Keepers
of the Secret Fire – Reformation, Revival, Renaissance and how they
all can prevent the Restoration
"You
cannot pass," he said. … "I am a servant of the Secret
Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor.
The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn.
Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass." - Gandalf at
Khahazadum bridge
Therefore
Ilúvatar gave to their vision Being, and set it amid the Void, and
the Secret Fire was sent to burn at the heart of the World; and it
was called Eä.
Preface
In the past hundred years,
American schools have been secularized, dumbed down, and finally
turned into institutions with the very opposite purpose from which
they were created. Every Christian wants to fix the education
problem; this book is designed to help anyone who can read to do just
that. Yet education is not a problem to be fixed, but rather the cure
to ignorance. As Dr. Michael Bauman puts it, those who find truth,
beauty, and goodness, find more. In a more mundane sense, they
“learn how to learn”. Now learning occurs either when someone has
an epiphany, or (more usually), when they work by asking themselves
questions. It also occurs in the background, at a base level: we
“absorb” certain ideas from our environment.
A lot of classical education is
meant to make us aware of that background, because without that
awareness and perception, we usually think we see or understand, but
without actually doing so. This is very easy to see in others. The
modern blue-haired, aging, baby-boomer liberal, for instance, is easy
to spot. In a very spiritual way, he “grasps” that everyone has a
right to practice whatever religion they determine, because democracy
is HIS religion, and is outraged by the very suggestion that reality
might be otherwise. When confronted with the practice of very twisted
and evil religions that impinge on other religions, he ignores the
fact that he has generated a contradiction in one of his moral
platitudes, and immediately switches to another soapbox: the idea
that those who practice evil religions can be re-educated out of it,
& that the only reason they are doing these horrible things is
that someone else has oppressed or otherwise victimized them. When a
contradiction of fact or internal contradiction is generated, he
moves on to another supposedly deeper insight: that this group of
people is entitled to do as they see fit within certain “agreed
upon limits” (eg., no more stoning of homosexuals, for instance),
provided they pay lip service to the original idol of democracy. Of
course, he never notices that this is a very un-democratic ideal, the
idea that one group should be held to a higher standard than another.
So that in the course of the wasted hour or so arguing, a gigantic
vicious circle (with tiny epicycles of smaller vicious circles) is
generated. The person living inside this Ouroboros or Mobius Loop
doesn't “get it”: they can't see the problem, or else they think
that moving inside the Matrix like this is actually sophisticated and
clever, a way of “throwing others off the track”.
So this is what ideology does to
people. Since we “absorb” ideology like sponges, it is useful,
from time to time, to turn around and look at the train of our
thoughts from a neutral perspective. One might call this the “Crazy
Ivan” maneuver: Soviet nuclear submarine captains used to make a
sudden change of direction in order to “clear their baffles” so
that the sonar array could sweep where the wake used to be. If
someone was following them, they could suddenly see them on the
radar. It was a dangerous maneuver, in that it could lead to
collisions, hence the name “crazy”. A lot of people think
classical education is crazy. In fact, a lot of people think
education all by itself is crazy.
People who notice things, or
think, or study things of special interest, or remember well, or can
express themselves beautifully and powerfully, are not well liked or
trusted in the North American continent. At least, not in “polite
circles”. Skill and knowledge and power are respected in wilderness
survival circles, athletics, business, and other rareified climates.
However, in corporations/politics, schools, churches, and now even in
the military (the secular-university-ecclesiastical-military polygon
one might call the “Cathedral”), we can see that society hates
the idea of distinction. Rather, the new idea that these nurseries
will be called to incarnate in those under them will be democratic
and egalitarian, and consistently so. This means (simply) that it
will be revolutionary.
This instinct, I would argue, has
even crept into the Church. It is most obvious in the Social Gospel
Churches that succumbed to Rauschenbusch's false Gospel a century
ago, the “mainline” Protestant churches, which are nothing more
than “finishing schools” for certain sectors of the Anglo-African
elite now governing the country. It's quite clear that the idea that
“everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others”, is such
a powerful cliché in these Churches that virtually no fact or
argument can disturb the conviction. A more troubling fact is that
this attitude has begun to seep into the country, Bible churches and
Reformed communities that I have attended in recent years. This kind
of hatred of distinction, or exception (as it is viewed, because it
is resented), is quite obvious in a variety of contexts inside the
Church itself: the idea that Scriptures are plain and perspicaciously
clear to anyone who can read (without subtle teaching to explain it),
the idea that one is getting “airs” if they become interested in
something abstract or different or foreign, the idea that it is
Satanic to point out that Scripture does not interpret itself nor
claim to, or that it is “pagan” to suggest that other religions
are vehicles for the Truth of the Holy Spirit. In recent years, the
Protestant fundamentalism movement has gotten a new leash on life by
moving beyond Sola Scriptura and Grace Alone to “No Neutrality”.
