The Continental Divide

Whoever heard of this guy in seminary?http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Alexandre+Rodolphe+Vinet
Sometimes, it seems as if history is not so much distorted, as just plain forgotten, somehow. This fellow seems pretty important to a Protestant, anyway.

German Literature

http://www.theatrehistory.com/german/goethe008.html
http://www.emersoncentral.com/goethe.htm
I looked at my blog, and realized I had veered away from Literature. Saints preserve me!

Goethe, according to Matthew Arnold, along with Dante, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Moliere, was one of the greatest poets of the West, by which he meant, someone who not only thought a worthy thought, but expressed it magically and well. Part of the German language's charm is the fact that it operates, syntatically, like a gigantic poem. Verbs, adverbs, nouns, and adjectives build off each other much more closely than in English. The logic and clarity of German, as well as perhaps the capitalization of the nouns (implying Platonic essences or Augustianian ideas in the mind of God, or universals), lead to German science and art and thought, in which it lead even the French until Hitler and the World Wars. German's one drawback is its harsh sounds, but, oddly enough, the b becomes an English p and the g becomes an English k (both softer sounds) when at the end of a word. German also borrows many French pronunciations. And so English may sound as harsh to some ears as German.
Unfortunately, in two hundred years, it will be a scholarly language and literary form only. President Mitterand of France predicted the same for French.
It's a shame to lose such a good language. Our minds could use it.

America and Rome

Differences between us and Rome:
1) Geography: we are a heartland, surrounded by cities, surrounded by oceans and northern waste and a narrow isthmus to the south. Rome's lifeblood was in her exoskeleton and primary organ of the capital city. She looted the provinces to glorify Rome, and when one city fell, the whole world fell. She could only survive by conquering new territory and building frontier forts that became medieval cities later on. But they weren't cities until Rome fell. They were just villages. America is a gigantic city, perhaps, but much more well-defended. We are not vulnerable to a coup d'grace.
2) Our president is a Methodist Christian in good standing.
3) We have nukes.
4) We will use them.
5) Nanotechnology is not being built fast enough to outstrip our own development.
6) Our immigrants are poor Mexicans, not Vandals and Goths.
7) Our evangelicals are having children, unlike in ancient Rome, where most Christians took a vow of celibacy.
8) We permit, but do not enforce, baby-killing.
9) We do not kill people in arenas for fun.
10) Our entire army is composed of Southerners, fundamentalists, and old fashioned liberals who think like their grandfathers of World War II.
Conclusion?
We're good to go for at least five hundred years.
Keep up the good work.

The Fault is in Our Stars, That We are Underlings

http://www.livius.org/te-tg/teutoburg/teutoburg01.htm

This battle, arguably, marked the extent of Roman imperium and the beginning of her decline into a decadent Empire defended by limes (garrison forts), instead of creative expansion. Many contemporary theologians/historians in Reconstruction have tried to argue that America (2006)=Rome (70AD). Empire, empire, empire...their arguments sound very similar to those made by the liberals who hate Bush, with the caveat that they believe that Christian persecution, bread and circuses, are right around the corner.
Ortega y Gasset has pointed out that Rome, following the assassination of Caesar, failed in its object, which was to turn her exoskeleton on the frontier into the heart of the Empire, with Gaul and Britain and Egypt as her new "heartland". What followed was this disaster, and the inevitable decline of military fortunes. America is in an entirely different situation, with, as a friend of mine said, two friendly neighbors to the north and south and two big ole honkin' oceans to the east and west. Rome was a victim of geography and Varus' stupidity. Her Empire was built around the rim of the inland Mediterranean Sea, which was why Caesar had to rid the sea of pirates. The Roman emperor used to wake up with nightmares during thunderstorms crying out - "Varus! Give me back my legions!". In an ironic twist, provinces that could have seceded and made it on their own during the fall of Rome were stripped of legions and leaders as people like Aurelius took the British legions and went to Rome, leaving Britain to fall before the Saxons.
It was a terrible tragedy that, because Germania was never "Romanized", cities like Cologne on the Rhine could not become the rule of Germany, and Northern Europe was cut off from the civilizing influence that would have restrained later German war adventures, which lead to the World Wars. Instead, Berlin and Prussia were the measure, and Bavaria was still pagan in the time of Charlemagne.
God had his hand in both events, which destroyed Rome and prevented Germany from rising to its rightful place as leader of Northern Europe and Christendom, rather than the Atlantic Empire.
A butterfly flaps its wings in Asia, and God works His will among the nations. Thus says chaos theory. How much more so such battles as Teutoburger Wold.
http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/comment/PanGer/PanGerTC.htm
http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/1914m/buloweng.html
http://h-net.org/~german/gtext/kaiserreich/bernhardi.html

