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.

Following Christ in a Time of Plague

The following essay was inspired by a blog post written by a member of the leadership team in my parish.   Since this man has been a friend for about a decade and his post inspired me to write the exact opposite of what he had written, I shall do him the courtesy of leaving out his name.   

 

My parish, like all other Churches, sectarian congregations, and sacred communities of other religions for that matter, are presently forbidden to meet in person here in the province of Manitoba, in violation of three of what the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms identify as “fundamental freedoms” and, indeed, in violation of the entire Common Law tradition of justice and liberty that has been the bedrock upon which the Dominion of Canada was built since Confederation.   This insane government overreach, which evokes memories of the persecution of religious communities in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Red China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba and North Vietnam, is called a “Code Red” lockdown, and has been ordered by the public health mandarin, because he and the premier don’t like the fact that the dishonest media concentration on rising numbers of people who test positive for the Wuhan bat flu, regardless of the facts that the tests used are not diagnostic tools and that the majority of the “cases” are people who are not sick in any conventional sense of the term, make them look bad.   Most people are incapable of distinguishing between what the media says and reality and therefore have been duped into thinking that the tearing apart of the fabric of society, dissolving of communities, eroding of social capital, and brainwashing us all into fearing ordinary human contact and distrusting our friends, relatives, and neighbours outside of an extremely small so-called “bubble” of contacts is somehow “necessary.”   The isolation this causes, is not merely an experience we don’t enjoy, something unpleasant, but is downright harmful to our social, moral, spiritual, psychological, and yes, as everyone who knows the meaning of mens sana in corpore sano is aware, physical wellbeing.   Anybody capable of distinguishing between the bare facts and the slant imposed upon them by alarmist adjectives in the news and drawing rational conclusions from the facts will know, regardless of what “most of us” may or may not agree upon, that these measures are by no means precautions necessitated by the spread of a virus which for the portion of the population under 70 and in good health is less dangerous than the seasonal flu and for the portion of the population that is most at risk, that is to say those over 70 and with two or more serious chronic health conditions, these measures are quite evidently not effective at protecting since that portion of the population has been under lockdown since spring.   Furthermore and more importantly, not only are the lockdown measures not necessary, they are not good.   (1)

 

It is not just disappointing, then, but actually rather disgusting, to see so many people, including professing Christians and even Church leaders, so determined to load the burden of these restrictions upon their family, friends, neighbours, strangers and countrymen in general, as if they were not familiar with our Lord’s warning to His disciples about imitating the Pharisees in loading burdens upon others.  

 

For much of the last nine months, but especially since the new lockdown was gradually introduced over October and November, I have struggled to reconcile how professing Christians could so callously disregard not only the civil rights and basic freedoms of their neighbours, but their needs as social and spiritual beings as well.  Jesus told us that to love our neighbours as ourselves was the Second Greatest Commandment after that which tells us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.   It is one thing to say that the voluntary sacrificing of our personal rights and freedoms in the name of keeping our neighbours “safe” is a fulfilment of this Commandment, it is quite another thing to say that sacrificing the rights and freedoms of our family, friends and neighbours is such a fulfilment.   Supporting public health orders that impose maximal restrictions on everybody’s freedom of association, assembly, and religion is doing the latter.   To mistake sacrificing the rights and freedoms of others, which is what support for these public health orders amounts to, for the voluntary sacrificing of your own rights and freedoms, and patting yourself on the back about how much you love your neighbour, is to give the text of the Second Greatest Commandment merely the most superficial of readings.

 

There is a popular but very wrong and misguided notion that says that to insist upon and stand up for our rights and freedoms is to act selfishly and that to blindly support and obey every rule and restriction that is enacted in the name of public health is to put the common good ahead of our own.   While it is true that at the experiential level rights and freedoms are things that we primarily enjoy on an individual basis it is entirely wrong to say that insisting upon them and standing up for them is selfish.   Once again, voluntarily agreeing to limit the expression of our rights and freedoms for the sake of others may very well be the loving thing to do, but supporting government action that limits those rights and freedoms, not just for us as individuals but for everyone in society, is the very opposite of a loving act.   Our Lord summarized the message of His Sermon on the Mount in the Golden Rule, which states “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you; do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.”   That is the rule worded positively, in terms of what we are supposed to do.   It is a coin with a reverse side, which expresses the same thing negatively, in terms of what we are not supposed to do.   Rabbi Hillel the Elder famously gave the negative form of this as “That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary” (Shabbat 31a in the Babylonian Talmud).   If supporting government measures that restrict to the point of taking away completely the rights and freedoms of all members of our society does not constitute doing to your fellows what is despicable to you, it is difficult to conceive of what would.

 

When, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, the most famous student of the said Rabbi Hillel’s grandson Gamaliel who went on to become an Apostle of our Lord, St. Paul, in his first epistle to the Church in Corinth instructed them to be careful in how they exercised their Christian liberty so as not to be as stumbling block to those of weaker conscience and to put the good of others ahead of their own good, he clearly meant that they should voluntarily limit and restrict their freedom for the sake of others, not that they should write Caesar and ask him to do it for them and everybody else, nor that they should become Caesar’s cheering section if he did so of  his own accord.   When it came to limiting the freedom of others, St. Paul’s thoughts on that can be found in his epistle to the Galatians, in which the very first anathema sit (actually anathema esto since St. Paul wrote in Greek not Latin) was pronounced on those who presumed so to do.    It is worth pointing out that in I Corinthians the recommended voluntarily imposed limits on freedom involved eating meat of dubious origins and in Galatians the limitations on others that were condemned involved forcing people to cut off their foreskins and to stop eating bacon.   Locking people away in their own houses for months, even if they are healthy, without even the pretence of a criminal charge, let alone trial and conviction, forbidding them any sort of healthy social contact, ordering the businesses in which their life’s work, and possibly that of several generations of their family, is all tied up, and upon which they depend for their living to close and this sort of thing goes far beyond what St. Paul condemned in the legalists troubling the Galatians.    What would he have thought if he had foreseen that some would take his plea to the Corinthians to exercise their liberty prudently and wisely and seek the good of others as an argument for supporting imposed limitations of this nature?

 

I suspect the answer would be close to what St. Peter had to say about those who misused St. Paul’s epistles in his own day “As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.”  (II Peter 3:16)

 

That Jesus demonstrated by His own life what love looks like is most certainly true.   Indeed, His life was a demonstration of what a love that goes beyond the love spoken of in the Greatest and the Second Greatest Commandments looks like.   Remember, those Commandments He said, were the summary of the Law, i.e., that which God rightly requires of us.   A self-sacrificial love, such as Jesus demonstrated by allowing Himself to be unjustly condemned, tortured, and brutally killed for the sake of us all, goes far beyond that, and it is Jesus’ example that Christians are commanded to follow.   To suggest, however, that support and obedience for the lockdown measures is what that kind of love looks like today, is to say something that could only be true in some sort of parallel world where everything is the opposite of our own.

