The Devil’s Deadly Trick

 

Last week David Warren wrote “I have long supposed the Devil’s ‘fan base’ is to be found overwhelmingly on the political Left. The cause is obvious: they are the godless parties.”  I agree with this.  I usually find myself in agreement with what the former editor of The Idler and Ottawa Citizen columnist writes.  Usually, not always.  I don’t agree with him that St. Peter was given a universal jurisdiction over the other Apostles and the entire Church which has descended to the Patriarch of Rome to this day although I rather admire the way he has handled that office being currently held by someone who is clearly not what the Presbyterian Anne Blythe nee Shirley would have called a “kindred spirit.”  Of course this is a relatively new belief of his.  He entered the Roman Communion in 2003.  Back when I was reading him in print in the 1990s he was still a member of the Anglican Communion to which I currently belong, although at the time alluded to I was attending Non-Conformist meetings of a very Low Church sort.  Looking back, it must have been somewhere around the time that he crossed the Tiber that my theology started to develop along the High Church lines that put me on the Canterbury trail by the end of the decade.  I also no longer share his current admiration for Donald the Orange, although in the interest of being fair I do admire the dismantling of America’s “deep state” that Warren was praising in the piece quoted above.  While Trump initially lost my admiration the moment he first threatened Anschluss against Canada I have since come to see that he is someone who no Christian of any Communion who is familiar with Scripture and Tradition should be supporting because he has formed a cult of followers around himself that make blasphemous claims about him that he has never repudiated, at one point retweeted, and has both made himself and encouraged among his followers.  In the most recent example, Paula White, the heretical televangelist whom Trump has appointed the head of his newly created “White House Faith Office” formed ostensibly for the purposes of combatting anti-Christian discrimination, blasphemously said “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.”  In the early centuries of Christianity, when persecution came from officials of the Roman Empire, it was because Christians refused to accept the claims of divinity that the state cult made for the emperor.

 

That having been said, I reiterate that I do agree with Warren’s statement about the Devil’s fan base being “overwhelming on the political Left.”   In this essay, however, I intend to demonstrate that the Devil’s can sometimes more effectively work through those who are not his fans, those who are not openly on his side.   The first step in the demonstration is to ask a question.  

 

If the Devil’s fans are on the Left what are we to make of a “Right” that has largely aligned itself with a cult that worships a false christ?

 

This is an important question to ask because historically the home of political messianism has been on the Left.  The idea that political action is the path of salvation is arguably the defining characteristic of the historical Left.   The Right’s historical attitude has been to reject this idea and to regard the various schemes that have been hatched out of it with the appropriate response ranging from skepticism to horror.  If it be countered that the “far Right” twentieth century movements Fascism and Nazism both preached a form of political national salvation, the response is that these movements were not related to the historical and traditional Right, did not consider themselves to be on the Right – Nazism stands for “National Socialism” and regarded itself as a revolutionary rather than a reactionary party – rejected all the principles of the historical and traditional Right, formed regimes that resembled those of Communism, and are only considered on the “Right” because the Left has so categorized them.

 

This “Right” that so blasphemously looks upon Donald the Orange as a “Saviour” is obviously primarily an American phenomenon based in the United States of America.   This itself is sufficient to explain its turn to political messianism.  The American Right has no more of a relationship with the historical and traditional Right than Fascism or National Socialism did because the United States was founded on the repudiation of the principles of the historical and traditional Right.

 

The historical and traditional Right was essentially the resistance of Christendom – Christian civilization – to its being replaced with Western Civilization – Modern, liberal, secular civilization.  As such, it held the worldview of Christendom, a worldview incompatible with theories of political salvation such as were to become all too numerous in the politics of Modern, liberal, secular, Western Civilization.  The struggles and woes of man in this world are a condition from which he cannot extract himself because they are the consequences of Original Sin – he is in exile from Paradise Lost.  The State has been given to man, therefore, not to save him from his condition, but to administer earthly justice and enforce the laws made necessary by Original Sin.  Although salvation was accomplished by God in this present world in history through the events of the Gospel, and can be partially enjoyed in this present world in Christ’s spiritual kingdom the Church in her “militant” mode, the full enjoyment of salvation, Paradise Regained is to be looked for outside of history, after the event that will bring history to a close, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to “judge both the quick and the dead.”

 

The historical and traditional principles of the Right are basically three – one political, one religious, and one that combines the political and the religious.  The political principle is royal monarchy.  Not just monarchy, the governance of the one. Dictatorship or tyranny, the absolute rule of someone propelled into power by the mob, is a perverse example of that.  Royal monarchy or kingship, the reign of someone selected not by popular election but by an established line of secession that places his office above democratic politics, who accedes immediately on the death of the previous Sovereign, but is confirmed in the office by swearing oaths before and to God in the Church.  The religious principle is orthodox Christian Churchmanship which is the confession and practice of the orthodox Christian faith of the ancient Creeds, in a Church in organic descent from the Church in Jerusalem, with valid Sacraments administered by the ministerial priesthood governed by bishops in Apostolic succession.  The third principle is the union of Church and State, not in the sense of a theocracy in which the Church rules the State or Erastianism in which the State rules the Church, but in the sense of the co-operative relationship between the Christian kings of the first principle, and the orthodox Church of the second principle, in which each exercises their authority in their own sphere to uphold the other in its sphere.

 

The most legitimate Right is the Right that continues to hold to these principles.   The second most legitimate Right is that which defends the other good things that the Left turned to attacking after its war on kings, the Church, and Christendom’s union of Church and State. Any list of such good things would have to be representative as the Left is constantly adding to it.  The American Right at its best – and it is far from its best at the moment – can only ever be a version of the second most legitimate Right, because the United States was founded on an explicit repudiation of the first and third principles, by Puritans, freemasons, and deists who had personally repudiated the second.

 

Does this mean that the United States was founded as a country of the Left?

 

Yes and no.  The United States was built on the foundation of liberalism.  While “liberalism” and “the Left” have often been used interchangeably they are not identical.  Think of a river, flowing from a spring, from which, near the source, a tributary breaks off.  Now, if you think of the spring as the turning away of Modern philosophy from Christianity and the traditions of Christendom, liberalism as the river flowing from it, and the Left as the tributary, you will have the basic idea of the relationship between these things.  It should be added that throughout their history the streams of liberalism and the Left have sometimes moved closer to each other and sometimes further apart. 

 

Now, while liberalism’s repudiation of the principles of Christendom and the Right was bad and places it on the Devil’s side along with the Left, the ideas of liberalism were not all bad, and those that were bad were not all bad to the same degree.  It was necessary that this be the case for the Devil’s trick to work.  For that trick is simply this, to present people with two options, one on the Left that is more or less explicitly evil, the other, a more palatable liberal option that can be marketed as “conservative” and to tell people they have to choose one or the other.  I am not thinking primarily of party politics although the American two-party system does provide an illustration of how the trick works.  The most recent Democratic presidential candidates have been people who think women have the right to murder their babies, that white people should be made into racial scapegoats for the problems of everyone else, that men who claim to be women are what they claim to be and have a right to be treated as such and that violent criminals should be turned out onto the streets as soon as possible.  That is only a sampling of their crazy and evil ideas.  They are the Devil’s fan base indeed.  So the Republican candidate gets elected. 

 

The Devil has played this trick very effectively in economics.  The Left has offered us an option called socialism.  Socialism is a scheme of political salvation.  It tells us that our woes are all due to economic inequality, that the cause of economic inequality is private ownership, and that salvation is to be attained by eliminating private ownership and replacing it with some form of common or public ownership.  Don’t be deceived by its surface appearance for if you look beneath the surface it is clear that this is not some benevolent if sappy “lets care and share” sort of thing but something far more sinister.  Where its true face can be seen is in its egalitarianism.  A movement that was genuinely about alleviating economic suffering and misery would do so rather than obsessing about the unfairness, real or imagined, of their being “haves” when there are also “have nots.”  Eliminating private ownership is a way to harm the “haves” not to help the “have nots.”  “Private property”, Simone Weil wrote in The Need for Roots, “is a vital need of the soul.”  Socialism therefore reduces to Envy, the hatred of others for their possession of something you desire that is the second worst after Pride of the Seven Deadly Sins.  That so many have been fooled into looking no further than the surface and seeing something that looks to them like Christian Love for the poor and disadvantaged should not surprise us.  This is another of the Devil’s tricks, the one identified by St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 11:14-15.  Today, after about a century of socialism having been given chance after chance to alleviate misery, only to produce more than it alleviated, that trick is less effective.

 

This brings us to the other economic option that in the Devil’s trick is presented as the alternative to the Left’s bad option of socialism.  This is capitalism, the economic system for which liberalism has always advocated although the capitalism of reality and the capitalism of liberal economic theory have never been the same thing.  For our purposes here the differences are irrelevant.  The key elements common to reality “capitalism” and liberal theory “capitalism” are the private ownership of capital (wealth that can be used to create more wealth), contractual labour, and voluntary economic transactions.  Since these are each preferable to their alternatives, capitalism as a whole has been easy to sell to those who see socialism for what it is and capitalism has often been thought of as the economics of the Right despite its association with liberalism.  When it comes, however, to all those good things that the Left has declared war on, capitalism, the economy of Big Business, has been very destructive, arguably far more so than socialism.  Richard M. Weaver, writing in 1948 identified a few of these goods: “The moral solution is the distributive ownership of small properties.  These take the form of independent farms, of local businesses, of homes owned by the occupants, where individual responsibility gives significance to prerogative over property.” (Ideas Have Consequences, 121)  He then added “Such ownership provides a range of volition through which one can be a complete person, and it is the abridgment of this volition for which monopoly capitalism must be condemned along with communism.”  

