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Let's say there really is such a thing as "spiritual need", that at least some people have a valid emotional need to feel transcendance, to believe in values, in a purpose greater than themselves, to find a source of meaning outside of themselves; that this need is just as important and vital, at least for a subset of people, as the need to feel loved, to have community, to be respected.
In other words: religion is needed, and it can't be a purely atheistic, secular, humanist religion, it must contain a part of mysticism, or irrational, of transcendence, something that is forever beyond the grasp of empiricism, for which empiricism is simply off-topic.
Let's say that the above really is true.
I will still argue that Christianity is uniquely terrible at fulfilling that purpose.
This is because, if you look at the history of Christianity (the actual history, not the narrative Christianity tells about itself), how it was formed, the politics around it, why these particular sets of beliefs and rituals became official Christianity while a whole bunch of others were declared heretical, it is pretty clear that Christianity was never designed and optimised to meet the spiritual needs of its followers.
It was designed and optimised to gain followers at the expense of other religions.
The entire idea that not only Christianity is the only true faith in the entire world, that other faiths are not only false, but in fact manifestations of the Devil, that Christianity is a universal religion that is mandatory for everyone to follow, outside of which there can be no salvation, that entire communities can be collectively punished if just some among them are insufficiently christian, this is all clearly designed to scare people into Christianity, to make them enthusiastic about abandonning their current faith and join Christianity.
Of course, this doesn't work at all when it comes to satisfy the spiritual needs of existing followers.
First because spiritual needs, as emotional needs, cannot and will never be a one-size-fit-all. They are a very individual business, the needs of which will never be met by a standardized faith that serves the exact same factory-made dogma to hundreds of millions.
Indeed, the need for individual, family and community-specific spirituality has made so that Christianity has never actually managed to be united — not once in its entire existence. Protestants vs Catholics, Catholics vs Orthodoxes, Eastern vs Oriental Orthodoxes, Orthodoxes vs Nestorians, Niceans vs Gnostics, Marcionists, Arianists…, Gentile Christians vs Jewish Christians… Even Paul didn't preach the same Christianity as Jesus!
This factionalism is the direct consequence of wanting Christianity to be a homogeneous, uniform, indifferentiated faith — with means that any difference that actually arises is a potential split, so most of the energy of Christianity outside of gaining converts is dedicated to playing whack-a-mole with a never ending spring of "heresies", which in almost any other religion would just be seen as local/personal quirks, something that makes the religion richer and contributes to its vivacity, rather than being a threat to its integrity.
And of course, this means that Christianity has been particularly hostile to mysticism in its history and regularly purged it from its ranks, since nothing say "heterodoxy" like the idea of secret knowledge revealed to select individuals thru intense spiritual experience. Unfortunately, mysticism is kind of the whole selling point of religion, a central aspect of actually getting those pesky spiritual needs met. The more a religion operates on a purely literal, rational level, the less emotionally satisfying it is for its followers.
And indeed, Christianity is terrible at retaining followers. It's good at gaining them, because the euphoria of conversion is enough to sustain the first few generations. But once the amount of people born-into-it starts to greatly outnumber the number of potential converts, Christianity can only retain its followers by locking the doors: everyone can get it, but no one is allowed to get out.
Christianity endured for so long only because whenever Christians became numerous and influential enough in a country, they made Christianity mandatory. Opting out wasn't an option, under penalty of death.
With a completely captive audience, Christianity didn't have to make any effort to meet the spiritual needs of its followers (nor to ensure that its theology was sound and made at least some sense — there's a reason why Judaism is theologically much more sound than Christianity; Jewish Talmudic students are encouraged to ask difficult, "bad faith" questions to their Rabbi, whereas Christian theology students are chastised and punished for doing the same), and so, over the centuries, Christians grew more and more spiritually starved, until the hunger was too strong and shared by too many, and the hold of Christianity broke down.
And once the doors were open, as soon as leaving was permitted, hundreds of millions of people enthusiastically rushed out. Is this what you expect to see from faith that meets all of its followers' needs?
The bleeding out is so strong that it even overcomes demographic trends. In the 1990s, US Evangelicals boasted that they were going to outbreed everyone else. They are now at their lowest percentage ever in the American population, and their decline has accelerated rapidly in recent years. It doesn't matter how many children you are having if most of them end up leaving the faith.
Religion may yet return to the West, but until Christianity has a complete overhaul and radically changes its design plan and its focus, it will continue to creep toward extinction in the general public.
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Pacifism
Thou shalt not kill was a religious command, and pacifism began as a religious or quasi-religious doctrine. The condemnation of individual retaliation appears in most “higher” religions and philosophies — so that the submissive non-resistance of Christianity is closely analogous to the non-violence of Indian religion, the non-assertion of Chinese Taoism, and the defiant non-resistance of Socrates and many of his successors. The power of non-violence over violence, of apparent weakness over apparent strength, of right over might, is illustrated in every mythology — Jack the Giant-Killer, David and Goliath and Daniel in the Lions’ Den, Rama and Ravan and Gautama and Mara, the Battle of Marathon or the Battle of Britain, Horatius on the Bridge or the schoolboy’s voice saying Play up, play up, mid play the game, or Thurber’s Termite. The difference is that Jesus and Gautama and Mahavira and Lao-tse and Socrates have ordered non-retaliation as a moral imperative rather than merely pointing it as a moral to a story. But it was only individual non-retaliation — the State still had to punish offenders at home and fight enemies abroad. And there were several personal inconsistencies — Jesus told us not to resist evil, but he drove the money-changers from the Temple by force; Socrates would not resist the Athenian state, but he fought bravely enough in the Athenian army; Marcus Aurelius as a philosopher was a convinced Stoic, but as a Roman Emperor he persecuted Christians and fought barbarians vigorously; Asoka was converted to Buddhism and renounced war, but he kept his conquests and ruled as firmly as ever.
The contradiction between the known wrongness and the continued use of violence has usually been rationalised by the assertion that life in this world is either evil or illusory, so that either you have to do bad things for good reasons or else it doesn’t really matter what you do anyway. Followers of theoretically non-violent systems have in practice tended to make life tolerable by treating the more difficult doctrines as counsels of perfection or to withdraw from it into asceticism or quietism or both. This tendency is of course greatly reinforced when a religion or philosophy becomes established by the State. “Every Church,” said Tolstoy, “excludes the doctrine of Christ.” The story of pacifism is ini fact the story of the way monks and heretics preserved the doctrine of Christ despite its rejection by the Churches.
The early Christians, who were heretics themselves, often took non-resistance seriously. It is well known that many of them refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods and were martyred; it is less well known that many of them similarly refused to bear arms in the Roman legions and were also martyred. Many writers, such as Origen and Lactantius, made uncomplimentary remarks about war; Tertullian’s De Corona condemned it out of hand. The change came at the beginning of the 4th century, naturally enough, when Christianity was made the state religion of the Roman Empire— when, according to the Spanish humanist, Luis Vives, “Constantine entered the house of Christ with the Devil by his side.” This was when the revolting doctrine of the “just war” was invented, though to see it at its best you must read Augustine or Aquinas, The Czech theologian, Petr Chelcicky wrote a book called The Net of Faith (1521), which described how the net had been strong enough to hold little fish like the early Christians but was broken by big fish like Constantine, so that they nearly all got away. But not quite all. The doctrine of non-resistance was held by early heretical sects like the Montanists and Marcionists, and later ones like the Albigenses and Waldenses always tended to condemn war (and, as often as not, the Warfare State as well). The same was true of 16th century humanists like Erasmus and Vives. But modern pacifism began with the followers of Wyclif, the Lollards, and of Hus. When the extreme Hussites—Taborites— were routed in 1434 by their moderate enemies�� Calixtines— after twenty years of bitter war, the survivors became non-resistants under their new name of Bohemian Brethren; the Moravians were a later branch who emigrated to America. Many “anabaptist” (i.e. extreme Protestant) sects followed the same pattern of pacifism following disaster after the fall of Minister in 1535. The Dutch Mennonites and Collegiants, the German Schwenkfelders and Dunkers, and the English Brownists and Baptists, were only a few of the unknown number of anabaptist sects who turned towards anarchist pacifism in the 16th and 17th centuries, when it became clear that the Kingdom of Heaven was not of this world.
But the best known of all the peace sects is the Society of Friends* which has been chiefly responsible for keeping Christian pacifism alive during the last three hundred years. There have been many later sects —the French Camisards, the Russian Molokans and Dukhobors, the AngloAmerican Shakers, Christadelphians, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses— but the Quakers have had the greatest influence, because they have taken the maximum part in conventional life with the minimum compromise of their principles, and because they have been so much more tolerant than most other religious groups. The Quaker “peace testimony” appeared as early as George Fox’s reply to Cromwell’s Army Commissioners in 1651 and James Naylor’s last words in 1660, and it was formally stated in the ofl&cial declaration of the Society in January 1661 : “We certainly know and do testify to the world that the spirit of Christ, which leads us into all truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the Kingdom of Christ nor for the kingdoms of this world .. When we have been wronged we have not sought to revenge ourselves. Never shall we lift up hand against any that thus use us, but desire the Lord may have mercy upon them, that they may consider what they have done.” This is a perfect formulation of the doctrine of non-resistance (and is exactly what Winstanley had been saying ten years earlier — how many disappointed Diggers became Quakers?). The remarkable thing is that the Quakers have never wavered from their first position.[2] Penn’s “Holy Experiment” of Pennsylvania was from its foundation in 1682 to the fall of the Quaker regime in 1756 the nearest to a non-violent state in history. Robert Barclay said in his Apologia (1676): “It is not lawful for Christians to resist evil or to war or fight in any cause.” Johnathan Dymond said in his Essay on War (1829): “Either we must refuse to fight or we must abandon Christianity.” This is still the Quaker view, and Quakers have always taken the lead in both the official peace movement and the unofficial pacifist movement. When A. C. F. Beales set out to write his History of Peace (1931), he was “surprised to find that every single idea current today about peace and war was being preached by organised bodies over a century ago, and that the world-wide ramifications of the presentday peace movement can be traced back in unbroken continuity to a handful of forgotten Quakers in England and America at the close of the Napoleonic Wars.” Thus it was quaker initiative that led to the formation of the British Peace Society in 1816 and of the National Peace Council in 1905, and Quakers have always been active in warrelief work (which has twice won them the Nobel Peace Prize). More important, it was Quakers who bore the brunt of resistance to the demands of the Militia Acts between 1757 and 1860, both by public protest and by individual conscientious objection. So they tried to prevent war happening and resisted when it did.