This catchphrase has enabled the
revitalization of (particularly) Calvinist theology in North America.
Like all good ideas, it started with genuine insight into the
“contradiction” of the Gospel; men like Van Til and Rushdoony
demonstrably proved that there was a worldview war being conducted by
secular-humanism at the expense of Biblical soteriology. They
surveyed the battlefield, and found the enemy gathering at all
points. Benjamin Warfield (for instance) argued that Calvinism was
the most consistent expression of supernaturalism, over against the
idea of humanism. Others like Wilson and North have attempted to
apply this dichotomy to education, with widely disparate results. The
idea has become an institution, and (like all ideas), it has
inevitably come full circle to its opposite.
At first, this may seem a
fantastic claim. How can “God's Law or Chaos” end up promoting
Chaos? How can Christian Reconstruction be subverted into a smaller
version of humanism? That is what the essays are about, because it
has to be seen with the eye of the intellect to be believed. The
“intellect” is not a man-centered organ; to claim that it is is
actually to give the intellect into the hands of the unbelievers. It
is to concede exactly the contested point of contest. The intellect
or Nous is actually a higher organ in man which is supernatural. The
Scriptures in many places call it the “heart”, and ancient
Christian teaching holds that it uses the word “heart” in order
to shock or draw attention to the teaching hidden in plain sight, the
pearl of great price in the field. St. Paul teaches this in Romans:
all men “know the God”. Psalms 19 clearly teach that the heavens
sing of God's glory. This is taken, by the fundamentalists, in a
metaphorical or poetic way, in order to avoid what they (in their
brain) conceive of an unacceptable truth: that God reveals himself in
the depths of the human Nous, that God is the “soul of the soul”,
and that it is possible to “seek after Him, if happily, they might
find Him”. So that in attacking the idea that there is such a thing
as “Christian humanism” or “supernatural humanism”, they are
actually making the secular-humanistic argument for their enemies,
and proving that God has no relevance to the most important part of
man, his Intellect or right Reason. If this is so, Christianity tends
to become a moralistic religion, focusing on attaining to God through
the “right arguments” which will lead the autonomous Brain back
to the “fundamentals”. The brain ought to agree with
such-and-such phrasing of the Truth and accept a particular rule of
faith and practice. There develops a legalism of the Intellect that
is out of place with the grace of the Saviour. This places right-wing
Christians in the same boat as liberal secular-humanists: they differ
(formally but not actually) only on the content of those
fundamentals. For the Christian, it is the Word of God revealed in
the Bible, which is seen as falling out of the sky, like Athena
springing full grown from the brain of Zeus. For the liberal, the
fundamentals are things like universal health care, democracy, and
tolerant diversity of all groups. In both cases, the reliance is on
the wisdom of man. For Catholics, there is a tendency to think that
if one agrees with the Pope, then all is well. And so on, and so
forth. In America, there is a constant tension and overlap of all
these groups, with many holding contradictory opinions from either
side, divided or walled off in the brain like so many air-tight
rooms. This arrangement in the American landscape is known as the
“Cathedral”, and although it has many rooms, all of which are in
some degree of warfare or rivalry with each other, it is in the end,
a rivalry of mutual contention. Mencius Moldbug defines the ruling
Cathedral polity effect as:
Union
of church and state can foster stable iatrogenic misgovernment as
follows. First, the church fosters and maintains a popular
misconception that the problem exists, and the solution solves it.
Secondly, the state responds by extruding an arm, agency, or other
pseudopod in order to apply the solution. Agency and church are thus
cooperating in the creation of unproductive or counterproductive
jobs, as "doctors." Presumably they can find a way to split
the take.