 

Much was made, and rightly so, in the Batflu scare of 2020 to 2022, of the harm the lockdowns and other repressive measures were doing to small businesses that did not have the resources to weather that storm of stupidity the way large conglomerates did.  While lockdowns, vaccine passports, and the like, are hardly “capitalist” measures, I wonder which was responsible for eliminating more small businesses, Batflu tyranny or the online global business empire of Donald the Orange’s newfound billionaire bestie Jeff Bezos?

 

Numerous other examples of this trick of the Devil’s can be produced.  One that is particularly germane at the moment is the nationalist opposition to the Left’s dream of world federalism with global citizenship and a battery of international bureaucracies to impose sex reassignment surgery on those few children they have allowed to escape subsidized, near-mandatory, abortion the second they experience a moment of gender confusion anywhere in the world whatever the local laws happen to say about it.  The alignment of the Left with the Devil’s values is particularly obvious in this case.  As tempting, however, as that makes the nationalist option, it ought to be resisted by the Right.

 

For one thing, nationalism’s home, like that of political messianism is properly on the Left.  Nationalism, historically, was a product of the French Revolution.  The Jacobins equated nation with state, and demanded, at the risk of your head if you didn’t comply, that loyalty to king and Church be replaced with loyalty to the nation-state.  For another, nationalism like socialism is a vice masquerading as a virtue.  The virtue it pretends to be, obviously enough, is patriotism, the love of one’s country.  Nationalism, however, is a poor imitation of patriotism.  It’s exaggerated and loud boasting about its country, its belligerence towards and bullying of other countries, none of which is characteristic of quiet, irenic, patriotism, betrays a lack of love for one’s country.  In a recent and excellent column Charles Coloumbe said much that is true, but when he wrote of Donald the Orange “That the newly restored president deeply loves the United States is, no doubt, true” he was very mistaken.  If Donald the Orange deeply loved the United States, he would accept her for what she is warts and all, quietly try to remove the warts without drawing attention to them, and leave the rest of the world alone, rather than loudly proclaim his intention to make her “Great Again” a proclamation that shows that he does not consider her to be great now and that greatness, a measure of strength and size, is the quality he wishes for her, rather than goodness, which is what someone who truly loved her would look for and manage see in her, even underneath her flaws.

 

In the last example there is a clear third alternative that the Right should chose over both nationalism and the Left’s world federalism/global citizenship/international bureaucracy and that is simple patriotism.  Such an alternative is more difficult to identify for the false choice of socialism and capitalism, in part because there are a multitude of acceptable alternatives. The distributism proposed by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, its close American cousin the agrarian economy that the Vanderbilt Twelve associated with the antebellum South which Wendell Berry both promoted and lived, Austrian economist Wilhelm Roepke’s synthesis of these with the liberal free market are just three such.  I shall defer further discussion of this point to an essay of its own at a later date.  I raise it here to make the point that these choices are false choices.  There are other options than socialism and capitalism.  There is a better alternative to one-worldism than nationalism.  There is a better alternative to democracy than republicanism.  We do not have to fall for the Devil’s trick and choose capitalism because socialism is so repugnant or choose nationalism because of all the evil that has been done by one-worldism.  Capitalism and nationalism have historically been very destructive of the good things in this world that we on the Right wish to conserve or restore.   

 

Finally, just because the Devil’s “fan base” on the Left, reviles and hates Donald the Orange for the things he gets right such as his refusal to allow his country to overrun by invaders, his banning the mutilation of children, his recognition of only two sexes, and the like, this does not mean that we on the Right should join what has so obviously become a deluded and dangerous cult, that worships the American president, and blasphemously looks upon him as some kind of saviour figure.   Out of all these false choices, this is by far the worst.

 

In the Olivet Discourse Jesus warned that “many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.” (Matt. 24:5)   Later He told His disciples how to respond to these “Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.” (v. 23).   It is incumbent upon us to obey our Lord’s words now.  False christs, as Gamaliel pointed out to the Sanhredrin in Acts 5, don’t end well, and they bring their followers down with them.  Jesus of Nazareth, was shown to be the true Christ, the Son of God, by the fact that the Crucifixion was not His end, He rose again from the dead and ascended into Heaven and is present in His Church to this day.   The Trump movement, by contrast, will end like that of any other false christ.  The fact that he is president of the United States will only make his fall that much harder.

 

Don’t fall for the Devil’s trick.

The Donatist Dilemma

 

In the early centuries of Christian history the orthodox had to contend with hundreds of heretical and schismatic movements.   Except among apologists and ecclesiastical historians, only a handful of these are remembered by name today.   Gnosticism, the first proponents of which challenged the authority and teachings of the Apostles themselves, was not the name of a specific heretical movement but the collective term for a large class of heretical movements.     Valentinianism, after Valentinus of Alexandria, was one such movement that was widespread in the second century and was the main heresy against which St. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote.   The ideas that the term Gnosticism usually brings to mind today more properly belong to Marcionism, named after Marcion of Sinope.    Historians are divided as to whether Marcionism is properly classified as Gnostic or whether it is best regarded as a heresy that deviated from both Gnosticism and orthodox Christianity.

 

The heresies that are still widely known by name are the major heresies that were addressed by the four earliest ecumenical Councils, the two that put together the most basic and fundamental of Christian Creeds (1) in the fourth century, i.e., the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD) and the First Council of Constantinople (381 AD), and the two that resulted in the Christological clarification of the Definition of Chalcedon in the fifth century, i.e., the Council of Ephesus (431 AD) and the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD).   In one way or another the heresies addressed by these Councils deviated from orthodoxy as to the Person and Nature of Jesus Christ.   Arianism, which takes its name from Arius of Alexandria and which was the principal heresy addressed by the Creed-forming Councils of the fourth century, denied the full deity of Jesus Christ and taught that He was a created being possessed of a lesser divinity than the Father.   Nestorianism, named after Nestorius of Constantinople, the principal heresy addressed by the fifth century Councils, stressed the distinction between the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ to the point where the unity of His Person was compromised.   This latter is a good illustration of the general nature of heresy which is not, as is often supposed, merely “wrong doctrine”.   Heresy is a truth taken out of the context of other equal or more important, balancing truths, and so twisted by exaggeration into an error that is far more dangerous than something that it is merely and entirely false.   G. K. Chesterton in his biography of William Blake (1910) said that “A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which, even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run”.   T. S. Eliot in After Strange Gods (1933) wrote that “the essential of any important heresy is not simply that it is wrong: it is that it is partly right.”

 

If we were to poll Christians, asking them to name and rank a few of the early heresies, it is unlikely that we would find many for whom Donatism would be at the top of their list.   Indeed, while I hope I am too cynical and am completely wrong in this, I suspect that if we were to instead provide that name and ask people to identify it, many would associate it with Donatello, the fifteenth century Florentine Renaissance sculptor – or the Ninja Turtle who bears his name. 

 

Donatism has nothing to do with either sculptor or Ninja Turtle, of course.   It takes its name from the fourth century figure Donatus Magnus, a priest from the Berber settlement of Casae Nigrae in Numidia, which is now the town of Negrine in Algeria.   With Donatus and his followers, it was not a dispute over doctrine that separated them from the orthodox Church as it was with the aforementioned heresiarchs Valentius, Marcion, Arius and Nestorius and their sects, but rather a dispute over practice.   It would be more accurate therefore to describe Donatism as schismatic rather than heretical, although the schism, as we shall see, eventually corrupted the doctrine of the schismatics.   It deviated from orthopraxis (sound practice), however, in much the same way that heresy deviates from orthodoxy (sound doctrine) – by taking a part of sound practice and emphasizing it to the point that other parts fell by the wayside.    The part of sound practice they so over-emphasized was holiness or separation from the world. (2)

 

The Donatist schism had its origins in the persecution of Christians in the reign of Diocletian.   This was the largest and harshest persecution of Christians in the history of the Roman Empire.   Previous persecutions had usually been local affairs, conducted with the authority or at least toleration of a regional governor.   This one came down from the very top and in theory covered the entire Empire, although in actuality certain regions were far more severely affected than others.   The severity of this persecution made it unpopular which contributed to the Roman Empire’s reversing course ten years after it began and issuing the Edict of Milan which legalized Christianity throughout the Roman Empire and granted it protection against persecution.

 

North Africa was a region that was particularly severely affected by the Great Persecution, as it had been during the lesser persecutions of the previous century.   It was almost, in a sense, the epicentre of the Persecution.   In 302 AD, Diocletian had issued an edict outlawing the Manichaeans, ordering that their leaders be burned along with their books and any of their followers who didn’t recant.   The Manichaeans were the followers of Mani, a third century Persian religious teacher who blended ideas from Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Gnosticism, and whose teachings were noted for their dualism.   Their teachings had spread from the Persian Empire westward and had become particularly influential in the academic centres of Egypt and North Africa. (3)   Diocletian had been persuaded that they were a subversive movement acting on behalf of the Persian Empire to infiltrate and weaken Rome.   Later that year, Diocletian’s ire would fall upon orthodox Christians when St. Romanus, a deacon of the Caesarean Church, denounced the pagan sacrifices that took place in his court at Antioch.   He was already ill-disposed towards Christianity because he blamed Christian members of his court for the failure of his attempts at divination after the Roman victory against the Persians in the Battle of Satala and the renewal of peace with the Sassanid dynasty.   Diocletian was, therefore, already half persuaded when his co-emperor Galerius (4) began to talk him into extending towards orthodox Christianity the same policy he had taken towards Manichaeism – persecution with the end of total extirpation.   While he initially proposed a more moderate persecution, his resistance to Galerius’ proposal was overcome when the two sent away to the oracle at the Temple to Apollo in Didyma and were told that Apollo was silent because of the presence of Christianity in the Empire.   In February of 303 AD, he and his co-emperors began issuing a series of edicts that forbade Christians from assembling to worship and ordered the Christian Scriptures and other Christian literature to be burned, Christian Church buildings to be destroyed, and Christian clergy to be imprisoned and stripped Christians of all the legal rights of Roman citizens.