The point is that Quakers don’t actually follow the doctrine of non-resistance at all. Fox told Cromwell in 1654, “My weapons are not carnal but spiritual,” but they were highly effective weapons for all that. (“The armed prophet triumphs,” said Machiavelli, “the unarmed prophet perishes.” Fox’s soul goes marching on, but where is Cromwell’s?) Quakers have never been reluctant to protest against social injustice. Elizabeth Fry’s prison work is hardly “non-resistance”. It was Quakers who led the campaign against slavery, from the early protest of the German Friends in Pennsylvania in 1688 to the formation of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787, and right on to the end. In fact one of the most interesting things in the history of modern dissent is the close connection between professed nonresistance to evil and sustained resistance to racial oppression. William Lloyd Garrison, the American Abolitionist leader, wasn’t a Quaker because he wasn’t a Christian, but he was a total non-resistant, and so were many of his colleagues — such as Whittier, Ballou and Musser. Indeed he symbolises in his own career this curious connection, for he was not only the founder of the New England and American AntiSlavery Societies and editor of the Liberator but also the founder of the New England Non-Resistance Society and editor of the NonResistor,
One day it might be worth making a detailed examination of the Boston Peace Convention of 1838, where the Non-Resistance Societywas formed. It passed a resolution “that no man, no government, has a right to take the life of man, on any pretext, according to the gospel of Christ,” and issued a Declaration of Sentiments, including the following: “We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government . , . Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind [this was the motto of the Liberator] ... We repudiate all human politics, worldly honours and stations of authority ... We cordially adopt the nonresistance principle.” Here is pure Christian anarchism, derived from 17th century Puritanism— no wonder it excited Tolstoy so much. But these gentle unworldly pacifists were right in the front of the campaign against slavery, and Garrison was notorious for his language about the American slave-owners, which was no less violent than Bertrand Russell’s about the present rulers of the world. Non-resistance indeed!
The fact is that theoretical non-resistance only means non-resistance in practice when it remains silent. The mere declaration of conscientious objection to violence is a form of resistance, since it involves nonco-operation with the State’s key functions of oppression and war. The State can tolerate the abolition of slavery, but not the abolition of war as well. When Jesus abrogated the traditional talion law he was unwittingly challenging his State. When Dymond said in 1826, “Now is the time for anti-slavery exertion; the time will come for anti-war exertion,” he was similarly threatening his State and ours. As Bourne said in 1918, “We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State.” It is because most pacifists never realise this that they are constantly surprised by the hostility their behavour provokes. Most pacifists are really sentimentalists— hoping to get rid of war without changing anything else, so you can bully people as long as you don’t actually kill them. It was because the greatest of all pacifists— Tolstoy— saw through this sentimentalism that he became an anarchist after 1878 as well as a pacifist. He never called himself one, since he used the word to describe those who relied on violence, but his eloquent and unequivocal condemnation of the State makes him one of the greatest of all anarchists too. His remark that “the most frightful robber-band is not as frightful as the State,” is simply an echo from Augustine’s City of God without Augustine’s pious reservation: “Without justice, what are States but great robber-bands.” And because Tolstoy utterly denied the justice of the State’s authority, he had to proclaim the duty of total resistance to the State’s totalitarian demands. It is ironical that he derived the right of resistance to the State from the same source that Augustine derived the right of oppression by the State— God.
“The clear and simple question is that,” he said in his Letter to the Russian Conscientious Objectors (1909): “Which law do you consider to be binding for yourself—the law of God, which is your conscience; or the law of man, which is the State?” The answer is in no doubt. “Do not resist evil,” he said in his Letter to a Hindu (1908), “but do not participate in evil either.” The doctrine is non-resistance, but the implication is obstinate resistance. He had already said in his Letter to the Swedish Peace Party (1899): “Those in power neither can nor will abolish their armies.” And the solution? “The people must take the matter into their own hands.” Here we see how religious pacifism and political anti-militarism came to the same conclusion before the Great War, for what Tolstoy was advocating was in fact a non-violent general strike, individual civil disobedience on such a scale that it became direct action, a revolutionary technique similar to those proposed by William Godwin, Pierre Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker, an anarcho-syndicalist insurrection without the insistence on violence that disfigured the thought of Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta. But how can such a strike be organised? In the event the pacifists were shown to suffer from the same false optimism as the anti-militarists, for when the Great War came their non- violent general strike turned out to be just as much of a myth as the industrial; general strike; and they were reduced to individual conscientious objection when they were called up.
It is often thought that military conscription was unknown in this country until the Great War, but as well as the old Militia Acts there were the press-gangs and the most efficient recruiting sergeant of all, hunger; Professor Coulton’s reference to “hunger-conscripts under the name of volunteers” was no exaggeration, and it was hunger that kept the British Army going until war became too professional and too efficient in killing people. Conscription in its modern form appeared on the horizon only when the weakness of British military preparations was revealed by the Boer War (the first serious war for half a century), and the foundation of the National Service League in 1902 began a long campaign for compulsory military service. Even when the Great War came the Government delayed as long as possible, hoping that Alfred Leete’s picture of Kitchener saying Your Country needs You would be enough. But within the first year the failure of voluntary recruiting led to National Registration (of all men and women between 15 and 75!), and this showed that two million men of military age had decided not to fight for their King and Country. After this the process was fairly rapid, with “attestation” in October 1915, conscription for single men in January and married men in May 1916, and further extensions in March and May 1917 and again in January and April 1918. Conscription didn’t come to an end until August 1921.[3]
Nothing is more instructive than the way the leaders of the Labour Movement rejected every stage in this process before it happened and then accepted it afterwards, condemning the principle of conscription all the time they were collaborating with it. In the same way they managed between the Wars to oppose pacifism and unilateral disarmament on one side and conscription and rearmament on the other, and once again they accepted the fact of conscription when it returned in April 1939; after the last War, of course, it was the Labour Government that extended conscription in 1947 and also decided to manufacture and test the British Bomb. All with the best intentions. In much the same way the Official peace movement — the conference and arbitration people — which had been trying to build igloos in the Sahara for a century, collapsed as ignominiously as the Second International in 1914 and offered even less resistance in 1939. On both occasions the only people who stood firmly and unwaveringly against all war were the extreme pacifists and the extreme socialists (including many anarchists). Here we come up against the really crucial problem, which consists of two questions — Who are the real war-resisters? and How can the warresisters really resist war?
The answer to the first question was given in the Great War, when the Labour and peace movements utterly failed to resist, when the “conscientious objectors” were found to have political as well as religious principles, when the people who formed the No Conscription Fellowship in November 1914 and began going to jail just over a year later turned out to be mostly Quakers and members of the ILP. Real pacifism and real anti-militarism were the same thing, though some people followed one rather than the other, since they persuaded the same end by the same means. Religious people had to have political feelings to make the public protest, and political people had to have religious feelings to take the punishment. Remember how unpleasant it was to be a “conchie” in the Great War.
It is estimated that 6,000 men went to prison, and the common sentence was two years; worse, you could be arrested immediately after release ,if they wanted to play cat-and-mouse with you. More than 650 people were imprisoned twice, and three were actually put inside six times. Arthur Creech Jones, later a Labour Colonial Secretary, was sentenced in succession to 6 months, 12 months, 2 years and 2 years again; Fenner Brockway, founder of the NCF and later of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, got 6 months, 12 months and 2 years. (Notice how both of them were strong anti-racialists as well as anti-militarists.) At least 34 men were taken over to France in May 1916 and sentenced to be shot, though Asquith stopped any of the sentences being carried out; and more than twice that number died as a direct result of brutal treatment they received in custody, which was quite normal. It is a valid criticism of individual passive resistance to war to point out that it is ineffective, but critics must admit that it demanded considerable courage and determination. The obvious corollary is that this determination should somehow be employed more effectively, and the obvious hope between the Wars was that it would be properly organised.
