Dissident Dispatches
Page 24
Race-as-Christian-theology warns all white peoples not to imitate Jews who anoint themselves their own Messiah.311 Isaac La Peyrère was a “baptized Jew” who rashly sowed the wind by encouraging his erstwhile co-ethnics to think of themselves as the eschatological hope of mankind — as if almost sixteen centuries earlier God had not finished, finally and forever, with carnal, national Israel. Little good, then or since, came from promoting such messianic pretensions among modern European Jews. But nationalistic pride is not always about supposedly superior bloodlines. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, white Americans, too, came to believe that it was their manifest destiny to redeem a fallen world. They drained their secular republic of Spirit, water, and blood in the vain hope that the hollowed-out shell of a Christian nation could be filled by the secular trinity of a civil religion: liberty, equality, and fraternity.
American Protestants transformed the language of religious liberty into the political theology of popular sovereignty. From the beginning of the American Revolution to the present day, the abstract idea of the “People” has contradicted the reality of race-as-biology. No wonder, then, that the nineteenth-century ideal of a White Republic now seems little more than a political oxymoron. Unfortunately, race-as-biology appears to have a congenital weakness for religions that set up the Volk as an object of worship. German National Socialism recognized the reality of race but insisted on putting the Holy Spirit of the Volk into the space reserved for the sovereignty of God.
The lessons of history and scripture are clear. The future of white children will not be secured by the promise of citizenship in recycled White Republics. Indeed, secular republics have become a large part of the problem facing white people worldwide. We have become one-dimensional men in a one-dimensional society. We are hopelessly dependent on the enchantments of Mammon in a Divine Economy; “the trinkets of the market” now “ape the delights of the heavenly city”.312 Hopelessly addicted to endless growth in a finite world of shrinking resources, we have died to God. Accordingly, we await a zombie apocalypse with superstitious dread. Only when the white race is resurrected as a confederation of Christian nations will we leave the land of the living dead.
This essay addresses both Christian believers and secular-minded white nationalists. To Christians, I say that we know not only that the Kingdom of God is present here and now but also that it will have no end. But while the Kingdom is eternal, it waxes and wanes in the course of history. Christian nations — in which men and women of all estates served their anointed kings and the kings served God — are now a thing of the past. Neo-pagan philosophers, such as Julius Evola, present cycles of decay and renewal in tribes, nations, and civilizations as the flip side of eternity.313 Clearly, Christendom has not been an exception to that rule. The Golden Age of the early church during the first millennium AD was followed in ever-quickening succession by its Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages: the Papal Revolution eventually produced the Reformation which led inexorably in our own time to the prosaic reign of the higher criticism. In its Iron Age Christendom has been reduced to a rusty hulk.
But the present, accelerating, downward spiral will not be the end of the story if white Christians fall in love with their own race all over again. Any such patriotic passion is unlikely to emerge, however, unless and until the ecclesiastical corporate body of Christ inspires legions of honourable men ready, willing, and able to defend the faith of their fore-fathers. Scandalously few Christians now recognize much less resist even the bred-in-the-bone racial/religious resentments driving age-old enemies of Christendom such as post AD 70 rabbinic Judaism and Islam. Indeed, the vast majority of churches actively collaborate with the proudly post-Christian, post-national Empire responsible for the terminal decline of White European civilization and culture.
