Judaizing, as Bernard of Clairvaux said, was a reversion by Christians grown weary of the freedom of the gospels and longing for the bondage of the law.
Revolution as practiced by the Puritan Judaizers was a reversion to a more primitive, pre-Christian political model. There was no separation of the two swords of pope and emperor here - or, to use the terms of a later more secular era, no separation of Church and State. Instead, pope and emperor were fused into one charismatic revenant of King David. -- E Michael Jones
Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and more reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of the equality of men. But the essential point of it is merely this, that whatever primary and far-reaching moral dangers affect any man, affect all men. All men can be criminals, if tempted; all men can be heroes, if inspired. And this doctrine does away altogether with Carlyle's pathetic belief (or any one else's pathetic belief) in "the wise few." There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob. Every oligarchy is merely a knot of men in the street—that is to say, it is very jolly, but not infallible. ~G.K. Chesterton: "Heretics,
Sexual liberation was the infallible sign that the revolution had arrived. -- E Michael Jones
As Plato had predicted in the Republic, anarchy led to tyranny.
The Ranters and Diggers were to England what the Taborites and Adamites had been to Bohemia and the Anabaptists in Muenster. "They taught ... that to the Pure all things are Pure (even things forbidden)". Soon Shabbetai Zevi began to preach the concept of "doing a good deed by sinning," an idea similar to the antinomianism the Ranters were preaching in England. After uttering the Tetragrammaton, Shabbetai Zevi ate pork and engaged in prohibited sexual activity; he encouraged his followers to do likewise. Zevi and his followers were expelled from Smyrna in 1651 because of the disruption they were causing. After traveling first to Salonika in Greece, then the largest Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire, Zevi and his followers wandered around the eastern Mediterranean, like an itinerant rock band hoping to bring about revolution by their songs. -- E Michael Jones
"The Enemy," Cromwell wrote, "were filled with much terror. And truly I believe this bitterness will save much effusion of blood, through the goodness of God. "
1000 Points of Light: Isaac Luria ben Solomon (1534-72) gathered a group of disciples bent on spreading his explanation of Jewish exile, of how recent catastrophes fit into the plan of divine redemption. To do this Luria had recourse to the Gnostic mythology circulating in the Mediterranean world since the first heresies of the Christian era. God had created bowls to contain the light of his understanding. The bowls proved incapable of containing that light and broke, scattering the light throughout creation, where it remained imprisoned in matter. The realm of qelippah, where the sparks are held in bondage, is a distinctly political realm "represented on the terrestrial and historical plane by tyranny and oppression." The purpose of man's existence on earth became tiqqun or healing, restoring the lights to their original place in the universe before the breaking of the vessels had released the forces of sin and evil. The Diaspora was now readily explainable. Jews were dispersed to be better able to discover the holy sparks, extract them from the matter they were enmired in, and then return them to their rightful place in the universe. When this was accomplished, the Messiah would come, and redemption would be complete.
Luria's essentially Gnostic thought projects evil away from the heart of man into structures outside of himself, which is to say, political structures, which can be changed by human effort. Instead of evil emanating from the heart, evil emanates from evil things in an evil universe, which is begging to be changed by those who know its secrets, i.e., the cabalists. "Practical" Cabala, says Scholem, "is synonymous with magic." Some of Luria's followers felt they could "force the end" by an act of "practical Kabbalah," which is to say by "invoking holy names and Kabbalistic formulae". Since the sparks have been "tricked" into matter, it might be possible to trick them out again by the use of what Hayim Vital termed "holy fraud".
The cabalists will lead the world to redemption through magic (or applied science and technology) and trickery, not by leading good lives while waiting patiently for the redeemer to come, because "in the Gnostic view, the evil that men do emanates not from their own flawed natures, but is the result of a flaw in the cosmos they inhabit, which they can repair".
Hayim Vital: "This is the secret why Israel is fated to be enslaved by all the Gentiles of the world: In order that it may uplift those sparks of the Divine Light which have also fallen among them... And therefore it was necessary that Israel should be scattered to the four winds in order to lift everything up."
Isaac Luria ben Solomon: "The Israelites are the first revolutionary internationalists."
The modern world emerged when medieval Judaism, having fostered northern Europe's rebellion against Rome, cracked open and fell apart when Lurianism found its fulfillment in Shabbetai Zevi, the false Messiah. Jewish Gnostic messianism, with the help of English puritan revolutionaries, was released from the ghetto into the nascent modern world that succeeded the medieval world and was its antithesis. The Messianic age of the mid-17th Century "was an age characterized by rebellion against the Catholic Church and the order which the Church had imposed on Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. A millennium of Catholic culture was threatened by the resurgence of an old idea." The resurgent old idea was the notion that the millennium meant restoration of the "terrene Kingdome of the Jewes," an idea condemned, but not destroyed, by the Council of Ephesus in 431. The new name for that old idea was revolution. -- E Michael Jones
“The power of rejoicing is always a fair test of a man’s moral condition. No man can be happy on the outside who is already unhappy on the inside… As sorrow is attendant of sin, so joy is the companion of holiness. -- Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Way to happiness)
"THE best reason for a revival of philosophy is that unless a man has a philosophy certain horrible things will happen to him. He will be practical; he will be progressive; he will cultivate efficiency; he will trust in evolution; he will do the work that lies nearest; he will devote himself to deeds, not words. Thus struck down by blow after blow of blind stupidity and random fate, he will stagger on to a miserable death with no comfort but a series of catchwords; such as those which I have catalogued above. Those things are simply substitutes for thoughts. In some cases they are the tags and tail-ends of somebody else’s thinking. That means that a man who refuses to have his own philosophy will not even have the advantages of a brute beast, and be left to his own instincts. He will only have the used-up scraps of somebody else’s philosophy; which the beasts do not have to inherit; hence their happiness."~G.K. Chesterton: "The Revival of Philosophy—Why?"