The preceding sites give some idea of how prepared Germany was to fight the wars, how much she desired to assert her imperium, and how close she really came to having the mindset necessary to pull it off. Talk about not playing well with others...
It was one of history's great ironies that British Protestants should foolishly back Prussia during Germany's re-unification as "progressive, socialistic, and Protestant", over backwards Austria. God's judgement spares no one when their foolishness abounds beyond all reason. Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first of all deprive of all reason...

Acedia, Angst, and De Profundis

Stars, strange stars have come over me and shone,
Shown, shown me strange dreams, dreams that I will tell.
The creaking insects whine away their drones
That yearn for heaven and promise hell.
I am on the wrong side of reality-
The passage is the breaking of my glass soul-
Heard I them aright, in angel harmony,
They would possess heaven, fear not hell.
This mortal sleep and blackened sun capered
Over in its hypnotic yellow
In a blissful death makes them immured.
But I am waking and it haunts a fellow.
I would not trade with them, I think,
Unless I cannot pass the middle of this bitter drink.
The lees of this wine is where, just like a God,
He's put the drug elixir lotus for His sods.


This poem is part of a sequence with Clementia Dei, and obviously should have come first.

Our world is rocked in cradles sleep and dreams
Unsettling and profound disturb us-
Not since waking life itself, it seems,
Becomes a greater nottle for brainfuss.
Hurtled down the invisible grooves of void,
Swept in chaining circles of cold space,
Our clay lump is God's long, lost toy.
Or perhaps a quarantine for our race.
Unchancy, unlucky, and unblithe,
Undone, uncomely, and unfit -
And this, the reckoning of the wise
And of the good, so it is writ.
Our heroes had their feet of reddened clay,
But their brave hearts mistook the nights for day.

These poems come from reading Charles Baudelaire too often, a Catholic "turned inside out", said Thomas Merton. It is written and it is breathed by God that we all shall despair and fall before God's childlike Love finds us. We should never take sin too seriously, in this sense, because grace much more abounds. We should not fear, but watch carefully, our dark sides.

Perhaps, tis so- they see what we will not-
A glimmer on the lips of dawn to them-
A nightmare ache that yammers to a sot-
Or some discharge behind the eye that dims
The pain or changes boredom at the first,
But soon becomes as common as the gloom.
A miracle seems so but once, and worse
Elements creep in and make heaven's tomb.
I must go on, and mankind as well.
Perhaps if nothing's sacred then is all
Holy- rediscover heaven, reinvent hell.
Or damn it all, just reverse the Fall.
One hero did, and God read the Fates-
All He loves prospers, withers His hate.

Ihr volt, ewige leben?

Oikumene and Demons

http://www.godecookery.com/mtales/mtales03.htm
http://www.bibleufo.com/ufos.htm

The Oikumene is the civilized world. Under the Beast, demons such as the Prince of Persia and the Beast of Ephesus operated inside the civilized world. Judea seems to have been the focus of the demons activity. In this, we would do well to remember the saying - Demons inhabit decayed altars. Hence, the enormity of Carthage, a beast reproduced from Philistia that sacrificed babies to Molech. After the Incarnation, demons were cast out of Christ's kingdom into the outer darkness of Thuringia, Cathay, darkest Africa. As the Gospel progressed, and as saints did battle with the princes of the power in the air of their countries, demons were relegated to the wilderness. Demon possession became, not common, but uncommon. This is changing. With the general apostasy, UFOs and Demonology is once again important reading. I have yet to read of a Christian "abductee". It is common and fashionable today to dismiss the Dark Ages as ignorant and unlettered and superstitious (which they were as much as we are today). Even Christians discount the stories of confrontations with preternatural powers. But with growing interest in the occult, these days are over. It is the sign of the cross that terrifies them, and the incense of living sacrifices to God. We ought neither to dismiss them nor to study them too closely.