 

Think about it.   In the time of our Lord’s earthly ministry, the disease that everybody feared, for which everybody who contracted it was excluded from the community and forced to announce themselves as “unclean” lest any unwary traveler come too close, was leprosy.   Jesus encountered several lepers at various points in His ministry, each encounter ending with the healing of the leper.   One particular encounter stands out, however, which is related in all three of the Synoptic Gospels.   In St. Matthew’s Gospel it follows immediately after the Sermon on the Mount.   After He comes down from the mountain a great multitude follows Him and a leper comes to Him, worships Him, and says “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.”   He answered, not just in word but in deed:

 

And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

He did not warn the leper to stay a safe distance away.   He did not warn His disciples to stay a safe distance away.   He did not stay a safe distance away Himself.   He “put forth His hand, and touched him.”

 

In 1832, the plague of cholera hit the city that is now called Toronto.   It killed a twelfth of the population.    It was, in other words, a plague that makes the one that has been generating an insane amount of panic this year, look small and pathetic in comparison.   While droves fled the city, John Stachan, the Anglican archdeacon of York who seven years later would become the first Bishop of the Diocese of Toronto, remained, personally attended to the sick, volunteered on the wagons that collected dead bodies, conducted the burials, and arranged for support for those orphaned and widowed by the plague.   He did precisely the same thing when the “second wave” of cholera hit two years later.

 

What does following Jesus’ example of self-sacrificing love for others look like in a time of plague?  Is it what soon-to-be Bishop Strachan did in 1832?   Or is it lecturing other Christians on how abiding by rules that destroy the economy, bankrupt small family businesses and enlarge the market share of big box chains and online corporations like Amazon, tear the fabric of society to pieces, dissolve communities, exhaust social capital, eliminate third places (2), keep families apart, close Churches, encourage distrust of neighbours, and accustom us to accepting severe government limitations on everyone’s basic rights and freedoms, all without accomplishing the stated purpose of saving lives, for the people most at risk and who have been under lockdown much longer are dying anyway and to their number are being added the underreported but rising numbers of suicides, murders, addiction-related deaths and other deaths caused by the lockdowns themselves, somehow serves the “common good”?

 

Go thou and do likewise.

 

(1)   For Christian insights drawn from Plato’s distinction in the Timaeus between “The Good” and “The Necessary” see the Notebooks of Simone Weil.

(2)   Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day, 1989.

 

The Moral Cowardice and Idolatry Among Today's Christian Leaders

Almost a century ago, poet and critic T. S. Eliot famously remarked “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.” This was in a Cambridge University lecture given in 1939, on the eve of the war that was precipitated by the short-lived alliance between these rival alternatives to God, the text of which would be included in the book The Idea of a Christian Society. Seventeen years earlier a young Eliot had decried the cultural and spiritual bankruptcy of post-First World War Western Civilization in the poem “The Waste Land.” Five years later he had found the roots he had been looking for – note that he would later write the forward to Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots – when he converted to orthodox Christianity, joined the Church of England, and swore his oath of loyalty to the Crown becoming a British citizen. He had found the true path and in the words quoted above warned those who were pursuing materialistic ends and placing their hope in democracy of where their path would ultimately lead them.

It is just under eighty years since Eliot spoke those words and Western Civilization has not turned back to God in the interim. Indeed, it has become far more godless, materialistic and secular than anyone could have imagined back then, and in the process, despite Stephen Pinker’s recent arguments to the contrary, become far more crude, vulgar, and immoral. Sad to say, much of the blame for the state of our civilization belongs to the leaders of the church. If you read the historical and prophetic books of the Old Testament you will be struck by the number of times a particular cycle recurs – the leaders of God’s people go whoring after heathen idols, the people follow them into sin, and judgement and a curse comes upon them and their land as a result.

That the leaders of the church in our day and age are just as prone to lead their flocks into worshipping the false gods of the day as the leaders of the ancient Israelites were is evident in the moral blindness or cowardice that so many have displayed in their response to the recent events in Charlottesville even while tooting their own horns about their great courage in daring to resist the evil of white racism. It requires no courage whatsoever to speak out and condemn white racism in this era. All you have to do is go along with the mob. The true test of your moral courage is whether or not you dare to condemn the anti-white racism that hides behind the mask of anti-racism. Those who do so risk incurring the wrath of both the mob and the corporate globalists. The vast majority of church leaders, even among the supposedly orthodox, have failed this test badly. This is because they have bowed the knee to the false deity that presides over today’s pantheon of idols – the idol of diversity.

The events in Charlottesville as reported by the mainstream media seem to have produced a wide-spread breakdown in moral reasoning. Which is interesting because the disparity between the facts and the interpretation placed on those facts by the media is particularly glaring when it comes to this incident. We are told that because the “Unite the Right” rally was unambiguously pro-white and because neo-Nazi and KKK-types were unquestionably among the participants that all of those participating in the protest were white supremacists, and that therefore because of who they were, and because one of the counter protestors, Heather Heyer, was killed, it is the organizers and participants of the rally who must be singled out for blame and moral condemnation over the violence that occurred that day. This is morally bankrupt nonsense. It confuses consequences with culpability – just because the former were unevenly distributed between the protestors and counter protestors with the most severe consequence of death falling to one of the latter it does not follow in the slightest that in the allotment of blame the largest share must go to the former. Worse, it requires the premise that if a group’s views are regarded as repugnant or even if those views actually are repugnant, it is to be blamed for the violence that ensues when another group attacks them.

The facts of the case are these: the organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally went through all the legal hoops to get a permit to hold a legal demonstration; the antifa showed up armed and masked with the intention of shutting the demonstration down with violence; the Charlottesville authorities declared a state of emergency and ordered the police to shut down the legal demonstration; the police forced the demonstrators to evacuate the park, leaving them only one way out – through the antifa; and the antifa then attacked the demonstrators with baseball bats, clubs, homemade flamethrowers, and projectiles of various sorts. The man, James Alex Fields, who drove into the crowd injuring several and killing Heather Heyer may very well have been acting out of fear for his life rather than homicidal malice – that remains to be determined. What is clear is that the bulk of the blame for this event going violent is to be divided between the Charlottesville authorities and the antifa.

Although the media have been consistently portraying the antifa as “counter protestors” it would be more accurate to call them terrorists. They do not show up to picket, hand out literature, and forcibly but peacefully express their disagreement with those they consider to be racists. They show up masked and armed, to intimidate, harass, and attack, to block access and shut down events. Although “antifa” is short for anti-fascist, in their tactics they bear a far closer resemblance to the thugs who followed Hitler and Mussolini than do their opponents, which can be explained by the fact that they are generally fronts for Marxist-Leninist groups, Marxist-Leninism or Communism being the parent ideology of which Fascism and Nazism were mutant offspring. They claim they are fighting racism but you will never find them trying to shut down a lecture by a Marxist academic who calls for the abolition of whiteness or a concert by a rapper who explicitly calls for violence against whites in his lyrics. They show no sign of comprehending either that a racist might not be white or that a white might not be a racist but instead treat racist and white as if they are synonymous. This is itself, of course, a form of racism.