“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which,if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” -- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
In Brazil the increased incidence of microcephaly (babies born with small heads and brain damage) is likely being caused by the larvicide Pyriproxyfen, placed in drinking water supplies to control mosquitos. Thus the “Zika threat,” Rappoport posits, is a cover story designed to protect the pesticide manufacturers and associated actors, including the Brazilian Ministry of Health.
2014 Dec;30(4):291-7. doi: 10.2987/14-6413.1. Truck-Mounted Area-Wide Application of Pyriproxyfen Targeting Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus in Northeast Florida. Laboratory analysis of water samples taken from the larval cups independently confirmed the presence of pyriproxyfen. Trap captures of wild adult Ae. albopictus were not markedly reduced...
Subsidiarity: "Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them." [Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 1931]
Novum Organum: a return to Adam's state before the Fall, a state of pure and sinless contact with nature and knowledge of her powers. To the universal laws of nature, Bacon attaches an almost occult like power: "But he who knows forms grasps the unity of nature beneath the surface of materials which are very unlike. Thus is he able to identify and bring about things that have never been done before, things of the kind which neither the vicissitudes of nature, nor hard experimenting, nor pure accident could ever have actualised, or human thought dreamed of. And thus from the discovery of the forms flows true speculation and unrestricted operation."
Descartes begins with a doubt of anything which cannot be known with absolute certainty and includes in this realm of doubt the impressions of sense perception, and thus, “all sciences of corporal things, such as physics and astronomy." [2] He thus attempts to provide a metaphysical principle (this becomes the Cogito) which cannot be doubted, on which further truths must be deduced. In this method of deduction, the philosopher begins by examining the most general axioms (such as the Cogito), and then proceeds to determine the truth about particulars from an understanding of those general axioms.
Conversely, Bacon endorsed the opposite method of Induction, in which the particulars are first examined, and only then is there a gradual ascent to the most general axioms. While Descartes doubts the ability of the senses to provide us with accurate information, Bacon doubts the ability of the mind to deduce truths by itself as it is subjected to so many intellectual obfuscations, Bacon's “Idols.”
Jews and Freemasons shared a common goal; they both wanted to restore a great thing which had been lost. "Like Davidson, Moray, and the Scottish Masons who returned from exile, Rabbi [Jacob] Abandana and the Jewish royalists would seek a revival of the ancient sciences of Solomon, by which 'the holy Temple' could be rebuilt within the adept and restored to its place in the center of the cosmos."
Jew and Christian could unite in the worship of the same god, "the Grand Architect of the Universe"... a Deity whose main characteristics could be seen in the order and harmony of the universe he had created, and then left to run according to its own rules. Human society should imitate the order in nature if men wanted to live orderly and harmonious lives.
Men who felt they could ignore nature and discern the mind of God directly through private revelations threatened this order. These men -- the Puritans, Quakers, Ranters, Diggers, and Fifth Monarchy Menhad implemented the Protestant vision, a conflation of Muentzer and Luther that was a combination of sola scriptura and mystical visions -- and had failed.
Hobbes and his followers felt that motion was inherent in matter, and because of that fact there was no need of divine providence in a universe which ran all on its own accord. This vision of the universe would find its fulfillment in Marx...
The Royal Society was drawn toward a universe that was orderly and harmonious without fussy overseers, either in the spiritual or political realms. The stars that, according to Aristotle, moved through the heavens because angels pushed them, were replaced by bodies that continued in motion until acted on by something that would slow them down.
Even after the founding of the Royal Society (1662), English science was still Jewish science; it was still cabalistic, symbolical, and numerological. It had not changed since Reuchlin. Rev. John Wilkins, his disciple, wrote that "important scientific and technological information was encoded in the Jewish scriptures." Science was still bound up with the prisca theologia; it involved recovering the lost wisdom of Adam and using that knowledge to reconstruct the Temple of Solomon.
"If you believe the Jews," Wilkins wrote, "the Holy Spirit hath purposely involved in the Words of Scripture, every Secret that belongs to any Art or Science, under such Cabalisms as these. And if a Man were expert in unfolding of them, it were easie for him to get as much Knowledge as Adam had in his Innocency, or Human Nature is capable of."
Rosicrucian "science" existed on three levels for members of the Royal Society, just as it had for John Dee: mathematics and mechanics for the lower world, celestial mechanics for the higher world, and angelic conjuration for the realm above the celestial spheres. Technological innovations were linked to the construction of Solomon's Temple, and drew on sources as diverse as Vitruvian architecture, Dee's reading of Euclid, Fludd's mechanical tracts, and Kircher's works on magnetism.
Two forms of Judaizing that were at odds with each other were Puritan enthusiasm and Masonic Cabala. The revolutionary movement in England had split in two, and those two factions waged war on each other. Just as Ziska would turn on the Taborites, just as Muentzer would turn on Luther, just as Robespierre would turn on Danton and Philippe Egalite, and just as Stalin would turn on Trotsky, so the Cabalists turned on the Enthusiasists, even though they were part of the same movement. The revolutionary spirit had jumped from one Judaizing movement to another, but the commitment to revolution as a prelude to heaven on earth remained constant. What these two opposing groups had in common was their connection to the Jews and the revolutionary spirit.
Luke 14:26: "If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate (miséo, 'love less' than the Lord) his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple".
