Tilting at Fake Crosses
Knowing the Stances
While I have a great deal of respect for
, and his well thought out positions (John, our back and forths have been nothing but respectful, and I know I have gained from them) - I feel like John fails to understand the Traditional Catholic position on many topics. This is certainly the case in his most recent piece on Nietzsche.
Slave Religion? Try Barbaric!
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”
- Tertullian, Father of the Church
The early Christians, while they had some slaves and women, were fighters. They had soldiers, hermits, traditors, judges….
A whole company of soldiers, the martyrs of Sebaste, were stripped naked and staked to a lake rather than give up the faith. One of them apostatized, yielded like a weakling to the hot bath that awaited, went into shock, and immediately died. One of the guards, seeing the strength of faith of the company, confessed the True Faith, converted, and took the place of the apostatizing man. Thus, the full forty souls gave glory to God and manfully died.
Hermits of the Church, on a regular basis, went forty days without food. We don’t have them now, but back then there were a special kind of hermit; the Skylite Hermits. These Hermits lived their lives entirely on a pillar, refusing to go down, and exposed to the elements. This practice began in the late 300’s and continued in the Western Church till the 12th Century, in the East until the 15th. Aside from the stoicism of the Skylites, there are the desert hermits, influential in North African mysticism, endurance to the elements, politics, etc.
The Traditor Debate was one in which cities burned. To me, I don’t know how anyone like Nietzsche can get away with calling Christianity a slave religion when you see people rioting in the streets all over the Empire over book burnings, things like the Date of Easter, and other things that we Moderns consider trivial. To me, these are signs of vitality and strength
Platonic Philosophy and Outlook was one of the hallmarks of the Church Fathers. Their views on the metaphysical, then virtues and vice are a mixture of scripture with a Platonic view on how the cosmos works. Look no further than St Augustine and his Just War theory. The Fathers of the Church are not ignorant of Human Nature, its beauty, its flaws, and how it works in the fallen world to attain to the beatific vision.
On the Current World
John then goes on about the current world. He has the idea that Christianity wants to reject all the findings of science, or to abandon what we have found:
The historiographical, archaeological, textual, geological, and astronomical discoveries of the scientific age that shattered Nietzsche’s faith, and the simple faith of so many others, cannot be undone ... not without the species giving itself a self-inflicted lobotomy. What has been learned cannot unlearned; what has been seen cannot be unseen. Naive innocence cannot be regained merely by wishing it so.
This is simply false. None of the major sects have this as a tenant of faith. Some of the traditional sects, and their practitioners like myself, are moving to rural areas. This is not a rejection of technology itself; but a rejection of modern culture and the reliance upon long supply chains that will break down in the coming wars. I can raise children here without them interacting with clown world, ever. I can have a lifestyle where I am much less dependent upon supply chains. But traditional Catholic and, I assume Orthodox and Muslim, tenants of Faith, say that there is no technology that has no moral use to it.
That is not to say that the uses it is currently put to are moral. Or to be trusted at large within the populace. Or any number of secondary and tertiary arguments that one can have.
And yet the world desperately needs a Reenchantment.
I do not disagree with the meaning behind what John is getting at here - that the average Joe needs to understand that we don’t live in a materialist world.
Yet, Catholicism never lost that. We never, if you actually believe the traditional teachings, lost the enchantment. We believe in Angels and Archangels guarding not just every soul of humanity, but guarding Countries and states, businesses, and other ventures. As angels are eternal; these spirits were created before the material universe, just for us, and waited to watch over us in our endevours.
What is more, is that we believe that Angels guide the planets, the weather, uphold the laws of physics, guide the markets, etc.
Then you have the fallen angels, battling these forces.
Or, as Nietzsche would call them…
Dionysius. Apollo. Other gods
And that, right there, is where we start to get at the heart of the issue. Christians take men’s words seriously - if he’s going to give things pagan names, we assume he’s a pagan, thus actually a part of that enchanted world view. He, himself, is showing that God is not dead, is filling his thoughts with the demonic, enchanted world view from a Christian perspective, and pursuing his Ubermensch in that light.
It’s not just that Nietzsche got so much wrong. It’s that he got them exactly the opposite of right. I can respect and understand someone like Ivan Throne talking about Machiavelli, and seeing it play out in Politics. I can understand, and will have agreements on some of what Marx had criticisms of Capitalism, but hate his solutions; with your run of the mill Marxist.
I can respect outright pagans, and have had good conversations on substack with them. But a Nietzschean, he goes beyond someone like Kimberly Steel or Sai that I’ve interacted with, and tries to make himself and the world around him more aligned with the “will to Power” he sees in himself. Which, as stated, is being subsumed in what Christianity sees as more aligned with the demonic because we take these words seriously, and not as mere symbols or metaphors.
So, to a serious Christian, that knows the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, that sees where things have come from the French Revolution (if not the Protestant Revolution)… we are done with it.
