The Heretical Pitfalls of Hyper-Protestantism

 

One of the interesting things about Hyper-Protestantism, which is distinguished from the Protestantism of the Magisterial Reformation by its opposition to and rejection of what is Catholic, that is to say, belonging to the faith, religion, tradition, and practice held since the earliest centuries by all the ancient Churches descended organically from the Church of Jerusalem, rather than merely the errors distinctive to the Roman Church that sparked the Reformation, is its obsession with Marian doctrine.   Hyper-Protestants often act as if they thought Rome's teaching with regards to Mary is her most serious error rather than the soteriological issues at the heart of the Reformation.   At some point in the future I plan, if the Lord so wills, to show how the English and Lutheran Reformers and even John Calvin held certain Marian doctrines that would be considered "popish"  by Hyper-Protestants.   For today, however, I wish to explore how this obsession with contradicting everything Rome - and in many cases all the ancient Churches - says about Mary often leads them into serious Christological heresy.

 

One person who commented on my earlier essay "Be a Protestant - BUT NOT A NUT!" insisted that the ancient Church was wrong in condemning Nestorianism as a heresy.   Nestorianism was condemned in the Third Ecumenical Council, the Council of Ephesus, which took place in 431 AD.   Nestorius was the Archbishop of Constantinople at the time.   While this See had not yet been made a Patriarchate - that would come twenty years later when St. Anatolius held the office - it had been given the second place of honour after Rome by canon of the Second Ecumenical Council held in Constantinople in 381 AD and was en route to becoming the fifth See of the ancient Pentarchy.   Nestorius, in other words, was in a very influential position, making error on his part all the more serious.

 

The controversy began with the use of the term Θεοτόκος (Theotokos) as an honourific title for the Virgin Mary.    Theotokos is Greek for "God-bearer".   In English it is generally rendered as "Mother of God".   The controversy over the title was older than Nestorius and Nestorius entered the controversy with the intention of being a peacemaker.   He proposed that the Virgin Mary be called the Christokos ("Christ-bearer").   Unfortunately for him, this was one of those cases where the compromise fell on ground belonging to one of the two sides (think of the Sunday School/Bible camp skit in which various people walk along a fence, with God and Satan each calling them to come over to their side, some choosing God, some Satan, until the last person, indecisively sits on the fence, only to be claimed by Satan, the owner of the fence).   By proposing the alternative title, Nestorius sided with those who rejected Theotokos, and as a consequence became forever associated with their ideas.   Those ideas included a serious Christological error.

 

Consider the following syllogism:

 

Premise A: Jesus is God.

Premise B: Mary is the Mother of Jesus.

Therefore:

Conclusion (C): Mary is the Mother of God.

 

This is a valid syllogism, meaning that if the premises are true the conclusion must be true as well, and so the conclusion cannot be rejected on the grounds of logical invalidity.    Those who reject the conclusion, therefore, must argue against the truth of either the Major or the Minor Premise.   They generally do not want to argue against the Major Premise by denying the deity of Jesus Christ.    Therefore they try to argue against the Minor Premise, that Mary is the Mother of Jesus.

 

Now, obviously they try to do so in a more subtle way than by an outright denial that would make them sound completely stupid.    What they try to do is to separate Jesus' human nature from His Person.   "Mary is the mother only of Jesus' human nature" they say.   

 

Do you see what they have done there?

 

In saying that Mary is the mother only of Jesus human nature they want you to think of His human nature in opposition to His divine nature.   That way they can come across as standing up for the truth against some unnamed heresy that says that Jesus got His divine nature from His human mother.   There is a reason, however, that this heresy is unnamed.  Nobody has ever taught it.   Nobody who calls Mary the Theotokos or the Mother of God thinks these terms mean that Mary was prior to God, that Jesus derives His deity from her, that she is the Mother of the Father or the Holy Ghost or any other such stupid things that opponents of these terms read into them.   Unnecessarily guarding against an error that nobody teaches is an easy way of falling into error yourself.   This is exactly what has happened here.

 

In actuality, when they say that Mary is the mother only of Jesus' human nature, this is not as opposed to her being the mother of His divine nature, but as opposed to her being the Mother of Jesus the Person.   Mother is a relational term.   It denotes how one person relates to another.   This is its primary use and meaning, and any implications it may have about the "nature" of either mother or child are entirely secondary.

 

By the reasoning the opponents of Theotokos use they should also be claiming that God the Father is not the Father of Jesus but only of His divine nature.   They do not usually say this, however, because the huge flaw in the argument is a bit more obvious when worded this way.

 

With other human beings a mother and father each contribute half of the genes their child inherits.   Each could, therefore, be said to contribute half of the child's nature, at least in its physical aspects - I don't wish to get into the ancient theological debate between Tertullian's traducianism and St. Jerome's creationism (of each individual's soul not of the world), now, maybe some other time.   We would never say, however, that someone's father is not that person's father but only the father of half of his genes, nor would we say such a thing, mutatis mutandis, about his mother.   A father is the father of his son as a whole person, not just the part of his son he contributed.   A mother is the mother of her daughter as a whole person, not just the part she contributed.

 

Now with Jesus we do not have a case of His Father contributing half of His genetic material and His Mother contributing the other half.   Jesus is One Person, with Two Natures, Fully God and Fully Man.   His divine nature comes entirely from His Father.   His human nature comes from His Mother.   This, however, does not mean that what we have just said about a father being the father of his child as a whole person, and a mother being the mother of her child as a whole person, rather than each being merely the father and mother of what they have contributed to their child does not apply with regards to Jesus.   Those who claim otherwise, seem to think it is sufficient to point to Jesus’ uniqueness as the Only Person born of a Virgin, or the Only Person with two natures, divine and human, and say see, Mary is mother only of His human nature not of Him as a Person, as if such a conclusion somehow inevitably followed from these observations. This is not, however, a conclusion that logically, inevitably, or naturally follows from Jesus’ being unique in these ways.

 

One objection that was raised that requires an answer is the following from someone posting under the name “Jason Anderson”.  He writes:

 

How can a mother of a pre-existent being be the mother of the personality that always existed? She can't.