Miséo – properly, to detest (on a comparative basis); hence, denounce; to love someone or something less than someone (something) else, i.e. to renounce one choice in favor of another.
[Note the comparative meaning of miséo which centers in moral choice, elevating one value over another.]
"IT is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom—that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect." ~G.K. Chesterton: "Orthodoxy."
The vehicle for the Whig assault on Catholic France was Freemasonry, after it had been purged of its Scottish and Jacobite associations. The Lodge became the vehicle for Newtonian ideas too, proposing as an alternative to the Catholic Christ of the Counter Reformation, the Grand Architect of the Universe, "who had constructed the cosmic machine and left it to follow its own laws'' in the same way the new constitutional monarch [William of Orange] had handed over the English economy to Whig merchants and landlords.
Newton provided the metaphysical foundation for Whig foreign policy: "In the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688-9, liberal Christianity wedded to the new science was offered to an English and eventually to a European audience as a binding social philosophy capable of reconciling diverse Protestants and of sanctioning a stable social and constitutional order, born in revolution but intent upon repudiating revolution as an instrument of change. Newton's mechanical universe... became the natural model for the triumph of the Whig constitution."
The Whigs in England were intoxicated by the political implications of Newton's laws of motion. As Freemasons they knew the physical world was the basis of the political world. That meant that some application of Newtonian physics would allow them to predict and control political motion. That meant the forces that had led to revolutions in the past could now be harnessed so that they would not get out of control. The relatively painless trajectory of the Glorious Revolution seemed the proof of that proposition. Man could now unleash the forces of nature without letting them get out of control.
Freemasonry was secularized Calvinism. The Elect became Lodge brothers through the alembic of time. Despite changes in names, the revolutionary distillate was the same in its essence, hatred for the Catholic social order of Europe, once embodied in the Habsburgs of Spain but now embodied in the Bourbons of France.
What was considered toxic by the Whigs at home was also considered good for export to France. Masons were supposed to be loyal to the Whig Glorious Revolution, i.e., the status quo in England, and they were also to promote the same Whig philosophy in Catholic countries on the continent, where it was seditious and revolutionary.
Toland used the Masons as his vehicle to spread subversive ideas on the continent. Between 1710 and 1726, when Voltaire arrived in England, Toland's ideas were circulating through France and condemned in England.
That battle between the "antients" and "modern" freemasons continued for a Century. The Whigs won the battle in England, but lost it elsewhere, notably in America, where "ancient" anti-Whig Freemasonry played a significant role in the American Revolution.
Kant felt Spinoza was a dangerous Jewish revolutionary, a Cabalist who got his ideas from Giordano Bruno. Spinoza was familiar with Bruno's writings and had written a dialogue in his manner as a young man. Bruno taught that "Natura est Deus in rebus etc in De immenso, spaccio, et summa terminorum," and so unsurprisingly this idea found its way into the writings of John Toland, who promoted Bruno and Spinoza. Voltaire cited Toland in 1734 and linked him to Spinoza.
If pressed on the issue of religion, Toland probably would have taken the position of the Traite de Trois Imposteurs that all religions were fraudulent. In practice; he came down harder on Christianity, claiming (if he were the author of the Traite) that Jesus was ignorant of even the Egyptian magic Moses knew. By 1714, Toland was praising the Jews, claiming they "honor one supreme being or First Cause and obey the law of Nature..."
Toland was also the first 18th Century thinker to espouse "the cause of religious toleration for the Jews..." This newfound sympathy may have a Masonic connection. Freemasonry aspired to be a religion that could be acceptable to all. The English lodges, at least, were admitting more and more Jews. This was another instance of ideas that were considered tame in England but subversive elsewhere. The German lodges had conflicts with the Grand Lodge in London over the admission of Jews. Germans did not want Jews in their lodges, but they were forced to accept them by the English. The Amsterdam lodge, "where a pantheist and hence a follower of John Toland served for many years as Master of its lodge," followed the English lead in admitting Jews.
"The Newtonian System of the World: The Best Model of Government." Masonic promotion of Newton provided an alternative to the Cartesianism triumphant on the continent (Cartesianism is the name given to the philosophical and scientific system of René Descartes and its subsequent development by other seventeenth century thinkers, most notably Nicolas Malebranche and Baruch Spinoza).
Plato: Under the name of "the Infinite" three-fourths of reality remains forever unknowable (See "Dark Matter").
The 1717 re-organization of the Lodge was really a redefinition as well. Newtonians and Whig agents presided over the expulsion of the Jacobites and redefined the lodges into something which was less Christian and more attractive to revolutionary subversives and Jews. This was especially true on the continent. Anderson and Desaguliers redefined the faith of the lodge, turning it away from its Jacobite philo-Catholic Masonic base into "the Religion in which all men can agree." The Whigs and Newtonians who refined the craft put it on a trajectory toward secularism and subversion.
According to its adherents, Freemasonry was not only the prisca theologia Reuchlin had sought in vain, it was the true religion because it was based on the foundation of all religion. "Masonry," according to Albert Pike, its most influential American spokesman, "teaches, and has preserved in their purity, the cardinal tenets of the old primitive faith, which underlie and are the foundation of all religion .... Masonry is the universal morality which is suitable to the inhabitants of every clime to the man of every creed.'' According to Sir John Cockburn: "Creeds arise, have their day and pass, but Masonry remains. It is built on the rock of truth, not on the shifting sands of superstition."