The voice of moral clarity in the aftermath of Charlottesville has been that of American President Donald J. Trump of all people. He unequivocally condemned white supremacism and neo-Nazism, but rightly distinguished between white supremacists and neo-Nazis on the one hand and those who were neither but participated in the rally to protest the erasure of history and the changing of culture. He did not shirk from calling out the antifa and allotting them the share of the blame that they so rightly deserve. This refreshing moral clarity was sadly lacking among many Christian leaders.

Take Timothy J. Keller, for example. Keller is the founding pastor of the Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. An apologist and the author of numerous books, Keller has something of a celebrity status among evangelical Protestants. In an article for The Gospel Coalition that came out the same day that President Trump gave his press conference, Keller began by asking the question:

How should Christians, and especially those with an Anglo-white background, respond to last weekend’s alt-right gathering in Charlottesville and its tragic aftermath?

Note the words “especially those with an Anglo-white background”. Keller is guilty of the very racism that he condemns so vehemently in this article. Indeed, he is guilty of the worst form of racism possible – racism against your own people.

Later in the article, Keller commits gross eisegesis when he reads the modern political discussion of race into St. Paul’s address to the Epicureans and Stoics at the Areopagus in Acts 17. The Apostle was not addressing the Greek idea that other peoples were barbarian, when he said that God had made “of one blood” every nation on the earth, but rather was establishing that the God he was preaching and Whom he identified with their “unknown God” was not a tribal deity but the One True God Who created the universe and to Whom all people owe worship. Furthermore, I find it difficult to believe that Keller does not know this and that this was an honest hermeneutical error on his part rather than sheer mendacity in order to pander to the spirit of the times.

Keller makes reference to “the idolatry of blood and country.” Keller has written extensively about idolatry in his book Counterfeit Gods. There too he refers to the idols of blood and country or race and nation. Now, I have no objection to what Keller says about this form of idolatry. Obviously blood, country, race, and nation can be made into idols, as the history of the early part of the last century proves all too well. Let us return to the quotation from T. S. Eliot with which I began this essay. “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.” Hitler, was the very embodiment of the idolatry of blood, country, race and nation. Note, however, that Eliot saw another option for God-rejecters in Stalin.

What I don’t see anywhere in Keller’s article – or his book for that matter – is any condemnation of the idolatry of those who brought the violence to Charlottesville on August 12th – the antifa. Again, it is easy to rail against the idols of blood, country, race, and nation, for these are the idols of a century ago. These idols were popular in the early twentieth century, but when they devoured their worshippers in the bloodbath of the Second World War, twentieth century man rejected them. He did not, however, turn back to the true and living God, but erected yet another idol – the idol of diversity. It is this idol whom the Stalinistic antifa worship and barring a revival in which there is a mass turn back to the true God, she, by the time her cult has run its course, will have exacted more in the way of blood sacrifices from her worshippers than her predecessors ever did. It is this idol that the faithful and courageous man of God is called to speak out against in our day and age. This is precisely what Timothy Keller – and far too many other – Christian leaders refuse to do, preferring to bow their knee to the new idol, just as the “Positive Christianity” cult that Keller rightly condemns as heretical, prostituted itself to the idols of the Third Reich.

Orthodox Christian teaching is that God divided the nations at Babel but in the Kingdom of God outside of history (the Fall to the Second Coming) He will gather “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” before the throne of the Lamb. Within human history, the Kingdom of God is represented on earth by the church, the body of Christ indwelt by the Holy Spirit, that accepts into its membership through baptism, anyone from any nation who believes in Jesus Christ. There is nothing in orthodox Christianity that requires us to support efforts to undo Babel politically, whether they be by dissolving the nations of the world into a global order of world federalism or by maximizing diversity within countries through mass immigration and then attempting to administer race relations bureaucratically. Indeed, to do this is to commit the utmost folly, to do the very thing most likely to exacerbate racial tensions, hostility, and violence. It is what the idolatry of diversity looks like.

Those who today are returning to the idols of blood, race, and nation are doing so because they have had a glimpse of the apocalyptic disaster that lies ahead of us if we continue down the path of the idolatry of diversity. Their solution is no solution – we must turn back to the True and Living God, through Him Who is the “Way, the Truth, and the Life.” It is not likely that this will happen, however, if Christian leaders continue, like Timothy Keller, to whore around with the idol of diversity, and to refuse to name the evil of anti-white racism disguised as antiracism, while hypocritically pretending to a moral courage they do not possess by reserving their vehement denunciations only for those evils the mob is howling after.

The Collective Madness of the Age

As a Canadian I am frequently amused at the way our neighbours across the 49th Parallel often accuse us of having an inferiority complex towards them and their country. What’s there to feel inferior about? We have a parliamentary monarchy, a form of government that has class if you ignore the parliamentary part, whereas all they have is a lousy republic. A century and a half ago they went to war with themselves to drive into subjugation a regional culture that had far more class than the rest of their country and are currently capitalizing on the suffering of those whose loved ones fell victim to a psychopathic killer in Charleston, S. C., to eliminate the last vestiges of that regional culture by ending the public display of symbols of its heritage such as its familiar battle flag.

Having said that, there is nothing classy in being smug and we have little cause to be smug towards the Americans with regards to their Supreme Court’s predictable ruling in the Obergefell case. They, at least, can blame a panel of lunatic judges for something which we did to ourselves a decade earlier by electing the Liberal Party to write the Queen’s laws for us in Parliament.

What SCUSA’s Obergefell ruling has done in the United States and which the Liberal Party’s Civil Marriage Act did in Canada in 2005 was to make same-sex “marriage” legal countrywide. Or, to translate that into the language of the sane person, it declared that the country must now pretend that something that is false is true. It is like the scene in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew in which Petruchio, having broken Katharina’s spirit, makes her affirm that the sun is the moon. Marriage is what it is, the union of man and woman through solemn vows, and it cannot be changed into something else by judicial ruling or parliamentary decree any more than the government can, by declaring it to be so, make two plus two equal to five.

“Love wins” is the meme that is spreading through the tweets and Facebook pages of celebrities, activists, and others who see the Obergefell decision as cause for rejoicing, but it would be more accurate to say that hatred has won. Hatred of the constraints and limitations imposed upon our wishes and wills by our human nature and the nature of the world we live in, hatred of truth and order, and hatred of the God Who is the Author of truth and order and the Creator of our nature. Hatred, certainly, of the faith that for two thousand years has offered love, grace, mercy, forgiveness, redemption, reconciliation, hope and renewal to sinful human beings, heterosexual and homosexual alike, because of that faith’s refusal to compromise the truth. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that as governments in Europe, Canada, the UK, and the various American states to do so prior to the ruling, have declared the creation of same-sex marriage by legislative fiat it has not resulted in lesbians and gays swarming the altars and courthouses of these nations to get hitched so much as in activists, strategically seeking out Christian florists, bakeries, printers, caterers, and anyone whose business is remotely connected to weddings and marriage, suing them, and winning large rulings if they stood true to the principles of their faith. A direct attack on churches is next in the revolutionary agenda.