 

Jesus was, of course, pre-existent.   Indeed, He is eternal.   He had no beginning.  There never was a moment before He existed.   The problem with drawing Mr. Anderson’s conclusion from this is that if his reasoning were sound it would also work against God being the Father of Jesus.   If Someone Who is pre-existent, Someone Who is eternal, Someone to Whom there is no “before”, cannot have a Mother, neither can He have a Father.    God the Father, however, is the Father of Jesus.   Furthermore, He is the Father of Jesus not merely by adoption, as the Adoptionist heresy would have, much less the Father of Jesus by creation, since Jesus is uncreated.   Jesus is the “Only-Begotten” Son of the Father, that is to say, the natural Son of the Father, the Son Who has the same nature as His Father which He gets from His Father.   Since both Father and Son are co-eternal, this does not mean the Father is temporally prior to the Son.   Theologically we refer to the way Jesus is begotten of the Father as “Eternal Generation”.   Unlike with a human father and a human son, the begetting or generation is not a moment in time to which there was a before when only the father and not the son existed, but is the eternal relationship between Father and Son.  

 

Now, before you raise the objection that Jesus’ relationship with Mary is not like this, that it had a beginning in time, that Jesus is eternal and Mary a created being, allow me to say that my argument is not that Jesus’ relationship to His Mother is identical to His relationship with His Father, obviously it is not, but rather my argument is that if a pre-existent, indeed, eternal Person can have a Father in this one way, eternal generation, then it is possible for the same pre-existent, eternal Person to have a Mother in another way.   That way, of course, is by Incarnation.   Jesus, the eternal Son of God, became Man by taking human nature and permanently uniting it to His Own eternal divine nature.   He did so, not by entering someone and taking possession of their body, but through the miraculous conception wrought by the Holy Ghost.    As St. Ambrose - and later John Francis Wade - put it, He “abhorred not the Virgin’s womb”.   He entered this world as Man, in other words, by being born into it.   By doing so, He Who was and is eternal, gained a Mother.   The Mother-Son relationship here is unique in that the Son existed before the Mother, not in that the Mother is Mother only of one of her Son’s natures rather than of her Son Himself.   The first uniqueness, the one that is actually true of Jesus’ relationship with the Virgin Mary, is a mystery.   The second is an absolute absurdity.

 

In addition to the thought-provoking question just addressed, Mr. Anderson provides us with a further illustration of the extremes to which the fanatical, anti-Catholicism of the Hyper-Protestant can take one.   He claims that Jesus “disowned” Mary three times.    Now, before looking at the passages he points to in order to back up this claim and seeing how he twists these Scriptures I am going to point out the gross Christological and Soteriological heresy he has committed by making this claim.   Jesus is both God and Man.   As Man, He is Perfect Man.   He is the Second Adam, Who succeeded where the first Adam failed.   He “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15).   His sinlessness is essential to His being our Saviour.   “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” (2 Cor. 5:21)  “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit” (1 Pet. 3:18).   If Jesus disowned Mary, however, He broke the Fifth Commandment.   That would mean that He was not without sin, and could not be our Saviour.   Mr. Anderson, by taking his anti-Catholic fanaticism so far as to try to throw dirt on Mary because Rome gives her too much honour ended up throwing dirt on Jesus and committing soul-damning heresy in the process.

 

His attempt to back up this claim from Scripture demonstrates his “exegesis” – it is really eisegesis, the reading into a text of ideas that are not there – to be as bad as his theology.   The three occasions are the Wedding at Cana in the second chapter of St. John’s Gospel, the account of Jesus’ identification of those who do the will of God as His mother and brethren at the end of the third chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel, and when He passed Mary into St. John’s care on the Cross in the nineteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel.    In his interpretation of the second of these, the one from St. Mark’s Gospel, Mr. Anderson attempts to guard against the obvious conclusion of his claim by providing a “justification” of Jesus’ “disowning” His Mother.    Even if, however, we accepted his interpretation of these events, it would not work as such a justification.   One of the examples of these supposed disownings took place prior to the events of Mark 3.   The Wedding at Cana took place before Jesus began His public ministry after the arrest of John the Baptist.   The events at the end of Mark 3 take place after the ordination and first commissioning of the Twelve Apostles earlier in that chapter which took place after His public ministry was underway.

 

There is no disowning in any of these passages.   Jesus’ words at the end of Mark 3 are for the sake of the multitude He was addressing.   He doesn’t say anything, positive or negative, about His biological relatives.   He asks who His mother and brethren are, then answers by pointing to His disciples, and saying that these are His mother and brethren, and that whoever does the will of God is His brother, sister, and mother.    This is an ecclesiological statement.   The Church is the family of God is what He is saying here.   Mr. Anderson bases his interpretation of this on the fact that the occasion of Jesus’ saying this was His Mother and brethren having come and sent for Him.   Earlier in the chapter, in verse 21, we read that “when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself” and while this might be referring to the people of Nazareth in general it is not unreasonable to see the visit of Mary and His brethren as the unfolding of this.   If that is the case, however, most reasonable people would look at this and in the parlance of our day call it a misguided intervention.   No such action was needed, but it was done out of love.   Mr. Anderson, however, calls it a “kidnapping plot” and a “gubpowder (sic) plot”, “treachery” and an “attempt to be Judas before the time of Judas”, basically a violent criminal conspiracy against Jesus, that would justify His disowning them.   This, however, comes from his own twisted mind.  It is not there in the text.