Phillip Rieff calls this
“therapeutic culture” : it is an example of something that has
become its precise opposite. The
original theurapeutics were monastics living in the deserts of Egypt,
who became the regenerating force that saved the Roman Empire and
created Europe. The modern therapeutic culture is doing precisely the
opposite. How does this happen? Well, let's look at Christian
Reconstructionism. Originally, it was designed to be the antidote to
secular humanism. As we have seen from the above, the dichotomy of
God versus man actually ends up, when it reaches its logical
conclusions, of agreeing with the secular humanists: there is no way
to bridge the gap, and man is stuck in a plastic world ruled by
technology, governed by bureaucrats, and overseen by the “Cathedral”,
a self-appointed hierarchy of “super-correct” people who ferret
out dissent and anything that inhibits the “machine” from running
on schedule. If man's mind has no connection with the Divine, then
the “Mind is what the brain does”, and we end up as practical
atheists, saying that it isn't possible to actually know God. Some
people remain secular humanists, others become religious
fundamentalists. From a larger perspective, what's the difference?
Both groups think that man's brain is essentially the measure of
reality. One group offers democracy and tolerance as a palliative,
the other the “Word of God” and a set of legalistic rules that
one has to follow to live a moral life. Sometimes, you find those who
do both, and maybe this makes the most sense: if you are going to be
totally wrong, you can at least be grandiosely consistent. The two
propositions only conflict at the existential level: they both follow
logically from the idea that there is nothing divine or supernatural
in man's Reason.
So
what does this look like in the field of Christian education? You
have a huge argument between those who think that the Bible is our
Constitution, and those who think that we can re-write this
Constitution for modern conditions. Both sides see the other as the
enemy. There are even sub-camps in each group, with various subtle
differences. Douglas Wilson is convinced that reading the Iliad
makes you more human, which helps with your walk with God. Gary North
thinks exactly the opposite. And both call each other heretic and go
home. Now, certainly, Wilson has more reason on his side than North.
However, like North, he has the idea that classical education is
useful only in that it makes someone a better Christian.
This is why New Saint Andrews
for instance, requires a confession of faith from its scholars, and
subordinates the goal of education to that of raising godly children.
Both sides assume a kind of written definition of Christian as
“given”. In a practical sense, all well and good: it does seem
that people who actually know and read their Bible are, in general,
more Christian. And it does seem that those who think that the Bible
is actually God's holy Word have a little more urgency to their
spiritual walk. However, since the “Spirit blows where it wills”,
it's not possible to restrict God's agency and presence to what one's
preconceived notions of correctness happen to be, useful as these
rules are in daily practice as guideposts. It is interesting, for
example, that the Rig-Vedas contains many sayings which are almost
identical to those of the Son of God Himself. Coincidence? Well,
without studying them, how could you know?
Both
actually, in spite of themselves, think that there is a “neutrality”
that exists. North sees it as the enemy in disguise; Wilson wants to
use that neutrality to Christian advantage. Of the two, I would
certainly side with Wilson. However, who wants to pick their way
through dichotomies? I would rather say it this way: there is nothing
neutral, because all of it belongs to God to begin with. Including
the Greek mysteries, the Greek perversions. Why is pederasty (to take
an extreme example) so onerous and disgusting? Because it represented
a perversion of something good. The Greeks understood that young men
needed mentoring and guiding to the Truth. It is unfortunate that
they were deluded into believing that erotic impulses could provide
and sustain such, but the fundamental insight is not incorrect.
English education and high society, down to the recent times, had the
same undercurrent and problem, and so does the Catholic Church.
Rather than descend into hysterics, wouldn't it be better to take
away the whole basis of the practice by co-opting it? What if we
admitted that young men, even more than young women, need art and
spiritual science (in short, discipling) in order to achieve full
manhood? This is precisely what Christian monasticism and early
Christian patristics did. They did not deny that the Greeks were
wrong to have intuited the existence of the Nous and celebrated the
idea of brotherhood. Instead, using revelation, they formulated the
proper basis for it in the first place. They could see that they
needed the libraries and history and tomes and ideas of Rome, but
they took these things captive to Christ.
Sticking
your head in the sand like an ostrich may make you feel better (which
is what North does), and trying to “tidy it up a bit” makes a
little more sense (the Wilson approach), but the only manly,
Christian approach is to aim for the target. Thus, we admit that the
Greek mysteries and the perverted practices had a point. Like the
great general Pyrrhus, the Greeks were content to win costly battles
and lose the war. Just so, they had their enlightenments, through
disgusting and needlessly useless and perverted methods, because they
lacked the fullness of the Logos, which only came with the advent of
the Saviour. This is why Paul did not lambast them on Mars Hill, but
rather (in Wilson's words) “took them down familiar paths to show
them new things”: he proclaimed to them, the very religious, the
identity of the unknown God, fully revealed in Christ Jesus, the
King.
