Europe is the Faith
A reader with more enthusiasm for controversy than knowledge of history, left this remark: “And yet, in Christianity, we find the roots of Marxism and Nazism. ”
Well, that is true, but it is not as world-shattering as it might seem.
In Christianity, we find the roots of everything, everything, everything in all of Western Civilization and every part of it.
The West is the Church. The Church is the West.
The only things one can claim are present in the West with no Christian roots whatever, are those things whose roots go back to the sinful nature of man, and are found in all cultures, East and West: polygamy, torture, crime, slavery, sodomy, divorce, contraception. These are things the Church specifically and unambiguously condemns, and, before 1930, all heretic break off from the Church, which we call denominations, did likewise.
Everything else in the West, the things that the West has and the East lacks or visa versa, these are all rooted in the Church because there is no other root for anything in the West aside from the Church.
This includes the pagan writings and institutions, everything from the Greek Alphabet to the Roman Senate, to philosophy to Homer to the theater, which would have been obliterated and forgotten save that medieval Christian men painstakingly preserved them and passed them along. All these pagan things are now Christian because the Christians baptized them.
Even the Greek love of rationality and philosophy is Christian, because the Churchmen incorporated them into Church teachings, and, more to the point, discarded the distgusting and superstitious practices of omen-reading and mysticism and the drug-induced hallucinations of the mystery cults, and everything else in pagan Greek culture which was unrational and unphilosophical, the orgies of Dionysus, the self-mutilations of Cybele.
The sole reason why the Greek writers look rational and reasonable to use us because the Church did not preserve the irrational and unreasonable writings.
Even those things that seem to be beyond the Church are merely heresies and schisms. They take what truth and virtue they have from the truth and virtue of the Church, nowhere else.
The only power they have to persuade or fascination comes from the original of whom they are a cheap tin copy.
That includes institutions like the hospital, the university, the rule of law, or political and social movements like the Enlightenment, and Liberalism, and Protestantism, and Socialism, and Modernism, and every other “ISM” that exists.
They do not have “ISMs” in the East, except for ones they copied from us. We find nothing like utopian political movements, or societies formed for the abolition of slavery, in China, Japan, or India, before the coming of the European. Even the Marxism as praticed in China, while it resembles the Legalism or Mandarin-class rule of ancient China, is an import from Christendom by way of a heretic named Marx.
Ideologies are merely the political and social teachings of the Church, stripped of God and removed from holiness, ripped out of the context of Christian history, and erected as a false idol. It is a partial truth erected as a whole truth.
Nazism is a heresy of Communism, which is a cheap secular substitute for the plan of history adumbrated in the Apocalypse of St John.
Indeed, our enthusiastic writer quotes one Norman Cohn:
“Beneath the pseudo-scientific terminology one can in each case recognize a phantasy of which almost every element is to be found in phantasies which were already current in medieval Europe. The final, decisive battle of the Elect (be they the ‘Aryan race’ or the ‘proletariat’) against the hosts of evil (be they the Jews or the ‘bourgeoisie’); a dispensation on which the Elect are to be most amply compensated for all their sufferings by the joys of total domination or of total community or of both together; a world purified of all evil and in which history is to find its consummation – these ancient imaginings are with us still.”
The definition of chutzpah is a man who murders both parents asking the jury for leniency on the grounds that he is an orphan. The rhetorical sleight of hand involved in Mr. Cohn’s passage above passage is a close contender in chutzpah.
The idea being implied is called post hoc ergo propter hoc, that whatever comes after an event is caused by said event. The fallacy in this case is the implication that if it were not for the Church teachings on the Apocalypse, no perversions and no heretical inversions of those teaching would exist, ergo the Church bears some or all of the blame.
So if the Church teaches a truth, and someone takes part of that truth, becomes and enemy of the Church, rejects her teachings, and uses that partial truth as a weapon to war against her, and slay her saints, the person speaking the truth is to blame? After all, if that girl had been dressed in a burka, she would not have been raped.
The other rhetorical trick involved is too clumsy and obvious to be called a sleight of hand: Cohn suffers from the phantasy that calling something a phantasy is an argument, rather than an unsupported opinion.
(In this case, the trick an insolent one, since the ancestors of everyone named Cohn also had their apocalyptic writing. His objection to the Church, in other words, has its roots in the Church. The only reason why his people are not as extinct as their contemporaries, the Amalikites and Jebusites and Hittites, the Assyrians and the Seleucids, is because of what he dismisses as a phantasy, namely, the religious truth to which his fathers faithfully clung.)
The only answer for a sneer is a belly laugh, particular where, as here, the sneer is merely an unsightly quirk on the face of someone belching a windy eructation of ignorance.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