Islam

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05193/536684.stm

This ought to alarm Europe. Islam is a gigantic, heretical, deviant Christian cultus, spawned (most likely) by a demon impersonating Gabriel (Demons were still active on the fringes of the Oikumene in the 7th century). Take the most bloodthirsty Christians, subtract any teaching on grace or mercy, and give them an inferiority complex. Presto chango, Muslims. In fact, it's really remarkable we haven't had a civilizational war with them until now. Probably because they are light years behind everybody in technology, but they hope that bombs (particularly nuclear) might even the score, much as Japan hoped the Divine Wind of Kamikaze would save them in late 1945. To quote a friend, wherever they live turns into desert. Islam carved an Empire out of heretical Christian and Jewish territory (a warning to bad theology). They conquered everything they own with the sword. They still punish rapes by executing the victim. They cut women's mouths to the ear for not wearing a burkha. If there is a hell, no doubt they are already there. They are known for their latent homosexuality (I could quote sources, but I prefer not to). They do not believe that the Koran has any human elements, in contrast to the Christian belief in revelation, involving veils and subjective recipients. George Grant is right. There is blood on the moon. And, of course, the moon was actually the Babylonian god Sin. They are frozen in amber of the ninth century. There is a war brewing. It will be up to the barbarians how far we have to go to stop them.

This Pope is Different...

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA10Ak01.html

It isn't pagan nationalism to call us "the last, best hope of earth", Leithart not withstanding. God, of course, is our final refuge, as well as our initial, and in between. However, I do not agree with F. Neuhaus that America is Babylon http://www.firstthings.com/menus/ft0512.html. We have that potential, of course, as any nation does, but so far, America has always thought well with its heart, though not so well with its head. In this sense, we are the opposite of Europe. America (and those under her aegis) are the only places on earth where the idea of God defending the weak, the stranger, the poor, the immigrant, the countrified, the city slum-dwellers has taken strong hold. God has chosen the poor and despised of the earth to confound the mighty. America is more than just haunted by that idea. It remains deeply embedded in her thoughts. It is, as they would say, self-evident here. Popularism, the politics of freed plebes, continues to basically determine policy. (Warning - this following website by Oriana Fallaci contains some language, if memory serves, but it sums up well how even a secularist might react to Islam - she said she thinks and reflects better in a cathedral, even though she doesn't believe in God) http://italian.about.com/library/fallaci/blfallaci09.htm Karl Rove is right - conservatism is the dominant political philosophy of the country, and that is because Christendom is on the retreat in Europe and Christianity in America. And so we conserve, as well we should. The Christian is always conserving and yet always experimenting. If the Mandarins of Europe can't keep the Oikumene from collapsing, it's up to the Christians. Just as the milites Christi filled up the Roman legions in the late period of the Empire, so do Christians fill up the armies and airforce and navy of America, as well as providing the cultural leadership that the liberals have lacked. We are the only "creative minority" left in this country.

EUROPA

Europeans left in Europe - heartland?
No, the soul of earth. Round the inland sea,
The gentle and the strong clustered, a band
Of fireflies outswept - bonus rei.
Flotsam, scrapped bones of Chaos and old race,
The tricklings of sunset, strainings of dawn -
Shine scoured down the walls of space,
And seeded here by furtive angels gone.
What good exists without or within Earth?
And who planted the groves of fragrant Greece?
The vinegar of Rome became wine-worth -
Prometheus is kind, and found, the Golden Fleece.
Europa beatified and Zeus constant?
Eternity was a perfect instant.


GK Chesterton said the Mediterranean Sea was the heart of the world. Teilhard de Chardin's Mediterranean Man cannot be replaced (he would argue) - merely improved upon. To the dismay and consternation of nihilistic and secular liberals, in order to repair the ruins, we will have to build upon European man and classical man just like the medievals looked back to Rome. It seems we must all imitate someone.
However, some have argued for American exceptionalism. The Pilgrim journey was a baptism, where the tribal loyalties leftover were left behind at last. Europe, like the Elves in Middle Earth, will fade and give way to the American hobbits, who are more good than beautiful.

Clementia Dei - II

The soul and heart, all mine, and all of me,
Hovers o'er small body and huge abyss -
Easily dissolved into a hot mist -
But not so, to arise quick and swiftly,
In the glimmering, vapor breath of dawn,
Into heaven's bourne and the breast of God,
As speedy and as easy as a nod,
Ripping away all that Edenic wrong.
The I lives on as the body unwinds.
What shall keep grave me from sinking into hell?
(So heavy and long dead the soul that fell.)
Long time before the worthless hope, I find
An older good, an ancient love, perhaps-
The Light that spoke to me before the Hap.