But that hope was false. The NCF was dissolved in November 1919, though it was revived in February 1921 as the No More Wat Movement; in February 1937 this was absorbed by the Peace Pledge Union, which had been formed after Dick Sheppard’s famous letter of October 1934. (It is odd how Arthur Ponsonby’s similar declaration of December 1927 has been forgotten, while the Peace Pledge has become part of the national memory, along with the irrelevant Peace Ballot of 1934–35 and the unimportant Oxford Union resolution of February 1933). The result was in effect to dissolve the alliance between the religious and the political war-resisters, and this couldn’t be restored by the War Resisters’ International (which was formed in Holland in 1921) because its British section was the predominantly religious PPU. It is true that the PPU kept the faith alive and got well over 100,000 members by 1939, but it was passivist as well as pacifist, and when the war against Fascism came and thousands of men broke their pledges, it was reduced to publishing literature and counting up the numbers of COs in the registrations (seldom more than 2% and usually less than 1%). So after 1945 the situation was far more hopeless than it had been before 1914, because the war-resisters had failed miserably twice-over, and far more urgent too, because the Bomb meant that the next war really would be the war to end war, and everything else with it. The first question had been answered, but there was stili no answer to the second one — How can war-resisters really resist war? Perhaps it was just because everything had become so hopeless and so urgent that the answer came at last
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im NOT a marcionist obv the god of the old and new testaments is the same one god but. in the old testament god is so much. cooler isnt the word. he's got more vibes.
i guess what im saying is that while i think it's kind of silly when people talk about a "god of the old testament" and "god of the new testament" if i were operating within that framework id be more into the god of the old testament.
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Le Marcionisme est-il un antisémitisme ?
Grâce à la vigilance de la rédaction d’E&R, j’ai appris qu’avait eu lieu il y a quelques jours cet échange entre BHL et Haziza sur Radio J :
– BHL : … ce vieil antisémitisme de droite de la tradition marcioniste, c’est-à-dire les Juifs vengeurs, le dieu de revanche et de mort, et ainsi de suite... – Haziza : C’est du Soral !
Ce que BHL baptise la « tradition marcioniste », c’est la critique radicale du dieu d’Israël, soit ce que j’appelle l’anti-yahvisme. Il n’y a pas de lien historique direct entre l’anti-yahvisme moderne, né au XIXe siècle, et le marcionisme du IIe siècle, sur lequel on sait peu de choses. Mais Marcion est la figure tutélaire de l’anti-yahvisme parce qu’il voyait le dieu d’Israël comme un dieu mauvais, l’ennemi mortel et non le père du Christ.
On devine donc derrière la remarque de BHL le projet de rendre l’anti-yahvisme hors-la-loi en le définissant comme une forme déguisée d’antisémitisme.
Pour ses besoins rhétoriques, BHL classe le marcionisme comme étant « l’antisémitisme de droite ». Est-ce exact ? Non. L’intellectuel allemand qui a introduit Yahvé dans le débat sur la « question juive », et qui peut donc être considéré comme le pionnier de l’anti-yahvisme moderne, est Bruno Bauer, dont j’ai déjà parlé dans un article récent (section intitulée « Bauer, Marx et le moment nietzschéen »). Bauer était une figure influente des « jeunes hégéliens », également appelés « hégéliens de gauche ». Très versé dans la critique historique de la Bible apparue à son époque en Allemagne, il publia en 1842, à l’âge de 33 ans, deux essais sur « la question juive », arguant que celle-ci se ramène à la question biblique. Car Bauer découvre l’essence de la judéité dans le dieu jaloux, colérique et génocidaire que vénèrent depuis toujours les juifs.
C’est en réponse à Bauer que Karl Marx, son jeune collaborateur au Rheinische Zeitung, écrivit deux brefs essais La Question juive. Le but très explicite de ces essais était de dissoudre la question juive dans la question économique, en réduisant la judéité à l’esprit bourgeois, soit l’amour de l’argent. Ce sont les premiers articles remarqués de Marx, et, bien qu’ils embarrassent un peu les marxistes, on peut légitimement les considérer comme les fondations souterraines de toute l’entreprise idéologique ultérieure de Marx. Et l’on peut donc dire que le marxisme a servi à étouffer dans l’œuf le mouvement intellectuel qui, sans lui, se serait peut-être appelé le bauerisme.
Que BHL s’en prenne au marcionisme et qu’Haziza colle aussitôt cette étiquette à Alain Soral, voilà qui en dit long. Cela nous dit que l’anti-yahvisme fait mouche, tape dans le mille. L’anti-yahvisme s’attaque au dieu d’Israël, c’est-à-dire à l’essence d’Israël. C’est donc la seule critique ultime et définitive d’Israël.
Son inconvénient est qu’il irrite les catholiques. Mais étant donné que la critique d’Israël est à mes yeux la cause prioritaire, et que l’anti-yahvisme me semble être pour cela un moyen bien plus efficace que le christianisme (avec sa thèse du « peuple élu mais déchu »), je continuerai à faire de l’anti-yahvisme du mieux que je pourrai, en tout cas jusqu’au jour où l’anti-yahvisme sera condamné par la loi. Le risque d’être, en tant qu’anti-yahviste déclaré, traité d’antisémite, ne m’inquiète pas trop. En 2018, j’ai été suspendu de mon poste de professeur d’anglais à l’Éducation nationale à la suite d’un rapport de mon rectorat dont voici la conclusion :
« Il apparaît de l’étude de la production de Laurent Guyénot [que] cette production est fortement marquée idéologiquement. Laurent Guyénot est et revendique être antisémite, complotiste, soralien donc négationniste et qu’il constitue, de fait, un grave danger pour l’intégrité des élèves qui lui sont confiés puisqu’il diffuse dans ses classes son matériel de propagande. »
Avec ça, je suis immunisé.
L’anti-yahvisme n’est pas seulement la seule critique radicale (qui s’attaque à la racine, radix) d’Israël. C’est aussi la seule critique bienveillante, car elle vise à libérer les juifs de l’emprise du dieu sociopathe qui les terrorise.
L’anti-yahvisme au secours des juifs
Dans un article récent, « Yahvé, le dieu terroriste », j’ai rappelé que Yahvé veut répandre la terreur d’Israël parmi les goyim (Deutéronome 2:25). Mais avant de terroriser les goyim, Yahvé terrorise les Israélites eux-mêmes :
« Et si malgré cela vous ne m’écoutez pas que vous vous opposiez à moi, je m’opposerai à vous avec fureur, je vous châtierai, moi, au septuple pour vos péchés. Vous mangerez la chair de vos fils et vous mangerez la chair de vos filles. Je détruirai vos sanctuaires, j’anéantirai vos autels à encens, j’entasserai vos cadavres sur les cadavres de vos idoles et je vous rejetterai. […] Je dégainerai contre vous l’épée pour faire de votre pays un désert et de vos villes une ruine. » (Lévitique 26:27-32)
L’obéissance que réclame Yahvé concerne toujours la séparation d’avec les goyim, et par-dessus tout le commandement absolu de la plus stricte endogamie.
« Si ton frère, fils de ton père ou fils de ta mère, ton fils ou ta fille, ou l’épouse qui repose sur ton sein, ou ton ami le plus intime, essaie secrètement de te séduire en disant : "Allons servir d’autres dieux" […], tu le lapideras jusqu’à ce que mort s’ensuive, car il a cherché à t’égarer loin de Yahvé ton dieu […]. Tout Israël en l’apprenant sera saisi de crainte et cessera de pratiquer ce mal au milieu de toi. » (Deutéronome 13:7-12)
Le règne de la terreur de Yahvé repose sur le sacrifice des juifs assimilationnistes. Dans le Livre des Nombres, Phinéas, petit-fils d’Aaron, scandalisé par la vue d’un Israélite marié à une Madianite, « saisit une lance, suivit l’Israélite dans l’alcôve, et là il les transperça tous les deux, l’Israélite et la femme, en plein ventre » (la tradition rabbinique précise que la lance les traversa tous deux durant l’accouplement). Yahvé félicite Phinéas d’avoir eu « la même jalousie que moi » et, en récompense, lui donne « pour lui et pour sa descendance après lui, […] le sacerdoce à perpétuité » (Nombres 25:11-13). Méditons sur ce fait que, selon la Bible, le sacerdoce est donné à la lignée d’Aaron (les Kohenim) en récompense pour le double meurtre, par empalement, d’un Israélite assimilationniste et de sa femme non juive.
Ce que ces épisodes soulignent, c’est que l’autorité de Yahvé et de ses élites représentatives (c’est une seule et même chose) est fondée sur la violence et la terreur exercées contre les Israélites eux-mêmes. Les juifs qui se socialisent avec leurs voisins non juifs, qui mangent avec eux et vont jusqu’à se marier avec eux, sont, selon l’idéologie biblique, des traîtres à Yahvé et à leur race, qui attirent sur leur communauté la colère de Yahvé et méritent d’être éliminés sans pitié. Leur extermination plaît à Yahvé et régénère le peuple.
La tyrannie lévitique
Qui est cette élite qui parle au nom de Yahvé pour maintenir le peuple israélite dans la terreur et l’obéissance ? Ce sont les Lévites. Les Lévites sont les gardiens du culte de Yahvé. Selon la Bible, ils n’ont pas de territoire comme les autres tribus, mais vivent dispersés dans les cités, entretenus par la dime et exerçant sur tous les Israélites un pouvoir religieux, administratif et politique. Dans un livre récent (The Exodus, HarperOne, 2017), le bibliste Richard Elliott Friedman a développé une théorie intéressante et convaincante sur l’origine des Lévites [1].
Friedman reprend une théorie déjà bien connue et largement acceptée, selon laquelle les Lévites ne désignent pas initialement une tribu, et que leur ancêtre éponyme (Lévi) est une invention secondaire. Friedman fait ensuite remarquer que, parmi tous les protagonistes israélites de l’histoire biblique, seuls les Lévites ont des noms égyptiens (Moïse, Aaron, Myriam, Phinéas, etc.). De plus, parmi les sources les plus anciennes de la Bible, seules les textes produits par les Lévites évoquent l’Exode, et montrent une certaine connaissance de l’Égypte. De ces indices et de beaucoup d’autres, Friedman conclut que les Lévites constituent un groupe venu d’Égypte. Le manque de trace archéologique de l’Exode s’explique par cette hypothèse que seuls les Lévites ont connu l’exode d’Égypte à Canaan en passant par Madian, tandis que les tribus israélites sont indigènes en Palestine (ce que les archéologues tendent à croire également).
