Answers to Nietzsche

Frederick Nietzsche has yet to be definitively answered. This is certainly not definitive, but I would suggest some lines of response to Nietzsche, who, by the way, deserved an answer from somebody. His main critique was that Christianity had inculcated such truthtelling and truthfulness that it was bound to devour itself. What did not devour itself (as he did) degenerated into mealy, sentimental liberalism, which was all about "gentle Jesus meek and mild". The cult of the Sacred Heart may have had something to do with that, and Schliermacher's erudite pietism most certainly did. It is worth noting that Nietzsche mainly targeted the weakened cultural Christianity, which was more concerned with being nice and helping everyone, something that took shape as the "Social Gospel". Nietzsche was hammering the emerging Anglo-American/Protestant piety, but he also included in his censure the declining and weakened (by the French Revolution) Catholic Church.
The obvious response to all of Nietzsche's problems was to immediately separate Western Christianity from its Gothic roots. The problem lay at the heart and genesis of Western Christianity, when it converted the roving Teutonic tribes. Pope Gregory the Great baptized their culture, but permitted them to keep their holy sites and their rituals and their seasons. This, while definitely successful from the outset, would prove a tragedy in the 1900s, as the tribes of Europe stopped naming themselves Christian names and rushed to the auto d'fe called World War II, frightened that the great national types would disappear from the face of the earth as the Burgundians, Jutes, and Swabians had (along with innumerable other Gothic tribes). http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FA05Aa01.html One can see today, in the revival of Vampire Goth and icons like Marilyn Manson, the yearning of many Teutonic bloods for one last revel in their pre-baptized state.
The separation of Christianity from its Gothic roots would have, unfortunately, run counter to the Faustian impulse of the West, its drive into the infinite, when it declared independence from the Byzantine East and pursued its own destiny in Europa proper. Pope Leo the Great negotiating with Attila was the first consecration and hint of the forthcoming Western balance of power between prelature and emperor, foreshadowing the feudal age, the warbands, and the truce of God, as well as interdiction and excommunication of entire royeumes (as King John learned to his hurt).
This Western separation of church and state represented nothing more nor less than the baptism and resurrection of Rome and Hellenic culture. This tension within the West worked very well, interspersed with periodic Revolutions and Reformations, until the present day, due to the suicide of Europa on the steppes of Russia and the fields of Flanders. A failure to be able to distinguish between what is Western and what is Christian undermined the faith, and gave Nietzsche both the torture and the excuse for his blasphemous assault on God. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GF01Aa02.html He saw himself as proclaiming what had already happened - "God is dead, and we killed Him". He prophecied unknowingly, as Caiphas the high priest did when he said of Jesus - "It is expedient that one man die for the nation" (rather than that Jesus start a Jewish revolt and bring down Rome's wrath).
Of course the West has always been more dynamic, barbaric, lax, and also questing than the East. Part of that is God-given. However, the obvious reply to Nietzsche was the opposite of what TS Eliot and the neoconservatives http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GB23Aa01.html of every age try to do: de-culturalize Christianity and let the Francis of Assissis and the Saint Patricks take over. The West had avoided Reformation for years that way, channeling its energy into Benedictine, Cluniac, Carthusian, and Franciscan monastic movements. Those, along with the Irish eremites, were the monks who saved Europa. Their ghosts are with us still, in the presence of the living Christ. It remains to be seen what their blood accomplished. The blood of Saint Alban is the seed of the Western Church.
And so Nietzsche was only dialoguing with himself after all - himself, and all others who were living in their own personal hell, having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof. They were all good Europeans, just as the neoconservatives are good Americans. Being conservative isn't enough, and there will always come a false prophet like Nietzsche to cast fake pearls before real swine.
Meanwhile, the roots of Christianity endure. In the catacombs of Russia, the monasteries of Kosovo, the chastised Southern states who found Christ in the Campfires, the marginalized evangelical "fundies" who are scorned by the American liberal elite, and the faithful Catholics of Spain who held to the good old ways in the midst of Civil War. Not to mention the Third World, which now sends missionaries to us and represents a far more traditional version of Christianity than we practice over here.
Nietzsche was wrong. The Church did die, and so did Christ. It's just that it keeps coming back to life again, or being rediscovered, like a pearl of great price. And someone forgot to acquaint Nietzsche with the Eastern Branch of the faith, whose Magian culture is impervious (Providentially) to many of the weaknesses of the Gothic and Faustian impulse. http://www.orlapubs.com/AR/R146.html Welcome to reality, Nietzsche. The joy of the labyrinth isn't complete until you emerge with the pearl of great price.

