome intrusion of Americanism into our system.

I also declared during the last Dominion election that I likely would not be voting in it at all. The Conservatives, I vowed, would never have my vote again as long as Stephen Harper was their leader. Harper, while admittedly the best Prime Minister Canada has had since 1963 – this is not saying much as the entire lot of post-Diefenbaker Prime Ministers were horrid and rotten and abominable – had ticked me off one too many times. He had capitulated to the liberal-left on abortion and immigration and was absolutely horrible on freedom of speech. While Section 13 was abolished on his watch, he deserves no credit whatsoever for that fact, for the bill that repealed it was a private member’s bill that a Conservative MP had introduced and which had received enough support from both Conservative and Liberal Members to pass, despite the active opposition of the Prime Minister. It was that crazy bill, authorizing the government to invade the privacy of ordinary Canadians in the name of “fighting terrorism” that finally made me wash my hands of Harper altogether. Since the usual alternatives to the Conservatives in my riding were the NDP and Liberals, neither of which I would ever consider voting for, the Greens, and fringe parties even further to the left, I thought I would have no-one to vote for, and was fine with that, citing the precedent of Evelyn Waugh, who, after years of voting Conservative and having them fail to turn the clock back by even a second declared that he would abstain in the future on the grounds that it was presumptuous for a subject to advise his Sovereign in her choice of ministers. In the event, the Christian Heritage Party ran a candidate in my riding, for probably the first time ever, and as the candidate was a friend, I had someone to vote for after all.

This Dominion election is not shaping up to be any better than the last. The Liberal Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, aka Captain Airhead still has an astonishing amount of support considering that he has accomplished nothing in the last four years except something which should not have been done, i.e., the legalization of marijuana, that he has spent Canada hopelessly into debt, has aggressively sabotaged the economy of one of our provinces and seriously undermined national unity, has gone out of his way to sour our relations with India, the Philippines, China, the United States, and perhaps other countries that I don’t remember off the top of my head, has been found guilty of major ethical violations, been hit with three major scandals within the space of a year any one of which by itself would have ended the career of virtually any other Prime Minister, and been proven to be a total hypocrite on three matters that he is constantly preaching to other Canadians about.

When the Conservatives were contemplating whom they would choose to replace Stephen Harper as leader I offered my opinion that they should pick Don Cherry. Granted, he was not actually seeking the position, but I said they ought to draft him. Had they followed my semi-serious suggestion they would be way ahead in the polls right now. They did not, of course, nor did I expect them to and they put in Andrew Scheer instead. Commenting on that at the time, I said that it was a mix of the good and the bad, the good being that Scheer, in a survey of the potential leaders, had taken the strongest royalist stand, and that he was a staunch opponent of the carbon tax by which Trudeau pretends to be saving the world from “climate change” while in reality doing nothing but unnecessarily increasing the cost-of-living for those least able to afford such an increase. The bad was that Scheer was a Harper-style neo-conservative, which meant that he would probably wimp out on social issues and on free speech. Look at his performance in this election campaign so far and tell me that these predictions have not been borne out.

Consider Scheer’s response to attacks from the left on the issues of abortion and same-sex marriage.

With regards to abortion, Scheer has told the press that while he, a Roman Catholic, is personally opposed to abortion, a government that he leads will neither move to limit abortion nor support any efforts by backbenchers to do so through means of private bills. This is the very definition of wimping out. Saying that you are personally opposed to abortion means absolutely nothing if you not only will not initiate any legislation on the matter but will deny your support to members of your party who wish to do so. Indeed, there is no difference between this and the position that Justin Trudeau has held until very recently when, realizing that it was self-contradictory, he rejected the personal opposition to abortion and came out as being entirely pro-choice. Trudeau’s position, although it amounts to openly declaring his allegiance to the forces of evil, is the more honest of the two.