This redefinition meant Masonry would attract a different sort of person than the Ecossais Jacobite lodges of the 17th Century had attracted. The changes in philosophy and criteria of admission made it more attractive to Jews, who began joining in greater numbers. "Jews," according to Whalen, "might well feel at home in the lodge since the Hiram Abiff legend was built on the Old rather than the New Testament and the Craft borrowed most of its terminology from the Hebrew. The core of Masonry, that mankind has suffered a great loss which eventually will be recovered, could easily be understood to mean the loss of the Temple and of Jewish Nationhood.''
The Catholic Church abetted the change when Pope Clement VI condemned Freemasonry in 1738. The exclusions of Catholics combined with the preponderance of Jews and Freethinkers turned the lodges into agencies of subversion, especially in Catholic countries, where "only religious rebels and Jews sought admission to the lodges. This concentration of atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, Jews, and anti-clericals turned Latin Masonry into a subversive and hostile critic of Christianity and all religions."
Membership in the lodge involved displacing traditional loyalties. The lodge thus contributed to the rise of modern ideology, where a confected creed like Marxism or Neoconservatism would replace traditional allegiances that united Christians and Jews to traditional religious faiths and their communities. The Masonic lodges solved the problem of religious war by adopting the Jewish idea of the Noachide Law as the basis for the Lodge and civil society. When the Protestants rejected the Catholic faith, they rejected universal religion. The lodge became, as a result, an example of the return of the repressed. Instead of believing in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, the lodge member was initiated into "the religion in which all Men agree." After over two hundred years of sectarian strife, the Lodge picked up where the now abandoned Catholic Church left off, as "the Means of conciliating true friendship among Persons that must have remain'd at a perpetual Distance." The solution to religious division was moralism. The lodge member could hold whatever religious views he liked, but the law of Noah, which antedated Christianity and the law of Moses, was universal and binding on all. From the Freemasonic point of view, the Jews had a superior revelation because it was prior to the Christian revelation and therefore pristine and uncorrupted.
An attack this radical on Christian principles could not go unnoticed, even if the members swore not to reveal the lodge's secrets. A mob attacked the meeting of the lodge in the Hague in 1735, the year the Dutch authorities shut it down, indicating a reaction was setting in. Not long after a lodge was formed in Rome, word of its existence, its popularity, and its subversive judaizing principles soon reached Pope Clement XII, who issued a bull condemning it in 1738. The Catholic condemnation of Freemasonry would remain constant and consistent for the next two and half centuries. Benedict XIV reiterated Clement's condemnation, as did Pope Leo XIII in the encyclical Humanum Genus on April 20, 1884. One hundred years later, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI, reminded Catholics the caveats the popes had ascribed to Freemasonry were still in force.
Leo XII said "by liberty ... we mean [being] free from slavery to Satan or to our passions, both of them most wicked masters."
Freedom, as defined by the masons, was indistinguishable from license; it allowed human lusts and passions to spin out of control, which led inevitably to civil strife and revolution
Considering that it was written in 1884, Humanum Genus was a remarkably prescient prediction of how sexual liberation would be used as a form of political control in Masonic countries like the United States during the 20th Century:
"For since generally no one is accustomed to obey crafty and clever men so submissively as those whose soul is weakened and broken down by the domination of the passions, there have been in the sect of the Freemasons some who have plainly determined and proposed that, artfully and of set purpose, the multitude should be satiated with a boundless license of vice, as, when this had been done, it would easily come under their power and authority for any acts of daring."
The American mind thus was formed by the confluence of contradictory forms of judaizing, i.e., Puritanism and Freemasonry. American political thought would oscillate between these two poles for the next two centuries. The revolutionary creed hatched in America found immediate acceptance in France, largely because of Benjamin Franklin, "the representative figure who embodied the new democratic ideal of a humanity, liberated from the restraints of privilege and tradition and recognizing no laws but those of nature and reason,'' but Franklin was not operating in a vacuum. Rousseau, whose books on the social contract and the noble savage seemed to have America in mind, prepared his way. Franklin was also a Mason, representing the Scottish tradition regnant in America, and his way had been prepared there too by the Ecossais lodges founded by the Jacobite exiles in the wake of their defeat by William of Orange in 1690. In America, it looked as if Bacon's dream of a New Atlantis had finally come true. A government had come into existence that was totally congruent with the laws of nature as formed by the Great Architect of the Universe...
Freemasonry is the link in the revolutionary chain that connects Protestantism to Socialism.
Christian theologians have traditionally described hell under three aspects: punishment, pain and privation.
- The word punishment can be interpreted in two different ways: as "positive law" or as "natural law." A "positive law" is a law that is "posited" or made by a will that chose to make it and could have chosen differently. The punishments of positive law are not necessary but rather chosen by the punisher. They may be right and reasonable, but they are not necessary; they are changeable. "If you steal that cookie, I'll slap your hand"; "If you drive ninety miles an hour, we will take away your license"-this is positive law. This is not, we think, the right way to conceive of the punishment of hell: as something God chose but could have chosen differently. The punishments of "natural law" are intrinsic rather than extrinsic, necessary rather than chosen. "If you eat that cookie before supper, you will spoil your appetite"; "If you drive ninety miles an hour, you will endanger your life"; "If you jump off a cliff, you will die"; "If you are a promiscuous, sexually active homosexual, you are likely to get AIDS" these are the punishments of natural law.
Take as an example God's command to Adam and Eve not to eat the forbidden fruit. If this is a positive law, it is like a mother threatening to slap her child's hand if he takes a cookie. If it is a natural law, it means that if we eat the forbidden fruit of disobedience to God's will, divorcing our will and spirit from God's, then the inevitable result will be disaster and death, for God is the source of all joy and life. In a natural law ethic, virtue is its own reward and vice is its own punishment. Virtue is to the soul what health is to the body. It has its own intrinsic, necessary and unchangeable structures, such that all good deeds help the doer as well as the recipient and all evil deeds harm the doer as well as the victim. The punishment of hell is inevitable, by natural law. Any human soul that freely refuses the one Source of all life and joy must find death and misery as its inevitable punishment.
