The Bee and the Lamb

A country in which demented Green Marxist twerps like Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit can become powerful and respected politicians, and a gobbledygook-spouting postmodernist Marxist tautologist like Jürgen Habermas can become the No. 1 public intellectual, is in a very bad predicament and doesn’t even know it. Underneath the prosperous, benevolent facade lies Germany that has done away with itself, as per Thilo Sarrazin’s famous book’s title (2).

And so we careen from one tainted formula to its poisoned antidote. Over time, to each vast falsehood there comes an opposite falsehood that sweeps its predecessor away. To each massive injustice there is an upending backlash, for the judge of history and destiny cannot be fooled but temporarily. Hence regenerating the West must start from what appears superficially as a utopian quest for truth. Truth not because it validates one belief or another, but because it stands sovereign.

Sea of malaise

The West is now at a critical juncture not seen at least since 1920s, and in some respects, since the 1^st century AD when the End of Times seemed imminent. Every component and institution of the ruling elite, every value it promotes and enforces, in every Western country, seems hypocritical, malignant, the whole thing reeling toward the ash-heap of history.

Another precept, now widely accessible due to one of the few advantages of the global village, comes from the 17th century samurai warrior and Zen teacher, Suzuki Shosan:

Whose Christianity?

Judaism itself had hardened into a misogynistic-patriarchal, racist cult uniting extreme religious fanaticism with the obsessive formalism of burnt offerings at the Temple. The theocratic elite attending to the Temple lived well from the half shekel tax imposed on every Jewish male. Furthermore, the last kings of Judah, heirs to the Hasmonean dynasty and High Priests themselves, were tyrants whose cruel oppression led to frequent civil revolts and reprisal massacres. Alexander Yannai (103 BC -76 BC), for instance, crucified 800 Pharisee opponents on a single occasion while holding a lavish banquet.

The seeds of a plant prone to withering were sown early. Fanatical Greek Christian theologians (e.g. Marcion, John Chrysostom) grafted onto the nascent religion the endemic Seleucid hatred of Jews, with suitable redacting of the Gospels and twisting of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible (which continues to this day, e.g. by the Christian Identity people). Eventually, they severed Jesus, Mary and the Apostles from their Jewishness, and the New Testament from the Old. Then came the North African Church Fathers like Augustine, Cyprian and Tertullian, with their own brand of fanaticism unknown among contemporaneous Greek or Roman pagans and Northern animists. Appropriately, Cyprian coined Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus (Outside the church there is no salvation), as though he had any clue or right to opine on the salvation of Karelians or Koreans, animists or Taoists.

Arius, like Jesus and Jeremiah before him, like Socrates, Cato the Younger, Cicero, Joan of Arc, William Wallace, Jan Hus, Jacques de Molay, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Churchill in the 1945 election or Goldwater in the 1964 election, Van Gogh or Juhan Liiv, Galileo then or James Watson recently, fell victim to the human aversion to carriers of the true, the pure and the beautiful.

                                              

By the 1950s, even revisionism was no longer sufficient to keep the better brains within the Christian fold. Scientists and jurists, cardiologists and novelists, engineers and philosophers have left the Church, any church, in droves. Empirical science could no longer sustain supernatural claims. Moreover, the intellectual left had trained its canons on all the follies and missteps of Christianity past, while omitting its blessings and benefits. The Christian community at large kept fighting the science instead of admitting its validity but challenging its exclusive claim on truth. Rather than owning up to past missteps but showing the much greater balance of positives, it kept skirting the crimes and denying the missteps (10). This brought further erosion, and eventual capitulation of the different denominations and their slide into do-good, activist-leftist movements.

In what they believed and were there is, embedded, a key to a better future.

(1) On the connection between Luther and Hitler see, inter alia, Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, Cambridge University Press 2003, pp. 136 -139.

(3) Brock Chisholm (Canadian general, psychiatrist, Head of World Health Organization), Psychiatry (February, 1946), pp. 7, 9-10, 16, 18.

 

(5) I wrote more about Fr. Tischner here.

For the Old Testament: Randel McCraw Helms, The Bible Against Itself, Millenium Press, 2006 [I have not read other works by McCraw Helms and cannot endorse them].

(8) Albert Schweitzer, who among his many talents and accomplishments had a PhD in theology, made this case in his 1899 Quest of the Historical Jesus.

here and here). All those are unable to breathe without the mother milk of Jew-hatred, Protestant-bashing and fanatically exclusive claims on capital T Truth. On the other hand, the Vatican needlessly replaced the Tridentine Mass and various liturgical elements. Its new ecumenism has a character of too much making up for too late, particularly with respect to decidedly unecumenical Islam. Mainstream Protestant Churches have engaged in other forms of Mea-Culpism, primarily with respect to past race and sexual orientation “discrimination.”

Takuan Seiyo is a European-born American writer living in exile in Japan. The concluding chapter of this multipart essay will appear next month.

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