Another way of putting it would be to say that truth has lost and that we have collectively descended into a world of insanity. Today we are expected to believe on the one hand that same-sex attraction is innate and unchangeable, as the LGBTTQ* movement insists, but on the other, that heterosexuality is socially constructed and imposed upon women by an oppressive and evil male power structure called the patriarchy, as the feminist movement teaches in its Women’s Studies programs in universities. (1) We are expected to simultaneously accept that sexual orientation, for homosexuals at least, is fixed in stone, but that sex itself, whether we are male or female, is not, that our “gender” is something we determine for ourselves regardless of our biology and that our sex can be changed to conform to our gender. When the Church reaches out to gays and lesbians, like anyone else for whom Christ died, offering them peace and reconciliation with God through the blood of His cross, telling them that in Him they can be made whole and set free from their passions, she, we are told, is being harmful and hateful, but we are supposed to accept as sincere and wholesome, the motivation of feminist and LGBTTQ* groups that put pressure on governments to introduce sexual education into schools at younger and younger ages. If we are unable to buy into all of this hogwash we are declared to be unloving, hate-filled, bigots. To a sane person, surely the most harmful, unkind, and hateful attitude possible towards gays and lesbians is that of the LGBTTQ* movement itself, which tells them to find their identity, purpose, and self-validation in the peculiarities of their libido. We are living in an age of madness, however, and the judgement of bigotry is pronounced on us even regardless of our sexual orientation. The judgement is even harsher on gays who go against the narrative, as Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana discovered to their discomfort earlier this year.

Those for whom SCUSA’s decision is a victory are currently engaged in a round of orgiastic, self-congratulatory, backslapping in which they are congratulating each other for their “courage”. It does not take courage, however, to ride the tide of history. Those who wish to see the virtue of courage on display would do better to look at those who have dared to oppose this juggernaut, especially those who will continue to do so now.

Fifty years ago, Canadian philosopher and conservative George Grant (2) observed that the tide of history was moving towards a “universal and homogeneous state” that would be achieved by a “modern science” that “leads to the conquest of nature…not only non-human nature, but human nature itself”. The “heart of the age of progress”, i.e., the age that is being swept by that tide, is “the definition of man as freedom”, which, Grant noted, meant emancipating the human passions from their traditional constraints and reshaping our nature in pursuit of perfection and defiance of the eternal order. While the masses embrace the spirit of these changes and see, in accordance with the doctrine of progress, the end to which they are moving as being inevitably good, Grant, in the tradition of Plato and Simone Weil, cautioned against the confusion of goodness on the one hand and necessity or inevitability on the other.

In today’s insistence that marriage be changed from the union of man with woman and that the biological reality of sex be altered through medicine to reflect self-determined gender, surely we see the conquest of “human nature itself” and “the definition of man as freedom” taken to the extreme of madness. When we are condemned by the masses as hateful, foolish, and out of step with the times for not going along with this flow it is important that we remember that just because something is unavoidable and has the force of the movement of history on its side, that does not make it right or good.

(1) See Robert Stacy McCain’s just published Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature, (Createspace: 2015) especially the chapter entitled “Essential Feminist Quotes” (pp. 48-54) for details.
(2) George P. Grant, Lament For a Nation, (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1965, 1978, 1989)

The Roots of the Old Dominion

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized needs of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. – Simone Weil

Today we celebrate the 147th birthday of our country. It is the anniversary of the day, in 1867, when the British North America Act came into effect, which effect was to form a federation out of the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, with its own federal Parliament modelled after the one in Westminster, under the Sovereign monarch we share with the United Kingdom and other countries in what was then the British Empire but is now the British Commonwealth of Nations. Eventually, all the Crown possessions in North America would be brought into Confederation, whether as provinces like Manitoba or territories like the Northwest Territories, with the last province to enter being Newfoundland and Labrador in 1949. There are ten provinces in total. The ones that I have not yet mentioned are, in order of their entry into Confederation: British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan and Alberta. There were two territories when I was growing up, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, but there are now three, Nunavut having become a separate territory from the Northwest Territories – which despite the plural title are considered a single territory – in 1999.

While the day our country came into being as the Dominion of Canada – the name the Fathers of Confederation chose for our country, taking “dominion” from Psalm 72:8 as a synonym for “kingdom” and not as a synonym for “colony” as the liberals, progressives, and socialists later falsely claimed – was just under a century and a half ago, Canada has roots that extend back much further. The British North America Act, enacted on this date in 1867, was signed by Queen Victoria on March 29th of that year, the culmination of a process of negotiation that had taken almost three years, beginning with the Charlottetown Conference of September 1864 and carried on through Conferences in Quebec and London, with plenty of discussion and negotiation taking place outside of the official conferences as well. Even this period of negotiation was merely the latest and ultimately successful stage, in the idea of creating a federation of the British colonies in North America, an idea that had been proposed several times earlier in the nineteenth century. Its revival in the 1860s and perhaps its success was in large part due to fear of the United States.

This fear was well-founded. The United States had invaded Canada in the war she fought with Great Britain from 1812 to 1815. In this war, Canadians had fought to repel the American invaders from their homes and communities and were ultimately, with the help of the British military of course, successful. Due to this success, the war which ended more-or-less in the preservation of the status quo ante and thus a stalemate as far as Britain and the United States were concerned, is, ironically yet accurately, traditionally regarded by Canadians as our victory over the United States, even though, technically, our country was not yet officially born. This victory became a key element of our country’s founding mythology – not mythology in the sense of “stories that are untrue” but in the sense of “stories that help a people to understand and identify themselves”. Here, therefore, is a root of the tree of the Canadian Dominion that extends back to the beginning of the nineteenth century.

It is not the deepest root, nor is it the only reason that the fear of an American invasion on the part of the Fathers of Confederation was well-founded. American politicians had been talking about their vision of “Manifest Destiny”, i.e. the destiny of the United States to rule all of North America, for most of the nineteenth century. Then the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of the United States split the American republic into two warring factions. While Britain was officially neutral, Lincoln’s actions generated tension between London and Washington, and there was a great deal of sympathy in Britain and in both the English and French speaking parts of British North America, not for the slavery which the Northeastern Yankees used to justify their cause – slavery had already been abolished in the British Empire and Canada had been one of the destinations of the “Underground Railroad” prior to the war – but for the Southern states who were, after all, merely giving to Washington a taste of the medicine that Washington had dished out to London less than a century prior. Out of this sympathy we gave sanctuary to Confederate officers just as we had given sanctuary to the escaped slaves before the war. Late in the war, Confederate agents were sent by Jefferson Davis to Canada to conduct covert operations against the North. Although these were mostly unsuccessful, it was deemed prudent by the leaders of the colonies of British North America, to form a federal union that would be able better to resist American retaliation.