Once again, C. S. Lewis makes the point most clearly: Though Our Lord often speaks of hell as a sentence inflicted by a tribunal, he also says elsewhere that the judgment consists in the very fact that men prefer darkness to light, and that not he, but his "word" judges men (Jn 3:19; 12:48). We are therefore at liberty-since the two conceptions, in the long run, mean the same thing-to think of this bad man's perdition not as a sentence imposed on him but as the mere fact of being himself. The characteristic of lost souls is "their rejection of everything that is not simply themselves." Our imaginary egoist has tried to turn everything into a province or appendage of the self. The taste for the other, that is, the very capacity for enjoying good, is quenched in him except in so far as his body still draws him into some rudimentary contact with an outer world. Death removes this last contact. He has his wish-to live wholly in the self and to make the best of what he finds there. And what he finds there is hell. (The Problem of Pain, chap. 8, "Hell")
In the famous painting of Jesus with a lamp knocking on a door (= your soul), there is no knob on the outside of the door. Only from the inside can the door of the soul be opened, freely, to goodness and truth and joy. And only from the inside can it be locked. If we lock that door, our folly and crime is its own punishment. - Since the God to whom we choose to open and love and obey is the sole source of all the joy in reality, our refusal of this God must necessarily be joyless and painful. Thus hell must have the aspect of pain as well as punishment. If God is joy, hell must be pain. Somewhat as with punishment, the pain can be thought of either externally or internally. The internal pain would be far worse than external pain, just as internal and spiritual joys far exceed any physical, external pleasures. Therefore the old question of whether there is physical fire in hell is a moot and pointless point. When our soul is in pain (e.g., despair), we may hit our head against the wall. Why? Because physical pain is not as bad as spiritual pain, and it distracts us from the worse pain, the spiritual. It was probably because she realized this principle that Catherine of Genoa said that she thought there were no physical fires in hell because if there were, that would not be the worst hell conceivable, since fire is a good and a creature of God. Thus, if we wish to deny the crude, old picture of hell as a physical torture chamber, we may be left not with a gentler hell but with a far more horrible and unbearable one.
The only premise we need to prove the conclusion that hell is supremely painful is the premise that the supreme joy is love, and thus the supreme pain is lovelessness. Dostoyevsky says that "hell is the suffering of being unable to love." There can be no greater pain than that because there is no greater joy than loving. Loving is even greater joy than being loved, for "It is more blessed [happy, joyful] to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35). Anyone who does not know that is still a spiritual infant.
Satan's primary lie that deceives humanity, keeps it in spiritual infancy and causes more suffering than anything else, is the lie that selfishness is fun and unselfishness is not. The origin of sin and suffering is faith in Satan's lie (which began in Genesis 3) that life and joy come from disobedience to God, from "my will be done." At the far end of that lie lies hell. - The third aspect of hell is privation, or deprivation of God. This does not mean that God shuts us out, but that we shut him out, and thus are deprived of God by our own choice. This aspect of hell is the cause of the other two. Only because hell is the privation of God -- the source of all joy -- is hell painful. And only because hell is the deprivation of God, the only God, the true God, "the only game in town," is hell's alternative to God the inevitable and just punishment for the folly of refusing this only game in town. The desire to be happy without God is doomed to failure, pain and inevitable punishment because God is not one among many sources of joy but the only ultimate source of all joy. Deprivation of the ultimate cause must mean deprivation of all its effects.
It is not a very popular idea - that God is "the only game in town." Yet it necessarily follows from the much more popular idea that God is Creator. If everything is either God or a creature of God, then there cannot be any source of good or joy that is not God or sourced in God. Everything in the world that gives us joy is like a sunbeam from the divine sun. However perverse or perverted, however turned or twisted, all joys are reflections of God. Therefore the privation of God is the privation not just of some joy but all joy. Of all hell's aspects, this is the most terrible. You see it on the faces of the damned in Gustave Dore's illustrations of Dante's Inferno. You can imagine it when pondering this quotation: "All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it; or else, that it was within your grasp and you have lost it forever" (C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, chap. 10, "Heaven").
"I suppose it is true in a sense that a man can be a fundamental sceptic, but if so then he cannot be anything else: not even a defender of fundamental scepticism. If a man feels that all the movements of his own mind are meaningless, then his mind is meaningless, and he is meaningless; and it does not mean anything to attempt to discover his meaning. Most fundamental sceptics appear to survive because they are not consistently sceptical and not at all fundamental." ~G.K. Chesterton
Let's look first at our concept of happiness. When I speak of our concept, who is us? I mean our culture, the mental landscape we all inhabit, even when we feel like aliens here, most generally the modern, post-Christian West, but most specifically contemporary America, as it would appear on opinion polls.
If an opinion poll were to ask Americans to list the nine most important ingredients in the happy life, they would probably give an answer pretty much like the following: First, the most obvious, though not the profoundest ingredient, is probably wealth. If you notice your friend has a big smile on his face today, you most likely would say to him, "What happened to you? Did you just win the lottery?" If that's what you'd say, it must be because that's what would put the biggest smile on your face. And let's face it; money can buy everything money can buy, which is a lot of stuff.
Second might be our culture's most notable success, the conquest of nature and fortune by science and technology, allowing each of us to be an Alexander the Great, conqueror of the world. Third would probably be freedom from pain. I think few of us would disagree that the single most valuable invention in the entire history of technology has been anesthetics.