Anglicanism, Jane Austen, and Jeeves

Much of the credit for Britain's stiff upper lip attitude and "non-excitable soldiering-through"must go to the Anglican settlement, the Book of Common Prayer, and the ancient British Church that predated Roman primacy. The Gallic Church in France was much less successful (as 1789 witnessed), and noteworthy for proving that ideas may have consequences, but they also have hidden subtleties that lead to drastically different results depending upon where one is standing. An independent Church worked extraordinarily well in England. It was a unequivocal disaster in France. Unlike Britain, who nationalized their Church rather successfully by the Act of Dissolution under Henry VIII, France proceeded straight from nationalization into revolution into civil war into world war into apostasy with blinding speed. What is medicine to one may prove death to another. Talleyrand as head of a Gallican clergy was about as good an idea as Kerensky at the head of the Russian Revolution.
To the contrary, in Britain, people kept the "Common Faith", culturally/personally/numerically, much longer, arguably even to this day. The end result today may be similar, but Britain proceeded upon a steadier basis, which created the British national character of muddling through with dignity, aplomb, and bulldog resoluteness and indifference. That, plus more than a little steady help from Wesley, Whitefield, and the like, who deserve the lion's share of credit with preventing the French Revolution from spreading to England's green and happy land.
The Gallic Church flirted with independence all throughout the Middle Ages, even taking the Papacy captive at Avignon. Even so, France remained staunchly Catholic in character. As Leon Bloy remarked, the Catholics in France remained pelerins d'absolu (pilgrims of the absolute). Hence the bloodshed and the cry of incresz infame!. The entire Anglican settlement, au contraire, was a via media between Scotch Calvinism and High Church Catholicism. Richard Hooker http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bio/64.html best expressed this Anglican grace of moderation when he stated: "God is no captious sophister, eager to trip us up whenever we say amiss, but a courteous tutor, ready to amend what, in our weakness or our ignorance, we say ill, and to make the most of what we say aright."
Jane Austen's novels of morals, miniatures, and manners would have been inconceivable without this "settlement" of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Her entire, idyllic, charming, and yet utterly realistic world of the country gentry and seafaring souls would have never occured had not the Reformation confiscated church lands for the middle gentry and the Glorious Revolution not launched the seafaring Empire where sailors went forth with "all the world before them and Providence their guide" (the last lines of Paradise Lost). When Queen Elizabeth designed the book of Common Prayer, her aim was to provide something with which Catholics and Protestants alike could worship in peace of conscience. In otherwords, the Anglican settlement was aimed at restoring peace and prosperity to the island of England, while preserving tradition, orthodoxy, and the insights of the martyred Ridley, Cranmer, and Latimer. There were martyrs for the Faith upon both sides in England, under Bloody Mary and Elizabeth. As 1588 showed, it was a close thing whether the Protestants would be able to remove England from the Catholic sphere of nations.
Jane Austen's beautiful landscape of genuine, evangelical moralism is inconceivable without Anglicanism. I hold her novels to be a refutation of any anathema directed against the Anglican Church en masse.