Ce sont les Lévites qui ont introduit le culte de Yahvé parmi les Israélites, lesquels connaissaient le dieu suprême, appelé simplement El, soit « Dieu » (parfois Elohim, soit « les dieux »). La fusion entre El (Dieu) et Yahvé (le dieu d’Israël), aux conséquences incommensurables, est scénarisée dans le récit sacerdotal (source E) de la révélation du Sinaï, lorsque le Créateur, qui n’a été jusque-là désigné que comme El ou Elohim, révèle son vrai nom à Moïse.
Les Lévites sont les maîtres du pouvoir religieux. Mais dans certains épisodes évoqués plus haut, ils apparaissent comme la garde rapprochée et la police de Moïse, prompte à massacrer ses ennemis. Ils constituent la caste dominante qui maîtrisent à la fois le pouvoir sacerdotal et le pouvoir militaire (le soft et le hard power).
Les sources indiquent, selon Friedman, que ce sont les Lévites qui ont introduit en Israël l’obligation de la circoncision des nourrissons au huitième jour. J’ai présenté, dans un article intitulé « Le Saigneur des prépuces », la démonstration que ce rite est venu remplacer une pratique antérieure du sacrifice du premier-né au huitième jour, dont la trace subsiste en Exode 22:28-29, Ézéchiel 20:25-26 et Jérémie 7:30-31. Ces sacrifices étaient faits au nom de Yahvé et dans son sanctuaire (Lévitique 20:2-5), le dieu Molek ou Melek dont il est question dans certains passages n’étant à l’origine qu’un attribut de Yahvé, qui signifie « roi » et est appliqué plus de cinquante fois à Yahvé.
La circoncision au huitième jour est un rite traumatique qui imprime dans chaque garçon juif la terreur subconsciente de Yahvé-Melek. Vue sous cet angle, la métaphore de la « circoncision du cœur » (Lévitique 26:41 ; Deutéronome 10:16 ; 30:6) prend un sens particulier. C’est par la circoncision que Yahvé, le dieu de la terreur, tient les juifs.
En conclusion de tout cela, on comprend que l’anti-yahvisme n’est pas, ne peut pas être un antisémitisme ; c’est au contraire un philosémitisme radical.
Laurent Guyénot
Ne manquez pas Laurent Gyuénot à Nantes, le samedi 20 avril !
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[1] Friedman est un auteur influent depuis son livre Qui a écrit la Bible ?, paru en 1987. Il se trouve que j’ai fait traduire ce livre pour les éditions Exergue, que j’ai créées, puis revendues en 2002 à Guy Trédaniel, qui publie depuis sous ce label un peu n’importe quoi.
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not to mention the whole Synagogue of Satan / Jews literally worship Satan quasi-gnostic quasi-Marcionist notion that gets thrown around a lot among Christian antisemites (e.g. Kaiser Wilhelm)
The ruling powers during the first world war appear to have been convinced that their opposite numbers were Satanists.
I think it likely that the reason this polemic had any effect was because, being aristocrats in that time and place, although they had outwardly to follow Christian norms, they knew that all the mysteries had been revealed, but could not help but see themselves as Satanists (cf. the also late Victorian Crowley). This brought them into an uncomfortable relation with the Jews who had been insisting all along that the Christian mysteries were no mystery at all, but were plainly what they appeared to be.
The Great War, brought down by their own actions, shocked them and they felt collectively the fright of the esoteric Satanist who discovers after a working that "this stuff is all real" and so they naturally turned on the Jews to bear the guilt for them.
It's a very practical response for Jews to attempt to pre-empt this kind of betrayal/predation.
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doctor wat
#thirteenth doctor is a marcionist confirmed#the witchfinders#doctor who#thirteenth doctor#shitpost#antisemitism
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Docetists thought that Jesus Christ wasn’t killed on the cross bc he was wholly Devine and only appeared human. Proto orthodox Christianity was only one variety of Christianity in the first few centuries
It was only Marcionist Docetism which believed that Jesus as wholly divine meant that he could not physically suffer or die. Nearly every other form of docetist heresy both before and after the first council of nicaea were focused on the idea that Jesus never physically existed. The reason Marcionism was different was because its founder/organizer, Marcion of Sinope, was a close companion of a very important Gnostic, Cerdo.
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Kaiser Wilhelm II was a Marcionist.
>Our Christian God, the merciful, forgiving God, the personification of eternal love, our father, as Christ has taught us, had absolutely not the slightest thing in common with the vengeful bloodthirsty, angry old Jahweh of the Jews...the old Jew-God Jahweh is...identical with Satan!
Letter to Eva Chamberlain-Wagner (14 April 1927)
I think you made a bunch of wrong assumptions
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I’ll say it again, just because you don’t approve of the practices of people who claim the same religion as you do doesn’t mean that those people aren’t actually part of your religion. Especially when those people are using discourses and ideas that are present within your tradition in order to create their theologies and worldviews, and aberrant and abhorrent as they may seem. Let’s look at ISIS real quick. ISIS kills Muslims and sells others into slavery. The average apologist may say that this disqualifies them from being Muslims, because you’re not supposed to kill fellow believers. But... ISIS doesn’t see those Muslims as fellow believers. They’re dirty kaffirs (Shi‘a) at worst, or tainted enough by the world to not be considered true Muslims (Sunnis) at best. And here’s the thing; the slaughter and enslavement of Muslims deemed “not Muslim enough” has precedent in the Islamic tradition; Imam al-Maghili encouraged Islamic states to wage jihad against states whose Islam was considered “compromised,” and produced fatwas allowing captives to be sold into slavery. This has been an undercurrent in Islamic tradition for nearly half a millennium. Let’s look at Robert Bowers and the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. What he did was horrible. He walked into a place of worship on the Sabbath and gunned down eleven people. To do so goes against everything I believe as a Christian. Yet Robert Bowers is a Christian, cited a New Testament passage that called some Jews “sons of the Devil,” and initiated a one-man pogrom. And here’s the thing; Christian association between Jews and the forces of evil has precedent in Christian tradition. Saint John Chrysostom, a beloved Church Father, called Jews Christkillers fit for the slaughter. This has been an undercurrent in Christian tradition for over a millennium and a half. Satanism and many other counter-cultural “Satanism-adjacent” movements sprung from engagements with Christian tradition. Talk to some Satanists, and chances are many of them will have come from Christian backgrounds. They bring their old prejudices into their new religious community, whether or not they do it consciously. Many Christians have semi-Marcionist views when it comes to Jews and the Old Testament (“the Old Testament is barbaric, Jesus made it better!”). Some theistic Satanists trade that semi-Marcionism for full on Marcionism (“the God of the Old Testament is a deranged serial killer, but Jesus is a cool dude even if Christians misunderstand him”). If semi-Marcionism is antisemitic, full on Marcionism is definitely antisemitic. And let’s not forget the writings of Aleister Crowley (Thelema, I know, but the movements influence each other), the fact that Anton LaVey himself tried to set up this weird “affinity” that his organization had with both Nazis and Jews, and organizations claiming the Satanic label while promoting a Neo-Nazi ideology or aesthetic. You are not guilty of the nasty things your community does just because you’re a member of that community. But you are responsible for decrying nasty things your community does. When you see it, call it out. When you see it, call it out. When you see it, call it out. This isn’t a hard concept to understand.
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Unpacking Marcionism :
So, if you haven't seen my recent blog post and this is something that interests you; go check it out, its a couple posts down on my blog from this one.
This morning I came across a new word on Wikipedia (my source for this post), and it resonated a bit with me, although I still am unsure of exactly what it means. Let’s find out.
This is the point where reading the previous blog post will get you a bit caught up with my current theistic beliefs and just where I’m at in general on this topic.
Define Marcionism :
Marcionism was an Early Christian dualist belief system that originated in the teachings of Marcion of Sinope in Rome around the year 144.[1]
“In Marcionite belief, Christ was not a Jewish Messiah, but a spiritual entity that was sent by the Monad to reveal the truth about existence, thus allowing humanity to escape the earthly trap of the demiurge.”
For context “Marcion was the son of a bishop of Sinope in Pontus.”
This is where I really find myself relating to this system.
“Marcion believed that Jesus was the savior sent by God, and Paul the Apostle was his chief apostle, but he rejected the Hebrew Bible and the God of Israel.”
“Marcionists believed that the wrathful Hebrew God was a separate and lower entity than the all-forgiving God of the New Testament.”
“Marcionism, similar to Gnosticism, depicted the God of the Old Testament as a tyrant or demiurge (see also God as the Devil).”
Marcionists reject the Old Testament, specifically the God depicted in the Old Testament.
My situation seems to be rejecting that the Bible is actually written/inspired by the Christian God. It’s just genuinely so inconsistent and I cannot get behind that. The Christian God is supposedly Love, yet the Bible depicts otherwise. There are just too many things that don’t sit right with me, the teachings in the Bible don’t align with the God that I was taught about or the God that I feel within my mind.
So which do you let go of? I really don’t know. That’s why I found this Marcionism point of view interesting. Rejecting the Old Testament, and embracing the God and/or the Spirit who is depicted in the New Testament, all-forgiving and all-loving.
My arising issue though is still this: The Bible was written by men, human men. Even the New Testament. I just can’t see how it is free of flaws and human desires. It’s also a dualist belief system.