What Scheer should have told the press – and the Liberal, NDP, and Green leaders when they all ganged up on him and tried to pressure him into affirming the Satanic dogma that a woman has a right to choose to have an abortion – is the following:

You claim to be worried that I am going to re-open the debate on abortion but the truth is that there is nothing to re-open because the debate on abortion never occurred in the first place. Abortion was completely illegal in Canada until 1969, and I affirm what previous generations of Canadians believed, that taking the life of an unborn, innocent, baby is nothing less than cold-blooded murder and nobody, man or woman, has the right to commit murder. The present status quo, in which there are no legal restrictions on abortion whatsoever up to the very moment of birth and the taxpayer is required to pay for it, would have been regarded as abhorrent by previous generations of Canadians, and would be rejected by most living Canadians if they actually understood what the status quo is. We did not arrive at this status quo by means of a debate in which the pro-murder side, as the so-called pro-choice side ought properly to be called, won. We arrived at where we are today, because the father of the current Prime Minister changed the law in 1969 to allow for abortions in exceptional circumstances, and then turned our Supreme Court into an American-style kritarchy in 1982, which then used the changes he had made to our abortion laws as a pretext for ruling those laws to be unconstitutional. That Parliament, which the Supreme Court in the same ruling said ought to pass new abortion legislation, has failed to do so for thirty-one years, is not due to there being any sort of general consensus in favour of the status quo but to the bullying tactics of the leaders of the progressive parties and their echo chambers in the media. These tactics are designed to prevent the debate that you falsely claim is over from ever happening. It is your tactics and not my views that are unacceptable in a civilized country like ours and I am and here and now calling you out on them and demanding that you cease and desist immediately. We are going to have that debate whether you like it or not and the fact that you are so desperate to prevent it from happening shows that you are not at all as confident of the claims of your own side as you pretend to be.

That is how Scheer ought to be talking. The same speech, mutatis mutandis, is also the appropriate response to the progressive attacks on him for his views on same-sex marriage.

Michael Wharton, who wrote the “Peter Simple” column for the Daily Telegraph for decades, frequently referred to what he called the “Great Semantic Shift” by which opinions on several matters “which were once held by the majority and described as ‘moderate’, ‘of the centre’ or merely ‘patriotic’ have gradually come to be described first as ‘right-wing’, then as ‘extreme right-wing’, then as ‘lunatic fringe’ and finally as ‘fascist’” (1) Others would describe the same phenomenon as a leftward shift in the Overton Window. The kind of bullying described above is the means by which this shift has been accomplished and right-of-centre parties have a duty to confront it head on and call it out for the thuggery it is. Otherwise, they will themselves be constantly drawn further to the left. As John O’Sullivan famously put it “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” (2)

The leadership of the Conservative Party evidently believe that doing the opposite of what I have been suggesting is the strategy that is going to put them back into government. That is absurd. Either you present the electorate with a real alternative to progressivism or you end up competing with the Liberals, NDP, and the Greens for the progressive vote which would far more naturally go to one of these other parties. With Trudeau’s dismal record as Prime Minister, the humiliating collapse of his reputation from one of international celebrity to that of the laughing stock of the whole world, and scandal after scandal after scandal, the Conservatives ought to be so far ahead in the polls as to make their victory in the upcoming election a foregone conclusion.

Of course, it does not help matters that Scheer has gotten himself embroiled in a scandal of his own with regards to his citizenship. When the Toronto Sun’s Lorrie Goldstein asked him recently “On dual citizenship, why wouldn’t you have dealt with that before the election?” he answered:

Honestly, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal … I know many, many people have dual citizenship for many different countries … The very first time I was ever asked that question I answered it truthfully and honestly.

I believe Scheer when he says he didn’t think it was a big deal. Sadly, that is the problem. For most of my lifetime (3) Canada has permitted dual citizenship with the United States. This change was made by a Liberal government – the government of the present Prime Minister’s father – and is an example of the decay of the very national principles for which the Conservatives, of all parties, ought to stand.