 

Nor is there a disowning of Mary in the second chapter of St. John’s Gospel.   The words that Mr. Anderson takes as a disowning, the English of which can unfortunately come across as rude even though it is not so in the original, are in the original Greek: Τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοί, γύναι.   A word for word literal rendition of this is “What to me and to you, woman?”    John Calvin took this to be a rebuke, but does not go so far as to read a disowning into it like Mr. Anderson does.  He said that it has the same force as the Latin Quid tibi mecum, which, while not entirely wrong, is not the whole story.   It is in fact a common idiom in Greek and Hebrew – it occurs several times in the Old Testament - as well as Latin.  Calvin likely had in mind the version of it that appears a couple of times in Plautus’ Menaechmi.   This is the play that inspired Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors.   It is about twins and mistaken identities.  The idiom, with the additional words est rei (Latin is not quite as economical with its words as Greek) has the meaning of “what business have I got with you?”   In the second scene of the third act it is spoken by the one Menaechmus to Peniculus who had addressed him thinking he was speaking to the Menaechmus he knew, the twin of the other.  This illustrates the sort of situation, or at least a farcical version of the sort of situation, in which this idiom is used as a rebuke.  As a rebuke, it is generally addressed to someone who you don’t know or don’t know very well who has been unduly intrusive.   This doesn’t fit the context of John 2 at all, making it really strange that John Calvin seemed to think this was the use in play here. The meaning that does fit here is “what does that have to do with me?” and in fact in this case it means “What does that have to do with us?”     Spoken in response to Mary’s having told Him that the wedding party had run out of wine, it means “why is that our concern?”  They were not, in other words, the hosts of the event, and were not responsible for the wine supply.  Note that neither this point, nor His hour not yet having come – a reference to His public ministry not having started yet – prevent Him from actually rectifying the situation, nor do they prevent Mary from understanding that He would do so as evinced by her instructions to the servants in the following verse.   Both her and His actions would be inexplicably odd if His words had the meaning Mr. Anderson reads into them.

 

As for the final reference from the nineteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, Mr. Anderson’s interpretation of the passage is literally the opposite of how it has been universally understood, that is to say, as the loving expression of a dying Son concerned that His Mother be provided for and asking a trusted and beloved friend to take care of her for Him.    The universal understanding is the correct one.    The language used is the language of adoption, not the language of disowning.     Here is Mr. Anderson: “and at the cross in John "man behold THY mother, woman behold THY son" (i.e. you can have her if you want her, I disown her for a 3rd time)”.    Here by contrast is John Calvin: “The Evangelist here mentions incidentally, that while Christ obeyed God the Father, he did not fail to perform the duty which he owed, as a son, towards his mother… Yet, if we attend to the time and place when these things happened, Christ's affection for his mother was worthy of admiration.”     Calvin’s is a far less tortured and much more natural reading of this text.   An even more natural reading is to emphasize the affection over the duty.  

 

It is one thing to say that we should not give to the Blessed Virgin Mary the honour and worship due only to her Son Jesus Christ Who, with the Father and Holy Ghost, is God.   All orthodox Christians should be able to agree on this.   Even the Romanists are not likely to disagree with it as worded, even if we Protestants suspect their practice to sometimes be in violation of it.   It is another thing to hate Rome so much as to take the furthest possible position from hers, even if it means disagreeing not just with Rome but with all the ancient Churches, rejecting the right judgement of the universal Church that Nestorius had committed heresy, and twisting and torturing the Scriptures beyond recognition, in support of a claim, that Jesus disowned His Mother, that contains within itself a blasphemous imputation of sin, specifically the violation of the Fifth Commandment, to the sinless Saviour of the world and is thus a worse heresy than that of Nestorius, who not wanting to ascribe too much honour to the Blessed Virgin ended up dividing the Person of her Son, Who in  His One Person is both fully God and fully Man.

 

It is okay to be a Protestant.   When Rome says or does something that goes against what the Scriptures teach, as faithful and orthodox Churches everywhere have understood them to teach since the days of the Church Fathers, then you can and should follow Scripture first, and the universal tradition second, rather than Rome.   The path of Hyper-Protestantism, however, is one which if followed, leads into pits of error worse than the errors of Rome.   It is best to avoid it at all costs.

Advent

It is Advent Sunday, the first day in the liturgical calendar for Western Christians, and the first of the four Sundays of Advent, the period that begins now and ends with the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour on Christmas.   It is, like the longer period of Lent that leads up to Easter or Pascha, the Christian Passover celebrating our Lord's Glorious Resurrection, a period for penitence and sober reflection.   I should say, that is what the period of Advent traditionally has been in the Church.   There is now a secular Christmas which falls on the same day as the celebration of the birth of Christ, and with it a secular Advent that is more-or-less the opposite of what Advent is all about in the Church.   Secular Advent comes in a long and a short version.   The short version is that which is evident in the secular version of Advent calendars.   An Advent calendar is the kind where you count down the days to Christmas by opening a door, eating a candy, or some such thing.   Religious Advent calendars begin with Advent Sunday which may, as this year, fall in November (the 27th is the earliest it can fall).   Secular Advent calendars typically begin on December 1st.   That is the short version of secular Advent.   The long version starts when the Christmas decorations go up.   This was remarkably early this year.   I  saw a house in Winnipeg's West End - that is the name of the section of town, not an accurate description of its location - lit up as if they were in competition with Clark Griswold, back in September.

Secular Advent, as stated above, is typically the opposite in tone and spirit to what Advent is supposed to be in the Church.   It is more of an extended version of secular Christmas, with parties and gift-giving and the like, and thus resembles Carnival, the pre-Lent festive season for those of the Roman Communion that corresponds to the more reserved Anglican Shrovetide, more than it does Lent itself.   That is what has been the norm for decades.   It does not look like it will be the case this year.   Grinches all around the world have seized the opportunity of the mass hysteria generated by media hype about the Wuhan bat flu to steal both the secular and the Christian Christmas, taking Advent to boot.   Here in the Dominion of Canada the chief Grinch has been Captain Airhead, who managed to retain his position as Her Majesty's First Minister last year despite being hit by at least three scandals any one of which would have taken down anybody who did not belong to the Canadian equivalent of the Kennedy family, but the provincial premiers, especially our own premier in Manitoba, Brian Pallister,  who cannot seem to make up his mind as to whether he is a rectal orifice or a squirt bottle used to clean the same, has come close to surpassing Captain Airhead in his Grinchiness.   He shut down the small businesses that depend upon the Christmas shopping rush to balance their books for at least a month in that very period, then, when they complained that they were being treated unfairly, instead of doing something that would actually help, ordered the larger stores to seal off everything except food and a few other "essentials", thus giving all the  business in the province for other items to Amazon.   He ordered the Churches to close and seems determined to make those Churches that have insisted upon their constitutionally guaranteed freedom of worship in defiance of his orders into scapegoats for the failure of his restrictions to produce the desired effect of lower case numbers.   I shall, Deus Vult, be addressing that scapegoating at greater length later this week , but note that this unconstitutional and totalitarian ban on in-person Church services includes even drive-in services where everyone remains in their own car in the parking lot and which cannot possibly contribute to the spread of this or any other disease.    He even had the nerve to lecture Lower Canada's premier François Legault over the latter's less Grinchy policy with regards to family gatherings over Christmas.   Sadly, Mr. Legault's response was merely to say that Mr. Pallister did not seem to be aware of the precautions surrounding the Christmas exception in his province, rather than the "va te faire foutre" that the situation seemed to call for.   Mr. Pallister is not content with trying to steal Christmas from Manitobans, he wants to steal it from other Canadians too.