Clementia Dei

O Lord above, All-penetrant and dread!
O King on high, from west unbound and fair-
(Your tongue a sword) - robed white and hands of red-
Your magnitude of goodness once unbared
Surpasses vessels cracked the while by less-
Those attributes which do delight You small.
You hide Yourself, Creation can confess,
But tiny sparks of justice we see fall -
Old worlds and galaxies are doomed and burned.
Your back is turned, Whose face in lambent,
Flaming love is by our black globe spurned.
On twisted tree, a tortured God is rampant.
Your essential love should immolate us;
None shields us but Your just-hidden selflessness.

The South Abides, But Will Not Rise

Don't call us hateful 'cause we fought yir flag.
Blast, it's our flag now, and we own up, on account of we were cussed wrong.
Back then, most us were too damt ornery for our own or other's good.
Still are, some say.
I couldn't stand myself if I weren't me!
Hatred came of defeat, and dirt, and pride.
It was our fall of man, but here we are!
If not good-natured, at least good-humored,
(Or the other way around, I firgit).
Sic transit gloria and hell on the Kennesaw Line and tough mule meat at Vicksburg,
And all that for all that, a mud stompin's a mud stompin and a'walkin' it dry.
So vade retro Sathanus, you Confederate re-enactors!
The sooner we get over this Norman Conquest of other folks solvin' our problems,
The sooner we can stop being Gurth the swineherd.
Come to cipher on it, reckon black folk got more in common than the Canuckois.
And old enemies can become old friends - indeed, they surely do.
And earth itself become a kindly garden,
Where we meet acrost our howin' in the cotton patch.
We've suffered into truth,
And the ghosts may not be at rest in Gettysburg,
But they quarrel not amongst themselves,
But at us, that we may still hear what they have to say-
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
You could learn a thing or two down South, says I.
Bre'r Mule, said Father Francis, you'll get yir resurrection someday.
Till then, just remember that you got some good licks in
And had a heckuva time.
It's not yir fault yoor a mule.


For all the right-minded attempts to defend the South, racial slavery (I aver!) is not to be found in the Scripture, the shade of RL Dabney not withstanding. Slavery was doomed the day that Christ nailed Himself to the cross, although perhaps some of the old ways still remain. And yet, the solid South does have a strange mystique to it, as any John Grisham fan can attest. And the Southerners have filled up America's armies for generations. The once great leadership of Virginia is gone in the tragedy of the Civil War, but the last three president have hailed from the lower states. And the South has threatened to develop a literature and a philosophy from time to time, only to piddle out. When all is said, perhaps it is good that we were beaten. We were certainly in an indefensible position vis a vis our peculiar institution of racial slavery.
I somewhat concur with this following assessment, minus a few caveats (founding an Empire in the Caribbean was a dream Alexander Hamilton entertained as well):

"The Confederate States of America arose through irreproachable democratic forms, with the overwhelming support of the populace of the southern states, who sent three-quarters of their military-age men to fight. In proportion to population, the 289,000 Confederate dead of 1861-1865 - one quarter of the military-age population - dwarf the million or so Iranian fatalities during the war with Iraq and seem trivial by comparison (6% of total population vs 2% of total population). No war cabinet ever enjoyed more enthusiastic support than that of Jefferson Davis, and no modern people ever matched the Confederacy's willingness to sacrifice for their ambitions. Yet the Confederacy was an evil proposition from start to finish, not merely because it wished to preserve the three-fifths of its net worth embodied in human chattels, but also because it proposed to create a vast slave empire in Latin America. [1] A slave economy based on cotton, which then ruined the soil in less than a decade, could not persist another generation without expanding its territory. The vast majority of Southerners did not own slaves, but hoped to get them through conquest. [2]"

However, the issue is naturally much more complicated than that, though if I had to simplify, I would do it something like that. No other nation was ever so right and so wrong at the same time. The South had all the rights in the world, yet failed to understand that being right is not enough. Certainly, in the name of Freedom, a great many beautiful forms were annihilated, in both North and South. This happens in any and every war. There are no exceptions, especially for one so sanguine. The South also committed the impardonable blunder of underestimating its opponent. For a mistake, this is too big...