So
what good is studying the Greeks? If they lacked the fullness, can't
we dispense with them entirely? Isn't there a better vein to mine for
our classicism? Christian Europe, perhaps, even by North's admission,
much less pagan? In short, by a higher path, aren't we forced to take
the Northian route? We can answer this quite confidently and
conclusively: there is, in fact, no absolute need for the classical
canon. A Christian student can just as easily find education in the
volumes and tomes of “classical Christian Europe” as he can in
ancient Greece or Rome. What difference does it make if you read
Faust or Imre Madach's
The Tragedy of Man?
They are the same for the hungry mind. A student who studies Euclid
is no better off than one who works his way through Euler's collected
writings. There is the added advantage that it appears that studying
Job and Faust
exposes a student to less
weirdness and confusion than reading (for instance) the collected
works of Euripides. However, an interesting thing happens in the
course of studying Western European culture: there are constant
references and deferences to ancient learning. When the Irish monks
set out to save Western culture, they copied Greek and Latin works.
Hence their learning is sprinkled with the salt and savor of all that
was good, true and beautiful from that eternal city, Rome, and her
heavenly counterpart, Jerusalem. So that in trying to understand the
one, it is useful to spend time on the other, however incidental or
desultory.
This
is an inconvenient fact: the best minds of Christian Europe were
trained on Latin. Latin proverbs, Latin literature, Latin politics
(the theories of Polybius, for example) formed the raw grist or fiber
of their minds. So that to understand (for example) Dante, one is
forced to know rather more than a small amount of ancient philosophy
and history, in an intuitive way, if nothing else. Therefore, by an
interesting paradox, it becomes unavoidable to “know the Greeks”.
John Keats, for example, was a popular poet who used the vernacular,
but he constantly hearkens back to the Greek myths, and (like a
mirror) sees his own individuality in that mirror. You can't refute
Keats without reading his poetry, and loving Greek myth. You can hate
him, but you can't deal
with him. And if you ignore him, your precocious son may accidentally
open his volumes, or worse, become a poet just like Keats. And what
will you do then?
For
those Christians who will go on to become the heart and soul of the
coming order that will arise on the wrack and ruin of modern USA
civilization, it will be incumbent to know as much as is possible to
know regarding the human condition. For this task, they will turn,
not merely to Christian Europe, but to the great “false idol”
that civilization erected with the purpose of imitating: all that was
best in the Imperium of Rome, the beauty of Greece, and the goodness
of Jerusalem. We assert something even more fantastic than Douglas
Wilson is capable of admitting: that the story of humanity is the
story of Divine action in history. Or, as the Bible puts it, these
“things were not done in a corner, but rather, when the fullness of
time had come”, the Saviour came. GW Hegel perverts this idea by
asserting that the Spirit of God reveals himself in secular history.
I trust the reader can see that what we are saying is somewhat
markedly different: the Spirit of God works within, permeates, and
works to save all of history, which remains (for the time) full of
both darkness and shadow. Hegel instantiated History and the State as
God: we are saying that God providentially uses
in strange circumstances whatever human conditions offer up to point
the way to a transcendence of those very perversions.
Christian Europe, in its
humility, was content to learn from the ancients, however corrupt and
perverted, anything that would serve the purpose of following the
Lord. Out of that came a thousand years of Christian culture that
made man “Christian in their bones”, and aimed to convert the
heart as well. No doubt it was imperfect. History always is. But to
quote the Russians, “the perfect can be the enemy of the good”.
It is better to be humble, and to learn from our ancestors, than to
spend aeons reinventing the wheel. This is not compromise, but the
divine humility which redeems the years that the locust has eaten, by
digging up and not merely baptizing, but regenerating, ancient forms
that missed the mark (hamartia).
This is taking all thoughts captive to Christ. Because it was the
Logos who walked on the Aeropagus, and bore with the sins of the
Greeks, who founded the ancient city of Rome and taught them to
prefer Order over chaos.
This
is not surrender to neutrality, but the pursuit of neutrality deeper,
until the meaning is discerned in the feet of clay. Truly there is
no “neutrality”, but all belongs to God. It is the task of the
human who seeks God to unravel this Gordian knot, in whatever
circumstances he or she finds themselves. If God is a circle without
a circumference, whose center is everywhere, then people travel in
different directions as they move back to that circle. This is a
mystery, but is understood as one travels “the Way”. Because God
calls even the sinful and the Greco-Romans back to the center.