In the history of the relations between pre-Confederation British North America and the American Republic we can see another root of the Canadian Dominion extending back to the Rebellion of the Thirteen Colonies. In that eighteenth century conflict, the leaders of the Thirteen Colonies had, citing various grievances against the British Imperial government, declared their independence from the British Empire. Not all British colonies joined in this rebellion, nor did everyone in the rebelling colonies support the rebellion. At the time the term Canada referred to a French colony that had been conquered by the British in the Seven Years War, and ceded to the British Crown by the French at the end of that war. Britain had promised the people of that colony, in what is now Ontario and Quebec, that they could keep their Roman Catholic religion, French language, and way of life, in return for loyalty to the British Crown. Canada did not join in the American rebellion and in the conflict, many of the American colonists fought on the side of the British Empire against the rebelling colonies. These Loyalists faced persecution, including loss of home and property, both during the war and after the rebels gained their independence and so many of these fled north to the loyal British possessions of Canada (Ontario/Quebec) and Nova Scotia (which at the time included what is now New Brunswick).

The division between the rebelling colonists who became the Americans and the Loyalists who became the first English Canadians was in part a reflection of political, philosophical, and even religious differences with roots in the English Civil War of the seventeenth century and ultimately in the English Reformation of the sixteenth century. The American colonies, especially those of the Northeast, had been strongly influenced by Puritanism, a form of English Calvinism that believed that the English Reformation had not gone far enough and that wanted to purify English Christianity of every vestige of the Catholic tradition that could not be shown to be directly authorized by the Scriptures, and which tended to be republican and anti-royalist politically. One of the real reasons for the American secession was this Puritan influence, for the ideological descendants of the men who put King Charles I to death, accusing him falsely of trying to bring England back under the yoke of the pope because he rejected the ecclesiastical reforms they demanded and their demand that he persecute the co-religionists of his French bride, were naturally not pleased that King George III guaranteed the people of Quebec their French language and Roman Catholic religion.

The leaders of the rebel colonies justified their secession from the British Empire by accusing Parliament and the king of tyrannical behaviour and by appealing to the doctrines of liberalism, a modern political dogma that asserted the primacy of the individual and his rights, the contractual nature of society, and government legitimacy based upon democratic election. The Loyalists preferred the government of king and Parliament that they had, over any experimental government to be put together by the kind of men who would use baseless and false accusations of tyranny in order to stir up rebellion and revolution. The American revolutionaries had an inclination towards experiment, innovation, and breaking with tradition and the past to pursue progress in the future. This would very much reflect itself in their national character as it later developed. The Loyalists, as the name by which history knows them would suggest, were more inclined towards sticking to the tried and true, and the older classical virtues such as loyalty. This was later reflected in the national character of Canada.

There are strengths and weaknesses to both of these approaches but one of the strengths of the philosophy that helped shape our national character north of the 49th is that it has allowed our young country to have very deep and extensive roots. The dynamic, progressive, innovative philosophy that has played so important a role in the United States is a philosophy that severs rather than nourishes roots. Thus, while our American friends and neighbours might be able to point to the events that established the Roman Republic in the sixth century BC as a classical antecedent of their own founding, this is more a case of what Nietzsche called “eternal recurrence” than of any organic, rooted, connection. By not severing our ties with Britain, but practicing the virtue of loyalty, and developing into a nation in our own right within the existing tradition, we were able to build a country with roots as long and deep as those of Britain herself.

French Canada, too, due to the timing and circumstances by which it was removed from the French Crown and joined to the British, was able through most of its history to maintain an organic, rooted, connection to the ancient French tradition from which, ironically, France attempted to sever herself in the even more extreme revolution she underwent less than a decade after the Americans won their independence. Thus, until very recently Quebec was in some ways the most conservative of the Canadian provinces and while this conservatism was focuses more upon the French and Roman Catholic language, religion, and culture that tend to set the province apart from the rest of the country, back in 1937, decades before Quebec rejected many of her own roots in the “Quiet Revolution”, when Maurice Duplessis was premier in the French province, Stephen Leacock was able to write that it used to be said that “the last shot fired in defence of British institutions in America would be fired by a French-Canadian.” (1)

There are those today, who would dismiss all of this as ancient history, and question what any of this has to do with the land of beer and hockey, the Canada goose and chocolate mousse, maple syrup and poutine, in which we live our everyday lives today. It is a good question, especially since the Liberal Party, with the full support of the New Democratic Party, with at most an extremely mild and moderate resistance from the Conservatives – more often complete capitulation and accommodation – has striven hard since 1963 to dig up these roots, haul them out to the old scrub pile, and burn them, while attempting to replace the healthy tree that grew from them with a sickly substitute. Nevertheless, I hope and believe that there is enough life left in the old tree, and that enough of the old roots remain, that she may one day be restored to full health.

Happy Dominion Day!
God Save the Queen!

(1) This was in My Discovery of the West. He went on to say: “It looks now as if there would be one more shot after his. It will be from the gun of an American whose name will be something like John Bull McGregor. His people will have been among the McGregors of Mississippi and the Bulls of the New York police: so he won't miss what he shoots at.” He was referring to American immigrants to Western provinces.

Making “Saints”

The word saint means “holy one”. It can refer, as it frequently does in the Holy Scriptures, to all of God’s people. The word “holy” denotes the state of being dedicated and set aside for the use of God. In the Old Testament, God called Israel out from among the nations and consecrated her to Himself, and the covenant He made with her contained both moral commandments, which forbade behaviour that was wrong and demanded behaviour that was right, and ceremonial commandments, the purpose of which was to separate her as a people God had set apart as His own. Old Testament saints, therefore, were Israelites, keeping in mind, of course, St. Paul’s remarks that “he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.” (Rom. 2:28-29). New Testament saints are all those, Jew or Gentile, who have been baptized into the church, the body of Christ, in which the wall of regulations separating Jew from Gentile has been torn down. St. Paul’s distinction between outward and inward circumcision, of course, can be applied to baptism as well, and the true New Testament saint is the person who believe in Jesus internally, in the heart. It is in this New Testament sense of the term that the Apostle’s Creed speaks of the “communion of the saints”, i.e., the mystic union and fellowship of all believers, here and in Heaven.

There are other ways in which people can be specially dedicated and set apart for and by God than by merely belonging to His people or His church. This is why from the earliest days the church has used the word saint to honour those that she has regarded as being particularly holy. In early centuries, local churches would honour their martyrs, those who had been persecuted and killed for their faith, as saints. Later, the catholic or universal church decided that the recognition and honouring of saints should be standardized throughout Christendom. This required that a canon, or list, of recognized saints be drawn up, which in turn required that the church define what it meant to be a saint in this sense of the term and that criteria be stated by which saints can be identified.

A consequence of this, as you may imagine, was that the concept of the saint within Christendom developed somewhat differently among the churchgoing populace than it did among the theologians and ecclesiastical authorities. You might call the one the popular concept of the saint, and the other the official concept of the saint.

