While Memory Holds a Seat

Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not “seems.”
‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected ‘havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shows of grief,
That can denote me truly. These, indeed, seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passeth show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

-Hamlet the Dane

__________

I got an unpleasant jolt from the past recently when I heard the song “Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell blaring throughout the supermarket where I was shopping. The song was included in my college poetry anthology right next to Andrew Marvell and Robert Frost, and you couldn’t go down the halls of the dormitory without hearing someone playing the song. Musically the song works. Joni Mitchell had a nice voice and her music does not jar your senses like so many of the rock songs. But nevertheless the song is offensive, because the song is so openly anti-Christian. Through the medium of Miss Mitchell’s melodious voice, we are invited into the brave new world of liberalism, a world without the Christ of Europe. If you never heard Mitchell’s anthem, you are lucky, but it is sometimes necessary to know the poetic of the enemy –

I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
I’m going on down to Yasgur’s farm
I’m going to join in a rock ‘n’ roll band
I’m going to camp out on the land
I’m try an’ get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it’s the time of man
I don’t know who l am
But life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

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

Mitchell, like so many of the sixties radicals, thought of herself as a rebel from the mainstream culture of war mongering, sexually repressed, unnatural, middle class whites. But she and her ilk were not rebels. They differed in style, not in substance, from their liberal parents. They, like their parents, had a different view of nature than the Europeans of pre-20^th century Europe. Mitchell’s nature is a closed system; it is not the mirror of another transcendent world, it is the whole world. No matter that the free love, back-to-nature hippies denounced science, they still were and are part of the new scientific world in which nature is just biological nature. That new-old view of nature returned the European people to paganism. The ‘garden’ that Mitchell wants to go back to is a natural world, free from the redemptive grace of Jesus Christ. Why do children of nature need redemption? Are they not without sin? Of course, as the scientific worldview replaced the Christian worldview, the new morality was developed, and what was implicit, that whites were unnatural and therefore damned, became explicit. The conservatives, even social conservatives such as Weaver and Kirk, were unable to offer their people the leadership they needed to fight liberalism, because they were unwillingly (1) to link conservatism to the defense of the European people, and (2) to invoke the second person of the Christian trinity, Jesus Christ, in the war against the new natural religion of the liberals.

Why were men such as Burke and Thomas Hughes able to invoke Christ and defend their own race while the 20^th century conservatives were not? I think it is the ‘pride of intellect’ temptation. Very intelligent men often become moral idiots; they betray themselves and others in deepest consequence, because they think they can storm heaven with reason alone. While making a theological affirmation of God, they proceed to quote Aristotle and Plato ad nauseam in order to defend what they vaguely call the Western tradition. This will not do. We are not Greeks – and by Greeks, I mean philosophers, not the Greek people – we are Hebrews. If we blend the living God with the universal mind of the great philosophers, we are heathens, even if we are very smart heathens. The smartest of the Christian heathens, St. Thomas Aquinas, was unable to figure out when ensoulment took place, thus paving the way for the theological justification for early abortions. The Bible makes it clear that ensoulment takes place at conception, but of course such an obvious conclusion is not acceptable to the philosophically trained mind. The ratiocinations of the philosophical conservatives always fail, because, as Hamlet tells Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” There is an appalling lack of passion and depth of soul in the 20^th century rational conservatives. We can’t rely on them, we can’t go to battle with their philosophies; we need a spiritual armor and a flaming sword that mere philosophical conservatism cannot provide.

We need to ask ourselves why after thousands of years there have been no philosophers that can rival Plato and Aristotle in intellectual acumen, while there have been thousands of poets who have surpassed, in depth of soul, the Greek poets. It is because man cannot know God through the mind alone. The philosophers of the Christian era did not think with their hearts, hence they could not say anything that Plato and Aristotle had not said already. But the poets whose hearts were united to a people that had hearts connected to His sacred heart revealed to us the divine element of the human soul.