Fourth would probably be self-esteem, the greatest good, according to nearly all of our culture's new class of prophets, the secular psychologists — and secular psychologists are among the most secular of all classes in our society. Fifth might be justice, securing one's rights. Justice and peace summarize the social ideals of most Americans, the ideals they want for themselves and for the rest of the world.
Sixth, if we are candid, we have to include sex. To most Americans, this is the closest thing to heaven on Earth, that is ecstasy, mystical transcending of the ego — unless they're surfers. Seventh, we love to win, whether at war, at sports, at games of chance, in business, or even in our fantasies. Our positive self-esteem requires the belief that we are winners, not losers. We want to be successful, not failures.
But it is even harder to believe that anyone would believe his utterly shattering paradoxes about happiness.
Eighth, we want honor. We want to be honored, accepted, loved, and understood. In our modern egalitarian society, we are honored, not for being superior, but for being one of the crowd. In most ancient societies, one was honored for being different, better, superior, excellent. But we still crave to be honored. Some even want to be famous. All want to be accepted.
Ninth, we want life, a long life and a healthy life. Thomas Hobbes is surely right in saying that fear of violent death, especially painful and early death, is very, very powerful. Your life is not happy if it's taken from you, obviously.
This all seems so obvious and so reasonable as to be beyond argument. Higher ideals than these are arguable. Some of us seek them and some of us do not. But these nine would seem to be firm and impregnable, universal and necessary. Whoever would deny that they form a part of happiness would be a fool. Whoever would affirm that happiness consisted in their opposites would be insane.
Let us now perform a fantastic thought experiment. Let us suppose that there was once a preacher who did teach precisely that insanity, point for point, deliberately and specifically. Perhaps you cannot stretch your imagination quite that far, but I'm going to ask you to stretch it even one step farther. Imagine this man becoming the most famous, beloved, revered, respected, and believed teacher in the history of the world. Imagine nearly everyone in the world, even those who did not classify themselves as his disciples, at least praising his wisdom, especially his moral wisdom, especially the single most famous and beloved sermon he ever preached, the Sermon on the Mount, the summary of his moral wisdom, which begins with his 180 degree reversal of these truisms.
Perhaps you find this far too incredible to be imaginable. It would be a miracle harder to believe than God becoming a man. It is hard enough to believe that anyone would believe the strange Christian notion that a certain man who began his life as a baby, who had to learn to talk, and ended it as an executed criminal, who bled to death on a cross, and in between got tired and hungry and sorrowful, is God, eternal, beginningless, immortal, infinitely perfect, all-wise, all-powerful, the Creator.
But it is even harder to believe that anyone would believe his utterly shattering paradoxes about happiness. Perhaps we do not really believe them after all. Perhaps we only believe we believe them. Perhaps we have faith in our faith rather than faith in his teachings.
For, of course, I am referring to Christ's eight beatitudes which opened his Sermon on the Mount, the most famous sermon ever preached, and the one part of the New Testament that is still held up as central and valid and true and good and beautiful even by dissenters, heretics, revisionists, demythologizers, skeptics, modernists, theological liberals, and anyone else who cannot bring himself to believe all the other claims in the New Testament or the teachings of the Church. These people strain at the gnats but swallow the camel. So let's look at the camel that they swallow. Perhaps they only seem to swallow it. Perhaps they swallow only their own swallowing, gollumping like Gollum.
To our desire for wealth, Christ says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." To our desire for painlessness, he says, "Blessed are those who mourn." To our desire for conquest, he says, "Blessed are the meek." To our desire for contentment with ourselves, he says, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness." To our desire for justice, he says, "Blessed are the merciful." To our desire for sex, he says, "Blessed are the pure in heart." To our desire for conquest, he says, "Blessed are the peacemakers." To our desire for acceptance, he says, "Blessed are the persecuted." And to our desire for more life, he offers the Cross. And now this man carrying his cross to Calvary even dares to tell us, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light."
The replacement of the House of Bourbon with a philo-Protestant constitutional monarch had been the goal of Whig foreign policy for almost a century. On the verge of achieving their goal, the English watched victory slip from their grasp as the revolution spun out of control. The terror lasted until March 1794, when Robespierre succumbed to his own killing machine. Philippe Egalite was guillotined on November 6, 1793 along with MarieAntoinette and 200 other enemies of the revolution.
The “God of the West” is ONE IN TRINITY OF DIVINITIES of Wealth-Technics-Comfort (WTC), in Slavic languages TPD/Zh ("Technika-Pieniadz-Dupa/Zhopa"). And from Lamarcko-Piagetian observations it is evident that the worship of WTC-TPD/Zh values necessarily leads to GENETIC ACCOMODATIONS of humans to life in an ever more sterile, lifeless environment...
Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. --G. K. Chesterton
“Have you noticed that when you realize you were made for Perfect Happiness, how much less disappointing the pleasures of earth become? You cease expecting to get silk purses out of sows ears. Once you realize that God is your end, you are not disappointed, for you put no more hope in things than they can bear. You cease looking for first-rate joys where there are only tenth-rate pleasures.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen
“Judging our fellow human beings is as perplexing as the perceiving of colors on a spinning top. When a person is at rest, or in a fixed state, we think we can very well judge his character. But when we see him in the whirl and motion of everyday life all his goodness and badness blur into indistinctness. There is so much goodness at one moment, badness at another, sin in one instance, virtue in another, sobriety at one point, excess in another, that it is well to leave the judgment to God.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Guide to Contentment)
Did you know that the 10 oldest colleges in the world were founded by the Catholic Church?