The writers of literature have drawn upon both concepts for inspiration. In Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess presents a fictionalized version of the history of the twentieth century as told from the perspective of Kenneth Toomey, a successful gay novelist who is reviewing his life in anticipation of writing his memoirs. He is doing so in part at the request of the Roman Catholic Church who have asked for his assistance in the canonization of the last pope, who had been a close friend of his and whose brother had married his sister. The Church approaches Toomey, because he had been the only witness of certain miracles that had been performed through the late pope and proper certification of miracles is part of the canonization process.

That miracles are performed through saints is common to both the official and popular understandings of the term, and in Fifth Business, the first of his Deptford trilogy, Robertson Davies introduces us to Dunstan Ramsay, a scholar who has made popular folklore regarding saints the object of his life’s studies. The novel is narrated by Ramsay, who, like Burgess’s Toomey, is telling the story of his own life, and in the telling Ramsay explains what lies at the bottom of his unusual line of expertise. He had experienced a miracle performed through a woman who had been driven out of her wits in an unfortunate incident in which he had been an unwilling participant as a small boy and over which he felt terrible guilt. He had become convinced that she was a saint, although few others were willing to share that conviction.

George Grant, the Canadian philosopher, reminds me a bit of the fictional Dunstan Ramsay in this respect. He was convinced that his favourite twentieth century thinker, Simone Weil, was a saint. His biographer, William Christian, quotes him as saying that Weil was “both a saint and a philosopher…She was a saint in the sense that she gave herself away to the divine charity.” (1) Like Mary Dempster, the character that Ramsay believed to be a living saint, Weil was an unusual candidate for sainthood, albeit for different reasons. Neither the fictional character nor the living philosopher-mystic would have met the church’s official requirements for canonization.

Had she been born a couple of thousand years earlier, Weil might have qualified as an Old Testament saint, for she was born of Hebrew stock to the wife of a Jewish doctor in 1909. This is an honour she would have rejected for herself, however, for she disliked the Old Testament and regarded Judaism as a barbaric religion. Needless to say, when she later embraced the Christian faith in her twenties, her theology was something less than orthodox. The great litmus test of Christian orthodoxy, the Nicene Creed, had been drawn up by the church against the early heretics who claimed, among other things, that the God of the Old Testament could not be the same God that Jesus Christ declared to be His Father. Weil expressed admiration for heretical groups like the early Gnostics and especially the later Cathari who rejected most or all of the Old Testament. This, and her persistent refusal to receive baptism despite the pleas of her friend and spiritual advisor Fr. Joseph-Marie Perrin, her letters to whom explaining this refusal were later published under the title Waiting For God, (2) would surely raise a few eyebrows among any ecclesiastical authorities asked to consider her for canonization.

Having said that, remember what I said earlier about how St. Paul’s distinction between inward and outward circumcision applies to baptism too. While under ordinary circumstances the persistent refusal to receive baptism would be a sign of unbelief, Weil’s reasons for so refusing were anything but ordinary. If she cannot be so easily written out of the “communion of the saints” in the creedal sense of the term, neither should her heterodoxy be regarded as disbarring her from the company of the particularly marked, holy ones to which Grant and several others believed she belonged. The ability to pass a theological exam is hardly the first thing that is looked for in considering a person for canonization. Indeed, Weil’s heterodox view of the Old Testament and admiration for the Cathari is itself an example, albeit a clearly misguided one, of the very characteristic that was perceived as being most saintly about her.

Weil was a lifelong sympathizer with the weak, the poor, the marginalized, the powerless, the voiceless and the downtrodden. This is a trait which can be very admirable but which can also be very easily taken to an ugly excess or diverted down unworthy channels. It is this trait that led Weil to condemn the religion of the Old Testament as condoning the abuse of power and to sympathize with the Cathari as the victims of power abuse. As a young teacher she was led by her desire to take up the cause of the downtrodden into political activism of various sorts, most of which were highly misguided at best. In this, she was hardly an atypical intellectual. What set her apart was her willingness to pay the price of her idealism personally. Her death from consumption in 1943, for example, seems to have been at least partly due to a refusal to eat enough to keep up her strength out of solidarity with those starving in Nazi-occupied France.

Indeed, Weil seemed driven by an insatiable desire to share in the sufferings of others. She herself tied this desire to her Christian faith. After her early radicalism she had come to a mystic version of Christian faith, grounded in her personal experiences with God, such as when she felt compelled to pray in a Catholic basilica in Assisi or when she felt “Christ himself came down and took possession of me” while reading a poem by seventeenth century metaphysical poet and Anglican divine George Herbert. In a fascinating comment in one of her letters to Fr. Perrin she remarked that “every time that I think about Christ’s crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy”.

A remark like this can really only be explained in one of two ways. Either she was out of her mind, or God Himself had marked her out for Himself and placed within her this holy, almost superhuman, desire to take up the cross.

If it is the latter, then what better word could there possibly be to describe such a person than the word saint?


(1) William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 228
(2) Most of the books attributed to Weil are compilations of her writings put together after her death. In the case of Waiting For God it is letters to a priest that are compiled into a book, in the case of Gravity and Grace it is excerpts from the notebooks she had written while staying at the farm of Gustave Thibon early in the war and which she had left in his possession. The notebooks have more recently been published in an unabridged format. Of her best known writings it is The Need For Roots which actually reads like it was composed as a monograph for publication. This is because it was originally written as a report for the French Resistance.

Man and Machine: Part Three

They Have Brains, and They Think Not; Hearts Have They, and They Feel Not

Their idols are silver and gold, even the work of men's hands.
They have mouths, and speak not: eyes have they, and see not.
They have ears, and hear not: noses have they, and smell not.
They have hands, and handle not; feet have they, and walk not: neither speak they through their throat.
They that make them are like unto them; and so are all such as put their trust in them. (Psalm 115: 4-8,from the Great Bible Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer)

Man began to measure time, by noting the position of the sun in the sky. He improved his time-telling technique with the invention of tools such as sundials and hourglasses. In the Middle Ages he invented a device that would not just assist him in measuring time, but would actually keep track of time for him through its own internal workings. It would, as long as it was maintained properly, operate on its own. This device is the clock. As man’s technology advanced in the Modern Age, he developed more machines that could be turned on and would then proceed to do what they were designed to do with little-to-no further input from man. Their function is built into them and, apart from a breakdown of some sort, will be fulfilled each time they run.

