Strong of Heart

You’ll find her father with her, and some more,
Who took the oath with you upon the Rutli;
Bid them be resolute, and strong of heart,–
For Tell is free and master of his arm;

– Schiller’s William Tell

__________

The essential ethos of a civilization is never written in a constitution or any official document. It is too sacred to be written down; it lives in the hearts of the people. For many centuries the ethos of the European people was a Christian ethos. In their hearts the Europeans believed that the touchstone of reality to which all questions of policy and ethics ultimately must be referred was the Man of Sorrows. He was the Hero of Western civilization. And one came to believe in The Hero through the type of hero worship that Thomas Hughes writes about in Tom Brown’s School Days:

And let us not be hard on him, if at that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there, than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship, to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes. For it is only through our mysterious human relationships, through the love and tenderness and purity of mothers, and sisters, and wives, through the strength and courage and wisdom of fathers, and brothers, and teachers, that we can come to the knowledge of Him in whom alone the love, and the tenderness, and the purity, and the strength, and the courage, and the wisdom of all these dwell for ever and ever in perfect fullness.

An incarnational faith needs men and women who embody the ethos of their God. Men like Alfred, Tell, and Wallace, and women such as Florence Nightingale and our mothers, sisters, and wives of the European hearth, who embodied the ethos of Christianity, pointed us toward Him. The attack on Christ and His civilization starts with an attack on the heroes of Europe because a people who lose their heroes cease to be a people. We live and die with the hero, his aspirations are our aspirations, his God is our God. We love him because in his selfless sacrifice for his people he imitates the sacrifice of Christ at Golgotha. That he is a man with faults makes us love him all the more because despite his faults he rose above the material and the mundane and strove with might and main for his people and His Kingdom come. 

Then the liberal comes along and either demonizes the European hero or abstracts the hero, isolates one of his virtues, and uses that one virtue in behalf of Liberaldom. Let’s take Nathan Bedford Forrest, Lincoln, and Robert E. Lee as cases in point. Forrest traded and owned slaves before the war. After the war he was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. From the liberals’ point of view he was Satan incarnate (metaphorically speaking, because liberals don’t believe in Satan). During the war and after “That Devil Forrest” was an anathema to the liberals. He was, and is, in liberal lore an unredeemable sinner. Yet to the white people of the South, the last Europeans, Forrest was the hero who stood above them all. He fought for his people to the last gasp, unconquerable during the war and still unconquerable after the war when the South lay prostrate before the seemingly invincible North. Forrest was a true European hero, in line with Alfred, Arthur, El Cid, Tell, and Havelock. In contrast, Lincoln was a new breed of liberal hero. He was willing to do the liberals’ bidding, so he was lauded, but not as a beloved hero who fought for his people, but as a man who fought for the abstract ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The liberal never has any other kind of hero than the Lincoln-type, because the liberal is the man without a country, a man “concentred all in self.” This is the key to the liberal. If you abstract from men only the qualities that fit your abstractions, and then revere and worship the abstraction, to whom are you paying homage? Whom do you really worship? Yourself, of course. Lee was only clubbable as an abstract supporter of abolition and higher education, not as the man who was the defender of his people. And the abstraction process did not start with Northern liberals nor did it stop with them. The Son of God was abstracted from the heart of Europe. In a bygone era, He was the sum product of a theologian’s abstract notion of nature. In subsequent eras, He became Christ the Watchmaker, Christ the Marxist, Christ the Democrat, Christ the End Product of Evolution, and Christ the Negro-Worshipping Social Worker. But in every liberal manifestation of Christ there is no living God, no Christ the Lord who carried our sorrows and was wounded for our transgressions. We must and will have that God, the true God, who comes to us through “our mysterious human relationships,” that the liberals have maniacally abstracted out of existence. 

Every so often I read a “conservative’s” expose of our school system. The conservative tells us of the anti-European bias that exists in the grade schools, the high schools, and our universities. Everything European is considered evil and every sexual perversion is considered ground-breaking and therefore good. All this is true, except I would substitute the words ‘satanic hatred’ for the word ‘bias.’ 