How then can one not sympathize with those who despise the multicultural madness of contemporary Christian churches and long for the restoration of a racially homogeneous White Republic? To such people I say that the religion of the Republic was a poor substitute for the ancient Anglican Commonwealth. Over a much shorter time-frame, the four ages of the Republic created by the American Adam reveal a decline more precipitous even than that of Christendom: the Golden Age of the First (Federal) Republic was followed after the Civil War by the Silver Age of the Second (Bourgeois) Republic. The Bronze Age commenced in America when the Depression-era fear of class warfare called forth the Third (Managerial/Therapeutic) Republic, a regime which — in more ways than one — abandoned forever the gold standard. Obama’s Fourth (Transnational) Republic signals the onset of an Iron Age which already rivals Sodom and Gomorrah. In little more than two centuries, faith in the Republic has become positively dysgenic among American whites. One wonders why God should save a postmodern populist White Republic, in which neither “the people” nor elected officials swear fealty to the King of Kings and his anointed servants on the throne and at the altar.314
If indeed we are entering into a New Dark Age, the existence of the white race will be secured only when renascent Christian nations re-inscribe the trinitarian faith of their archaic origins into the future forms of their private, social, and public life. Those who pray together with those who work will help those who fight for the future of white children remain faithful to the Lord. The survival of the Kingdom will depend on churches which provide not just sanctuaries for suffering servants of the Lord but also base-camps for heroes defending God, King, and Country in the next Golden Age of Christendom.
2013: Turning the Other Cheek
THL 316 / The Triune God / DI
THL 203 / Paul and His Letters / HD
THL 307 / The Johannine Literature / HD
THL 215 / Jesus the Christ / HD
THL 315 / Anglican Foundations / PS
1: Gregory of Nazianzus on God and Christ
Introduction
The doctrine of the Trinity as set out in the Nicene Creed was adopted by the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in AD 381. According to the Creed, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are a unity in diversity of the same substance (homoousius). As a statement of Christian orthodoxy, the Creed made heretical the Arian view of the Son as a lesser deity created in time by the Father. At bottom, the Arian heresy reflected the profound disconnect between the Hellenic logical principle of non-contradiction and the Jewish salvation history which reveals the sole, true God as three distinct persons sharing the same divine nature. To those steeped in Aristotelian logic, it seemed obvious that the Father who begets the Son must be prior in time and different in essence (i.e. A ≠ non-A). It stretched credulity even further to suggest that even the Holy Spirit is consubstantial with both the Father and the Son. Just prior to the Council, Gregory of Nazianzus, then Bishop of Constantinople, undertook the task of bridging the cultural gulf between “the Semitic imagery of the Scriptures” and “the Hellenistic logical process” invoked by his Arian opponents.315
Partitive Exegesis
In doing so, Gregory constructed a new paradigm of “Christian Byzantine culture that set out to clip the roses of Hellenism of their thorns, and to gather them in to decorate and color the form of a new world order”.316 His achievement was the product, first of all, of the rhetorical methods he employed so brilliantly in his Five Theological Discourses.317 McGuckin suggests that the “creative ambivalence” of Gregory’s rhetorical methodology allowed him to hold “apparent opposites in creative tension”.318 Many other scholars have been impressed by Gregory’s use of “partitive exegesis” to read “Scripture as speaking of Christ as both God and human, distinctly but not separately”.319 In effect, Gregory denied that the Son must be either divine or human. He insisted that Jesus Christ was both God and Man. His solution to the logical conundrum posed by the Incarnation allocated “the distinctly divine expressions of Scripture to the Godhead, the humbler and more human to the New Adam”.320
Such a strategy carried the danger of distinguishing too sharply the human body o
f Jesus from the divine mind of Christ. On the basis of the “grand and sublime language” of Scripture, Gregory understood and preached the Son’s Godhead. But the same Scriptures tell us that Jesus “slept,” “was hungry,” “got tired,” “wept,” and “was in agony”.321 Beeley contends, however, that Gregory managed to avoid a dichotomy between the human and the divine character of the Messiah. In his view, “the dynamic thrust” of the incarnation was “a unifying one” for Gregory.322 And indeed Gregory declares that when the eternal Son burst into history and assumed human form Man and God “became a single whole”.323 Even so, Gregory conceded an inescapable asymmetry in the relationship between the divine and the human in the person of the Son. Nor could he deny the asymmetry in the relationships between the Father, Son, and Spirit.324