Mr. Pallister, whose inability to think outside the lockdown box when it comes to the bat flu evinces his lack of understanding the meaning or perhaps even of having read Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Read Death, shows by his efforts to steal Christmas that he  has failed to grasp the lesson of Dr. Seuss's story about the Grinch as well.   In the end, despite all the Grinch's efforts, Christmas came "it came just the same".   It is perhaps too much to hope that Mr. Pallister's small heart will grow three sizes when this very thing happens this year.  Denied his annual vacation in Costa Rica because of bat flu travel restrictions he seems determined to make everybody as miserable as he is.   Those who do not understand the purpose of penitential seasons like Advent and Lent might conclude from this that he has restored the original spirit of the period.

They would be wrong, of course, because gloom and misery do not add up to penitence.   Indeed, they are even more a part of despair than they are a part of penitence or repentance.   Despair, you might recall, was in medieval moral theology, the mortal sin opposite to the theological virtue of hope and amounted to the repudiation of the latter.   In its most extreme form it was the belief that one had sinned beyond the capacity of God's grace and mercy and expressed itself in suicide.   The mental anguish that tormented the eighteenth century poet and Olney hymn writer William Cowper in the latter years of his life, from which he received release only shortly before he was allowed to die in the peace of assurance of God's forgiveness, was pretty much the textbook example.   In is a recurring subject throughout Shakespeare, the ending of Romeo and Juliet being the most obvious example although it is expressed best in all that King Lear says after he enters, in the third and last scene of Act V, carrying the dead body of Cordelia, the only one of his daughters, as he realized too late, who had been truly loving, devoted, and loyal.   Despair is so serious a sin because it precludes repentance.   Penitence or repentance, always includes hope.

True penitence or repentance involves a sober reflection upon one's own mortality and that which is ultimately the cause of the dread which the inevitability of one's own death inspires, one's sin.    "It is appointed unto man once to die", St. Paul wrote to the Hebrews, "but after this the judgement."   The Greek word translated repentance is often given the definition "change of mind".   It is, in fact, formed by adding a preposition which when used in compounds has the meaning "again" to a word referring to thought.    The image is of looking upon one's thoughts, words, and deeds of the past and recognizing how far short of God's will, whether expressed in the Ten Commandments or the Greatest and Second Greatest Commandments to which our Lord pointed, we have fallen.   The basic Greek word for sin in the New Testament, the same used by Aristotle in his works of literary/theatrical criticism/theory to denote the "fatal flaw" of a tragic hero, means literally to miss the mark, to fall short of the bull's eye.   This sort of reflection falls short of being repentance, however, and leads to despair, if it is not joined to faith and hope.

This is why seasons of penitence are always seasons which look forward to a faith and hope inspiring event.   Lent looks forward to the remembrance of the events whereby sin and death were defeated, the Crucifixion, in which Our Saviour allowed Himself to be unjustly executed by wicked men, that He might offer Himself up as the One true sacrifice that takes away the sins of the world, and the Resurrection in which His triumph over sin, death, and the very gates of hell, was declared to the world.   Advent looks forward to His birth, and what His birth signifies, the Incarnation, God coming down to earth and becoming man that He might lift man up to God.     Faith rests upon God's revelation of Himself and His love and saving mercy to the world in these events and it is faith which gives birth to hope, which is but faith looking forward, and charity or Christian love, which is but faith in action.   Repentance prepares our hearts to receive God's saving revelation of Himself in faith.

So, denied the shopping, partying, and revelry of secular Advent this year by Satan-possessed politicians and doctors determined to preserve our mere existence by forbidding us to truly live our lives, let us reflect in the true spirit of the season, on our sinfulness and mortality, repent, and embrace in faith and hope the "dawn of redeeming grace", to borrow Dr. Luther's words, in the events remembered at Christmas.   If we do so, Christmas will come just the same despite the efforts of politicians and physicians to prevent it.

The Witch Doctors

Ross Bagdasarian Sr. was the most famous Armenian-American in show business prior to the Kardashians, if show business is the proper term for what the latter do.   He got his start in acting before switching to singing and song-writing in the 1950s.   Late in that decade, he thought up the gimmick of speeding up the voice track on recordings to make the singers’ voices sound high and squeaky as if they had been performing in a studio full of helium.  He began recording songs using this technique and giving the attribution to a trio of cartoon chipmunks – Alvin, Simon, and Theodore.   Needless to say, it was successful and fairly soon a television series featuring his cartoon band premiered.  Bagdasarian would interact with Alvin and the Chipmunks as a cartoon version of himself who acted as their manager and went by the name David Seville.

 

Immediately prior to creating Alvin and the Chipmunks, Bagdasarian, already using the stage name David Seville, released a single which soared to the top of the charts.   The song’s title was “Witch Doctor”.   In the song, Seville as narrator addresses the object of his unrequited affection, and tells how he went to a witch doctor for help with this situation.   The witch doctor offers him the following advice:

 

ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang walla walla, bing bang,

ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang, walla walla bing bang.

 

Who was this person with such lucid and helpful advice?