Which makes me question this, does an opposing spiritual force exist? Does Satan, the Devil, exist? I have no idea, I don’t think I believe in Hell so I also don’t know if this ‘evil being’ exists. I think that this adds a layer to my beliefs and ideas but I don’t think it encompasses it thoroughly.
With Love & Light
Jordan Christine <3
#marcionism#witch#withcblr#witchcraft#christian witchcraft#catholic witch#christian mystic#Christianity#christian witch#Catholic Witchcraft#christian agnosticism#agnostictheism#agnostic theist#agnostic#atheist#Christian#theism#religion#witch aesthetic#green witch#eclectic witchcraft#wicca#christopaganism#christopagan#witchy community#witchy#spiritual#spirituality#spiritual life#Jesus Christ
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Oh Mormons are worse than just arians, they're gnostics, and marcionists, and whole slew of other early christian heresies all jumbled into one """christian""" religion
SMH. No argument from me, bro.
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Comment le messianisme juif est-il devenu athée ?
Vocabulaire :
Tikkun : concept de la kabbale lurianique qui signifie rectification, transformation des âmes par la pratique des mitzvoth.
Mitzva, pluriel mitzvoth : commandement(s) de Dieu.
Kelipa, pluriel kelipoth : écorce ou prison de l’âme à son niveau le plus bas, celui de la Nefesh.
Nefesh : âme ; dans la kabbale lurianique c’est le plus bas niveau de l’âme.
Selon le grand historien et penseur juif israélien d'origine allemande Gershom Scholem, une partie du judaïsme messianiste est devenu athée après la déception et la frustration ressentie quand en 1666 Sabbataï Tsevi, qui s’était proclamé messie et avait entraîné derrière lui la majorité des juifs européens, africains ou asiatiques, s’est converti à l’islam. C’est ce passage du messianisme juif teinté de kabbale lurianique à l’athéisme que je vais tenter de résumer en m’appuyant sur le livre où Gershom Scholem décrit cette surprenante « conversion » : Aux origines religieuses du judaïsme laïque, sous-titré De la mystique aux Lumières.
Selon Gershom Scholem le passage du judaïsme à l'athéisme aurait été initié par l’un des deux théologiens de Sabbataï Tsevi, Abraham Miguel Cardoso, l’autre étant le très fameux Nathan de Gaza.
Comment ce passage s’est-il effectué ?
En dépit de tous ses débordements gnostiques et de sa profusion parfois délirante la mystique juive ne s'était jamais attaqué à Dieu lui-même, ni à la pratique du judaïsme. La cabale d'Isaac Luria faisait reposer le tikkun – il s'agit de la rectification qui permet la remontée vers l'Un des étincelles divines prisonnières des kelipoth (la kelipa joue dans la kabbale lurianique le même rôle que la matière mauvaise qui retient prisonnières les âmes ou parcelles de la divinité dans le mythe manichéen) – sur la pratique des mitzvoth (une mitzva c’est un commandement de Dieu). Un kabbaliste lurianique conséquent se devait donc d'être un juif exemplaire.
Que s’est-il passé avec Cardoso ? Une chose véritablement inouïe. Vous connaissez sans doute la doctrine de l’hérésiarque Marcion du Pont qui affirmait que le Dieu révélé en Israël, le Dieu de l’ancienne alliance, n’est pas le Dieu de Jésus. Le Dieu de Jésus est le vrai Dieu, le Dieu bon qui n’est pas responsable de la création matérielle mais qui envoie un sauveur pour racheter les âmes censées être issues de manière indirecte de la substance divine. Le Dieu de l’ancien testament est, selon les marcionistes, le démiurge mauvais responsable de la création matérielle et du mal. Cette doctrine a été vigoureusement combattue par les Pères de l’Église au deuxième siècle de notre ère. Et bien de manière très surprenante Abraham Miguel Cardoso a repris à son compte cette doctrine. Dans la kabbale l’Ensof (peut-être dérivé du grec En Sophia, l’Un-sagesse) désigne le Dieu transcendant de la bible hébraïque, celui dont le nom est YHWH et que les juifs prononcent par respect Adonaï. Et bien Cardoso a eu le culot phénoménal de dire et d’écrire que l’Ensof n’est pas le Dieu des Hébreux puis des juifs mais la source qui n’est pas responsable de la création du monde. Le vrai Dieu d’Israël, celui que la bible nomme YHWH, serait le démiurge ! Cardoso a, sans doute par défi, dépit et ressentiment, repris à son compte la doctrine de Marcion, l’un des pires ennemis des juifs ! Selon lui le Dieu de Jésus serait l’Ensof donc en aucun cas le Dieu d’Israël.
Cardoso, qui en tant que marrane avait été catholique avant de retourner à la religion juive, ne pouvait pas ignorer que Marcion considérait le Dieu des juifs comme Satan !
De manière tout aussi surprenante Cardoso affirmait que l’homme peut connaître le Messie et son Dieu, le démiurge, par la raison seule ! La connaissance humaine, dérivée de la raison seule, permet, selon Cardoso, de connaître l’Absolu, sa volonté et ses moyens !
On tient ici les cinq fils qui tissent la modernité :
1. Dieu est rejeté hors du monde de manière radicale. Le christianisme, le judaïsme et l’islam affirment à la fois la transcendance ontologique de Dieu et son immanence, sa présence active dans le monde par sa volonté, sa connaissance, sa toute-puissance, ses commandements et sa grâce. Mais Cardoso rejetait Dieu totalement hors du monde. Ce qui revient à dire qu’il n’agit pas dans le monde donc n’existe pas. Le pas suivant sera franchi par certains athées qui diront que Dieu n’est pas, ni hors, ni dans le monde.
2. La raison seule suffit à connaître le Dieu qui agit dans le monde, son Messie et ses moyens.
3. Ceux qui ont la connaissance fondée sur la raison seule, les Sachant, les Initiés, jouent un rôle particulier parce qu’ils ont en eux la puissance du démiurge, celui que les marcionistes appelaient le Dieu mauvais, le Satan ! Ce sont en fait, collectivement ou individuellement, des messies !
4. Sans être dualiste sur le plan ontologique, la structure de la métaphysique de Cardoso est très proche de la métaphysique du mythe manichéen ou du dualisme marcioniste. Il n’y a qu’un pas, franchi par certains Initiés, pour faire du Dieu des chrétiens, des juifs traditionalistes et des musulmans le Dieu mauvais aussi bien sur le plan ontologique que moral.
5. Il semble que Cardoso n’ait pas été lui-même antinomiste. Par contre l’antinomisme s’est manifesté chez ses épigones et continuateurs par le rejet violent des cultures et civilisations traditionnelles, juives, chrétiennes et musulmanes qui affirmaient à la fois la transcendance et l’immanence de Dieu. C’est cet antinomisme qui se manifeste aujourd’hui dans la volonté prométhéenne de ces mondialistes qui cherchent à construire une société totalitaire dont toute transcendance sera bannie, une société de la raison humaine divinisée.
Cardoso s’est donc attaché à détruire le judaïsme de l’intérieur, de manière raisonnée, systématique et acharnée. Ses successeurs lointains se sont attaqués aux autres religions monothéistes, le christianisme et l’islam ainsi qu’aux sociétés chrétiennes et musulmanes.
Bien entendu ni Cardoso, ni les juifs ne sont à l’origine de l’athéisme qui existait déjà dans l’antiquité grecque ou romaine.
Un article de encyclopedia.com sur Abraham Miguel Cardoso :
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the Marcus the Evangelist fandom is dying reblog if you are a true Marcionist
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D'ailleurs le diable a toujours essayé de diaboliser l'Ancien Testament, notamment au moyen des nazis ou des marcionistes. https://www.instagram.com/p/CRwM5KKslLO/?utm_medium=tumblr
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by Revilo P. Oliver
Editor’s Note: Dr. Revilo P. Oliver was a distinguished Classics professor at the University of Illinois for 32 years, was a founder of both the John Birch Society and National Review magazine, and was a leading partisan of our race in the latter half of the 20th century. This review of Lawrence Brown’s Might of the West is one of Oliver’s best essays. Originally published in Instaurationmagazine in slightly edited form, it appears here for the first time as originally written by Dr. Oliver, based on a new transcription of Dr. Oliver’s typescript. — Kevin Alfred Strom.
LAWRENCE R. BROWN’s The Might of the West is one of the fundamental books of our century. It was published by Obolensky in 1963, just at the time at which that publishing house passed into the hands of new owners, who virtually suppressed the book. It has only now become generally available, thanks to the enlightened generosity of a young architectural designer in Wisconsin, who provided the money for a photo-offset reproduction of the original printing, necessarily but unfortunately including its rare typographical errors, a few deplorable misstatements, and a conjectural number of passages that the author would doubtless have wished to revise, since it is most unlikely that a vigorous mind would have learned nothing from study and meditation in seventeen years. These, however, are but minor blemishes in a great work, and we should be grateful for what has been given us.
Inquiry into the causes of the rise and fall of nations and civilizations is at least as old as Herodotus, but study of the problem in the form in which it presents itself so acutely and so urgently to us may be said to begin with Théodore Funck-Brentano’s La Civilisation et ses lois (1876), which was followed by such notable works as Brooks Adams’ The Law of Civilization and Decay (1896) and Correa Moylan Walsh’s The Climax of Civilisation (1917). All earlier works, however, were so eclipsed by Oswald Spengler’s magisterial and celebrated Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–22) that all subsequent writing on the subject must be defined by reference to Spengler, although the course of history since 1922 has shown that he failed to take into account some forces that have powerfully distorted the development of our civilization, if not of others.