 

Although all Christians were targeted by this persecution, the clergy - the bishops and priests who led, taught, and officiated in the Churches - were particularly hit hard.   While many of these remained faithful to the point of martyrdom, many others did not.   These handed over their copies of the Bible to the Roman soldiers to be burned.    Often they handed over the names of other Christians as well.   This earned them the label traditores, meaning “those who handed over” which is the root of our word traitor.  (5)

 

Mensurius, who was Bishop of Carthage at the time, removed the Scriptures from the Church building and hid them in his own home, substituting heretical writings in their place for the soldiers to seize.    While he thus cleverly avoided becoming a traditor himself, this act was not exactly impressive to those who contrasted his example unfavourably with that of those who submitted to arrest, torture, and death.   It did not help his image any that the contrast was particularly great with his own predecessor in the See of Carthage, St. Cyprian, who had been martyred in the earlier persecution under Valerian, less than half a century prior to this.   Mensurius then forbade the Carthaginian Church from honouring as martyrs any who initiated their own martyrdom by defiantly turning themselves in to the Roman authorities.    Needless to say, he was far from being the most admired bishop in the Christian Church at the time.  

 

Mensurius died in 311 AD, about six years after the Great Persecution had begun to wane.   The Edict of Milan was still two years away, but North Africa was governed by Maxentius (6) who had already liberated the Christians.   Caecilian, who had served as archdeacon under Mensurius, was chosen as his successor, and among those participating in his consecration was Felix, Bishop of Aptunga.   Immediately this succession met with protest.   Caecilian had been an even more zealous advocate of Mensurius’ position vis-à-vis the voluntary martyrs than Mensurius had been himself and so was most objectionable to those who found that position odious.   These then claimed that his consecration was invalid because of the participation of Felix.   Felix had been absent from his See during the Persecution and so had avoided arrest.   The opponents of Caecilian accused Felix of being a traditor, and maintained that this invalidated the consecration.

 

The matter was appealed to Secundus, Bishop of Tigisis who was the closest Primate (7), and Secundus with the support of 70 other bishops ruled against Caecilian.    These then chose and consecrated Majorinus, who had been a lector in the Carthaginian Church, as bishop.   With two different groups claiming two different individuals to be the validly consecrated holder of the same bishopric, a schism was born.   Each side excommunicated the other, albeit on different grounds.   Those who supported Majorinus as the validly consecrated Bishop of Carthage maintained that those in fellowship with Caecilian were tainted by association with the sins of the traditor alleged against Caecilian himself and against Felix who consecrated him.   Those who supported Caecilian excommunicated those in fellowship with Majorinus on the grounds that their actions were schismatic.   This schism was very much a local affair as outside of North Africa the supporters of Caecilian were a clear supermajority.   The Patriarch of Rome was asked to look into the matter and with the backing of the Roman Synod he ruled in favour of Caecilian in 313 AD, as did the Council of Arles of 314 AD to which the decision was appealed.   These rulings were upheld in the ecumenical Councils later in that century.   Majorinus died two years after his consecration and was succeeded in the schismatic line by Donatus Magnus and so the schism came to take the name of Donatism.

 

The error of the Donatists, as we noted at the outset of this discussion, grew out of a matter of practice rather than a matter of doctrine.   When it comes to the actions of the traditores, orthodox Christians and Donatists were in agreement that it was reprehensible to collaborate with the persecutors of the faith by handing over Scriptures, sacred items, and the names of the brethren.   The Donatists, however, in their zeal for the holiness and purity of the Church, good things in themselves, insisted that the betrayal of the traditores forever disqualified them from being restored to their positions of leadership in the Church and thus invalidated their every ministry from administering baptisms to celebrating the Eucharist to, in the case of bishops, ordinations and consecrations of other bishops.   As easy as it is to see where the Donatists were coming from in this, had the Lord Jesus Christ thought the same way, St. Peter would never have been restored to his position as Apostle after he denied Christ three times on the evening of His betrayal and arrest, would never have been empowered to preach the sermon on the first Whitsunday through which  three thousand souls were converted, would never have opened the door to the evangelism of the Gentiles by bringing  the Gospel to Cornelius, and would not have written the two epistles under his name that are part of the Sacred Canon.   Yet even before the denial had taken place, indeed, just before the Lord predicted it, He said unto St. Peter “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren” (Lk. 22:31-32).   After St. Peter had denied Him, and after He had risen from the dead, He called him to feed His sheep three times – one for each denial – and then, prophesying his eventual martyrdom, repeated to him the call to “Follow Me” (Jn. 21:15-19).   The difference between the Lord’s response to St. Peter and the Donatists’ response to the traditores shows us how their emphasis on holiness was at the expense of other elements of orthopraxis such as forgiveness and restoration and thus the equivalent of heresy in practice.   Ultimately, this error in practice translated itself into an error in doctrine, the error that the efficacy of the Church’s Ministries of Word and Sacrament as conduits of the grace of God is dependent upon the spotless purity of the ministers.   The controversy over this was still raging almost a century later when St. Augustine of Hippo, than whom there was no clearer and stronger expositor of the grace of God between St. Clement of Rome and the Reformation, answered the Donatists in his De Baptismo.

 

What message is there in this historical episode for our own day?

 

There are a number of parallels between the Diocletian Persecution and the bat flu madness of the last two years.   There are huge differences too, of course.   Whereas Diocletian and Galerius saw their persecution of Christianity for what it was – a deliberate attempt to extirpate the Christian faith and religion – the governments of the present day deny to themselves that they are doing anything of the sort.  Since they allow Christians and people of other religions to “worship” online, they have convinced themselves that their having forbidden Christians and those of other faiths to meet and assemble in person for much of the last two years is not the same thing as Diocletian’s outlawing of all Christian assembly.   Having convinced themselves of this, they have also persuaded themselves that in having Christian ministers arrested for holding services where their congregations could, well, congregate is not the same thing as when Galerius ordered bishops and priests to be arrested.   They obviously see no similarities between their attempts to prevent the spread of any information that disagrees with their narrow, official, narrative about the bat flu and, indeed, to stomp it out as “misinformation” and the Roman Empire’s efforts to burn all copies of the Christian Scriptures and other sacred literature.   Some would say that because with regards to each of these parallels the difference is that what the Roman Empire did was that much more severe the comparison is therefore inappropriate.   Others will, more astutely, note that this difference is what allows today’s governments to convince themselves that they are not engaged in persecution which self-deception makes what they are doing that much more dangerous than the open persecution of the Roman Empire or in more recent times of the Communist countries.

 

A similar comparison could be made between the response of the Churches to the almost universal medical technocratic tyranny of the bat flu scare and the actions of the traditores.   Again, there are huge differences, but not such as necessarily mean that the Churches of the present day come out favourably in the comparison.   Complying with an order from the state that the Church not assemble is, in one sense, not as extreme a betrayal of the faith as handing over the Scriptures to be burned and handing over the names of other Christians to those seeking to arrest them, but it is a betrayal in that the teachings of the Scriptures, as interpreted by the faithful in all places and all times from the Apostles to the present  (8) is that a state ban on Church assembly is a clear and obvious exception to the Scriptural injunction of civil obedience. (9)    If it is less extreme in this sense, it is greater in that it is far more widespread than that of the traditores was.    The compliance of the Churches with these tyrannical public health orders was almost universal.   The leaders of the Churches have undoubtedly persuaded themselves that they are not guilty of the same thing as the traditores and even that their compliance with this medical totalitarianism is virtuous, an act of sacrifice for the safety and wellbeing of others, especially the most vulnerable among us.    However, just as governments are capable of more and greater oppression and persecution when they have deceived themselves into thinking that they are acting for the public good instead of oppressing and persecuting people, so this self-deception on the part of the Churches compounds rather than mitigates the problem.    Those who regard their sinful betrayal of the faith not as a sinful betrayal of the faith but as a virtuous act of self-sacrifice are incapable of the repentance and confession that the orthodox Churches of the fourth century required from the traditores before their restoration.                                                                                                                                           

 

This leaves anyone who is trying to follow Christ in accordance with what historically and traditionally have been regarded as orthodox faith and orthopraxis and who has not bought into the Great Deception of the bat flu madness caught on the horns of a terrible dilemma.   To anyone trying to follow Christ in this manner, Church is essential not optional.   For almost two years, however, the leadership of the Churches have acted as if the opposite is true.   They have closed their doors, tried to get us to live a lie by pretending that watching a tiny Church service broadcast online and saying the words along with them is a form of assembling together as a Church (it is not), and allowed attendance on occasions that the public health tyrants permitted provided that a stringent list of requirements all arising out of a worldly spirit of fear that would drive the sanctity out of the Church were adhered to.   The Christian leaders who have most conspicuously and admirably resisted the public health tyranny have for the most part come from sects that are either extremely schismatic, enthusiastic (in the theological sense of the word which is not a good thing), heretical – sometimes grossly so – or all of the above.  

 

Should the public health scare ever end, what ought we to do?