 

A witch doctor or shaman is an important figure in most tribal societies, and in a few that have developed well beyond the tribal stage as well.   These are the people to whom the members of the tribe traditionally turn when they need healing and for a number of other reasons.   The healing the witch doctor offers involves him performing rituals and entering into a trance to make contact with the spirit world.   In the language that has become de rigueur in our age of political correctness, this would be described as an “alternative” form of medicine.   Being a traditionalist, I prefer the language with which both testaments of the Christian Scriptures condemn this sort of thing, terms like “witchcraft” and “sorcery”.

 

We, in our advanced technological civilization, like to think that our medical system bears no relationship to this sort of thing.   Our medicine, we keep telling ourselves, is scientific, and therefore based upon logic, facts, and evidence.   To compare it to shamanism is like comparing apples and oranges – or rather, since apples and oranges are both fruit, like comparing apples and thumbtacks.

 

I think, however, that we are very much deluding ourselves about the amount of witchcraft present in our own medical system.

 

If you turn in your Bible to St. Paul’s epistle to the Church in Galatia, and go to the fifth chapter, you will find, starting at the nineteenth verse, a list of the manifest “works of the flesh” which the Apostle contrasts with the fruit of the Spirit listed in the twenty-second and twenty-third verses.   After “idolatry” and before “hatred” in the list of the “works of the flesh” is “witchcraft.”   The Greek word translated “witchcraft” in the Authorized Bible here is φαρμακεία.   This word is also found in the ninth chapter of the Revelation of Jesus Christ given to St. John the Divine, in the twenty-first verse where it is translated “sorceries” and listed alongside “murders” “fornications” and “thefts” as among the things which the idol worshippers did not repent of, despite all the plagues that have been sent on them so far (at this point they are up to the sixth trumpet judgement).   Later in the same book, in the twenty third verse of the eighteenth chapter, it is again rendered “sorceries” and said to be the means by which Babylon deceived the nations of the world.

 

If you are unable to read the Greek alphabet, φαρμακεία is transliterated into English letters as pharmakeia.   Does that look like any English word you are familiar with?

 

You have undoubtedly answered that it looks like “pharmacy.”   Unlike with the word ai, which in English means “a South American three-toed sloth” and is a word borrowed from Portuguese, but in Japanese and Chinese has the meaning “love”, this is not a case of two different language traditions having developed words that are identical in spelling and pronunciation but completely different in meaning.   Pharmacy in English is derived from the Greek word.  

 

If we look up φαρμακεία in the venerable and trusty Greek-English Lexicon of Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott we find that the first definition given is “use of drugs, esp. of purgatives”, which is supported by references from the Aphorisms of Hippocrates.  Specifically they cite where Hippocrates says “use purgative medicines sparingly in acute diseases, and at the commencement, and not without proper circumspection” and “Persons in good health quickly lose their strength by taking purgative medicines, or using bad foods.”    It would sound, from these references, like Hippocrates of Kos – this is the Hippocrates to whom the oath which physicians are required to swear is attributed – was not exactly a fan of φαρμακεία.   Remember that, because we will return to it and draw out its significance later.  Liddell-Scott, continue the definition by clarifying that emetics are the type of purgatives specifically meant, adding that the term also has special reference to abortifacients, i.e., drugs that induce abortions, before saying “generally, the use of any kind of drugs, potions, or spells” of which usage they give multiple examples from Plato.   The second definition offered is “poisoning or witchcraft”.  

 

It might seem at first glance like the translators of our Bible used the same words “witchcraft” and “sorcery” to translate words expressing different concepts in the Old and New Testaments.   In the Old Testament, witchcraft and sorcery clearly refer to trafficking with the spirit world, and if the roots of the Hebrew words are not always clear about this, the context will generally spell it out.   The most famous example of a witch in the Old Testament is the witch of Endor, who summons up the spirit of Samuel the prophet for King Saul in the twenty-eighth chapter of I Samuel.   She was what is most often called a medium today.  The New Testament, as we have just seen, uses a word that has the use of drugs as its primary meaning.   The word for witchcraft used in the verse which prescribes the death penalty for it in Exodus is כָּשַׁף and its origins are unclear.   James Strong in his concordance and Wilhelm Gesenius in his Hebrew lexicon appear to be of the opinion that it originally meant to “whisper” or “mutter”, and so referred to softly chanting an incantation.   Others see it as being derived from the word for herbs and having a meaning almost identical to the Greek φαρμακεία.   The translators of the LXX evidently were of the later opinion for that is how they consistently rendered it.

 

The difference in meaning is not as great as it first seems.   What brings the idea of trafficking with the spirit world together with that of using drugs is the altered state of consciousness that is common to both.   Many drugs put a person into an altered state of consciousness, opening that person up to the spirit world.   Given the Biblical prohibitions against this sort of thing, it is evident that the spirit world that people enter in this state of consciousness is the demonic rather than the angelic.    Apart from use in their own making contact with the spirit world, of course, witches traditionally had a sort of apothecary business going on the side in which they dispensed drug concoctions to those who sought their aid, whether to heal their ailments or poison their enemies.

 

Now my point, if you recall, in bringing all of this up, was to argue that we are deluded, in our modern, technological, civilization, in thinking that witchcraft or sorcery might have been part of the medicine of the shamanism of primitive societies, but has nothing to do with our modern, “scientific” medicine.    On the contrary, our modern medicine is thoroughly dominated by the pharmaceutical industry.  

 

There are those who will counter by saying “yes, but the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t practice witchcraft, it uses science to manufacture drugs that help people.”    This is similar to, although not entirely the same thing, as the idea that drugs come in two types, the good, which are legal and used for medical purposes, and the bad, which are illegal narcotics used for recreational purposes.   Both viewpoints are incredibly naïve.

 

Drugs are, essentially, poisons.   All drugs have side effects, and while these vary, of course, in their nature and severity, all drugs, even the popular pain killers acetaminophen, ASA, and ibuprofen, are potentially fatal.   Medical drugs work, not by doing positive good to your body, but by doing harm, albeit harm that impedes not only the ordinary functions of your bodily systems, but also the condition that you have been diagnosed with.   The physician who prescribes them, does so in the hope - a reasoned, evidence-based, hope if the physician is at all competent - that the harm done by the drugs, will be less than the harm that would otherwise have been done by the condition, if left untreated.   Or, to put it more morbidly, they hope that the poison administered will kill what is killing you, rather than killing you.   That this is the essential nature of drugs has been recognized since ancient times, and the ethics of such an approach to healing was debated as far back as Plato’s Protagoras.