A Frankish Dark Age Debate

Ratramnus was a monk of Benedict's Rule, one of the earliest Catholic orders, serving in an abbey in the Somme, which would later be one of World War I's bloodiest battles ever. Under the aegis of Charlemagne and the Frankish dynasties (who had expelled the Moors from Franconium, subdued the Lombards in Italy, decimated the pagan Saxons, and conquered the pagan duke of Bavaria, as well as looting the fabled fortified ring of the Avars), the Gallic Church was growing up, a church which would be one of the centers of Catholicism until the Great Revolution of 1789, which nationalized the church under Napoleon and appropriated all church property to the state.
Although we like to think of these time periods as intellectually barren, as well as physically miserable (which they were), Ratramnus and his opponent Paschasius Radbertus debated one of the critical mysteries of the Church in a dialectic that would be resurrected immediately after the triumph of the Reformation. The question was this: In what sense is Christ present in the Eucharistic meal of the Lord's Supper?
Ratramnus defended the Catholic position later articulated in terms of substances and accidents by Aquinas: namely, that although the bread and wine retained the outer properties of bread and wine (accidents), they became, under Consecration of the Host, the actual body and the blood of God (in substance). The "invisibilis substantia vere corpis et sanguis Christi".
This is the doctrine we call transubstantiation. The Catholics maintain that the elements are not equivalent to the historical Christ, not identical in every way. Nevertheless, the Host becomes the body and the blood of Christ.
Radbertus, on the other hand, claimed that it was "non alia plane caro, quam quae nata est de Maria et passa in cruce et resurrexit de sepulchro". Roughly translated, "none other than the Christ who was born, suffered, buried, and rose again". Berengarius of Tours in the 11th century, as well as Calvinists during the Reformation, particularly attacked this understanding of the elements, although the Calvinists also objected to Transubstantiation.
Why is all of this of any interest, let alone use, to the Reformed American Christian of today? What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem (Tertullian)? To delve into this is to put vain philosophy above Christ, and to worship a God of the Philosophers, and not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Blaise Pascal)! Isn't this like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Actually, our Reformed Fathers had the same debate and gave various answers. The Lutherans taught consubstantiation, while Calvin taught that it was a physical sign made efficacious by the Spirit, while others believed in a "spiritual" presence only.
Presbyterians today have resurrected the question in a different form in a vigorous debate http://www.paulperspective.com/, asking whether one can truly have any assurance outside of partaking of the Lord's Supper and attending orthodox worship services http://www.christkirk.com/Literature/ReformedIsNotEnough.pdf. One party seems justified until another skilled examiner steps up for the cross! Baptists discuss the same question under the paradigm of "if you are once saved, are you always saved?" It boils down to this: where does our assurance and means of grace come from? How you answer classifies you as either sacerdotal/legalistic, or grace-oriented/Gnostic. You know the saying: I am principled, he's stubborn, you're pig-headed. The question is neither moot nor ridiculous nor pointless. Nor, apparently, is it settled in Q.E.D. fashion.
It is interesting for Protestants to note that Ratramnus taught predestination to hell (although not to sin) and so did Gottschalk of Orbais http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06682a.htm, who was condemned by the Council of Orange. See this link for other arguments made by Berengarius which would have pleased the Reformers: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02487a.htm. All of this is to say that we don't like in a historical vacuum, nor were our spiritual ancestors dolts and gimps who slobbered over the Host like benighted heatherns. There were Reformers before the Reformation, and some of them were jolly good Catholics. Did you know that the Orthodox had a Jesus prayer for centuries before we invented the Navigators and simple prayers for Jesus to come into the heart?http://home.it.com.au/~jgrapsas/pages/Jprayer.html. It seems we may have reinvented the wheel, except, of course, we only have to say it once. Or so the Baptists say. And as the little old lady once said when the preacher explicated a Greek meaning of fine subtlety - "What are those Greeks doing messing with my Bible?"
Footnote: One should note that the Roman province of Gaul was one of the earliest areas of Christian civilization. Iraneaus of Lyons was a bishop in the second century who wrote Against the Heretics (Adversus Haereses -Gnostics), and there were many Christian martyrs in Gaul during the persecution. The Church held many important councils in these regions (for example, Orange), and Eastern monasticism was transmitted to the West through John Cassian and also Benedict's rule. France was the cradle of Western Christianity, though Rome was her head see. The Irish also came back into France following the Frankish invasions, and re-evangelized. France is to be regarded, especially following the repulsion of the Moors at Tours and the defeat of the Lombards and subjegation of the Saxons, as the center of the "West" as opposed to the "East". Although Orthodoxy in the East regards the early spread of the Gospel as genuine, they will not concede that the West remained Orthodox after the spread of Augustinianism. There is some basis to the critique: Augustine is to be regarded as the founder of a distinctively Western Church, with his doctrine of substitionary atonement and predestination. The Western Church insisted upon venturing out into the "secula", armed with the doctrine of predestination, which brought secular history under the redemptive aegis of the Church. The East has never accepted such "nonsense", and remains a distinctively monastic Church. In the West, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which seafaring Britons went out onto the silvery jewel of the ocean armed with predestinating Providence as their guide (see the last lines of Paradise Lost), was the crowning jewel of this eccelsiastical doctrine. Thereafter, the purely secular revolutions, in both East and West (1789 and 1917) extended the doctrine of redemption by blood to even the dirty souls of the savages, as well as the very atoms of Creation. For a very interesting treatment of this, see Charles Williams' Descent of the Dove and his idea of the Co-Inherence and substitution and exchange. The entire history of Western Christianity stands or falls on Augustine and Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, the corresponding extension of this universalism into every dimension of Creation (the Great Revolutions, including the revolt of Rome against the patriarchs), and the culminating doctrines of liberalism and tolerance (properly understood in the classical, Baroque sense). If substitionary atonement is not accurate, the West is completely invalid. I, for one, believe that it is legitimate, although perhaps not in its perfect flowering or proper balance. The Eastern Orthodox Church offers a corrective (but not an antidote) to Western deficiencies, and vice versa. However, I think Charles Williams may have been right to place the way of affirmation (delight and substitution in the Beloved as Dante followed Beatrice into Paradise) above the way of negativity, which is supposed to lead to a divinization of the ascetic as they directly experience God's energies (not His inconceivable essence). The West has refused to make such a distinction, and this leads to repeated attempts to extend God's grace, by the virtue of the All-Sufficient Substitution, to even God's enemies. Thus is explained Unitarianism, Universalism, Liberalism, and other such (perhaps) ill-timed extensions and Crusades. This accounts for Western decadence and dynamism versus Eastern monolithicism and "staticism". Readers interested in comparing may consult the difference between someone like Swedenborg and the thought of Father Seraphim Rose. Or, to be more fair, Saint John of the Cross or George MacDonald on behalf of the West. Or Charles Williams.