These machines accomplish their function without thinking about it. Rational thought is still a property of living human beings, and not of machines. Future situations where this is no longer the case is one of the staples of the dystopic side of the science fiction genre. Usually, the scenario involves the machine gaining sentience and turning against its maker. Since science fiction is a pop culture expression of the modern spirit, the spirit of the age in which man turns his back on his Creator and attempts through his conquest of nature to build a new world in accordance with the values he has chosen, it is fitting that it would express such fears that man’s creation would in turn do the same, much as the Titan king Saturn in ancient mythology feared that his son would rise up to depose him, the way he had deposed his father Uranus. Perhaps the first example of the expression of this fear is Mary Shelley’s early nineteenth century science-horror novel Frankenstein, although it is not a machine, but life in a monstrous creature, that Dr. Victor Frankenstein creates. The idea of robots with artificial intelligence, rebelling against mankind was such a popular theme in early robot fiction, that Isaac Asimov deliberately set out to do the opposite, to depict robots incapable of turning against a mankind and the popular fear of the robotic as irrational. Probably the best known example of the sci-fi meme of machines that turn against man is to be found in director James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator and its various sequels and spinoffs. This film depicted an assassin cyborg, sent back in time from a future where a military computer system Skynet had gained consciousness and declared war on humanity.

A scenario in which machines gain consciousness and turn against their creators is not the only way in which a future different from the present status quo of thinking human beings and unthinking machines can be depicted. The other alternative is to present a future in which mankind has lost the capacity for rational thought. To a limited extent, this scenario is used in stories which depict a general populace that is oppressed by being prevented from perceiving the world as it is, whether through the brainwashing of a police state as in George Orwell’s 1984, or living out their lives in a simulated reality generated by now dominant machines, as in the Wachowski Brothers’ popular The Matrix trilogy. This scenario is more fully utilized by Pixar Studio’s 2008 computer animated film WALL-E, in which, the earth having become a giant garbage dump, mankind has gone on an interstellar cruise, leaving robots such as the title character to clean up his mess. The cruise spaceships take care of all their passengers needs and schedule their daily routine so that they live out their lives in a kind of pleasure-induced trance.

Fanciful, as the scenarios depicted in these works of fiction are, the ideas contained in their general themes, the idea of machinery taking over the world and the idea of man himself becoming more like an unthinking, unfeeling machine, are worth reflecting upon. Do these represent valid concerns about the direction in which modern technology is taking us?

The question is a legitimate one. Originally tools were invented by man to assist him in doing his work, to lighten his load. In the Modern Age man began to develop machines that would not so much assist him as do his work for him. Initially, the work machines were invented to take over from men was mostly physical labour. As far back as the Renaissance, however, Blaise Pascal had invented a functioning calculator that could perform simple arithmetic. In the twentieth century, this branch of technology, that of machines that do mathematics, solve problems, and otherwise take over tasks for which man used his brain instead of his hands, really took off. Computers began as large machines, used for military purposes and by scientists for calculation in their research, but within decades of their invention smaller, personal models for use in the home were invented, and by the end of the century portable “laptop” models were available. As the size of computers shrank, the number of functions they could perform increased, and in the last few decades computer technology has been incorporated into all other kinds of technology and into every aspect of our lives. Telephone communication is now mostly done through small, mobile, telephones with built-in computer functions allowing access to the internet and all sorts of other functions. Automobiles now have built-in computers that remind you of things you may have forgotten, that inform you when your car needs maintenance, that help mechanics diagnose problems, and which in some cases help you plan your route and even park your car for you. Everything from agriculture to medicine is computerized these days.

The incorporation of the computer into so many different aspects of our lives has inevitably and radically altered the way we live them and the societies in which we live them. While these changes have enriched our lives in many ways, there are also many ways in which they are cause for concern. The more we build machines to do our work for us, the more we become dependent upon those machines. The more dependent upon machines we are, the more serious is the difficulty we will find ourselves in if those machines break down or if for some other reason they are not available to us and we must again do the work for ourselves. This is a danger that gets progressively worse because the more collectively dependent upon machines we become, the less likely we are to pass on to future generations the skills and know how necessary to do the tasks that machines do for us. When we start to rely upon machines to do tasks that are part of rational thought, like making calculations, solving logical problems, or even making decisions, we run the risk of allowing our very thought processes to atrophy. If you doubt that is the case, then observe what happens at the till of a coffee shop or grocery store when the computer system crashes and the person behind the till is required to calculate your change manually.

If through the development of robotic and computer technology which performs an ever increasing number of man’s mental tasks for him man is creating machinery after his own image, the surrender of these tasks to the machine and allowing of our own mental powers to atrophy would seem to be making man ever more like a machine. This is not the only way in which this is true. As we develop our technology through modern science, we increasingly organize our societies according to the principles of technology, and human existence becomes more and more mechanical.

As Jacques Ellul put it about sixty years ago “No social, human, or spiritual fact is so important as the fact of technique in the modern world.” (1) While Ellul meant something more than just the mechanical by “technique” – he meant every application of reason towards the goal of efficiency – the mechanical is certainly included and in explaining why technique is more than machine, he wrote “the machine is the most obvious, massive, and impressive example of technique, and historically the first…Technique certainly began with the machine. It is quite true that all the rest developed out of mechanics; it is quite true also that without the machine the world of technique would not exist.” (2) As a principle of social organization, the technical is radically different from anything that had preceded it. It meant that all of society would now be directed, not towards a vision of the Good, such as that represented in the culture of the countryside and organic community or that represented in the laws and civilization of the city, but towards maximum efficiency to be achieved by knowledge and reason harnessed in the service of the will to dominate.

If technique became the primary principle of social organization in a kind of technical revolution and if technique began with the machine which remains the most impressive example of technique, it follows that a society completely touched by and organized by technique could to some degree or another be described as mechanical. Owen Barfield, in a book we will shortly take a closer look at, said of the machine “The whole point of a machine is, that, for as long as it goes on moving, it ‘goes on by itself’ without mans’ participation.” (3) While obviously a human society in which man does not participate is a contradiction in terms, when Barfield says that a machine moves without man’s participation he is speaking of man as someone external to the machine. The men in a society that has become mechanical are not analogous to the man who owns a clock but to the gears and cogs within it. In saying that a society has become mechanical we are saying that the society has been organized so that to a certain degree the motion within it men within it, including that of the men who live within it, has become automatic, determined by routines and patterns established by planners with technical efficiency as their end. That human activity ought to be in harmony with the natural rhythms of life, which are instead interrupted and trampled upon by technical efficiency is a theme that runs throughout the writings of poet, novelist, essayist and farmer Wendell Berry. Surely the best word to describe activity that is out of sync with life and driven by ends to which such harmony is irrelevant, is mechanical.

That the more man becomes dependent upon the machine the more like the machine he becomes himself and that the more dependent upon technology human society becomes the more mechanical it becomes itself is something that was predictable long before the modern experiment. The basis of the prediction is right there in the eighth verse of the one hundred and fifteenth Psalm quoted in the epigram to this essay. “They that make them [idols] are like unto them; and so are all such as put their trust in them.” Modern man has made idols out of his machines and technology, and having put his trust in these idols, has come to resemble them.