 

Which brings us back to Hippocrates of Kos.   As the quotations from his Aphorisms given above demonstrate, this legendary physician and medical ethicist, a contemporary of Socrates and Plato, who is remembered as the “Father of Medicine” was not a fan of the medical use of drugs.   He stressed the harm that they did, and in his own practice emphasized techniques that maximize the body’s own natural healing properties.   Although the maxim often attributed to him – primum non nocere (first do no harm) – does not actually appear in those words in his extent corpus, it does represent the basic principle of his medical ethics, and his famous Oath includes a pledge to inflict no harm.

 

The significance of this cannot be stressed enough.   Today, those who promote healing techniques that rely upon the body’s natural healing powers, like Hippocrates, and eschew the use of drugs in most situations, also like Hippocrates, are labelled “unscientific” by the medical establishment, and lumped together with the shamans.  Yet to the extent that there is a medical tradition in Western Civilization of which it can be truly said that it is based on a scientific foundation rather than witchcraft, that tradition began with Hippocrates of Kos.   Meanwhile, the very medical establishment that regards naturalistic and holistic approaches to medicine as “unscientific”, has for a very long time existed primarily to peddle the poisons of the pharmaceutical corporations, which, other than the big tech companies, are by far the most corrupt and shady sector of corporate industry, and which make their billions in profits from the technologically updated production of the very things which traditionally defined witchcraft’s approach to healing.

 

In other words, within the larger tradition of medicine and healing, the modern day heirs of the witches and sorcerers, who employed drugs and trafficking with demons to provide healing, have stolen the scientific credentials of the tradition which begins with Hippocrates and have become the establishment within the medical community.   That those credentials have been stolen has been very obvious this year, as the medical establishment has constantly told everyone who applies logic in questioning the totalitarian restrictions and public health orders that have been imposed upon their recommendations to “shut up” and “listen to the science” or “listen to the evidence.”   Obviously, those who talk this way, as if “evidence” and “science” were authorities that speak with a monolithic voice, demonstrate thereby that do not have even the most basic understanding of what these terms have historically meant in the intellectual tradition that goes back to Socrates and Plato.   They also illustrate precisely what the great Oxbridge don C. S. Lewis meant when he warned that the popular attitude towards science, already ubiquitous in his day, made people incredibly susceptible to being duped, because they would believe anything coming from the experts if dressed up in the language of science, and that therefore, when the next tyranny came, it would come in the name of science.  (1)

 

Indeed, by its behaviour this year, the medical establishment had clearly demonstrated that it is following the tradition of witchcraft rather than that of Hippocrates.   Primum non nocere has obviously been completely defenestrated since everything the medical experts have recommended this year has done an incredible amount of harm, and only very questionable amounts of good.   Keep in mind that all of this has been done in order to prevent the spread of a coronavirus which produces mild-to-no symptoms in the vast majority of people who contract it, is a significant threat only to those who are both very old and very sick, and which has failed in every way to live up to the alarmist hype surrounding it.

 

Shutting down every economy on the planet, threatening the global food supply and potentially starving millions if not billions of people, destroying people’s businesses, livelihoods, and savings, taking away everyone’s most basic rights and freedoms and placing them all in what amounts to a universal house arrest, without arrest, charge, trial, conviction, or even a crime having been committed, all constitutes harm on a colossal scale.   They shut down all the Churches – the ancient foes of witchcraft – all around the world, weeks prior to Holy Week, and left them closed for months.    The Jews, Muslims, and adherents of other ancient religions were similarly persecuted.  They left the abortion clinics open, of course, declaring the horrific procedure to be an “essential service.”   The resemblance between this physician-performed procedure and the ritual sacrifice of infants to devils is so obvious that further comment seems unnecessary.    Most recently, they have been telling everyone to wear face masks everywhere they go.   These masks are dangerous for some people (such as those with asthma or COPD) all the time, and for all people some of the time (such as when engaged in strenuous exercise), always have the effect of lowering the amount of oxygen and increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air you breathe in and so are not safe for anybody when worn everywhere and all the time, and, furthermore, breed and spread infectious microorganisms when protocols such as washing your hands before and after putting them on, not touching them while wearing them, and discarding them as hazardous material after each use, are not followed.    The medical experts are now claiming that they significantly reduce the spread of the coronavirus, based upon what they call “new evidence” but which is merely a selective cherry-picking and re-interpretation of old studies in order to fit them into a new narrative.  Actual new evidence which conflicts with that narrative, such as that which the Danish study from this summer presumably contains, is being suppressed.   Even if we accept these claims, however, the good done is far outweighed by all the harm they do.  The masks are intended as symbols, symbols of acceptance of and submission to, the totalitarian “new normal”, and ultimately to the author of the “new normal” who is Satan.   All of this is witchcraft. 

 

Furthermore, the direction in which all of this is heading, seems rather obvious.  At some point, probably in the next few months to a year, the medical establishment will announce that their puppetmasters in the pharmaceutical industry have concocted a witches’ brew that will save us all from the Big Bad Coronavirus if we allow them to inoculate us with it.   The ingredients of that witches’ brew will probably make Shakespeare’s “eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog, adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting, lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing” recipe seem positively wholesome in comparison.   Adjuvants and preservatives in previous vaccines have included aluminum salts, which are suspected of contributing to Alzheimer’s, MSG, formaldehyde and thermerisol, which contains mercury, all toxic, none of which any sane person wants injected into his bloodstream.   Will the bat flu vaccine contain aborted foetus cells, like the vaccine commonly used for measles, mumps, and rubella?   Will it contain some sort of nanotechnology brewed up in Bill Gates’ cauldron?   Whatever it contains, judging from the immense pressure being placed on people to conform to the mask requirements, there will be a push to make it mandatory.    Whether they make it mandatory outright by passing a law requiring everyone to get the needle, or sneakily by getting every public service outlet and business to require proof of vaccination, it will constitute forcing people to receive the injection of foreign substances into their bodies against their will.   Such a universal rape would be the ultimate culmination of the long list of evils done in the name of protecting us from the coronavirus.   It would be a lot easier to fight against that evil, if more people were firmly opposing the tyrannical measures that are already in effect.