Gregory begins his first oration on the Son by identifying monotheism as the source of order in the universe. Atheism and polytheism by contrast both generate disorder and disintegration. He emphasizes that monotheism is not “the sovereignty of a single person…but the single rule” of a one which “eternally changes to a two and stops at three”.325 The Father begets the Son while the Spirit proceeds from the Father who simply is. Gregory insists that Christians “have one God because there is a single Godhead. Though there are three objects of belief, they derive from the single whole and have reference to it.” But, when he tries to explain why the existence of three hypostases of a single deity does not lead to “degrees of being God or degrees of priority over against one another,” logic fails him. In the end, any philosophical enquiry resting solely on the “frailty” of human reason will end by destroying “the credibility of the Spirit”.326
Salvation History
The efficacy of Gregory’s partitive exegesis depends on his ability to present the salvation history of Israel as a “marvellously constructed drama dealing with us”.327 Eventually he had to leave “theology” behind to explore the divine “economy” revealed in “the Biblical narrative of creation and redemption — culminating in the story of the Incarnation of the Word”.328 The asymmetry between the three persons of the Godhead and between God and Man are spiritual realities better apprehended through poetry than by deductive logic. In either case, the asymmetry fulfils the purpose in God’s plan of salvation. When God became Man, the “stronger side” predominated “in order that I might be made God to the same extent that he was made man”. Similarly the three hypostases of the Godhead perform distinct roles or functions that have been revealed successively in the covenantal history of God’s people. The old covenant was inaugurated to “cut away idols”. But it was “dangerous for the Son to be preached openly when the Godhead of the Father was still unacknowledged”. Similarly, the Spirit could not be revealed before the Son had been received. Only “by progress and advance from glory to glory” could “the light of the Trinity…shine upon more illustrious souls”.329
Gregory was convinced that the purification of body and soul was the essential prerequisite to theological understanding. Certainly, he devoted himself body and soul to the struggle to bridge the gap between Jewish salvation history and Hellenic culture. Daley remarks that “he seems simply to have been driven to communicate his Christian sense of reality with all the resources that his education in Greek language, philosophy, and literary style had put at his disposal”.330 But neither Daley nor any other scholar seems to have considered the possibility that Gregory’s “Christian sense of reality” was informed by something more or other than the fusion of the Scriptures with the high culture of Hellenic civilization in late antiquity.
Loose Ends
The fact is, however, that Gregory was born and spent most of his life in Cappadocia in Asia Minor. The people of this region were of Indo-European stock.331 Indeed, the neighbouring province of Galatia was settled by Indo-European Celts in the third century BC.332 The distinguishing feature of Indo-European peoples is the triadic structure of both their religions and their societies. Gods were divided into three ranks, each playing its own distinctive role in the cosmos. Indo-European societies were likewise divided into three orders: those who fight, those who pray, and those who work.333 The power of Gregory’s rhetoric in the Five Theological Orations must have derived at least in part from a native cultural affinity for the Trinitarian traditions of Indo-European theology. It is reasonable to suppose that he developed an intuitive appreciation of those deeply-entrenched cultural norms during his lifelong quest for solitude and spiritual purity. Perhaps it is time for historical theology to investigate the Indo-European and not just the Greek and Jewish roots of the emergent “Christian sense of realty” in late antiquity.334
2: Augustine of Hippo on the Trinity
Introduction
Augustine conceives the inner structure of the human mind as an “analogical site” within which the image of God is revealed to those wise enough to seek it.335 The triadic structure of the mind corresponds to the trinitarian nature of the Godhead. His argument peels back several layers of trinitarian analogies. Only by purifying the inner workings of the human mind can we hope to see the image of God. “We do not see now, but because we believe, we shall deserve to see.”336 His book on the Trinity is about bringing to sight those who are spiritually blind.