There is one thing that always strikes me as woefully inadequate in the concerned conservatives’ suggested solutions to the liberals’ hatred of all things European. The conservatives always want more democracy! They want Joe Public and Peter Parent to put pressure, through petitions and “turn the scoundrels out’ voting, on the anti-European academics. But even if we assume, which is an unwarranted assumption, that there are members of the public who are against the anti-European educational system, by what stretch of the imagination are we to believe that redemption is to be had from the devil? Are the liberals going to tell us, “Yes, by George, now that you mention it, we are quite biased against the European people; we’ll correct that mistake immediately!”? Of course not. This is not a time for a reasoned, measured response, which we would give to someone with whom we had a mild disagreement on a minor issue. We are dealing with an enemy who we are diametrically opposed to. There can be no dialog, no democratic pleading, with an enemy whose a priori assumption is that you and your people must die. Our race and our soul are one; if the liberals abstract that from us, what is left? There is nothing left. Look to the north, to our past, when the newly Christianized men of the European forests and mountains were not abstracted men. They loved their own race more intensely after their conversions to Christianity. Which is as it should be with us. Nothing good comes from hating your own race. It shows no disrespect to other races when you love your own race above all other races, because a man who hates his own race will be unable to love any race. He will set up an abstracted idol of another race, and make that idol his God, but he will not love anyone of any race. The first great betrayal of his own race renders a man incapable of loving anyone outside of himself and anything that does not serve his exalted image of himself.  The religious justification for the hatred of the white man comes from the theologians of the abstract. If all our mysterious human relationships are suspect because human passions and emotions are involved in those relationships, then what is left? Abstracted reason is all that is left. And abstracted reason needs no body, no blood; it is a disembodied, cosmic thing floating above us and beyond us like a deadly gas. The churchmen, like their big brothers of the Academy, do not have the intellectual honesty or integrity to live in the mind-forged world of their own creation. While denying their own people the right to love their own above all others, they claim the right – because even liberals have human needs and wants – to make the colored people their own. But their love is a twisted egotistic love because of their rationalism. The liberals can “help” the colored people in a way that feeds their self-love. There is no room for God in Liberaldom because no God can enter into a mind-forged world of self-love. 

The first rationalist revolt took place in the Garden of Eden, when Satan reasoned things out with Adam and Eve and convinced them that they would not die when they ate from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” And that initial revolt, that passion to live with our own reason outside of God’s love is in us all. When the European people countered that illicit passion with a passion for intimacy with the Son of God, Europe was strong and healthy. When the rationalist serpent entered the church and spread outward the European people took sick and became a death-in-life people. 

Thomas Hughes, to his credit, saw the Christian gentlemen, Battle-of-Waterloo-playing-fields-of-Eton ethos when he attended Rugby under Thomas Arnold and later when he attended Oxford. He, and he alone, was critical of trying to go through life with the Greeks as a guide rather than Christ.

The result of Hardy’s management was that Tom made a clean breast of it, telling everything, down to his night at the ragged school, and what an effect his chance opening of the Apology had had on him. Here for the first time Hardy came in with his usual dry, keen voice, “You needn’t have gone so far back as Plato for that lesson.”

“I don’t understand,” said Tom.

“Well, there’s something about an indwelling spirit which guideth every man, in St. Paul, isn’t there?”

“Yes, a great deal,” Tom answered, after a pause; “but it isn’t the same thing.”

“Why not the same thing?”

“Oh, surely, you must feel it. It would be almost blasphemy in us now to talk as St. Paul talked. It is much easier to face the notion, or the fact, of a demon or spirit such as Socrates felt to be in him, than to face what St. Paul seems to be meaning.”

“Yes, much easier. The only question is whether we will be heathen or not.”

“How do you mean?” said Tom.

 “Why, a spirit was speaking to Socrates, and guiding him. He obeyed the guidance, but knew not whence it came. A spirit is striving with us too, and trying to guide us–we feel that just as much as he did. Do we know what spirit it is? Whence it comes? Will we obey it? If we can’t name it–we are in no better position than he–in fact, heathens.”

–Tom Brown at Oxford

But unfortunately there was another side to the British tradition, a classical, rationalist side that both the Catholic and the Protestant held to, that destroyed Christian Europe. Thomas Arnold wanted to make Christian gentlemen, but there was Greek rationalism in the classrooms which bore poisonous fruits in the next generation. Arnold’s son, Matthew Arnold, was the logical consequence of the ill-fated attempt to fuse Greek rationalism and Christianity. What a despair-ridden, bloodless faith results from such a pairing:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

If the romance of Christianity is made into a philosophy, mankind will flee from that philosophy and take refuge in the romance of hedonistic, race-mixing Babylon. It’s a small step from “Dover Beach” to Woodstock:

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

The poor spiritually crippled children of Woodstock were merely acting out the despair of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” The fruits of rationalism are poisonous as our Lord warned us they would be. We have gone back to the garden, to feast once more on the forbidden fruit. The Woodstock generation grew up and institutionalized racial Babylon, which spawned sexual Babylon and legalized abortion. We don’t need to go back to a liberal, utopian Eden, which is in reality a nightmarish dystopia. We need to go back to incarnational Europe, the land of the one true romance of life: The romance that begins in a stable in Bethlehem and ends with The Hero conquering, for the sake of His people, that last great enemy. Look to the heroes of Europe, past and present; they are the men and women who still dream dreams and see the vision of the risen Lord, presiding over His Europe. +