Although Mr. Brown’s purpose is to illuminate the true nature and vital force of our culture rather than to formulate general laws of historical change, he follows Spengler in regarding our Western civilization as unique and discrete, having no organic relation to any other civilization: it began around 900 and has brought us to our catastrophic present. He has dropped, however, Spengler’s conception of a civilization as a quasi-biological organism with a fixed life-span, whence it follows that the West is now senile and, like an old man, has no future but the ineluctable decay of vitality that precedes an unescapable death. In this respect, therefore, Mr. Brown’s philosophy, as he formulated it in 1963, is basically optimistic: Far from being doomed by some inherent or external destiny, we of the West, if only we come to our senses and understand who we really are, may be just beginning the great age of our civilization.
Like Spengler, Mr. Brown identifies the Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu, and Chinese civilizations as discrete from our own. He concisely surveys their political development and their accomplishments in mechanics, architecture, and the arts, with the notable exception of literature, for which he evidently feels indifference, if not disdain. He also recognizes Spengler’s “Magian” culture but uses the term ‘Levantine’ to designate it, devoting special attention to its dominant superstitions and the mentality that produced them. These other cultures, and even the Classical, are described for purposes of contrast, for Mr. Brown, who doubts the possibility of establishing an historical causality, writes to enable us “to discover our lost identity.”
He makes a strong case — stronger, I should say, than Spengler’s — for the independence of European civilization, and he is eminently right in making the principal criterion the great technology and the scientific method that are the true glory and the unique creation of our culture.
Our civilization, on his showing, was born in the time of Charlemagne, and it went through the process that Spengler calls pseudo-morphosis, by which a young people, emerging from barbarism, takes over some of the outward forms and the learning of a more advanced civilization. We took over very little from the Classical and much from the Levantine world, which was represented by both Byzantium and Islam. But we failed — at the time and ever since — to eliminate the alien elements after they had served their purpose, and that is why it has been the West’s dolorous fate to be “a society whose inward convictions have been at hopeless variance with its outward professions.”
Mr. Brown proves that the characteristic tendency of our dominant mentality appears in Anselm; he rightly emphasizes the great intellectual activity of the Scholastics; and his disquisition on the emergence of real scientific inquiry among them will astonish, I dare say, all but the very few of our contemporaries who take the trouble to read the most uninviting of all the uninviting texts in Mediaeval Latin.
European civilization was developing the great power for which its unique mentality destined it, and it was gradually expelling the alien elements it had absorbed at its origin, when its progress was checked by a disastrous recrudescence of those alien elements, which thus came to dominate and pervert it for centuries. The two fatal poisons were Christianity and Humanism, which Mr. Brown regards as concurrent and complementary infections of the mass mind, and not as essentially antithetical forces. He accordingly sees “the Renaissance and the Reformation as two manifestations of the same retreat from the exacting moral and intellectual responsibilities of Western civilization.”
Of the two forces of pseudo-morphosis thus identified, one is obvious, but the other will startle most of our educated contemporaries. Both require some consideration, since the thesis of The Might of the West depends upon them.
Mr. Brown has the courage to state explicitly an indubitable fact that most historians timidly evade or leave to be inferred from hints and ambiguities, lest they expose themselves to fanatical reprisals. In the decaying Roman Empire, Christianity was devised by the Jews who had long before infiltrated all the prosperous parts of it to exploit the inhabitants. Most of those Jews, as is common in Jewish colonies, knew only one language, the one required by their business. They spoke and read the Greek koine, which was the language of international commerce and industry at that time, known throughout the Roman Empire and in a large part of Asia outside its boundaries. The koine, furthermore, was the only language generally known throughout the populous regions of the Empire that lay east of Italy; and in some of the larger cities of the west it was the language habitually spoken by large sections of the lower classes. Where Latin was the language of the common people or useful for penetrating higher circles, Jews naturally learned Latin, and it may be that where Latin was the common tongue, low-grade Jews, engaged in petty retail trade, knew only Latin, but the Greek koine, not any Semitic dialect, was the language of the international Jews.
These enterprising Jews knew their own pseudo-historical myths only in the text of the Septuagint, which, finally assembled early in the first century B.C., is the oldest form of the so-called Old Testament and does not show the excisions and revisions made in the much later text in Hebrew and Aramaic that Christians now strangely consider more “authoritative.” And the Jewish merchants, slave-dealers, and financiers in the great cities of the Empire can have had little interest in, and perhaps little knowledge of, the numerous goëtae who agitated the squalid peasants of Palestine with their futile claims to be christs.
What the prosperous and superficially civilized Jews of the Empire may have privately believed cannot, of course, be ascertained: it is likely that they differed among themselves and changed their opinions over the years. They must have seen the obvious profit to be derived from peddling a religion that emphasized their great racial superiority as the Chosen People while enabling them to convert and control a large population that would have refused to submit to the barbarous sexual mutilation and absurd taboos enjoined by “orthodox” Judaism. The new cult, ostensibly based on a special message from Yahweh transmitted through a christ in a remote and little-known region of the Empire, was an ideal instrument of proselytism: it appealed to the malice and resentments of the mongrel proletariat, while enjoining on them conduct that inhibited resentment of the Jews’ commercial practices. And it served as a cover for Bolshevik agitation that could not be identified as exclusively Jewish and would keep the consciousness of the masses permanently focused on exciting illusions and fanatical controversies.
This explains what would be otherwise mysterious. When one Christian sect prudently modified its revolutionary activity sufficiently to convince despots that it could be a useful support of their power, their first concern was to extirpate the large and, it seems, politically passive Christian sects that rejected the Jewish Septuagint. As Mr. Brown observes, the largest of these sects, the Marcionists, were the really “gentile” Christians, and their suppression would be a paradox, if one believed that the so-called New Testament, which was put together to provide an “authority” for denouncing them, had actually been intended to show a new dispensation by an omniscient god who had changed his mind about his former pets. And this explains why it was only later, after the “orthodox” sect had acquired governmental power, that the Christian mobs, described, e.g., by Libanius, surged through the predominantly Greek cities of the Empire, pillaging and looting the property of their betters and murdering “pagans.” The non-Jewish Christian sects had to be disposed of first.
Mr. Brown devotes a large section of his book to his reconstruction of the obscure history of early Christianity, but we need not follow him through that dismal swamp of fiction, forgery, and fraud. It was the “orthodox” version which, with slight variations, was imposed on the Germanic tribes who took over the European parts of the dying Empire. In their ignorance, they believed the Bible to be an historical record of events that had actually taken place at specified times in known parts of the world, and they therefore accepted it as proof of the intentions and power of a god to whose will and caprices men had to conform, however immoral or unreasonable the divine edicts might appear to mortals.
The Might of the West gives us the clearest and most cogent summary I have seen of the intellectual development of our civilization in the Middle Ages. As seeds sprout beneath a layer of fertilizing compost and send their shoots up through it, so the native rationality of our race grew up through the protective mantle of its religion. The Scholastics labored to make the cult logically intelligible, and at the same time they virtually founded modern mathematics. The better minds saw through the veil of Christian ignorance and rediscovered such fundamental facts of the real world as the sphericity of the earth. Technology, the source of our unique power, began more and more to harness the forces of nature by, for example, building windmills and watermills, breeding sturdy draft horses, inventing an efficient harness for them, and so nicely computing stresses that the audaciously soaring architecture of the Gothic became possible. The feudal rulers, furthermore, gave formal assent to the religion, but conducted their affairs with worldly prudence, while good society insisted on standards of personal honor, honesty, valor, and chivalry for which there was no sanction in the supposed revelations of their deity. Christianity was being gradually but surely civilized.
Our contemporaries generally accept as a truism the view that men’s minds were fettered by superstitions about the supernatural until they were emancipated by the Humanism of the Renaissance, but thoughtful students will at least admit that the proposition is open to doubt. Egon Friedell may not greatly exaggerate when, in the first volume of his Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit, he claims that Nominalism, which was the final and greatest triumph of the Scholastics and antedated even the earliest symptoms of the Renaissance, was more decisive in its effect on our history than the invention of gunpowder or of printing. Nominalism illuminated the impassable gulf between our racially instinctive standards of morality and the tales in the Bible. It did not question the historicity of those stories or expressly repudiate the religion, but it did make it incontestable that the god who was an accomplice of the Jews when they swindled the Egyptians and stole their property obviously offended our concept of justice. The only escape from that dilemma was to regard as just whatever that capricious and ferocious god did, however repugnant his conduct was to us. Could the Catholic unity of Christendom have been indefinitely preserved after that demonstration?
Mr. Brown does not ignore that question, although he does not press the point as far as he might in support of his contention that Humanism was a bane, rather than a benefit, to our civilization. He admits that “It is, of course, a fair question whether the Western Catholic Church could ever have been Westernized sufficiently to keep within it scientific thought and still retain enough of the sacred tradition to be considered Christian.” The crux here lies, perhaps, in the fact that Nominalists invariably affirm their unquestioning belief in the prevailing religion. When such affirmations are made in the Renaissance by such highly intelligent men as Laurentius Valla or Pomponatius, we naturally scent protective hypocrisy, although they may have sincerely been unwilling to disturb the social order, and would have made the same asseverations, had they been able to do so with impunity. We do not like to think of Mediaeval men in the same terms, and when we do, we must remain undecided. The great Nominalists were all ecclesiastics, and we can never know whether William of Occam, for example, was personally so devout that he never questioned his faith or had an understandable desire not to be incinerated—or an equally understandable desire to continue untroubled enjoyment of his sacred perquisites—or had a prudent prevision of the catastrophes that afflicted Europe when the empire of the Church and the unity of Christendom was shattered. The important point, perhaps, is that if there was scepticism or disbelief, it was not expressed in any form that could agitate the masses.