The German Reformation

Pontifex Maximus remarked that a wild boar is loose in God's vineyard concerning Luther. Luther remarked that I flatulate in the pope's general direction vis a vis the pope. As Rosenstock-Huessy wrote, all of the West was by assumption and long tradition Catholic, and then one fine day, everyone woke up to the trumpet of war and schism. Imagine a general revolt all over the West against, say, democracy and universal franchise. There you have some idea of the tectonic shift.
Luther hailed from the sands and bogs and forests of Saxony, a monk who once licked the Eucharist up off the floor of the church because it was the body of Christ, plagued by illness and pain all his life (as many then must have been), and a genius at polemic. His greatest statement may have been parallel to Cromwell's I beseech you in the bowels of Christ that you be mistaken. His manifesto was this: popes and councils may err.
Specifically, he was tormented for long years with the fear of damnation, which he gave a name to: Anfechtung. The Nightingale of Wittenberg began to sing, and, as even the Catholics say, he sang millions out of the Catholic Church. The hymns of Germany still constitute a spiritual reliquary (repository) of impressive proportions, set to the music of Bach and Handel and Haydn.
Luther followed the via moderna and the modern piety also, rejecting the scholastic and juridical tradition of the Latin West that had developed in response to the retranslation of Greek theology and philosophy (through the Muslim outpost of Cordova) into Latin. The intellectualist tradition of Aquinas and Duns Scotus had been overturned by William of Ockham in the via moderna, which placed a heavy emphasis on volition and will as opposed to right reason. The late devotional manuals of the Middle Ages contained more emphasis on emotion than previously. The Augustinian canon to which he belonged taught all these things, and Luther kept his hatred for the "schoolmen" (as he called the legal and juridical scholastics) all his life.
Still, while the Reformation rejected legalism in soteriology, it retained it in ecclesiology. The first schisms among the Reformers occured over the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and also over church government, which remained magisterial and hierarchical, with an emphasis upon tradition and authority in subordination to Scripture. The Anabaptist persecution was brutal and vicious, surpassed only by the repression of the anarchistic peasant uprising, which was lead by so-called prophets of a new millenium order, such as Ziska the One-Eyed.
The Reformation continued to teach tithing, sabbath observance, and church membership, while rejecting sacderotalism and sacramental theology in soteriology and the sacraments. While the distinction may be a fine one, Luther retained many Catholic elements all of his life, and would hardly recognize a Southern Baptist Church as legitimate. It is well to remember that he was forced out of the Catholic Church, and did not leave voluntarily. Lutheranism was a state religion in Germany and Sweden and Norway until our own day and time.
In his own way, Luther was bitterly conservative. Baron Ledhin (of worthy memory) has documented Luther's roots in Manichean and chiliastic heresies in Eastern Europe, his anti-Semitism, and the resulting influence upon the Nazi Party, all the while recognizing that Luther had a valid spiritual experience of God. In fact, he has proven that the areas which voted for Hitler were apostate Lutheran areas, and not the Catholic strongholds, who voted staunchly Centrum. It was a curious combination of Lutheran apostasy and freethinking, combined with the leftover Catholic spirit of pilrimage towards the absolute (Leon Bloy) which produced the deadly virus of fascism, a revival of a secular pope, and the totem-worship of Teutonic rascism. The perfect storm, you might say. For a modern perspective that reaches the same conclusion from different angles, and shows how the papacy contributed to the problem, see
http://http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GF01Aa02.html.
Unless one imagines Luther as a puritan and a backwoods preacher, one cannot make sense out of his visit to Rome, prior to his conversion, which so disgusted and energized him. It was the Baroque painting and architecture encouraged by Pope Hadrian which struck him as so pagan and anti-Biblical. Oswald Spengler in his magisterial Der Untergang Des Abenlandes has shown the uncomfortable morphological parallels which exist between Luther in his reaction to the Gothic and Mohammed and his reaction to the Magian/Greek culture. Calvinists, like Muslims, are fundamentally fundamentalists. While I will leave to theologians the argument over the implications of this observation (which could, arguably, be either good or bad), I do insist upon it as a historical fact. Certainly, the Lutheran doctrine of passive obedience to the civil magistrate did not stand the Germans in good stead in 1939. Or at least, one might argue, the Calvinistic and Lutheran Staatlehr (Theory of Politics) needs more fleshing out than has hiterto occured. I would argue that Reconstructionists have fallen short of this, Theonomy notwithstanding, in that they have still not come to grips with the richness of history both secular or ecclesiastical, as this website will bear witness:
http://http://www.tourosynagogue.org/GWLetter1.php
Confusion continues to this day, and we are still mixed up. Should we be a theocracy? Is God our King? How far should we push toleration? What does toleration mean? Do we stone people to death for mowing lawns on the Sabbath? If we are a Christian nation, what does it mean to be Christian? The answers are being written in living history by actors who agree on very little, even in Reconstructionist circles.
All of this is to conclude that Lutheran piety is immensely interesting, and still relevant, very relevant, to the discussion we are having today over the separation of church and state at the federal level. His persecution of Anabaptism, the massacre at Munster, the subsequent history of Germany - all bear witness against him, despite his immense achievements in challenging the primacy of Rome and elucidation of imputed righteousness. The controversy around him is another reason to study and read the writings of Luther