“There are 10,000 times 10,000 roads down which you may travel during life. But at the end of all of these roads, you will see one or the other of two faces: the merciful face of Christ or the miserable face of Satan.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Treasured Love Story)
"But if you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will find that no medium is admitted between violence and evasion. You will have no answer except slanging or silence. A modern editor must not have that eager ear that goes with the honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent; and that is called dignity. Or he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashing journalism. In neither case is there any controversy; for the whole object of modern party combatants is to charge out of earshot." ~G.K. Chesterton: "What's Wrong with the World," Part One, Chap. III.-The New Hypocrite
"THE wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air." ~G.K. Chesterton: "Eugenics and Other Evils."
“For meditation the ear of the soul is more important than the tongue. God has things to tell us which will enlighten us-we must wait for Him to speak. No one would rush into a physician’s office, rattle off all the symptoms, and then dash away without waiting for a diagnosis. It is every bit as stupid to ring God’s doorbell and then run away. The Lord hears us more readily than we suspect; it is our listening to Him that needs to be improved.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Lift Up Your Heart)
“How are we going to live in these troubled times? There’s really only one answer. We have to become saints…so here we have the dilemma, that we have to become saints to be happy, and yet how to be one? Well, the Church has given us a saint for our times, and that is, the picture of this young nun, St. Therese, who gave us a way, first of all, that is very simple…she really had two rules. One was never to seek the satisfaction of the self, and secondly, to do everything, to bear everything, out of love for our Lord…the method of the little flower was to integrate sanctity with what we are doing….a saint is one who makes Christ loveable…it does not require much time to make a saint, it requires only much love.” ~Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Treasured Love Story)
"Accept the Republic, that is to say, the power constituted and existing amongst you; respect it, and be submitted to it, as representing the power that comes from God. All political history furnishes, without cessation, examples of unexpected changes in form of government. These changes are far from being always legitimate in their origin. It would be vain to expect that it should be so. Nevertheless, the supreme advantage of the common welfare and of public tranquillity imposes on us the acceptance of those new governments established de facto in place of former governments, which de facto are no more." Pope Leo XIII
In Africa an infamous commerce was being renewed. The savage crack of the slave driver's whip was becoming louder and more audacious and the pitiful processions, the self-propelled freight, fettered and handcuffed, of the desert caravans, were becoming longer and commoner. The misunderstanding and jealousy which had marked the relations of the European powers in their intrusion and exploitation of Africa's wide regions and fabulous riches had resulted in a stimulation of the slave trade which was conducted by Arabs but which was protected by profit-sharing scoundrels of all races and creeds. The suspicion with which each nation regarded the activities of a rival power on the so-called Dark Continent prevented any effective action against the vile traffic and so it flourished without hindrance and with increasing boldness. In Brazil slavery, although under far more humane conditions, existed also, and to the hierarchy of that country the Pope sent instructions, exhorting them to work for immediate abolition rather than the gradual process of liberation which had been suggested in other quarters. To the credit of the Brazilians, the Pope's suggestion was adopted very quickly. Meanwhile, acting with his friend Cardinal Lavigerie, Leo embarked upon a campaign to break the abominable power of the Arab traders. "Since Africa," he said, "is the principal theatre of this traffic . . . we recommend to all missionaries . . . to consecrate their strength, and even their lives, to that sublime work of redemption. We recommend them also to ransom as many slaves as it may be possible for them to do. . ." A gift of 300,000 francs accompanied these words while Cardinal Lavigerie preached a crusade throughout all Europe and the nations bestirred themselves to a Conference on the subject. In England, which had produced such champions of human liberty as Wilberforce and Clarkson, a great movement was already under way and publicly the Pope complimented the country "which had so well and for so long a time proved her interest in the cause of negroes." The slave traffic was gradually abolished but the lot of the negroes was to remain hard and unjust in many countries. With the vision that he exhibited in all matters, Leo foresaw and deplored such conditions and in an attempt to change them he stressed the age old fact that color and racial prejudices were no part of Catholic dogma and he urged that vocations should be encouraged amongst the liberated slaves and their sons and that they should be given every facility to train for the priesthood.
“It is one of the curious anomalies of present day civilization that when man achieves greatest control over nature, he has the least control over himself. The great boast of our age is our domination of the universe: we have harnessed the waterfalls, made the wind slave to carry us on wings of steel, and squeezed from the earth the secret of its age. Yet, despite this mastery of nature, there perhaps never was a time when man was less a master of himself. He is equipped like a veritable giant to control the forces of nature, but is as weak as a pigmy to control the forces of his passions and inclinations.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (The Moral Universe)
"The movement is to break down all sense of moral order, because that's the only thing that protects us from the powerful. It's the only defense we have against the rich and the powerful and they know that. They want to break it down so they have total control over us. Our only defense is the moral order, and the only defense we have is our Logos, and Jesus Christ is the Logos Incarnate and that's why Christian societies are free." - Dr. E Michael Jones
C.S. Lewis: “Humility is not thinking less of oneself; it is thinking of oneself less.”