 

If we wait for the leaders of our Churches to acknowledge and repent of the sins of betraying the faith and leaving us without the ministry of the Church in any real sense for the duration of the public health scare before resuming fellowship with them we will be waiting a very long time and run the risk of becoming Donatists in spirit, if not in letter.

 

If, on the other hand, we just try to pick up where we had left off in March 2020, forgetting the entire horrible interlude, and pretending that there was no betrayal or apostasy to forgive (since offering forgiveness in the absence of acknowledgement of wrongdoing cheapens forgiveness), we will have traded the Scylla of Donatism for the Charbydis that is its opposite.

 

There is no obvious solution to this dilemma short of the public health scare being brought to an end with the Second Coming of Christ in Glory to judge both the quick and the dead.   Whatever we end up doing, we should devote much prayer and contemplation to the matter.

 

 (1)   The Nicene-Constantinopolitan, the Creed that was put together by and in the first two ecumenical Councils of the early Church, is the most basic and fundamental Christian Creed in that it is the only Creed universally accepted among all the Churches that can claim organic lineage from the Apostolic Church.   This is further attested to by the fact that the addition of a single word – filioque – to the Latin text of this Creed, was the most important doctrinal issue that separated the Eastern Greek-speaking Church from the Western Latin-speaking Church in the eleventh century.   The Apostles’ Creed is shorter and simpler than the Nicene-Constantinopolitan, but it does not seem to have ever been as universally accepted and used as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan.     The traditional account of its origin – that it was composed on the first Whitsunday by the Apostles themselves, with each of the Apostles, St. Matthias having been chosen as Judas Iscariot’s replacement already, contributing one of the twelve lines – is very old.   St. Ambrose of Milan and Rufinus of Aquileia both spoke of it as a well-established account less than a century after the Council of Nicaea.     If true, this would be an incontrovertible argument for the priority of the Apostles’ Creed over the Nicene-Constantinopolitan as the basic Creed of Christianity (not that the two, which are very similar, and could almost be taken for the longer and shorter forms of a singular Creed, contradict each other), but if true, it would be difficult to explain how it fell so quickly out of use in the Greek-speaking Churches of the East.     In its earliest form, the old Roman Symbol used in the baptismal rite of the Church of Rome – in the sense of the Church particular to that city, not in the sense of the “Roman Catholic Church”, i.e., all Churches that remained in communion with the Roman Patriarch after the Great Schism and the Reformation – it predates the Nicene-Constantinopolitan and goes back to at least the early part of the second century.   Nevertheless, although a strong case can be made that it was originally written in Greek – see Rev. John Baron The Greek Origins of the Apostles’ Creed Illustrated by Ancient Documents and Recent Research (1885) for the case that the Greek text of the Creed that Marcellus of Ancyra brought with him to Rome during his exile was the original form – the history of its usage is almost entirely Latin and Western.

(2)   “World” is the word we use in English where the Greek-speaking Church used κόσμος.   In Scriptural and ecclesiastical usage these terms have a positive sense in which they are basically synonyms of “Creation”, i.e., everything God made.   The Latinized transliteration of κόσμος as “cosmos”, a synonym for “universe”, is a secularized equivalent of this.   This positive sense of these words can be narrowed to focus on one aspect of Creation if the context requires it.   For example, the world in “For God so loved the world” in John 3:16 is Creation but with a focus on the people who live in it.    There is also a negative sense in which these words are used by the Scriptures and the Church and this is obviously the sense intended when we speak of holiness as separation from the world.   In this sense, world or κόσμος means the fallen state of Creation, human sin or rebellion against God not merely as it touches each of us as individuals, in which case the word for it would be flesh as a rendition of the Greek σὰρξ in its specialized New Testament usage, but as it permeates and corrupts human organized society.

(3)   Manichaeism had a strong presence in these places both before and after the Persecution. St. Augustine, prior to his conversion to the orthodox Christian faith of his mother, had been associated with the Manichaeans for about a decade.  He had come under their influence as a student at the University of Carthage.   This was about seventy years after Diocletian had ordered Manichaeism rubbed out.

(4)   This was the period of the Roman Tetrachy.   Although Diocletian’s treatment of the Manichaeans and Christians was undoubtedly tyrannical, in one sense he behaved atypically for a despot and divided his power with others.   Two years after becoming emperor in 284 AD, he named one of his cavalry comrades Maximian his co-emperor, assigning the Western Empire to Maximian and governing the Eastern Empire himself.   Seven years later, he named two other co-emperors, Galerius and Constantius to serve as Junior Emperors under him and Maximian.    The Senior Emperors took the title Augustus, the Junior Emperors took the title Caesar. The Tetrarchy was short lived.  Constantius’ son Constantine succeeded his father in 306 and was awarded both imperial titles.    In less than two decades he had consolidated his reign over the whole Roman Empire, although the division between East and West was lasting and would re-assert itself after his reign.   A famous episode in the process of consolidating his rule was the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD in which he defeated Maximian’s successor Maxentius, leaving him the sole Western claimant to the Imperial title.  This was the battle in which in response to a vision he fought under a standard bearing the ☧, the Christian monogram formed by combining X (Chi) with P (Rho) the first two letters of the word Christ.

(5)   While the word “traitor” is derived from traditor(es), the word “tradition” comes from the same source as traditor.   The concept common to both is of something having been handed or given over.   The source is the Latin verb trado “I hand over, surrender”, tradere “to hand over, surrender”, a contraction of the compound formed by combining the preposition trans meaning “across” and the verb do, dare meaning “give”.   This verb takes the form traditus “having been handed over” in its fourth part, the passive perfect participle.   “Tradition”, which preserves the passive voice of this form of the verb, means “that which has been handed over” in the sense of that which has been handed down to us from those who have gone before us and lacks the perjorative connotations of traditor(es) which is formed from the same part of the verb, by modifying it with the suffix that indicates the agent of the action of the otherwise passive form and which is pejorative because the handing over indicated in this case was an act of cowardly betrayal.

(6)   Vide supra, note 4.

(7)   The Bishop of Carthage was also the Primate of North Africa but for obvious reasons could not adjudicate this case.   Secundus was Primate of Numidia.

(8)   This is the test of Catholicity – ecumenicity, antiquity, and consent - proposed by St. Vincent of Lerins in his famous canon – “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est” (“whatever is believed everywhere, always, and by all”) in Commonitorium 2:6.

(9)   The examples of Daniel when forbidden by Darius to pray to the true God in the sixth chapter of Daniel, and of the Apostles when forbidden by the Sanhredrin to preach and teach in the name of Jesus in the fourth and fifth chapters of Acts, set the Scriptural precedent followed by the Churches that continued to meet during the persecutions including the Diocletian.

Christ and Paganism

 

Before I came to faith in Jesus Christ when I was fifteen I became aware of a sect that maintained that the only true and faithful Christians left on the planet were those who belonged to their group.   It was difficult not to be aware of them.   They would periodically come knocking on everyone's door, armed with literature "proving" their distinctive doctrines, hoping to find someone who did not spot them coming and pull the drapes down before they arrived, and try to convert him.   I am referring, of course, to the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, better known as the Jehovah's Witnesses.  These disciples of Charles Taze Russell and Judge Rutherford, have revived the ancient heresy of Arianism (the idea that Jesus is not the Eternally-Begotten Son of God, co-equal and co-eternal with His Father and the Holy Ghost, as orthodox Christians believe, but a lesser divinity, the first created being) and blended it with a strong millenarianism (they have set dates for the Second Coming numerous times in the past, all of which have come and gone).   They are frequently designated a "cult" by evangelical watchdog groups who use this term to refer any Protestant separatist sect that deviates from Creedal orthodoxy in some way with regards to the Trinity or the Person of Christ.   One of the ways in which they consider themselves to be superior to orthodox Christians is that they don't celebrate Christmas - or Easter, any other holiday, or even their own birthdays.

 

Shortly after coming to faith I received literature from another such sect, the Worldwide Church of God, founded by radio preacher Herbert W. Armstrong.   They too rejected the Trinity and orthodox Christology, although at a later point they apparently recanted all of this, embraced sounder doctrine, renamed themselves, and joined the National Association of Evangelicals.   This had not yet happened at the time I am alluding to.   I first recognized that there was something off about their doctrine by the fact that they, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, had a major problem with Christmas.

 

I have, ever since, been strongly inclined to doubt the orthodoxy of anyone who professes a fervent Christianity but who attacks Christmas.   I am aware, of course, that there have been some to whom no specific error with regards to the Trinity or Christ can be attributed who rejected Christmas.  Oliver Cromwell is the most obvious historical example, but as Cromwell was a self-righteous Pharisee, a boorish Philistine, and a vile, treacherous, regicide who ruled as a tyrant over the people he had deprived of their lawful king through murder, this hardly raises my esteem of Christmas rejecters.

 

I have a colleague who is like this.   Pretty much every time Christmas and Easter roll around, he insists upon pestering me with annoying questions about why we are celebrating "manmade" holidays like Christmas and Easter rather than the ones God ordained in the Law.   No matter how many times I have explained to him that God ordained the holidays in the Pentateuch for a specific nation - Israel - and the New Testament is absolutely clear on the fact that the Church is not bound to keep the Old Testament feasts, that people are not required to become Jews in order to become Christians, and that the Church is free to set its own holy days (the practice of having a special assembly of the Church on the first day of the week, Sunday, in commemoration of the Resurrection, rather than the seventh, Saturday, the Sabbath of the Old Testament, is already in evidence in the book of Acts), it never seems to penetrate and he persists in thinking that he is like Jesus admonishing the scribes and Pharisees for setting God's commandments aside for manmade traditions.