We’re just being honest - we, on an individual level, may or may not put up with some Nietzsche for a time. To get rid of the current Regime.
But, we’ll also be honest in that we see no place for him and his thoughts in a future home that includes us. We see those thoughts as Anti-Human, more than any that came before, and any that have come since.
And Christ came to perfect the Human, that it might become as God. He is the God-Man. Come to redeem all that is man that is beautiful, good, and true.
Not the God-slave.
Not the God-master.
The God-Man, and all that entails.
Excellent piece! Shaykh Faraz Khan noted in his essay 'The Incoherence of Secular Messiahs' a lot of points that you (& other Traditional Catholics, Orthodox, etc) will find great concord with:
https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-incoherence-of-secular-messiahs
Excerpt:
>> The void can only be filled by what is objectively true, good, and beautiful—by Truth. And only Truth can ground morality, science, politics, art, and human existence and effort. The fundamental “big” questions cannot be answered by a worldview that affirms only matter, or by a worldview of “nothing matters,” let alone by a worldview of value creation by “human gods,” each vying with the other by asserting his Nietzschean “will to power.” The nostalgia will only deepen without the Absolute. Meaning is beyond matter, so its source must be luminous and beyond matter. That is the gift of all prophets, and every age is their moment. <<
Thanks for the considerate reply!
I think there are some errors in the piece, however.
First, regarding the distinction between master and slave morality. This is not necessarily the propensity for violence: an angry mob is quite capable of violence; by the same extension, the lord of the manor is not necessarily inclined to it, or reliant upon it. The distinction is rather found in the ends of the morality, its area of concern, its definition of the good and the bad. Master morality holds up everything that is strong, bold, ferocious, and beautiful as the good, and their opposites as the bad; it holds up the exceptional man as the ideal, as opposed to the herd.
Slave morality, by contrast, is concerned with the good of the lowest. The good is charity, mercy, the redistribution of wealth. The good is the kind and pleasant man; the bad, by contrast, is the oppressor, who tends to be the strong and powerful man. Nietzsche's point was that the pre-Christian ideal of the good man, essentially the fierce warrior, is very similar to the Christian conception of the evil man, which characterizes this ideal as a brute and a tyrant; by the same token, everything pre-Christian Europe found contemptible and small, is by contrast celebrated. I do not say that this is necessarily so, or that it is in practice such a clean -cut distinction; only that this was Nietzsche's characterization.
Next, on the gods. I don't think Nietzsche believed in Apollo and Dionysus as literal, embodied entities, as the ancients did; he used them rather as metaphors for different ways of being, which are of particular relevance to the creative imagination of the artist. Iain McGilchrist has several times drawn parallels between Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian, and his own conception of the different roles played by left and right hemispheres, respectively. I alluded to this in my own essay, though did not make it explicit.
Finally, on science. Here I think you have gotten me utterly and completely wrong, to the degree that you are yourself tilting at a strawman of your own imagination. I do not say that Cbristianity wants to utterly reject all of modern science and technology. The point is far more specific than that: it is that after centuries of archeological digs, textual analysis, and historiographic investigation, no evidence whatsoever exists that verifies the Biblical version of history. Abraham, Moses, Solomon, and David appear nowhere in the records of other, supposedly adjacent cultures, a remarkable fact given that the Kingdom of Israel is portrayed as the axis around which the political and religious world turns. They are not present even as footnotes. The Egyptians have no record of Exodus ... though they DO record a very similar incident with the Hyksos, albeit one that differs in quite noticeable respects, which are not flattering to the Hyksos by the way. Jesus of Nazareth himself does not seem to be referenced in any reliable fashion in contemporaneous extra-Biblical texts; what references do exist, in Josephus for example, are all quite clearly pious frauds (which is not to say that Josephus himself was not a notorious liar) ... and the known tendency of monks and priests to commit pious frauds with regularity must surely be a fact that gives us pause when regarding the entirety of the Abrahamic corpus, which has been assembled almost entirely by such men.
At the same time, textual analysis has demonstrated innumerable parallels between Biblical texts and Hellenistic philosophy, particularly that of Plato, leading to the hypothesis that Israel itself may be largely the invention of Platonic philosophers in the 3rd century. Is this true? I do not know, but I am persuaded that it is quite plausible.
When I say that a mass return to Medieval Christianity would require a civilizational lobotomy, it is this body of work I am referring to, not some notion that the strictly miraculous aspects of Christianity require an abandonment of science.
You may of course see all of that as an attack on faith. Personally, I believe that if faith is to be worth anything at all, then it should be able to survive such interrogations ... not by closing its eyes and shoving its fingers in its ears, but by engaging with it openly and honestly, in order that the transcendental aspects might emerge purified and all the stronger, after sloughing off the detritus of thousands of years of accumulated errors and deceptions.