To any unprejudiced mind, the Protestant Reformation was a catastrophe. Europe was fragmented by irreconcilable hatreds which endure to the present day. Endless and almost innumerable wars were waged, not rationally for political or economic ends, but insanely to enforce obscure and paradoxical doctrines that the various Christian sects today have discarded as nugatory or illusory. For more than two centuries, the best blood of Europe continually drenched battlefields and washed city streets as men, inflamed with pious blood-lust, butchered their kinsmen in frantic efforts to deliver their omnipotent god from the clutches of the Antichrist. The genetic loss, which fell heaviest upon the northern countries, was great beyond calculation. Historians estimate that in just one of the many Wars of Religion, two-thirds of the population of Germany perished; and while that is an extreme example of the power of Faith, no country in Europe failed to sacrifice a part of its population to please Yahweh.
The intellectual and moral disasters matched the genetic. For more than two centuries, most of the intellectual energies of Europe, which could have been devoted to science and useful scholarship, were diverted from the tasks of civilization and squandered on interminable argumentation about holy ghosts, goblins, and witches. In their efforts to solve God’s puzzles, the clergy on both sides had to learn God’s own language, Hebrew, and cognate dialects; and Jewish influence became ascendent, sometimes paramount, through both the Old Testament and the theosophical rodomontade of the Kabbalah. And on the Protestant side, the fragmentation continued until any crack-brained tailor, disgruntled wife, or clever con man could have a revelation of what the Scriptural conundrums really meant and set up in business as an heresiarch.
During the Middle Ages, it is true, there were some outbreaks of religious hysteria, but the Church kept them under control. With the Reformation, the brain fever became epidemic. What was novel about it was that Biblical texts were used to incite revolutionary agitation among the masses, and civil wars. Whether or not the initiators foresaw the consequences of their arson, the blaze, once kindled, became a conflagration that swept over all Europe and mentally stultified it for centuries and even to the present day, especially now in such basically Christian heresies as Marxism and “Liberalism,” which claim to be atheistic but obviously must believe in the Devil, whose malevolent disciples, particularly “Fascists” and “racists,” they righteously long to exterminate.
What is startling about this book is the identification of Humanism as another deadly pseudo-morphosis. The usual view is that the Renaissance was an antidote to Christianity, and some scholars, such as Émile Callot, not only recognize the Reformation as (I translate) “a violent regression to the Middle Ages, by which the limpid stream of ancient wisdom would be contaminated for two centuries,” but argue that, strictly speaking, the Reformation was the effective end of the Renaissance. Mr. Brown sees matters quite differently. For him, the Renaissance was a second and simultaneous disaster. It was a pseudo-morphosis, an attempt to revive the Classical civilization, which had no legitimate connection with ours, thus imposing a pernicious illusion that long distorted our culture and, like the Reformation, prevented us from becoming aware of our true identity. He has thus neatly offended both the credulous and the educated among our contemporaries.
I shall not attempt to refute Mr. Brown. I can understand and sympathize with his position. It is quite true that the supreme question of elegance in Latin style, the Humanists’ absolute criterion, was not only a potent weapon against the churchmen, but also obfuscated intellectual issues. That tendency was inherent in the movement from the first. After the Reformation set Europe ablaze, we naturally make great allowances for scholars deficient in philoparaptesism (as they sardonically termed a willingness to be roasted for the glory of God), and we wonder what was inwardly believed by men who outwardly conformed to the official cult of the region in which they lived and even found gainful employment in employing their learning in its service. Before that catastrophe, however, there is less uncertainty. We are saddened, for example, when we see Petrarch, who is generally accounted the first of the Humanists, in violent controversy with the Averroists, who represented in their way the rational tendency of our civilization, because their Latin was barbarous, and it is with compassion that we see him dote on the ravings of Augustine and also carry our instinctive veneration for womanhood to the point of a mystical and more than romantic gynaeolatry. When we read Attilio Nulli’s study of Erasmus, we agree that the great scholar ought not to have been a Christian, even while we have to admit that the evidence shows that he, however inconsistently, probably had a genuine faith in doctrines taken from the New Testament, even though he deplored the irreversible error that had saddled the Church with such embarrassing and compromising baggage as the Old. And we are saddened to see him launch diatribes against his fellow scholars who used the literary convention of a strict Ciceronianism as a mask for their own irreligion—as, indeed, some scholarly churchmen continued to do until the middle of the Eighteenth Century.
It is true that, as R. R. Bolgar has said and Mr. Brown would not deny, the Humanists and their disciples turned to the great classics of Graeco-Roman antiquity not only as masters of literature but “above all as masters in the art of living,” and they saw in the society of the great ages of Greece and Rome a model to be imitated, so far as possible, in the modern world. One consequence of this, which may be cardinal in Mr. Brown’s thinking, will be noticed below.
Whether or not Mr. Brown is right, it must be observed that he writes with a polemic animus against Graeco-Roman culture, often underestimates or misrepresents the facts, and is sometimes led by his polemical ardor into ludicrous statements, of which the very worst is to be found in his comparison of the Hindu and Classical cultures on page 121. Mr. Brown knows very well that the Parthenon is not built of wood; that Athens was a thalassocracy and that Rome was a great naval power after 260 B.C.; that the poems of Homer were not first written down in the time of Marcus Aurelius; that the Greek alphabet was in use nine centuries before that time; and that Greek was written (in a syllabic script) and records kept as early as the thirteenth century B.C. Mr. Brown knew all that, of course, but his temper momentarily got the better of him, and a judicious reader, even if not charitable, will overlook this and other lapses, which are really irrelevant to the main argument.
Mr. Brown’s disparagement of the Classical civilization and his certainty that it was foreign to our own are based on its failure to develop a comparable technology. He was, perhaps, less than generous when he failed to mention that the epistemology of the New Academy, known to everyone through Cicero’s Academica, is precisely what is taken for granted in the methodology of modern science, but the problem is a real one, and I do not profess to know the answer. We should not try to evade it by observing that modern respect for ancient technology has greatly increased since the discovery of a machine, hyperbolically called a computer, for astronomical calculations, nor should we speculate about the possible prevalence in ancient society of the sentiment that led Vespasian to reject labor-saving machinery because it would deprive workmen of a livelihood. (See Suetonius, Vesp. 18.) There is no escaping the fact that the Greeks and Romans never had steamships, railways, or cannon. But our author could profit, I think, from reconsideration of some points in his argument.
He mentions, for example, the development of cannon. As everyone knows (and has recently been demonstrated by such developments as radar, atomic fusion, and guided missiles) the necessities of war are the mother of invention, and the major technical advances are the direct or indirect results of military need. The need to cast bigger and better cannon created the metallurgical skill without which most subsequent machines of any kind, to say nothing of steamships and railways, would have been impossible. Now one reason why the modern world developed cannon and the ancient world did not may be the fact that the Western world had lost the art of constructing the great torsion-artillery of Hellenistic times, which was superior in both hitting power and rate of fire to any cannon that Europe was able to produce for two centuries after cannon were first introduced. (See Erwin Schramm, Die antiken Geschütze der Saalburg, Berlin, 1918; cf. E. W. Marsden, Greek and Roman Artillery, Oxford, 1969).
Is technology the sole criterion? And is there not a radical difference between Mr. Brown’s two instances of pseudo-morphosis? The religious one was injected into our culture at its very inception, was enforced by fear of a terrible god whose existence and power was not doubted, and became the basis of all social organization from the very first. If Humanism was also a pseudo-morphosis, it was spontaneously and voluntarily adopted by Europe when our civilization was, on Mr. Brown’s own showing, in a quite advanced stage. It corresponded to no political, social, or economic imperative; it was fostered by no organization or class in its own interest; and it so appealed to the minds of our race that it triumphed over the determined and vigorous opposition of a large part of the Christian clergy, who rightly foresaw in it a threat to their business. In fact, I learn from the Jewish Chronicle (London) that even today an active admiration of Classical culture is a “fight against the Judaeo-Christian tradition” and that something so horribly “anti-Semitic” ought to be suppressed as “Fascism.”
The Classical world of antiquity must have captivated the modern mind through some charm, beauty, or world-view inherent in its surviving literature. From the end of the Fifteenth Century to the beginning of the Twentieth, our civilization voluntarily so identified itself with the Graeco-Roman that it devoted the greater part of the youth of every educated man to the extremely difficult and even painful task of so mastering the modalities of Classical thought that he could think directly in Latin and Greek and thus compose both prose and verse in those languages in conformity with the purest models and the most exacting standards. For that vast expenditure of intellectual energy there is no analogy in recorded history. And if that was pseudo-morphosis, what accounts for so great, so spontaneous, and so continuous an hallucination? One, moreover, that, as Mr. Brown complains, probably did impede the progress of science, technology, and the prosperity they create, since Humanism did divert so much mental energy of superior minds into its own channels.
Why the West turned in admiration to Antiquity is clear, even if we follow Mr. Brown in refusing to see any significance in the fact that the Classical and the Western are the only two civilizations that were created by Aryans—and flourished so long as Aryans remained dominant in their own countries. Apart from the beauty of an unsurpassed literature, and apart from the historical realism that one learns from Thucydides and Tacitus, the modern world sought in the ancient a system of civil ethics and of political life. The great men of antiquity, as their lives are reported, for instance, in Plutarch’s biographies, obeyed standards of personal honor as well as prudence which we instinctively admire, although Christianity contemns them. Cicero, for example, was indeed admired for his eloquence, but no less for his vision of, and devotion to, the Republic. And, as Mr. Brown is well aware, it was the Graeco-Roman conception of a mixed constitution (Cicero, Polybius, Aristotle) that ultimately produced the American Constitution, which most of us regard as a noble effort, even though it failed.