 

The most recent such episode involved him trying to get me to acknowledge that Christmas was a "pagan" holiday.   While my response was to explain to him that the Church had already begun celebrating Christmas on December 25th before Aurelian proclaimed the Feast of Sol Invictus on the same date in the third century, and to get irate at being forced to have this same conversation over again, it occurred to me later, after I had cooled down, to contemplate what he and those like him think the word "pagan" means.   

 

Judging from the way such people use the word it would seem that they think "pagan" describes everything pertaining to the religion and culture of Gentile nations prior to their evangelization, that this consisted 100% of "manmade tradition", and that anything brought into Christianity from this source is an impurity that should be expunged because the Jewish tradition was the only pre-Christian tradition to have anything in it that was of God.

 

The irony of this point of view is striking.   Consider the passage in which Jesus denounces using man-made traditions to set aside God's commandments.   You can find it in the fifteenth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, the first twenty verses, and in the first twenty-three verses of the seventh chapter of St. Mark's Gospel.    Who did He address these words to?   Were they Gentiles?   Were they ethnic Jews who had abandoned Judaism to worship in the temples of the gods of Greece and Rome?

 

No, they were the Pharisees, a sect of Second Temple Judaism.   They were the sect, as a matter of fact, that was most rigid about keeping the Torah (the Law), insisting upon maintaining Temple-level purity in every aspect of ordinary life, which is where they were coming from in asking the question that promoted Jesus’ stinging rebuke.   More interestingly, they were the explicitly anti-Hellenistic sect.   Their origins go back to the immediate aftermath of the Maccabean Revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes, following his desecration of the Temple.   The flip-side to their insistence upon an ultra-rigid, formal, purity according to the Law was a demand for separation from all things Gentile and especially Greek.   They would have been the last Jews in the first century to have any appreciation for Philo of Alexandria.   In case the relevance of this has not jumped out at you, it was the sect of Jews who made it their crusade to keep Judaism unspotted from Greek influence, that were at the receiving end of the rebuke about substituting manmade tradition for God's commandments that is evoked every time someone takes issue with Christians celebrating the Birth and Resurrection of Jesus Christ in the absence of an explicit Scriptural command to do so.

 

It is interesting that the person who was most responsible for evangelizing the Gentiles in the New Testament period, St. Paul, was himself a former member of this sect and one who had been a particularly zealous Pharisee at that.  This same St. Paul is the one who brought the question of whether Gentiles needed to become Jews in order to convert to Christianity to the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem in the fifteenth chapter of Acts, and then became the foremost champion of the answer he received, which in short, was no.   It is a prominent theme in several of the epistles he would later wrote, and the main subject of one of them, the epistle to the Galatians.   In addressing the Stoics and Epicureans at the Areopagus, St. Paul took an apologetic and evangelistic approach that is the exact opposite of the “only Jews have ever had the truth, you goyim know nothing” approach that might be expected from someone with his Pharisaic background.   He borrowed their own shrine to the "Unknown God" to preach the True and Living God to them, even applying to Jehovah, lines the Greek poets had addressed to Zeus.

 

I shall have more to say about St. Paul in a moment.  First, I would like to briefly return to Oliver Cromwell, or rather than the Puritan movement of which he was a representative and leader.   These were the forerunners of all of these sects that object to traditional Christian feasts and festivals as “manmade” and “pagan” as well as of political liberalism (their party in Parliament developed into the Whigs) and leftism (the Jacobins, who perpetrated the French Revolution, and became the template for all subsequent leftwing revolutionary movements, including the Bolsheviks, themselves took their inspiration from the Puritan revolt against King Charles I in the English Civil War).   The most extreme – theologically – of them, also objected to the conventional names of the days of the week and of the months.   The grounds, of course, were that they take their names from pagan deities (Wednesday, for example, takes its name from Wotan or Odin).

 

If the Puritan reasoning were taken to its logical conclusion we would have to throw out the New Testament.   Repeatedly, the authors of the New Testament, writing in Greek, the lingua franca of the time, referred to the place the Old Testament calls Sheol as Hades.  It occurs mostly in the Synoptic Gospels and Revelation, although it also appears in the second chapter of Acts where it is used to render Sheol in quotations from the Psalms in St. Peter’s address on Pentecost.   It was the obvious word to use – Hades in Greek thought, like Sheol in Hebrew thought, was the underworld, the land of shadows, where the spirits of the departed went.   Where did it get its Greek name, however?

 

The answer is that the Greeks named this place after the god they assigned to rule it.   In Greek mythology, when the Olympians, the third generation of gods, overthrew the Titans, the second generation, the sons of Kronos who had been ruler of the Titans, divided the world between themselves, with Zeus taking the sky, Poseidon the oceans and Hades the underworld.

 

If it is wrong for Christians to call the fifth day of the week Thursday after Thor, then it must also have been wrong for the Apostolic writers of the New Testament to refer to Sheol by the name of the Greek god who got the short end of the stick.  Apparently the Apostles were not as fastidious about avoiding names with pagan associations as the Puritans would later be.   It follows from this that neither was the Holy Ghost Who inspired their writing.

 

Nor is this one isolated example.  A related one can be found in St. Peter’s second epistle, the second chapter, fourth verse, where he uses a verbal form of Tartarus to refer to the fallen angels being imprisoned.   Tartarus, in Greek thought, was originally the place where Zeus imprisoned the Titans, and later came to take on the idea of a general place of punishment for the wicked dead (Sisyphus and his stone, Tantalus with his ever-out-of-reach grapes, etc.)   St. Peter is obviously using it in a sense that corresponds with the original meaning of the term.   Although this is much rarer in the New Testament than Hades – St. Peter’s is the only use of the term, the abyss or bottomless pit that appears in St. John’s Revelation is a reference to the same concept or place – it is an example of a concept borrowed from Greek thought that does not really have a strong close equivalent in Hebrew thought, except perhaps Dudael, which was originally the place in the wilderness where the scapegoat was thought to end up, but in later Jewish thought a general prison for evil spirits, a usage not found in any of the books regarded as canonical by both Jews and Christians (it can be found in the Book of Enoch which, although quoted by St. Jude in the New Testament, is not considered canonical by the mainstream of either Judaism or Christianity, although the Ethiopian sects of both religions place a very high value on it).   The Greek name of this place, like Hades, comes from a god, one whom the poet Hesiod, Homer’s contemporary, assigned to the oldest generation of gods that preceded the Titans in his Theogyny.

 

Incidentally, or not, the word we generally use in English for both places or concepts is also the name of a pagan deity, Hel or Hela, the Norse goddess of death who ruled the underworld and was the daughter – not sister as in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – of the god of mischief, Loki, although it is debatable whether the Norse named the realm after the goddess or the other way around.

 

Again, it is quite evident that the authors of the New Testament did not share the Puritan – or Pharisaic as it would have been called in their day - notion that borrowing words and even ideas and concepts from the Greeks and Romans somehow compromised the purity of God’s revelation.  

 

Let us return now to St. Paul.   In the first three chapters of his epistle to the Romans, he makes clear the distinction between special and general revelation, both of which come from God.   He does not use these terms but the concepts are plainly there.   General revelation is how God reveals Himself to all people everywhere in His Creation.   This is what he is talking about when he writes in the first chapter:

 

Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; For God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.  (vv. 19-20)

 

Later, in the third chapter, he writes that the advantage of Jewishness was chiefly that “unto them were committed the oracles of God”.   This is special revelation, God speaking to people through His prophets with a specific message.

 

Note that the distinction is made in the context of an indictment against all people, Jews and Gentiles both, as sinners.   The Gentiles are rebuked in the remainder of the first chapter for turning away from the Creator to worship created images and for the moral decay that accompanies such idolatry, and the Jews are rebuked in the second chapter for the hypocrisy of glorying in having received God’s Law without obeying it, all of which comes to a head in the  general indictment “for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” which is immediately followed by the Gospel proclamation that we are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus”.  

 

One of the implications of this, that the nations have received the general revelation of God in Creation and Israel His special oracles, but that both have fallen into sin and that Jesus Christ is the Saviour Who brings the freely offered redemption of God to both, is that Christ is the fulfilment of both special and general revelation.

 

C. S. Lewis had clearly thought through this implication.   In response to the argument, common among anthropologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that the Gospel message of the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ was merely another version of the dying and resurrected god – the corn king – that appears in many mythologies as a symbol of the death and decay of fall and winter being replaced by the renewing of life in spring, he argued that whereas in pagan mythologies the myth was a symbol of the reality that was the natural phenomenon, in Christianity the natural phenomenon was the symbol of the greater reality to be found in the death and resurrection of Christ, and that thus Jesus, by fulfilling the symbol meaning pointed to by the natural phenomenon to which the pagan myths pointed, was the ultimate fulfilment of the myth.   This and other related arguments can be found in the essays of his which were collected into God in the Dock.   It is a subject that was particularly meaningful to him in that it was J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson’s challenge to him to consider the Gospel as a “true myth” that brought him to faith in Jesus Christ.   Among the most relevant essays are “Myth Became Fact” and “Miracles”.   In the latter, which argues that God is always at work in the world in natural processes in ways we have become so accustomed to that we fail to see God in them and that the miracles recorded in Scripture consist basically of God doing the same things but “at a different speed and on a smaller scale”, revealing the Agent Who is at work in the ordinary processes.    In this essay Lewis wrote:

 

God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities. Thus every year, from Noah’s time till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see. Either like the Pagans they refer the process to some finite spirit, Bacchus or Dionysus: or else, like the moderns, they attribute real and ultimate causality to the chemical and other material phenomena which are all that our senses can discover in it. But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off. The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at a wedding party in Cana. Every year God makes a little corn into much corn: the seed is sown and there is an increase, and men, according to the fashion of their age, say “It is Ceres, it is Adonis, it is the Corn-King,” or else “It is the laws of Nature.” The close-up, the translation, of this annual wonder is the feeding of the five thousand. Bread is not made there of nothing. Bread is not made of stones, as the Devil once suggested to Our Lord in vain. A little bread is made into much bread…When He fed the thousands He multiplied fish as well as bread. Look in every bay and almost every river. This swarming, pulsating fecundity shows He is still at work. The ancients had a god called Genius – the god of animal and human fertility, the presiding spirit of gynecology, embryology, or the marriage bed – the “genial bed” as they called it after its god Genius. As the miracles of wine and bread and healing showed who Bacchus really was, who Ceres, who Apollo, and that all were one, so this miraculous multiplication of fish reveals the real Genius.