Augustine’s quest for the image of God begins, therefore, with our primary sense of sight. He discovers there “first of all a trinity of the outer man in things that are observed outwardly.” The physical experience of sight necessarily involves a triad “consisting of the body which is seen,” the form which it impresses on the mind of the observer “and the intention of the will which couples the two together”. But it is axiomatic for Augustine that the image of God is never revealed through the temporal activities which preoccupy the mind of the outer man. Only through the contemplation of eternal things can one “find something that is not only a trinity but also the image of God; while in the part [of the mind] that is drawn off for temporal activity one may perhaps find a trinity, but certainly not the image of God”.337
Ascending to the Godhead
It is only when the human mind is “contemplating truth” that it ascends from the lowly things of this world towards the heavenly image of God. Truth is a form of wisdom that transcends the materialistic knowledge necessary to the management of our temporal activities: “action by which we make good use of temporal things differs from contemplation of eternal things, and this is ascribed to wisdom, the former to knowledge”. For Augustine, “it is not the soul, but what is pre-eminent in the soul that is called mind”.338 Augustine portrays the incorporeal relationship between memory/power, understanding/reason, and will/passion as the analogical site which most closely resembles the unity in diversity found in the three persons of the divine Trinity.339
But he does not believe that it is reason or understanding that is pre-eminent in the life of the mind. He endows the search for wisdom with an inescapably erotic (sometimes verging on auto-erotic) dimension.340 In moving from the outer to the inner man, Augustine encounters a mind which knows and loves itself. In essence, mind combines the distinctive elements of memory, understanding, and will into a seamless unity. But it is not “because the mind remembers and understands and loves itself” that this “trinity of mind” becomes the image of God. Rather, the image of God shines forth in the mind which remembers and understands and loves him by whom it was made”.341
In other words, the mind is drawn by desire to contemplate the eternal Good which is God.342 As Lewis Ayres observes, “Augustine does not believe that we come to see the soul in the presence of God simply through deeper self-examination”. It is faith in “the principles of Trinitarian theology” that provides “us with the terms for speaking of the soul’s nature and the nature of love”. Because “we know in faith that the soul or love is both triune and a unity because it is in the image of God, then the language of that faith can guide our investigation into the image itself”.343 Clearly, Augustine’s work itself has had a major impact on the
language and grammar of Trinitarian theology. The question is whether Augustine’s understanding of the Trinity enhances or diminishes the strength of Christian faith.
Ayres clearly believes that Augustine’s work strengthened the Christian faith — at least insofar as faith is identified with traditional acceptance of the Nicene Creed. He presents Augustine as one among many fourth-century theologians who contributed to the consolidation of the now-orthodox or traditional form of “pro-Nicene” trinitarianism. The pro-Nicene theological culture that Augustine helped to shape assumed the ontological unity of the three persons of the sacred triad. Ayres credits the pro-Nicene theologians generally, both east and west, with a “new clarity about the simplicity and immateriality of the Godhead” which “enabled a clear insistence that the generation of the Son (and ‘spiration’ of the Spirit) did not involve a dividing of the divine being”.344 Augustine’s work on the Trinity may have strengthened the pro-Nicene consensus in the fourth century but in the long run his distinctive assumptions about the unity of the Godhead and the essential incomprehensibility of God have given aid and comfort to modern Western atheism, not least of all by casting “doubt upon the doctrine of the incarnation”.345
The Word Becomes Flesh
Augustine’s profound suspicion of the material world made him reluctant “to give due weight to the full materiality of the incarnation” by exploring the humanity of Christ.346 Augustine acknowledges, of course, that “the Word of God became flesh, but it is unthinkable that it should have been changed into flesh”. The idea that the Word was “consumed into” flesh was clearly repugnant to Augustine.347 Augustine therefore stands in stark contrast to Gregory of Nazianzus who made good use of “partitive exegesis” to underscore both the humanity and the divinity of the incarnate Christ.348 Gregory also pointed to the distinctive personal roles played not just by the historical Jesus but by the Father and the Holy Spirit in the unfolding biblical narrative of salvation history.349