The idols of which the Psalmist wrote, were images made of stone or metal that represented the various deities the pagan nations worshipped. The making and worship of idols was a practice forbidden to the Israelites in the second of the Ten Commandments. The point of the psalmist’s mockery of pagan idolatry is that man-made idols, rather than being the hosts of powerful deities, are just lifeless images. The craftsmen who built them gave them the appearance of having mouths, eyes, ears, noses, hands and feet, but these were merely appearances. The idols were dead stone, dead metal, and by making and putting their faith in them, men became like them, killing their spirits by focusing on these idols the attention and worship due to the true and living God, thus cutting themselves off from the Source of life.

The idols men build today are in one sense more impressive than statues of Chemosh, Ba’al, Moloch, Dagon and Astarte. They are designed to actually do things, from moving goods and people to calculating complex equations. It is not just hands and mouths, modern man has given his idols, but brains and hearts as well, in the computers that direct their functions, and the sources from which the power that keeps the machines in motion circulates. Yet despite this greater resemblance to living beings, it is still just an artificial imitation. To paraphrase the psalmist, they have brains and they think not, hearts have they, and they feel not. Unlike Dr. Frankenstein, modern man has been unable to give life to his creation and in transferring his faith from God to the machines his science has enabled him to build and the techniques his reason has enabled him to devise, he has again broken his connection with the Source of his life, and come to resemble his moving but lifeless creation.

There is another aspect to the idolatry in modern science and technology that is worth contemplation. Earlier I had quoted Owen Barfield’s remark that the point of a machine is that it moves by itself without man’s participation. This remark was made in the context of a paragraph in which Barfield was arguing that the machine is the model by which the modern mind conceives the universe. In the next paragraph he explained that this is not how science itself conceives of nature, but rather the conception that science has created in the minds of ordinary people. This is part of a larger argument that modern man, by confusing his conception of the world with the world as it is in itself, is committing a form of idolatry.

This argument is part of a book entitled Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, which out of all of Barfield’s books is the one most likely to be remembered today. (4) The book begins with a discussion of the Kantian difference between things as they appear and things as they are in themselves. The difference, of course, is that the way things appear always involves the interpretations of our senses and minds. What is called “post-modern” thought has taken this difference and run with it in a most unhealthy direction, but the argument Barfield made is very different. Noting that the appearances involve a collective interpretation – whether an individual perceives things correctly or wrongly is generally judged by holding his interpretation up to the standard of the collective perception – Barfield argued against the positivist belief that ancient man and modern man live in the same world but that modern man’s perception, understanding, and explanation of that world is better, more in line with the world as it actually is, than the ancients. Instead, he argued, it would be more accurate to say that ancient and modern man do not live in the same world, because the world they live in is the ever changing world of appearances. Man’s role in generating this world of appearances, he called participation, and the way man participates in the world of appearances and even his recognition of his own participation, changes with his thoughts through time. In earlier eras man recognized that the world they saw, was something in which they participated themselves, as did the unseen that lay beyond the appearances. In the modern, scientific era, recognition of man’s participation has been pushed back to a second and even third degree of awareness, whereas recognition of the reality of anything beyond the appearances other than that which appears in scientific hypotheses is mostly absent.

The difference between the ancient and the modern perception of the world is not, Barfield therefore argued, that primitive man sought the same kind of understanding that modern science seeks but through a less developed mythology that “peopled the world” with spirits. Rather the modern perception has come about through a change in thought about the nature and purpose of science.

Plato, Barfield reminded us, recognized three levels of knowledge – the first and lowest being sensory observation, the third and highest being intellectual perception of the divine ideas, with geometry or mathematics as the intermediate level. What we call science today corresponds with the second level. The purpose of scientific hypotheses was to “save the appearances” (5), i.e., to provide a working explanation of what is observed in the first level of knowledge. This working explanation was understood to be man’s own creation and not to be confused with the truth, or the world as it is.

This understanding has largely been lost. The knowledge obtainable by science, Barfield explains by analogy, is “dashboard knowledge” rather than “engine knowledge”, i.e., a knowledge of how to drive a car rather than knowledge of its internal workings. (6) Sir Francis Bacon understood this when he declared knowledge to be power. There may still be an understanding of this among scientists themselves. Plato and Aristotle, however, believed that a knowledge of truth, of the permanent, unchanging, reality beyond the world of appearances was also accessible to man and with the evaporation of this belief, the idea that scientific hypotheses themselves can explain the reality beyond the appearances became the vogue among scientists and among the general public this became the idea that the explanations of scientific hypotheses are the reality beyond appearances. Since scientific hypotheses are themselves part of the world of appearances, the confusion of scientific hypotheses with the world as it is, the idea that nothing other than scientific explanations lie beyond the appearances, is a form of idolatry, Barfield reasoned, because it is an attribution of ultimate reality to what is merely an image.

On a somewhat similar note Simone Weil wrote:

Idolatry comes from the fact that, while thirsting for absolute good, we do not possess the power of supernatural attention and we have not the patience to allow it to develop. Lacking idols, it often happens that we have to labour every day, or nearly every day, in the void. We cannot do so without supernatural bread. Idolatry is thus a vital necessity in the cave. Even with the best of us it is inevitable that it should set narrow limits for mind and heart. (7)

The cave she refers to is Plato’s, i.e., Plato’s allegory illustrating the difference between the realm of appearances as opposed to the realm of true Forms. Those who see only things as they appear in the physical realm, Plato said, were like prisoners chained in a cave, who see nothing but shadows cast from a fire behind them upon a wall, and mistake that for reality. Surely nobody in the history of the world could be better described as “in the cave” than modern man who in his positivism has rejected the metaphysical and theological, and sees nothing beyond the appearances than the scientific explanations he devises for them, who mistakes what Barfield’s most famous student and friend, borrowing from the same Platonic allegory, called “the Shadowlands” for the ultimate reality.

If we consider this alongside what we have already discussed about modern man’s having made idols out of his machines it would appear that modern man is engaged in multiple, related, layers of idolatry. First he made idols out his images of the world and his scientific explanations of them, then, with the power over nature his science obtained for him, he created machines, to do his will and to do his work for him, upon which he became dependent and in which he placed his faith, turning his machines into idols too.

The more man’s technology advances, the more of an idol he makes it. The more of a technolator he becomes, the more mechanical his life and society becomes, and the more he begins to resemble his own soulless, lifeless, creations.


(1) Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 3. This is a translation by John Wilkinson of La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle, completed in 1950 and published in Paris by Librairie Armand Colin in 1954.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York and London: Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957, 1965), p. 51.

(4) Barfield himself is probably more likely to be remembered today for his association with C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams than for his own writings.

(5) This phrase, translating the Greek sozein ta phainomena (σῴζειν τὰ φαινόμενα), was borrowed by Barfield from the commentary by Simplicius of Cilicia on Aristotle. It is more frequently rendered “saving the phenomena”. Barfield preferred the translation appearances because the transliteration phenomena has taken on weaker connotations.

(6) Barfield, p. 55.

(7) Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952), p. 109, a translation by Arthur Wills of La Pesanteur et la grâce, first published in Paris by Librairie Plon in 1947. Weil died in 1943. This book is not something she wrote for publication, but was posthumously compiled from her notebooks by her friend Gustave Thibon.