 

One of the books that C. S. Lewis claimed as a major influence on his own thought was G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.   Originally published in 1925 as a sort of response to H. G. Wells’ The Outline of History, it consists of two parts, the first of which gives a sort of overview of the pre-Christian history of the world, the second part of which looks at Who Jesus Christ was, and overall demonstrates why materialistic, rationalistic, and evolutionary accounts of both man and Christ such at that proffered by Mr. Wells are unsatisfactory. Throughout the book Chesterton presented mythology and philosophy as existing in a seemingly irreconcilable tension in pre-Christian paganism.   In the fifth chapter of the first part, “Man and Mythologies” he writes that “All this mythological business belongs to the poetical part of men” and proceeds to explain why a scientific account of mythology will miss the point completely, because it is all about imagination and the aesthetic point of view of the artist.   For Chesterton, as later for Lewis, mythology did not represent an inferior form of theology, because it was not of the genus theology at all: “A man did not stand up and say ‘I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,’ etc., as he stands up and says ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty’ and the rest of the Apostles’ Creed.”   In the chapter that follows this he begins the degeneration of mythology into superstition, black magic, and devil worship, noting that contrary to what is often assumed this was characteristic of civilizations grown decadent rather than primitive societies embarking upon civilization.   He then switches gears to discuss the Philosophers, who sought absolute and abstract answers to ultimate questions, and into which category he places not just people like Aristotle, but the founders of Eastern philosophical systems usually thought of as religions, such as Buddha and, especially Confucius.   In the fifth chapter of the second part, entitled “The Escape from Paganism”, he returns to the theme of this tension and maintains that in Christ and His Church, the mythological and philosophical are brought together and reconciled:

 

The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it is the realization both of mythology and philosophy.   It is a story and in that sense one of a hundred stores; only it is a true story.   It is a philosophy and in that sense one of a hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that is like life.    But above all it is a reconciliation because it is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories….To sum up; the sanity of the world was restored and the soul of man offered salvation by something which did indeed satisfy the two warring tendencies of the past; which had never been satisfied in full and most certainly never satisfied together.   It met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.   That is why the ideal figure had to be a historical character, as nobody had ever felt Adonis or Pan to be a historical character.   But that is also why the historical character had to be the ideal figure; and even fulfil many of the functions given to these other ideal figures; why he was at once the sacrifice and the feast, why he could be shown under the emblems of the growing vine or the rising sun.

 

The position taken by Chesterton and Lewis could be summarized as this: Jesus Christ is the true and ultimate fulfilment of pagan mythology and philosophy just as He is the true and ultimate fulfilment of Old Testament Judaism.   Those who have inherited the Puritanical spirit of Oliver Cromwell, as he in turn inherited it from the Pharisees of old, will howl their outrage over this suggestion and claim that it is unscriptural, but it is implicit in St. Paul’s account of general and special revelation in the epistle to the Romans and explicit in his address to the philosophers of Mars Hill.   Obviously, this does not constitute an endorsement of the idolatry, immorality, or philosophical errors of paganism, all of which St. Paul rebuked.   After all, saying that Jesus was the fulfilment of the Old Testament hardly constitutes an endorsement of the arrogant ethnocentrism of the Pharisees, much less the errors of the other sects of first century Judaism.  

 

For all those who believe in Jesus Christ, as the Son of the True and Living God, equal to the Father and the Holy Ghost, Who became truly Man while remaining fully God in order to redeem all of mankind, and to fulfil all that God had revealed before through general or special revelation, there could hardly be anything wrong with celebrating either His birth, as narrated to us in two of the Gospel accounts, or His triumph over all of mankind’s enemies – sin, death, the devil, and hell – in His glorious Resurrection as told in all four of the Gospel accounts.   To claim that the celebration of either of these is “pagan” is absurd.   Yes, Christmas falls close to the winter solstice, as do the festivals of lights of all sorts of other religions such as the ancient Roman Saturnalia, the Hindu/Sikh Diwali (technically this falls about a month earlier but close enough) or, for that matter, the Jewish Hanukkah (which the Gospel of John records our Lord participating in even though it is “manmade”), but this is hardly grounds for objection.    The Book of Genesis says that God put the sun, moon, and stars in the sky for “for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years” and so it is hardly surprising that the different religions that arose out of the basic need to worship that God placed in human nature at Creation would often have festivals at the same time of year.   Ironically, those who dismiss Christmas as “pagan” are themselves guilty of what they accuse others of.   Pagan, in the Latin tongue, meant rural, rustic, and peasant.   It was a snobbish term by which the sophisticated, urban, elites of ancient Rome dismissed simple country folk.   If there was anything the Church borrowed from ancient Rome that it ought not to have it was this term with its associations of contempt for those who live on farms and in villages.  

 

 

Convictions and Contrasts

The year 2020 Anno Domini, an annus horribilis if ever there was one, has finally and mercifully come to an end.   It is the first of January once again, New Year's Day on the civil calendar, and the octave day of Christmas, dedicated to the Circumcision of our Lord, on the ancient liturgical kalendar.    This means that it is time once again for my annual essay about myself and my personal views, a tradition that I borrowed from one of my own favourite op-ed writers, the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel.

I grew up on a farm near the hamlet of Bradwardine, the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in southwestern Manitoba, one of the prairie provinces of the Dominion of Canada, as is still the full constitutional title and name of my country, one of the Commonwealth Realms of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.   Growing up, I received the basic sort of minimal, religious instruction that is generally available in the mainline Protestant denominations - I was taught the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Golden Rule, and made familiar through the format of children's Bible stories with the most significant events in the life of Jesus Christ and of the major Old Testament figures, but not in such a way as to instill the conviction that this was meaningful truth rather than mere storytelling with moral lessons attached.   Late in the summer after my fifteenth birthday, I had an evangelical conversion in which I came to faith in Jesus Christ as He is presented in the Scriptures and the ancient Creeds - the Son of the True and Living God, Who is equal to and One with His Father and the Holy Ghost, Who without ceasing to be fully God became fully Man, through the miracle of the Virgin Birth, and Who came into the world that He had made so that He might be betrayed, unjustly condemned, and die a cruel and unjust death at the hands of men in order to take the sins of the whole world, including my own, upon Himself and offer His sufferings, shed blood and death on the Cross as the one final and true sacrifice that would atone for sin and reconcile the world to God, and Who rose again from the grave, victorious over sin, death, and hell, to bring new and eternal spiritual life to all who believe in Him.   I was baptized about a year and a half after this and after high school took five years of formal theological training at what was then Providence College and Theological Seminary in Otterburne, Manitoba, but which has since grown into Providence University College.   I have lived In Winnipeg, the capital city of Manitoba, where I have worked in inner-city Christian outreach ministry ever since.   In this time I have been confirmed in the Anglican Church of Canada, the Church of my paternal forebears, and while I have no more use for the theological liberalism that plagues my Church than I did when it infested the denomination of my maternal ancestors, the United Church of Canada, I am theologically most at home in orthodox Anglicanism.  By orthodox Anglicanism I mean the Anglicanism of the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer, that is Catholic in its affirmation of the ancient faith stated concisely in the Apostles' Creed and in its fullest expression in the Athanasian, and in its retention of the Apostolic ministry in its three-fold orders, the Gospel Sacraments, and the ancient liturgy as translated into beautiful English by Thomas Cranmer, and Protestant in its rejection of those later errors that are distinct to the patriarch of Rome rather than Catholic (belonging to the whole Church, "everywhere, at all times, and by all").

For as long as I can remember I have loved  my country and admired her history, traditions, and institutions.   What I came to admire about her in childhood is what I still admire about her now.   Whereas our friends and neighbours to the south take pride in the fact that their republic was born out of rebellion and revolution and built upon ideals drawn from eighteenth century liberal philosophy, what I admire most about the Dominion of Canada is that the historical path that led up to her birth in Confederation began by diverging from that taken by the Americans at precisely this point.   For differing reasons, the British Loyalists, the French Canadians who had been guaranteed their language, religion, and culture by the British Crown when they were ceded to the latter at the end of the Seven Year's War, and the Red Indian tribes who had treaty alliances with the Crown, chose loyalty and honour, the virtues of the older, pre-Modern, tradition of Western civilization over rebellion, revolution, and the ideals of the newer, Modern, and liberal form.   This choice, first made at the time of the American Revolution, was made again in the War of 1812, and indeed, in the very process of Confederation, and the choice of loyalty and honour continued to light the Dominion's way through two World Wars.   This is the part of our history which ordinary Canadians admired the most when I was growing up and likely still do.   The Liberal Party of Canada has tried its worst to erase and eradicate the older, Loyalist, Canada and her heritage, traditions, and history, for which reason I despise, have always despised, and always will despise the Liberal Party.  The New Democrats, who differ from the Liberals in this regards only in the sense that they wish the erasure and eradication were more complete and more quickly accomplished are even more abominable in my eyes than the Grits.