And here at last we have come to the crux of the problem. When I first read Mr. Brown’s breath-taking assertion that the Greeks and Romans lacked “a sense of politics,” I thought that merely another slip of an impassioned pen. But I think he meant precisely what he said, although he refrained from developing his point. One of the characteristics that most sharply differentiate the Classical civilization from all others except our own is its idea that a highly civilized people is capable of self-government through elected officers. The Greeks and Romans, so long as they controlled their own countries, were devoted to democracy in the ancient sense of that word, that is to say, government of which the policies are determined by a limited body of responsible citizens, who must be free, economically as well as politically, and thus must necessarily be supported by a subject mass of slaves or the equivalent. (Needless to say, the current notion that every anthropoid is entitled to a vote to express his whims is a form of gibbering idiocy that was unknown in Antiquity.) All the political convulsions of Graeco-Roman history arose from either divisions within the limited body of citizens or disputes about the most expedient extension or contraction of the franchise. It is true that no ancient state ever succeeded in stabilizing a constitution by which the franchise was so nicely adjusted that it was large enough to avert rule by self-interested cabals and small enough to exclude the feckless and ignorant, but the principle that free and responsible citizens (to the exclusion of slaves, proletarians, and aliens) were sovereign was maintained even in the Roman Empire until the Romans were supplanted by the descendants of their former slaves and subjects, especially wily Levantines, to whose radically different minds the very concept of political freedom and personal self-respect was childish and repugnant.
Now if it be true that our people’s infatuation with systems of elected government sprang from an attempt to imitate the politics of a civilization whose literature we admire, then the Renaissance was, as Mr. Brown claims, a pseudo-morphosis, and practically all of our political theory since the Sixteenth Century was an alien importation that the West, through a gross misunderstanding of itself, permitted to pervert its own nature and to drive it to an endless series of calamities. The true form of Western government, therefore, must be found in a stable hierarchical system based on personal loyalties and status within a virtually closed society, preferably the feudal system at its best or an adaptation of the Mediaeval polity to present conditions. The proximate collapse of the ochlocracy to which Americans are now mindlessly devoted will lend cogency to that proposition.
Our conceptions of history have inescapable consequences, and the consequences of Lawrence Brown’s historical analysis will startle and dismay most of the readers of Instauration. The second thesis of The Might of the Westwill particularly distress everyone who has not been cowed into pretending that races do not exist and who hopes that there still is a residual instinct of self-preservation in a large part of our own race, for if the Renaissance was a vast pseudo-morphosis, we must recognize the utter folly of trying to imitate a dead and alien civilization in the mad hope that we can succeed where it so notoriously failed. We must therefore purge our minds of the very notion of majority rule and all that it implies. It is not enough to recognize the suicidal insanity that has now enslaved us to our parasites and eternal enemies, for it would be equally unnatural to vest power in a legitimate majority of responsible citizens. We must even discard aristocratic dreams of rule by a majority of a highly select minority. It is idle to inquire whether the American Constitution failed because the requirements of property that entitled men to vote were set too low, or because it did not prohibit the immigration of Jews and other unassimilable aliens. It is futile to speculate whether the principle of human freedom and republican government could have been saved, had the Confederacy defeated the fanatical invaders and vindicated its independence. It is absurd to consider, as some of our more intelligent contemporaries are now doing, the creation of a viable society by resurrecting the Servian constitution described in Cicero’s De republica, substituting for property criteria of measured intelligence or racial purity. The very concept of self-government is like the Ptolemaic astronomy, which could not be saved by positing more epicycles or modifying it, as did Tycho Brahe, to eliminate the more glaring discrepancies: it was the basic idea that the heavens revolved about the earth that had to be discarded.
If the Renaissance was a delusion, we are deluding ourselves so long as we tinker with the Graeco-Roman idea of self-government—fatally deluding ourselves about the nature of Western man. In our civilization, the natural and requisite government must not only be completely authoritarian, but must be one of which the inner structure and purposes are concealed from the majority by means of a religion or equivalent faith to which citizens and masses alike will give implicit and unquestioning obedience. Mr. Brown explicitly warns us that
We should not fool ourselves into supposing that the core and source of strength of Western civilization can ever win the conscious applause of the great bulk of Westerners. Unconsciously they live by and treasure the standards of their civilization, but the intellectual acknowledgment of these standards runs counter to so many demands of self-esteem and self-justification, of childish hopes and pathetic dreams that most men can never verbally make this acknowledgment even secretly to themselves.
It follows, therefore, that so long as our civilization endures, ours must necessarily be “an esoteric, not a popular society.” If the West is to be preserved from the death that now seems imminent, it must be brought again under the control of Western minds, who, whatever the outward professions they may deem it expedient to make, will recognize and foster, quietly and more or less secretly, the implacably objective science that has “created the unique greatness of our society.”
It will have been seen that the problem whether our civilization is in its fundamental nature linked to, or totally independent of, the Classical has immediate and drastic implications for us. I have sought to elucidate the question, not to answer it. I shall only add that although Mr. Brown admits that “a connection between biology and civilization is an obvious historical fact,” and although he perceives that the Levantine mentality is totally incompatible with, and inimical to, our own, he does not consider the possibly relevant fact that the Classical, like all the civilizations known to history, declined and perished with the deterioration, mongrelization, and supersession of the race that created it. (The biological facts have most recently been set forth by Elmer Pendell in Why Civilizations Self-Destruct, Howard Allen, 1977.) Whatever weight we accord to this fact, we may be confident, I think, that Mr. Brown understands that his own premises require racial homogeneity in at least the élite of the West, and that only a scientifically rigorous system of eugenics can produce men of the rare intellectual capacity and the rarer dedication that will make them both able and willing to bear the enormous burden of high civilization.
Every reader must decide for himself how much of Mr. Brown’s analysis he will accept, but in so doing he will have been forced to face the fact that “the greatest ethical problem of our lifetime is to keep our society alive.” The word ‘ethical’ is well-chosen, for there can be no morality higher than one which will deliver us from “the ruin we have fought two world wars to achieve.” That profound perception alone would suffice to make The Might of the West one of the great achievements of the Western mind.
(October, 1979)
Unfortunately, the book which Dr. Oliver reviews here is no longer in print. Used copies are occasionally procurable at a high price. If there are any benefactors willing to finance a reprint, with Dr. Oliver’s brilliant review included as a foreword, please contact me via the links at the top of this page. — Kevin Alfred Strom.
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Les marcionistes éjectés sur Mars par la lecture de l’Évangile : https://francenationaliste.wordpress.com/2019/10/31/les-marcionistes-ejectes-sur-mars-par-la-lecture-de-levangile/ "Le marcionisme fait référence à Marcion, lui qui croyait pouvoir opérer une scission totale entre Ancien et Nouveau testament. Hélas, il est de bon ton chez les religieux contemporains de « l’antisémitisme » de tomber dans ce panneau. Le Maître du Logos, comme sa seigneurie de Lesquen, par exemple. Le second groupe qui a du mal avec cette réalité sont les identitaires européens (Jean Yves Le Gallou), ils ne comprennent pas que même si les européens ont été certes les plus inventifs, certaines découvertes ont pu venir d’Orient, et avant de venir d’Orient il faut surtout remarquer que ces vérités ont été avant tout universelles. Ce en quoi elles doivent s’appliquer partout et de la même manière. Ce qui n’a pas empêché le christianisme, toutefois, de relever essentiellement d’un esprit hellénique. Mais voilà un passage qui, somme toute, une fois lut à l’endroit expédie l’erreur sur la planète Mars, bientôt colonisée par Jacques Cheminade : ☧ « Isaac préfigurait Jésus-Christ ; Rebecca, l’Église : leur union et leur amour, l’union et l’amour de l’Église et de Jésus-Christ. Isaac, fils unique d’Abraham n’épouse Rebecca qu’après avoir été immolé sur la montagne de Moriah : Jésus-Christ, fils unique de Dieu, n’épouse l’Église qu’après avoir été immolé sur la même montagne. Rebecca est amenée à Isaac par les chef des serviteurs, Eliézer, aidé de ses compagnons : l’Église est amenée au Christ par le chef des Apôtres, Pierre, aidé de ses collègues. Eliézer reçoit l’ordre d’aller la chercher dans la parenté temporelle d’Isaac, avant de se tourner ailleurs : Pierre et les siens reçoivent l’ordre de s’adresser d’abord à la maison d’Israël, avant de s’en aller dans la voie des nations. Lorsque le mariage d’Isaac et de Rebecca se fait, la mère d’Isaac, Sara, était morte : lorsque s’accomplit l’union de Jésus-Christ et de son Église, la Synagogue, mère du Christ selon le temps, ne vivait plus. L’amour d’Isaac pour sa nouvelle épouse ne lui fait point oublier la perte de Sara ; il en conserve toujours un douloureux souvenir : l’amour du Christ pour l’Église ne lui fait point oublier la perte de la Synagogue ; après avoir pleuré sur elle, il lui garde toujours une place dans son cœur. »Abbé Rohrbacher, Histoire de l’Église catholique, tome 1, Librairie ecclésiastique de Briday, Lyon, 1872, p 91."
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