 

If there is any good that has come out of this scam it is that it has divided the sheep from the goats, so to speak, in the medical community.   The true heirs of Hippocrates are the dissident physicians, speaking out against the lockdowns, the masks, and all the other tyrannical measures.   The others are the heirs of the ancient witches, taking their orders, through the intermediary of the pharmaceutical industry, ultimately from the devil himself.

 

If, of course, you prefer to follow the advice of a witch doctor, that is your choice.   I recommend, however, if that is your choice, that you consider the advice of David Seville’s witch doctor.   “Ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang” makes a heck of a lot more sense than forcing people to practice social distancing, stay at home, and wear masks.

(1)   Lewis addressed this attitude towards science, usually called “scientism”, in many places.    The third of the King’s College, Newcastle lectures, that were published together as his The Abolition of Man in 1943 is particularly worth mentioning here.   In this lecture, which bears the same title as the published work as a whole, Lewis discussed modern applied science as “man’s conquest of nature.”   He drew out the totalitarian implications of this, noting that the exchange man make’s in return for this conquest of nature is a “magician’s bargain.”   From here he launched into a discussion of how science and magic sprang out of the same impulse.   “The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins.”   He pointed out the similarities between Sir Francis Bacon and Faustus as the latter appears in Marlowe’s play, noting that neither man valued knowledge as an end in itself, contrary to much misrepresentation.   Bacon “rejects magic because it does not work; but his goal is that of the magician” he wrote, and, especially relevant to my topic here “In Paracelsus the characters of magician and scientist are combined.”   The man to which he refers was a sixteenth century Swiss physician who is known as the “father of toxicology.”   He practiced both medical science and various forms of occultism, including alchemy and divination, being an important transition figure between alchemy and modern chemistry.   He was also one of the earliest of modern pill pushers among Western physicians, liberally prescribing laudanum long before the use and abuse of opioids became common.    For a fuller discussion of C. S. Lewis’ insights into both science and scientism, see John G. West, ed., The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, published by the Discovery Institute in 2012.

The Meaning of the Mask

 

Last fall, a virus that was common enough among Chinese bats managed in some way to jump to humans in Wuhan, the capital and largest city of the province of Hubei in China. The question of exactly how, whether it involved mad scientists working in a lab, a plot by the Communist dictatorship in Beijing, or merely the barbaric cultural practices of the notorious “wet markets”, became a topic of hot debate. The virus, which usually produces either no symptoms at all or a disease indistinguishable from the ordinary flu, can, like all other colds and flus, turn into a potentially fatal pneumonia under certain circumstances.  In this case, the pneumonia is the particularly nasty form known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, first identified almost twenty years ago. Those who are above retirement age and who have two or more other serious health conditions are, as with other colds and flus, the ones most at risk from this virus. By the end of January, the virus had spread beyond China, in this case definitely due to malfeasance on the part of the Chinese authorities who had sealed the inflected province off from the rest of their country while deliberately allowing international travel in and out of Hubei. In March, the hopelessly corrupt and Communist-dominated World Health Organization declared the spread of the virus to be a “pandemic”, a truism, since the word “pandemic” simply means that an infectious disease is being experienced around the globe, like every seasonal cold and flu. The mob, however, never noted for its ability to think clearly – or at all – influenced by the malice of the media, took the word to mean something along the lines of “the next Black Death” or “the super-flu from Stephen King’s The Stand” and dropped the dem from pandemic turning it into a panic. 

Governments around the world, seized on the opportunity to give dictatorial powers to their public health officials, who of all bureaucrats are the least worthy of enhanced powers of any sort since they are medical doctors, who have long had the reputation of having the highest percentage of tyrannical, full-of-themselves, jerks of any of the professions. Those public health officials, proceeded to live down to this highly negative assessment of their character, and imposed an experimental and thoroughly draconian new form of quarantine on most countries. Whereas traditional quarantines are imposed upon the symptomatic and those known to have been in contact with the symptomatic, for a set and limited time, this new quarantine was imposed upon everybody, healthy and sick alike, for an indefinite period of time. 

In imposing this new form of quarantine, the public health officials issued “stay at home” or “shelter in place” orders, closed all public facilities, and shut down all businesses except those which sold groceries and medicine or were otherwise arbitrarily declared to be “essential” by these autocratic “experts.” These measures were generally called “lock-downs”, although many of us who had more sense than to be in favour of them referred to them as “house arrests”. Both terms evoke the image of a police state. They caused immeasurable damage – economic, psychological, spiritual, and, yes, physical, for the medical health profession used the pandemic as a pathetic excuse to fail in the treatment of non-COVID-related conditions – as many of us, right from the onset, could and did say would happen. 

After a couple of months of this nonsense, the public health tyrants began to slowly ease up on these restrictions. Businesses were allowed to re-open, provided they followed a long list of new regulations aimed at promoting “social distancing” within their buildings. The number of people allowed to gather for social functions was gradually increased. Restaurants were given permission to re-open their dining rooms at a reduced capacity.

In a famous scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film version of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, the character of Johnny Fontane, widely believed to have been based on Frank Sinatra and portrayed in the movie by Al Martino, goes to his godfather – in this case, in the literal sense, as well as the more obvious one given the nature of the story – the title character of Don Vito Corleone, portrayed by Marlon Brando. The crooner whines and complains that the head of a motion picture studio won’t give him the film role he needs to salvage his career. Don Vito, after slapping him and telling him to act like a man, advises him to go home, eat and rest, and in a month he would have the role. When Fontane says that this is impossible because they start shooting in a week, Don Vito utters in response one of the most familiar lines in all of cinematic history “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” The audience had been tipped off in advance to the double meaning of this phrase when, only a short time prior to this, the Don’s youngest and favourite son, Michael, played by Al Pacino, had used it in explaining how his father conducted his business to his girlfriend Kay, played by Diane Keaton. Later in the film, it is made quite clear when the studio executive, after telling Don Vito’s consigliere Tom Hagen, played by Robert Duvall, that Johnny Fontane would never get that role, wakes up one morning to find the head of his very expensive race horse lying beside him. 