If you are familiar with the party system in Canada you might conclude from the last two sentences in the previous paragraph that I am a Conservative.   While I describe my political outlook as Tory I do not mean this in the sense of a Conservative Party supporter.   The old Conservative Party, as it was from the time it was led by Sir John A. Macdonald, the leading Father of Confederation and Canada's first Prime Minister until the time the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker led it in Opposition in the early years of the sweeping changes being brought in by Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, the two Communist traitors who led the Liberals in government from the 1960s through the early 1980s, was a party I could have called my own had it not been before I was born.   After Diefenbaker was ousted as leader, the party veered off in all sorts of wrong directions, which it would be too much of a rabbit trail to specify here.   In the late 1980s, populists of the Western, prairie provinces, founded a new party, the Reform Party of Canada, that purported to be more conservative in its platform, policies, and philosophy than the Conservative Party.   That they chose the name by which the Liberal Party had been known prior to Confederation was a good indicator that this was not the case.   I supported this party in the 1990s, because it had many policies and ideas with which I agreed, but eventually I got fed up with the way these good ideas were constantly being wed to an anti-Canadian attitude, hostile to our history, traditions, and institutions, which looked with envy towards those of the United States, an attitude which is as repugnant to me as everything I loathe in the Liberals and NDP.   The present Conservative Party was formed out of a merger of the old Conservative Party and the Reform, and while some of the best aspects of each party were incorporated into the new, overall it gives more of an impression of combining the worst of both.

Therefore, when I say that I am a Tory, I do not mean this in the partisan sense but in the sense of Dr. Johnson's definition "One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolic hierarchy of the Church of England, opposed to a Whig" or, as T. S. Eliot described himself, in what seems to be a paraphrase of Dr. Johnson's definition "an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics".   I use Tory, which was the name of those who defended the royal prerogative and the established Church in Parliament in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before Robert Peel founded the Conservative Party that took their place in 1834 rather than small-c conservative, the more common way of distinguishing one's centre-right political philosophy from Conservative partisanship.   This is because small-c conservatism is generally understood to mean support for law and order, government fiscal responsibility, property rights, low taxes, and economic freedom.   While these ideas are not bad - I generally agree with them - they are all what I would consider secondary or even tertiary ideas and there is nothing in them to distinguish conservatism from what was called liberalism up until the early twentieth century.   By contrast, Tory as I use the term, stresses the importance of the older virtues such as loyalty, particularly as directed towards the institutions that have come down to us, albeit in a highly diluted form, from pre-liberal Christendom and which constitute a link to the Christian civilization of the past, and the classical civilization of the pre-Christian ancient world, the best elements of which had been absorbed by Christian civilization.   While obviously, when it comes to civil institutions, I primarily mean royal monarchy, I also would include Parliament as that legislative assembly, in which a voice in government is given to the Commons as well as to the lords spiritual and temporal, evolved out of the king's council fairly early in the history of Christendom, centuries prior to the Modern Age.   Whereas the typical small-c conservative is indistinguishable from a liberal or socialist in his support for democracy, an abstract ideal and hardly of the first order of abstract ideals, my support as a Tory, is for Parliament, the concrete institution, which has been tested and proved by time.

As a Tory in the twenty-first century, I am more of a reactionary than a conservative.   Reactionary is a term more often used as a label of abuse by the progressive Left than as a self-description.  I learned to embrace the term from John Lukacs, the Hungarian-American, Roman Catholic, historian who was, along with the Canadian Tory historians, Donald Creighton and W. L.  Morton, the latter a fellow Manitoban, one of my favourite writers of history.   You can read his account of how he came to self-apply it in the first volume of his memoirs, which is the best-titled autobiography I have ever come across, Confessions of an Original Sinner.  The difference between a reactionary and a conservative is usually understood this way - a conservative wishes to keep things as they are, a reactionary wishes to make them what they were in the past.   I would prefer the distinction to  be much more nuanced than this.   The conservative, an advocate of present day Western Civilization against those who wish to destroy it, whether from within or without, sees the merits of Western Civilization as consisting primarily or even entirely of elements and aspects introduced by liberalism in the Modern Age.   The reactionary, on the other hand, believes that what is of greatest value and most worthy of defence in our Civilization, is what has come down to us from Christendom and classical antiquity.   Furthermore, the reactionary acknowledges that the transition to modernity involved loss as well as gain, and is willing to contemplate the possibility that the loss exceeded the gain or even that it was too high a price to pay for the gain.   This is why for liberals, socialists, and all other stripes of progressive, reactionary is the worst possible insult.   Their most basic faith is in the idea of progress, that the present, whatever its faults, is far better than the past, and that improvement can only consist in moving further away from the past.

While one can be a Tory and a reactionary without believing the Christian faith - Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Charles Maurras and Anthony M. Ludovici are among many examples that could be named - and a Christian believer without being a Tory or reactionary, orthodox Christianity and reactionary Toryism are complementary each to the other.   Before my conversion and baptism, I already had certain Tory convictions - I have been a lifelong royalist from the moment I learned the difference between a monarchy and a republic and that my country was the former rather than the latter - and what could be called a sort of instinctual reactionary skepticism towards fashionable, progressive, and forward-looking trends.  These were certainly augmented by my coming to faith and growth in small-o orthodoxy.   Orthodox Christianity teaches us that two human institutions are essential to human society in the truest sense of the word - they are not artificial creations of our own, but gifts given to us by God in Creation, and belong to the very nature of our esse, our being.   These are the family and religion.   However literally or figuratively we may understand the first two chapters of Genesis, it is clear that they teach the family to have been part of human nature from the beginning. Genesis 1:27-28 tells us God created man "male and female" and instructed him to "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth" whereas the second chapter provides us with the more detailed account in which God, having created Adam and declared "it is not good that the man should be alone", forms Eve out of Adam's own flesh and unites the two in the institution of marriage (2:22-24).   That religion is also part of human nature, something God gave us from Creation, is evident in the account of the Creation of the sun, moon, and stars "for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years" (the calendar's religious function is antecedent to its other functions such as civil) and the communion between God and man in the Garden prior to the Fall.   The Fall changes the nature of religion by introducing the requirement of an offering when man approaches God, but the basic need for communion with God that is the essence of man's religious nature is there from Creation, from man having been created in God's image.   By contrast, the two institutions which are fundamental - in the original sense of being the foundation upon which something is built - to civilization, the market, the place where men meet to trade goods and services, and the state, the civil authority that enforces the law and administers justice, do not go back to Creation but enter history after the Fall.  This does not make them bad things - the state is clearly stated to have authority from God Himself, both in the account of its institution after the Flood (Gen. 9:5-6) and by St. Paul in Romans 13 - but they are not essential in the way the family and religion are, a fact of which we all could use a reminder after the nauseating events of the previous year in which the state declared itself to be more essential than family, religion, and the market.   The ancient debate between royalism and republicanism reduces to a debate about whether the state should be patterned after the essential institution of the family (the role of king and queen is that of father and mother to the city or country or nation or empire as a whole) or be organized according to the principles of the artificial (although fundamental to civilization) institution of the market (a republic is a state organized along the lines of a business corporation).   Christian orthodoxy supports the royalist side because pious as the Calvinist republican's "no king but King Jesus" may sound, it is spoken with the voice of heresy, denying to Christ His Scriptural title of "King of Kings and Lord of Lords".   Perhaps the best argument for the Westminster System is not merely that it is a concrete example of the mixed constitution ideal of classical antiquity (pre-Socratic Athenians, Aristotle, Polybius), or even that it is a better guardian of freedom than republicanism as John Farthing so excellently argued, but that it incorporates the strengths and advantages of republicanism into the more natural, royal constitution.   Or as the great Stephen Leacock put it, it solves the dilemma of the old debate by "joining the dignity of Kingship with the power of democracy".   Christian orthodoxy reminds us that Kingship, taking its pattern from the essential family, is the more important part of this union.   C. S. Lewis worded it as a question in "Myth Became Fact", but his other writings on the matter leave no doubt that he held it as a fact that "monarchy is the channel through which all the vital elements of citizenship, loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the hierarchical principle, splendour,  ceremony, continuity - still trickle down to irrigate the dust bowl of modern economic statecraft".

Furthermore, Christian orthodoxy complements reactionary Toryism in its account of the present state of Creation which is utterly at odds with the false doctrine of Progress.   The overarching narrative of the Christian Scriptures begins with man being placed in Paradise at the beginning of Genesis and ends with him being brought back to Paradise at the end of Revelation.   The Paradise to which man is restored, like the Paradise which he lost in the Fall, is the gracious gift of his loving Creator.   The gift of Paradise in eternity future is made possible by the gift of God in human history - the gift of His Only-Begotten Son in the Incarnation, Who became man that He might raise man back up to God, by defeating the enemies of the devil, sin, and death that brought about man's Fall and expulsion from Paradise.   In all of this - man being placed in Paradise originally, man being given a Saviour in the Son of God, man's being reconciled to God by that Saviour, and finally man being re-admitted to Paradise - God's favour - His grace - is freely given by God, out of the goodness and love of His own heart, and man's part is to receive that favour by faith, never to earn it.   Indeed, the repentance that is the reverse side to the coin of faith, consists primarily of the humble contrition of admitting we cannot earn or deserve God's favour.    The Church, the institution that Christ founded through His Apostles, which is in some ways a form of the institution of religion that goes back to Creation, in other ways is something completely new that transcends it - see G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man for an excellent discussion of this - was not given to man as a ladder with which to climb his way back into Paradise, but as the instrument through which God works in her Ministry of Word and Sacrament to bring the grace given to us in Jesus Christ at one particular moment in history, to us that we might receive it by faith in the time allotted to us on earth. The doctrine of Progress in its myriad forms, is the idea that man can regain Paradise through his own efforts, whether they be technological development, moral reform, restructuring society, or whatever.   As George Grant put it, the idea of Progress is the heresy that replaces the eschatological Kingdom of God with the Kingdom of Man.  It is a scheme doomed to fail horribly.  As David Warren recently reminded us "Dystopia and Utopia are really the same place".