Orthodoxy

One of the more interesting sites I have come across lately in my desert wanderings is the following: http://www.romanity.org. Of particular interest to the parched Protestant may be the doctrines of hesychasm/theosis, hell, and tithing. Just as Rosenstock-Huessy remarked that the thirsty Westerner finds refreshment in the Baroque and German music of Bach or Handel (they composing in an earlier period of Western spirituality that even Nietzsche admitted was a more genuinely "cheerful" time), so the jaded and weary Protestant may take comfort in the fact that all Truth for all time has not been delivered merely to Charles Finney, Hal Lindsey, and John Calvin.
If nothing else, perusal of this site will contribute to the ongoing effort made here to engage different elements of the true tradition across the boards in a concord that will preserve distinctions and richness of our variegated ecclesiastical history, while exalting the invisible harmony that prevails wherever the Spirit blows. It is this which, I maintain, is discerning the spiritual body of Christ, and also contending earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints: not dogmatism and polemics, but the joyful science of the Logos.
One has to wonder what effect the decimation and decapitation of the Church had upon the transmission of the faith in the period between 100AD and the Diocletian persecutions. In these formative years, fire, sword, and heresy ravaged the young faith, which fought back for its life desperately. If individuals can quench the Spirit, and churches, could not an entire century or even a millenia of ecclesiastical history be somewhat imperfect insofar as it erred from the councils of perfection? Any other view leads into infinite controversies over what constitutes the "true Church". My own tradition skips from Paul to Augustine, and from there straight to Calvin and Geneva, and from there to Hodge, Warfield, and the Princeton school, then from there to Bahnsen, Rushdoony, and Douglas Wilson. It is a shortcoming which I confess is "for my sins", and one which I must labor to overcome.
This is not to belittle the Catholic tradition, to which I will return in later posts. It is only to recognize that, as Protestants, we are uncomfortably still to close to Catholicism to objectively evaluate it in charity and spiritual discernment.
The two mottos of this site, to continue my dedication, will be "Reforming the Reformation" and "For My Sins". This, I hope, will capture the spirit of things.
As Wooster asks "where will it all end?", and Jeeves answers, "who can say, sir?". I will propose, and God shall dispose.

PS. We shall have a separate column on Anglicanism, Jane Austen, and the world of Bertie and Wooster, but that's for a rainy day. Cheers and what ho!

DEDICATION OF THIS SITE

This site is named the West Wind as a sign of conscious incompleteness, there being four corners of the earth. It is written that the Spirit is like the wind, and blows wherever it is pleased to do so. I pray that the tone, subject matter, and results of this site will be in concord and harmony with the purpose of the Spirit, which will lead us into all truth, which testifies of the Logos, and who is in union with us as our Creator, and which teaches us to call the unknown God our Father Who is in heaven.
May the Church of God join back into completeness. As on earth, so in heaven, and may our Church be various and yet unified, even as the mystery of the Trinity.
This site is dedicated to living Truth, regardless of where it may be found, for the Spirit is unseen and blows where it lists, as it is written.