This is why the race war is a religious war. The church men have made Christianity an intellectual system that can be passed on from one universal mind to another universal mind. And what do universal minds need with hearts? Why do minds need a local habitation, a people, to dwell in? They don’t. But is the mind-forged world of the 20^th and 21^st century philosophers the real world? I say it is not. The old natural world, the world in which our human nature was a reflection (imperfect certainly, but still a reflection) of God was the correct view of nature. The repentant Katherina in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew eloquently defends the Christian view of nature when she links what is natural to the transcendent virtues of the human heart placed there by our Lord –

Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?

The real human nature has been buried in biological nature in the modern world. The mad-dog liberals have presided over the burial while the philosophical minded conservatives have acquiesced to the burial. They made, as did Caiaphas, a practical decision. “Let the European people and their connection to the heart of Christ die so that the universal mind can live.” Because of that decision, we have “conservative” authors such as Peter Kreeft recommending (in Ecumenical Jihad) the blending of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Because of that decision, there are no leaders in the Western world who will defend the European people against the colored barbarians and the Moslem infidels. Universal minds do not need a people, nor do they need anything more than a generic God. The God of St. Paul, the Christ celebrated in Handel’s Messiah, has disappeared from the face of the earth because of the satanic hatred of the Jacobin liberals and the Thomistic Buddhism of the conservative liberals.

The conservatives in church and state did not veer from the truth because they defended the old forms and rituals against the new forms and rituals. They went astray because they saw the forms and rituals as ends in themselves. They lost the heart of their forms and rituals. The liberals have replaced the old forms and rituals, which were merely outer crusts without a center, with their own forms and rituals. At the heart of the new throne and altar system of the liberals is the negro and the auxiliary gods of color, because Satan knows that mankind must have gods. As the Israelites returned to Baal when Moses went up to the mountain, so have the European Hebrews returned to nature and nature’s God, the natural black savage.

The liberals possess a poetic; they are of the devil, so they use the colored races as shock troops against the white, Christ-bearing race. The philosophical-minded conservatives do not possess a poetic. And without a poetic they are unable to combat the wickedness and snares of the devil. You cannot dialog with the demonically possessed. And the conservatives must dialogue, because they believe that reason is their salvation. So the conservatives remain in the first circle of hell endlessly discussing how to formulate a rational argument against their liberal brethren. The “conservative” pundit William Buckley had a show called Firing Line in which he would debate liberals. From my perspective his guests were from the devil, but Buckley considered many of them his friends and entertained them at his house. Is that the proper response to the devil and his minions? Was Christ merely being whimsical when he said that the tares, the bad seeds, were the “children of the wicked one”? Is the Socratic dialogue the essence of the West, or is Burke’s charity of honor the essence of the West? Men who believe in the charity of honor do not dialogue with the children of the wicked one.

In his poem, “The Second Coming” (1920), William Butler Yeats says that

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

But Yeats is not looking to the Second Coming of Christ, he is looking for a new god –

The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Who is the rough beast that was within the womb of Europe? He is the natural savage, the end product of the new scientific view of nature, which is nothing more than the old paganism in a different form.

Yeats compared Zeus’ seduction of Leda and the subsequent birth of Helen of Troy as the annunciation that founded Greece (see “A Vision” and “Leda and the Swan”). He found no poetry in Christianity, so he sought to return to the pagan Greeks. But the European people rejected Yeats’ poetic for their own blend of pagan, scientized nature worship. Is our ancient faith really so uninspiring? Does Zeus and his pantheon of lecherous rapists and promiscuous goddesses touch our souls? Does the modern pantheon of colored gods and feminist harpies inspire us as the Man of Sorrows once inspired the antique Europeans? There is a seemingly impregnable, rational, natural wall that separates the modern European from the real world, the natural world of the antique Europeans. Only a passion that knows not seems can conquer that wall. A passion linked to His passion and His Sacred Heart. +