As a small-o orthodox Christian and a reactionary Tory I oppose many of the same things small-c conservatives oppose, including those that they opposed a hundred, fifty, twenty, or even as recently as five years ago, but oppose no longer.   My grounds for opposition usually differ from those of the conservative.  Often the difference is in what we would prioritize, although in some cases it amounts to opposing the same thing from different directions.   A comprehensive list would make this essay far too long so I will select three as being representative - socialism, environmentalism, and anti-racism.

Before addressing socialism it is necessary to say a few words about capitalism.   Whereas the market - as defined a few paragraphs above - is as old as civilization, capitalism is a Modern phenomenon.   Its advocates and its foes have never agreed as to what exactly it is, just the when and where of it.   Karl Marx its avowed enemy, gave it its name, which the economic liberals promptly adopted for the laissez-faire system they recommended and advocated.  Oddly enough, the Marxists and liberals are largely in agreement that they are talking about the same thing, even though their descriptions and definitions of it are almost as different as their attitudes towards it.   Conservatives are big believers in capitalism as classical liberals understand and explain it.   As a Tory I am a critic of capitalism on the grounds that it involves a basic inversion of value and makes  the market more important than family and religion.   The market is a good thing and it is fundamental to civilization but it is not more important than the family or religion.   

Conservative advocates of capitalism oppose socialism, as do I.   Conservative opposition to socialism, however, tends to be based upon pragmatic grounds - it is less efficient, it just doesn't work.   Or,  for conservatives who are not satisfied with pragmatic arguments, a higher case against socialism is made that it is contrary to freedom and amounts to universal slavery.    While I don't disagree with any of this, it all falls short of the most damning indictment of socialism that can be made.    In the Seven Deadly Sins, which  being behaviour patterns rather than single acts are actually vices, Pride is traditionally ranked as the worst, followed closely by Envy.   Whereas the lesser of the Seven Deadly Sins - Avarice, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth - are merely natural human desires that have been indulged to the point of excess - Pride and Envy were the source of Satan's rebellion against God.   While envy sometimes is used to mean mere covetous jealousy - as I used it when talking about the Reform Party above - the Envy in the Deadly Sins is not so much wanting what others have as hating and wishing the destruction of those who have what one wants.  Whereas the lesser and human vice of Avarice or Greed is frequently linked to capitalism, the most that can really be said in this regards is that capitalism provides an environment in which Greed can flourish.   By contrast, Envy, the greater and Satanic vice, is the very essence of socialism - the hatred of the Haves for being Haves.   The Satanic nature of socialism is doubled in that just as the devil disguises himself as an angel of light (II Cor. 11:14) so the Envy of socialism hides its true face behind the mask of Charity - Christian love - the highest of the three theological virtues (Faith, Hope and Charity).    It pretends to be about helping the Have Nots, but assisting them would never satisfy it if the Haves were not torn down in the process.   Whereas capitalism must be criticized, socialism, which is thoroughly Satanic, must be opposed..   All of this pertains, of course, to socialism as the socialists themselves beginning with Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Marx have understood it, the repudiation of private property and not what such well-meaning Christian royalists as F. D. Maurice, Eugene Forsey, and George Grant have romanticized it to be out of their well-founded criticism of capitalism.

Conservatism is less united in its opposition to environmentalism than it is in its opposition to socialism.   Conservative views range from a full embrace of environmentalism (rare) to moderate acceptance tempered with the recognition of the need to balance other concerns to opposition on the grounds that the movement has been taken over by its lunatic fringe.   Those who hold a more negative view of it generally do so because they perceive it to be a threat to capitalism and the livelihoods of those who depend upon capitalism for their employment.   Environmentalism is this, but perhaps more importantly, it is a movement the agenda of which, if allowed to succeed, would accomplish the exact opposite of the good it claims as its end.  Environmentalism purports to be a movement advocating for things that no sane person could possibly oppose - clean air, clean water, the conservation of limited resources, the preservation of beautiful surroundings and threatened forms of plant and animal life.   It is not entirely wrong in perceiving a threat to these things in capitalism  with its technological industrialism but it goes completely off by embracing the socialist attack on private ownership as the solution.   Aristotle observed two and a half millennia ago that private ownership is generally more conducive to the conservation of resources and the upkeep of the aesthetical quality of places than public ownership and the history of the last century, in which the Soviet Union and Red China by implementing a socialism that included all of the polluting industrialism of capitalism without the safeguards of private ownership produced a level of ecological devastation no capitalist country ever came close to matching, a fact that pro-socialist environmentalist Ronald Wright conveniently omitted from his Massey Lectures on A Short History of Progress.   When we look more closely at environmentalism's agenda, we find that they envision a future in which the human population has been radically reduced, what remains of it has all been herded into big cities, where they work and socialize from home in an entirely artificial, virtual, environment.   The materialization of such a vision would completely defeat the purpose of preserving clean air, clean water, and beautiful surroundings.    Sane people want these things not as part of a "nature" untouched by man from which we are forever locked away in an artificial environment resembling the Matrix but as the actual environment in which they live their lives.    Environmentalism is essentially a theological error - or rather a curious combination of every different sort of theological and philosophical error.   It sees its cause as a crusade to save the world from an impending Apocalypse, which is a form of the Millenarian heresy.   It is also a form of idolatry which makes the earth and nature into objects of worship, sometimes with the mistaken notion that it is reviving a form of pre-Christian paganism.   It makes what it thinks is science into an object of faith, contradicting the essential nature of true science.   It represents a complete failure to understand that fighting pollution and preserving the environment is primarily a matter of aesthetics, the pursuit of beauty, and that the ideal of a completely wild nature untouched by man is itself an invention of the human mind and not true natural beauty.   Had it understood these things it would not be trying to imprison mankind in a thoroughly ugly artificial environment for the sake of protecting what it wrongly considers to be nature from what it foolishly considers to be a pollutant, carbon dioxide, the food that sustains all plant life.   Ironically, in its attempt to seal man away in this prison, its destination converges with that of the very technological, industrialism that has played the villain in its narrative from the beginning.   It is as if, to take an illustration from J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, the Ents, in the name of protecting the forests from Saruman, were to drive the hobbits from the Shire and lock them away in the dungeons of Isengard. 

If conservatives are less unified in their opposition to environmentalism than in their opposition to socialism, they have more or less capitulated completely to anti-racism.   The braver among them may decry the methods of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, but few would dare to criticize the movement itself in terms of its goals and ideals, except, perhaps, to say that the movement has failed to live up to them.   I condemn anti-racism totally and completely for being the very thing it claims to oppose.   Racism is understood by most people to mean either the belief in the superiority of one's own race or the contempt or hatred of other races or both.   The liberals of sixty years ago considered racism to be  evil because it violated one of their basic ideals, human equality.   This ideal is a false ideal, a substitute, and a poor substitute at that, for what the ancients called justice,    Nevertheless, liberals of that era at least conceived of the evil of racism as lying in the act and attitude itself, and not in the race of the perpetrator - or accused perpetrator.   Today's anti-racists, whose hatred of what they call racism is far more intense than that of the liberals of decades ago, consider racism to be something which all people of white skin and European descent are guilty, whether they are conscious of it or not, and which only white people are guilty of.   A white person who says something that most people would consider innocuous is said by the anti-racists to have committed a "microaggression" if somebody of another race takes offence at it, regardless of how irrational that taking offense may be, whereas explicit expressions of hatred towards white people, including calls for violence and even genocide, are not considered to be racist by anti-racists despite fitting to a tee what ordinary people consider that term to mean.  Last year we saw the anti-racist movement demand that all white people show their full support for anti-racism, confess to their part in "racism"  whether they were conscious of any such thing in the normal sense of the word or not, and make a gesture of submission to the "people of colour" they have supposedly wronged, as the movement erupted into orgies of violence and vandalism in its demands that white men of the past be erased from history in Cultural Maoist "Year Zero" fashion.   All of this, of course, constitutes racism - racism directed towards white people - and not just the relatively mild "we don't want your kind in our club" type racism, but the  violent racial hatred that is usually associated with the Third Reich.   That regime had made idols out of race and nation, idols that proved to be devils which like the Chemosh and Moloch of ancient times demanded human sacrifice.   Liberalism, recoiling in repugnance against this, tore down the idols of race and nation and replaced them with the idol of equality.   That idol has now proven itself to be just as  much a devil as the others and it is now demanding its human tribute.   The orthodox Christian answer to racism, whether of the National Socialist variety or the kind that wears the mask of opposition to itself, is to call all men to turn from idols - race, nation, equality, whatever - to serve the True and Living God, of Whom, as St. Paul told the philosophers of Mars Hill in calling them from idolatry, we are all offspring.

Happy New Year

God save the Queen!