But I still love the South. And saying they were wrong doesn't make the North a plaster-saint. It is grossly unfair to call the South "an evil Empire" (one of my cavils with the above quote), but it is equally unfair to call it anything better than a "dubious proposition". Success in war would have justified the slavery situation. And expansion would have come as soon as the secession was a fait d'accompli. The South as it stood in 1865 (and not in 1800), would have been a bad idea.

The Freedom of the Good/ Leithart IV

Many times Christians fall into the idea that the Bible presents us with a list of do's and don'ts. While it most certainly does, it does not reduce to this. And it conveys the entirely false impression that dos and don'ts operate in the same manner. They do not. But because we speak that way, abusing language, we end up tending to think it as well.
For instance, it is entirely possible for even the most blatantly "modernistic" Christian to come up with at least a couple of absolute don'ts (total negatives or absolute evils). The less modernistic Christian could think of perhaps two or three hundred. We call this someone's code or ethos, usually. The very words conjure up thoughts of prohibitions (or as Leithart would say, interdictions or anti-remissions).
Leithart, while properly rejecting the idea that Constantine be constrained by a simple list of dos and don'ts made up by peasantry or by modern theologians, is guilty (I think) of refusing to allow Baptistdom (or Christianity/Churchianity) the same privilege. This is to say that while Kantian categorical imperatives are easy to construe or lay down in the negative (Thou shalt not...), the Holy Spirit gives birth to the new Creation whose law is love and who is really free. The options of the person of good will, oriented towards the God Who is Light, are greatly enhanced. A good man is hard to find, but when you find him, you will find that he may choose to sacrifice or he may not, that he may choose to sacrifice himself for one person or for many, and that he may choose to sacrifice himself out of many possible ways. No one tells an American soldier laying down his life for God and country how to die. Not even his officer. No one tells a martyr which tribe to lay down his life for. No one tells a confessor who is tortured how far his suffering must last. No one tells the one who loves whom to love and how.
We may tell someone to love in a basic sense, and enjoin him to do so to his basic circle of society. Beyond that is the territory of the Spirit. Beyond that is where Christ is walking to and fro, going about the earth to see what mighty works of love and suffering He can endure.
So to bring this analogy to full circle, if Baptist and Methodist circuit riders wear themselves out in the saddle of mules and nags evangelizing the frontier while Presbyterians are too busy worrying about preaching in defense or in favor of a Civil War over slavery, the heretical Christianity sects deserve to triumph over Christendom, just like John Knox earned Scotland with his famous prayer "Lord give me Scotland, or I die". The blood of the martyrs and the aches of the saddle-weary circuit-riders are the seed of the Church. Christianity stole a march on Christendom, Mr. Leithart. Nothing could be more seemly than the old dictum that those who suffer win.
Until Christendom recovers her martyrs, Christianity will continue to dominate America and the world, in conjunction with liberal democracy. That's what 2000 American soldiers have died for in Iraq. Their blood will argue strongly with God. Whatever their theology.
Intellectual and liturgical cultures or mini-cultures often forget that the beautiful and the good are not identical in the vale of tears.

Leithart III

Leithart is brilliant, and his book Against Christianity is an easy, erudite, lucid read. Simultaneously challenging and enjoyable. His main distinction is the one he draws in the last chapter between Christianity (something like what Churchianity is to others not of Leithart's persuasion) and Christendom. Christendom Leithart endorses, arguing that when an Emperor embraces the Faith, and forces the Empire to accept it, that such is the will of God and the existential choice of a man with a purple mantle upon his shoulders. In otherwords, if an individual is free to embrace a faith and implement it around his home (which all good Baptists agree to) then why would an emperor not be free to embrace it and enact laws and change culture based upon the implications of that same Faith? Is Constantine not a man? Is he not free? Is he not free to stand before God and accept responsibility for what he has done? Prick him, does he not bleed?
This is the highlight of his book. Of course, we answer. An emperor, like we, has a conscience, and if he can't live before his living God with the idea of letting a hundred thousand screaming Saxons come raiding into his territory every year, then he will baptize them at swordpoint, in order to make them stop. It's his call. Leithart admits we have fallout from that, but that is our responsibility and calling. To mitigate Constantine's wager. After all, the emperor knew we might have to. And we know that others will deal with the negative consequences of our choices. But we still have to call the ball. It's our move, and evil consequences, no doubt, will dog our steps unseen when we lie asleep.
It is a challenge to accomplish even more good. Anything else is just peace in our times.