"On the day of my conversion Charity entered into my heart and with it a yearning to forget self always; thenceforward I was happy." St. Therese of Lisieux
"I do not well see what more I shall have in Heaven than now. I shall see the good God, it is true; but as to being with Him, I am wholly with Him already upon earth." St. Therese of Lisieux
"...it was for me to do His will and not for Him to do mine." St. Therese of Lisieux
Practice "little hidden acts of virtue" St. Therese of Lisieux
"How glad I am that from the beginning I learned to practice self- denial!" St. Therese of Lisieux
"From the beginning I realized that all souls have more or less the same battles to fight, but on the other hand I saw that since no two souls were exactly alike, each one must be dealt with differently. With some I have to humble myself and not to shrink from confessing my own struggles and defeats; by this means they have less difficulty in acknowledging their faults, being consoled by the discovery that I know their trials from my own experience. In dealing with others, my only hope of success lies in being firm and in never going back on what I have said, since self-abasement would be mistaken for weakness." St. Therese of Lisieux
"My whole strength lies in prayer and sacrifice: these are my invincible weapons, and experience has taught me that the heart is won by them rather than by words." St. Therese of Lisieux
You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
Self-government requires qualities of self -denial and restraint. JFK
"The worst education which teaches self-denial, is better than the best which teaches everything else, and not that." - John Sterling
Augustine: There are only two options in life:
- The city of God, which is based on love of God to the extinction of self.
- The city of man which is based on love of self to the extinction of God.
Once the ruling class turned away from Christianity, which is based on love and service to mankind, there was only one other place to turn, namely, to “libido dominandi,” domination of your fellow man for your own good, as the ultimate goal in life.
The WASP elite was not “in rebellion against Christian morality”, rather “their rebellion was against the concept of a God who was not restrained by the laws of science.”
Narcissism develops when the child fails to develop a realistic understanding of the relationship between his desires and reality. The likelihood of developing narcissism as a personality disorder increases when the father, who is the bearer of the reality principle in family life, is absent. The mother, reacting to that absence, tends to give into the narcissistic wishes of the child, creating in him illusions of the grandiose self and its limitless control over nature.
By now it should be obvious that post-’60s sexual liberationist culture is a culture which promotes just this sort of illusion. As a result, a developmental disorder which is present because of the natural vicissitudes associated with psychic development got promoted into a cultural norm, something which Christopher Lasch termed, the “culture of narcissism.”
In its pathological form, narcissism originates as a defense against feelings of helpless dependency in early life, which it tries to counter with “blind optimism” and grandiose illusions of personal self-sufficiency. Since modern society prolongs the experience of dependence into adult life, it encourages milder forms of narcissism in people who might otherwise come to terms with the inescapable limits on their personal freedom and power—limits inherent in the human condition—by developing competence as workers and parents. But at the same time that our society makes it more and more difficult to find satisfaction in love and work, it surrounds the individual with manufactured fantasies of total gratification. The new paternalism preaches not self-denial but self-fulfillment. It sides with narcissistic impulses and discourages their modification by the pleasure of becoming self-reliant even in a limited domain, which under favorable conditions accompanies maturity (Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979], p. 231).
Rather than try to wean the narcissist away from his debilitating fantasies and give him some connection with reality through work and love in the family and the local community, the culture of narcissism promotes the very fantasies that cripple him. Through advertising, the consumer is given the sense that he can become his fantasies by consuming objects that have been endorsed by people he admires. The culture of fulfillment through consumption, in other words, is a powerful ally in the narcissist’s war on reality, forging increasingly more sophisticated and intrusive forms of control by pandering to the narcissist’s grandiose vision of his own unlimited power.
The homosexual is the consumer culture’s version of the ideal citizen because he takes all of the strains of narcissism to their logical anti-essentialist conclusion. The homosexual qua homosexual can form no family and, as a result, no real community; in a culture which promotes sexual liberation as a form of control by breaking down family and community, homosexuality is the most exaggerated form of sexual individualism. The homosexual “lifestyle,” which is based on unnatural sexual acts, is proof that there is no nature and, therefore, no reality. By promoting homosexuality as a viable alternative lifestyle, the consumer culture is saying that fantasy can triumph over reality, which is the essence of the narcissistic personality disorder.
Magic is, in many ways, the state religion of any culture based on narcissism. As the description of consumerism as ingestion has shown, magic is the central belief of a culture that is based on appetite and fantasy. If I buy those shoes, I will be attractive and sovereign over the vagaries of everyday existence, just like Michael Jordan. Those shoes will help me abrogate natural laws, like the law of gravity. The fantasy is so deeply engrained in the culture that it never needs to be stated explicitly. All we need to remind ourselves of its essentially narcissistic message is a billboard icon of Michael Jordan, basketball in hand, soaring through the clouds with the Nike swoosh in the lower left hand corner reminding us about how we can make this fantasy real. The fact that billboards like this generally get displayed in places like the south side of Chicago, where people have been known to kill for these expensive shoes, only points up the function that advertising performs as a form of social control. Instead of changing the circumstances of their lives by making some contact with reality, like, say, improving the local community, the empty self is encouraged retreat further into his narcissistic fantasies. The young man who feels that he is as sovereign over the laws of nature as Michael Jordan is in reality the couch potato watching the slam dunk contest on television. Fantasy becomes a form of debilitation and control. The more time the narcissist spends in front of his television set, the less capable he is for any kind of physical activity, much less the heroic exploits of Michael Jordan.
For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique, and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious--such as digging up and mutilating the dead. CS Lewis
Thomas Arnold’s priorities in education at Rugby were clear: “first, religious and moral principle; secondly, gentlemanly conduct; thirdly, intellectual ability.” In many ways, these are precisely the correct priorities for the education of young people, who need to develop skills in controlling the passions more than they need to understand the foundations of either practical or pure reason.
Crucial to both the vitality of the country and the vitality of the ruling class was the notion - derived from sports - of the “amateur,” a word derived from the Latin “amare,” which means to love. An amateur is someone who does something because of love and not because of money. Some things, like sex, should only be done for love and should never be done for money. Love and money provide, then, two poles or paradigms for human endeavor.