Here is how I worded the problem in a comment on a post at the Patriactionary blog the other day:

The law should not allow for someone to have this kind of dual citizenship. It is a contradiction. Canada is a parliamentary monarchy built on the sound, pre-modern, Christian principle of allegiance to our reigning Sovereign. The United States is a republic built upon the evil, Satanic, and thoroughly modern anti-principle of rejection of that allegiance and arrogant assertion of the “sovereignty” of an autocratic “people”. (4) No one can be a true citizen of both. Dual citizenship between Canada and any other Commonwealth monarchy is no contradiction. Dual citizenship between the United States on the one hand and any Communist country on the other, is no contradiction, shocking as that will be to most Americans to hear. Dual citizenship between these two sets of polities is an absolute contradiction and the Conservatives, of all parties, ought to look on this particular kind of phony dual citizenship with repugnance. (5)

I don’t have much else to add on that subject and so will leave it at that and move on to my final observation about this election.

Two weeks prior to the last Dominion election I posted an essay entitled “The Election Issue That Wasn’t”. The issue in question was immigration. In it I said the following:

It is not an election issue for the same reason it has not been an election issue in previous elections – no party dares raise the issue for fear of being labelled racist…The only way this matter will ever be brought to a vote is if one of the parties breaks with the consensus of the others and makes it an election issue. Despite there being plenty of reasons for the Conservative, New Democrat, and Green parties to do so, none seem to possess courage enough to weather the accusations of racism that would come their way if they did, and so immigration remains the election issue that wasn’t.

This time around someone has decided to make it an election issue. That someone is Maxime Bernier who was narrowly defeated by Andrew Scheer in the Conservative Party’s leadership race. Subsequent conflict between Scheer and Bernier over the latter taking far more right-wing positions than the former was comfortable with led to Bernier leaving the Conservatives and founding a new party with an unfortunate, Communist/American-sounding name, the People’s Party of Canada.

On Sunday, someone slipped a card outlining the party’s platform under my windshield while at church. Which is good, because the media have been conspiring to keep the public uninformed as to that platform. The entire platform on the card is exactly what I would have liked to see from the Conservatives. Here is the section on immigration:

“On Immigration the PPC will:
*keep Canada safe and say “no” to illegal immigration;
* focus on what unites Canadians instead of on diversity;
*respect Canada’s constitution, history, and heritage;
*focus on Canada’s economic needs when setting immigration policy;
*reduce immigration to 250, 000 per year; and
*increase resources to vet immigrants.

To all of which I give a hearty amen.

My church is in the next riding over from the one in which I live and vote and in which I have seen no sign of a PPC candidate. It is nice to know that someone is finally taking a stand for all the right things however, whether I have an opportunity to vote for them or not.


(1) I have taken the words quoted from a column entitled “Extremism” reprinted on page 36 of Peter Simple’s Century, The Claridge Press, 1999, but he made this observation far more than once.
(2) John O’Sullivan, “O’Sullivan’s First Law”, National Review, October 27, 1989. Also extremely relevant is (Robert) Conquest’s Second Law, which O’Sullivan cites in the article “The behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies”
(3) I am five years younger than Justin Trudeau and three years older than Andrew Scheer. The law recognizing dual citizenship went into effect a couple of months prior to my first birthday.
(4) This is very strong language but I stand by it. Fr. Seraphim Rose, the American Russian Orthodox hieromonk wrote the following “We have already seen, in the preceding chapter, that the principal form government took in union with Christian Truth was the Orthodox Christian Empire, wherein sovereignty was vested in a Monarch, and authority proceeded from him downwards through a hierarchical, social structure. We shall see in the next chapter, on the other hand, how a politics that rejects Christian Truth must acknowledge ‘the people’ as sovereign and undertand authority as proceeding from below upwards, in a formally ‘egalitarian’ society. It is clear that one is the perfect inversion of the other; for they are opposed in their conceptions both of the source and of the end of government.” Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994, 2018, p.28. This entire book was originally the seventh chapter of Rose’s never-completed magnus opus The Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom of God. The “preceding chapter” and “next chapter” referred to in the quote are the preceding and following chapters in the larger work. This was written before his ordination and so the book is credited to him as “Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose”.
(5) Upon further consideration, I would have to revise the statement that “Dual citizenship between the United States on the one hand and any Communist country on the other, is no contradiction”, for while the principles of the American republic and Communist “peoples’ republics” are far closer to each other than either is to the sound, royalist, Loyalist principles on which our country was originally founded, it occurs to me that with republics of any sort, it is probably a contradiction to be a citizen of more than one.