People like Gary North
misunderstand the idea that there is “no neutrality”. They think
this neutrality or non-neutrality exists as the end result of a
dialectic of discursive reasoning. For them, the truth is
ideological, and not mystical, intuitive, and super-Rational. Thus,
they see “dichotomy” everywhere except in their own point of
view. The result is that rather than support a classical education
(which acknowledges that “we are not God” in our brains), they
want their students to read the King James Bible, Shakespeare, and
learn basic mathematics and sciences. He goes on to assault the idea
of classical education in general, accusing it of being rooted in
pederasty and orgies and idol-worship galore. North is useful because
he does such a massively flamboyant chop-job assassinating “classical
education”. Reading him, you would think that all we need are
Bibles and our multiplication tables, along with an unexplainedly
exempt copy of the Bard's complete works, in which witchcraft,
prostitution, revenge, idol worship, and other cleaned up versions of
“classical education” would survive as a little added color. It's
not surprising that a middle class American Protestant outlook would
gravitate toward the idea of educating the child merely to take their
modest place in the bowels of the gigantic military-industrial
complex that sprawls over North America. After all, as long as we can
keep Raytheon and Tyson going, what else do we need, other than
faithful church-goers each Sunday? This “God, Gold, & Guns”
school of theology is a peculiar sect of late 20th century
America which seems to think that the Bible is more like a lawnmower
manual than the revealed Word of God, or (worse) that the Word of God
IS a lawnmower manual. It is not. The Word of God is primarily the
second person of the Trinity; the Bible is His reflection, not His
face.
These are of course, deep waters.
We are not saying that the Bible isn't holy, or not a written and
inspired record of Jesus, or that (in one sense), it is not
indispensable to the full knowledge of the Logos. What we are saying,
and surely, is that it is not a schematic manual in the same sense a
manual for repairing a 1990 Ford Ranger is definitive and
perspicacious. For that matter, even a lawnmower manual or auto
manual is not the “full story”. As the Bible itself proclaims, if
all was written of this Logos, “not all the books in the world
would contain it”. But this is one of those unquoted Scriptures
that is always overlooked. If the Bible, in short, commands us to
meditate beyond its clear teachings, then “supplementing the Bible”
is the only course of obedience for the faithful Christian. If Jesus
commends the Law and the Prophets, but says that “you search them,
for in them you think you have eternal Life”, but I am He that
testifies of its truth, then Fundamentalism has a problem. If God's
Word tells you that His Word is everywhere, the solution is not to
pretend that He didn't say that.
Of course, it always surprises
these eminent gentleman scholars of leisure when the stifled
curiosity and imagination of the child gets exercised, one fine day,
on the pages of the Holy Scriptures. If bright children do actually
read their Bibles, and discover more than a moral code book and
record of purely ethereal “spiritual” happenings, they quickly
find out that there is a lot of demonism, witchcraft, and “paganism”
in the Holy Writ. Nothing is more “classical” than Ahab's answer
to the pagan king: “let not him who puts on his armor boast as him
who takes it off”! If they continue to absorb the culture around
them, they quickly discern “errors” in the Bible (eg., the value
of Pi, for instance, in I Kings), as well as gaps or discrepancies in
supposedly literal writ. A child with active intellect is
particularly cursed: no matter how good a Christian he or she is,
they will continue to note oddities in Scriptures which
(unfortunately) do not explain themselves, and are not explained
(typically) to them. Even the Bible warns us: there are “many and
deep things, which the ignorant twist to their own destruction”
(specifically in the epistles of Paul, but I believe, in all of the
Holy Writ).
The Wilson theory of education is
much more subtle and sound; he understands that we are trying to do
more than just “outfit” someone for life in the missile factory
or as an independent plumber. I am not disparaging honest labor with
hands: everyone especially those with classical educations, need to
learn to work with their hands. But to say that God, work, and
independence are all that exists (and in the most basic form we can
wrangle up), seems to be a bit draconian, even by Northian standards.
Here he is at his finest satire
(satire is almost the only thing he does really well):
We teach classical
education here -- not the G-rated censored version that our
competitors palm off as classical education. They are pandering to
the little old Christian women of both sexes. We don't pander here.
We provide the real deal. We say that when you teach that classical
culture is the basis of art, liberty, and higher values, you should
teach what the classical masters did and said. Our competitoTrs, with
their G-rated version, refuse to do this.
We don't sugar coat
classical culture in order to fool parents who have never studied
classical Greece and Rome, and who have heard about how great a
classical Christian curriculum is. They want to baptize an expurgated
version of classical culture. They say that classical culture was
consistent: religion, sexual mores, slavery, politics, and war. We
agree. It was. But that culture had nothing to do with the G-rated,
expurgated version that is taught in the Christian schools that
advertise a classical Christian education. They want to fuse the
Bible and classical culture. That is because they are unfamiliar with
classical culture. In our school, we teach unadulterated
schizophrenia. Send your children here. We know you want your
children to be taught the truth. That's what we teach here.