In the midst of the far-too-slow re-opening of our countries, those who took all of our rights and freedoms away from us back in March made us an “offer we can’t refuse”. We can have our lives back, they said, and everything else they took from us, we can see our friends and families again, we can have access to public facilities again, we can go to Church, the library, the movies, etc., and basically resume our normal lives, provided we wear a mask. 

It is truly appalling to see the extent to which the public have taken them up on this offer. I am not referring merely to the number of people who have started wearing masks, even out of doors, but to the enthusiasm with which they have embraced the making masks mandatory. It makes one wonder whether anyone reads George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four anymore. Those of you who have read that classic dystopian warning against totalitarianism will perhaps recognize the part of the novel to which I am alluding. In Orwell’s novel, the totalitarian state in which the protagonist, Winston Smith, lives, is entitled Oceania, a vast super-state and one of three between whom the world is divided, an allusion on Orwell’s part to James Burnham’s theory that the world was headed towards a geopolitical realignment around three regional loci of power. The extent to which the state of Oceania, represented by the figure of Big Brother, controls the thinking of its citizens is illustrated by the fact that at any given time, Oceania is allied with one of the other two super-states, Eurasia and Eastasia, and at war with the other. When the identity of the ally and the enemy switches, the Ministry rewrites history, and the controlled populace accept against the evidence of their own memories that “we were always at war with Eastasia.” The relationship between the totalitarian regimes of Orwell’s own day, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, which went from being enemies to being allies to being enemies again all within a short space of years, was, of course, the inspiration for this. 

Interestingly, a similar sort of mind-control in which someone is made to affirm contradictory propositions can be found in William Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew, where it was put to comic rather than political effect. In that comedy, the Paduan nobleman Baptista Minola has vowed that he will not allow his younger, more pleasant, daughter Bianca to marry, until her older sister Katherina does. This is not an easy hurdle to overcome because Katherina, the shrew of the play’s title, has driven away all prospective suitors with her acerbic tongue. Hortensio, however, one of Bianca’s suitors although not the one that ends up with her, talks Petruchio, who is looking to marry a rich wife and live off of her fortune, to court Katherina. Petruchio is successful both in his courtship and subsequently in his efforts to tame his sharp-tongued bride. At the beginning of the fifth scene of Act IV, Petruchio and Katherina are travelling to her father’s house, and Petruchio comments about how bright the moon is shining. While Katherina initially points out that it is the sun, Petruchio insists that it is the moon, and that he won’t go any further with her unless she agrees. She declares “Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,/and be it moon, or sun, or what you please:/An if you please to call it a rush-candle,/Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.” “I say it is the moon” he replies, to which she says “I know it is the moon” only to hear “Nay, then you lie: it is the blessed sun”, to which she says:

Then, God be bless'd, it is the blessed sun: 

But sun it is not, when you say it is not; 

And the moon changes even as your mind. 

What you will have it named, even that it is; 

And so it shall be so for Katharina. 

The mask-wearing populace of today resembles both the citizens of Oceania and Katharina in their willingness to accept the necessity of masks today, even though it is coming from the same experts and authorities who told us not to wear masks back in February, March and April. 

This is not a matter about which the body of knowledge could have grown sufficiently within a short period of months to justify a complete turn-around on evidentiary grounds. This particular virus may be new to humans, but the effects of masks on the transmission of viruses has been studied for years. Either the experts were lying to us then or they are lying to us now. Either way, it completely undermines any notion that they deserve to be trusted with the sort of absolute control over our lives that they have exercised since March. 

As far as the efficacy of masks as preventatives of viral transmission goes in itself, the data largely confirms what common sense tells us. There are masks designed to prevent viral transmission and there are masks which are not. The latter, which are the kind that are being made mandatory almost everywhere, are ineffective at preventing the spread of viruses. If air can get through the mask, a virus can. Since the corollary of this is that an effective anti-viral mask will prevent airflow, such masks are not safe to be worn by anybody long term – unless, of course, we are talking about some kind of Darth Vader type apparatus that provides you with a non-external source of oxygen, which obviously we are not. Non-anti-viral masks are effective at preventing the spread of larger particles, which may contain viruses and transmit them through other-than-airborne means and this is what most of the memes and videos and articles in support of masks concentrate on, but the slight benefit in slowing transmission gained in this way, hardly constitutes grounds for justifying forcing everybody, including the asymptomatic, to wear these things. 

The efficacy of masks is not really the issue, however. If it were, and masks were incontrovertibly effective, what we would be hearing is advice to consider wearing one if we are experiencing either a) anxiety about contracting the virus or b) symptoms. This is not what we are hearing. The argument we are hearing from the pro-maskers is that although the masks probably won’t keep you from getting the virus they may prevent you from spreading it so they provide a protection against the virus but only if everybody wears them. This, however, is an argument that is clearly not derived from fact and logic, but crafted to support its end, which is the shoving of masks down everybody’s throat. 

The real issue, therefore, is what the masks represent. Earlier this year, the public health officials, and the politicians who gave them their power and seat and great authority, took away from us our lives and livelihoods, our friends and families, our basic rights and freedoms, showing thereby that in their opinion these were not ours but theirs to give and take away from us as they so choose. Now they are offering all that they took away from us back on the condition that we wear the very masks they told us not to wear half a year ago. We are threatened, if we do not comply, to have everything that had been left to us at the beginning of the lockdown – such as being able to buy or sell groceries - taken away from us. The masks are not, therefore, tickets out of the oppression of the lockdown. They are symbols of the very tyranny and totalitarianism behind the lockdown. The insistence that we wear them is a demand that we acknowledge the claims of that tyranny and totalitarianism and wear a sign of our submission and obedience on our faces. 

In the masks, therefore, the oppression of the lockdown, has been taken to a whole new level. It has increased rather than decreased, grown greater rather than less.   The masks are not there to give us our lives back, as some internet propaganda would suggest, but to force us to grant our approval to their having been taken from us int he first place.