There is, of course, a
marketing problem.
Even blind squirrels find a nut now & then, and North is
no exception. He is right about the sordid details of Greco-Roman
civilization. But then, how would he know this? Presumably he's done
some reading on the sordid subject. But don't trust yourself on the
subject, trust the man who's waded through the slime, and turn away
in horror and disgust from neo-classical education! Those who have
argued with North (like Douglas Wilson, the founder as it were of the
movement) aren't (of course) saying that we should expose our
children to such garbage: North constructs a straw man and has a lot
of fun batting it around. However, it is fair to say that Wilson and
others do try to “clean things up” in a certain sense. There is
nothing wrong with this in one sense: why not “spoil the
Egyptians”, as Augustine argued when he made the case for
Christians preserving classical learning? Wilson wants to enrich the
Christian world with the ornaments of antiquity: why not use the
rhetoric of Cicero, the beauty of Phidias, and the truth of Zeno on
behalf of Scriptural revelation? But Wilson doesn't go far enough.
The truth is that Wilson (and the classical movement in
general) does have a problem – the early Church, when they took the
truth, beauty, and goodness of paganism, most certainly did not
intend merely to ornament the insides of their Romanesque cathedrals,
adorn the sides of their Gospel pages, and embellish their political
theories with quotations from Plato. There is a kind of “generic”
feel to a lot of the classical Christian school movement, a kind of
whitewash that has its place, but doesn't get down to the grittiness
of pagan reality in the classical world. I think this is the white
whale that North is hunting, however confusedly, in his periodic
diatribes against the ACCS.
When Justin Martyr “baptized” Plato, he wasn't
recognizing that Plato was graceful, witty, insightful, and even
profound. He was claiming that Plato and the Greeks actually
understood the Gospel in a formal sense, even if there was some doubt
as to whether and to what extent this knowledge was salvifically
actualized. They were Christians before Christ, in that they
discerned and followed the Logos, the pattern of God. Augustine
claims that the Christian religion was nothing else other than the
“true religion” which had always existed, just in its fullest and
most perfect form. Keep in mind that, of all people, the early
Christians were aware of just how corrupt and degraded the
Greco-Roman world was – they inhabited it. Despite this intimate
and first hand knowledge, the best minds and hearts of the Christian
world (with notable exceptions like Tertullian), openly taught that
Athens and Jerusalem were the same city, a union that was effected in
the sacred and eternal city of Rome: Rome became both Athens and
Jerusalem to the new Christian Europe that rose, a phoenix from
ashes, out of the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
What does this mean? It all comes back to St. Paul at
Aeropagus, on Mars Hill. Did the apostle go out and cry “rubbish”
through the forum and agora, indicting them with a litany of their
abuses and heinous sins? Was Jesus a revolutionary, who saw no need
of the Law and the Prophets? Was Augustine an innovator, who hated
the “wisdom of man” in the ancient Greeks? Or did these men in
fact see deeper into the pattern of the Logos in a way that allowed
them to discern that pattern at work in even the darkest corners of
human history? Which view builds more confidence and Christian power?
A view that some things are irredeemably bad and ought to be buried
alive forever, or a view that seeks to understand that “nothing
human is alien to me”, or to God?
I can tell you which one will create Christian young people
who can take dominion, and which one will continue to foster a
retreat into a subculture that thinks it can once again become the
dominant culture by Reconstructing a 1950s world in which Protestant
work ethic, church-going, and neo-Calvinism will save us all. I can
tell you which view will be able to withstand the all out assault on
Christian truth and purity in the brave new world dominated by racial
conflict, cybernetics, gigantic corporations and governments, and God
knows what else, and which one will be hiding in the hills or bowling
allies of a decaying and collapsing American Empire. I want the faith
that sustained early Christians through the collapse of their entire
way of life and world, in the face of invasion, plague, famine and
war. How about you?
It’s
October, and I am thinking, inexorably, of the Protestant Reformation,
where my spiritual roots lie. In order to do those roots justice (it
does no good to saw them in two), I have to understand the contention
made against the Church of the West, the Latin Roman Catholic Church.
Now there are two types of attacks usually made on the Church: one of
these points to specific abuses (in the modern day, these have to do
with altar boys, but I qualified this 
