Don’t Cry for Me, Europa
One more blow has been dealt to those who still cling to the inheritance that deprives them of the right to be the compliant “stakeholders” of the present epoch.
The fire that devastated the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris on April 15-16th, in the middle of the Holy Week, can be perceived as an ominous sign or as one of those accidents that add insult to injury in such a manner that even the most critical minded of people instinctively have problems thinking about it in terms of it’s being a mere accident.
It is quite natural that those whose inheritance has been assaulted on a daily basis not only – and not mainly – by their enemies, but also by its designated guardians, who, apparently, and in significant numbers at the highest echelons of ecclesiastical power, intend to dissolve it into the nothingness of acceptability for its mortal enemies, have some knee jerk reactions to traumatic events.
Yet, with all the allowances a sensible person can grant, reactions to the (half) burning of Notre Dame were off the charts, even in an age where the conspiratorial mentality is more or less a thing of the mainstream, with adamant assertions being made of arson committed by the enemies of the Church – the Pope has an alibi, we checked, so scratch that one – in order to send a clear message to Christians that the deposit of Faith is now but a burning trash can.
Shock is the only excuse one can grant to people who, while the fire was still raging, exclaimed that it was set by “our overlords” and that there can be no doubt about this, because … well, it fits the big picture.
However, when the mental concussion wears off, one would surely have to reclaim his senses and note that it was his own media-based system of meaning and not some kind of intuition of truth that made him think this way.
Surely, does anybody really want to go down the path of postmodern prophets like David Icke, one apparently only capable of upholding the holy tradition of sporting a mullet in the age of hipsters? This is more like a terminal adolescent lack of self awareness that has persisted well unto ripe old age, than the courage to be unfashionable which is a prerequisite for prophetic action, sans God’s grace, of course..
Not to mention that – to dwell for just a wee bit more on this postmodern “son of god” – Icke gave an interview containing the “unquestionable conspiracy to symbolize the end of Christianity in Europe” thesis to Russian agitprop rag Sputnik. I don’t see how, all contempt for the postmodern EU aside, an old aged new ager talking to the open enemies of that same Europe that Notre Dame is supposedly the symbol of, does not raise some eyebrows at least among those Catholics who are reiterating the mirror image of his flash of conspiratorial intuition.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, so it’s the “shadowy elites”, because never was there nigh a barbecue without them fanning the flames …
Well, it’s more like, where there’s Russian low level agitprop there are low level Western idiots to provide it with talking points.
People who inherited the Tradition, a part of which is this great cathedral, not only should, but are obliged to know better.
But who is to speak of obligations in the age of human rights?
And this brings us to the second and more worrisome point concerning the crocodile tears over the catastrophe.
There are a plethora of commentators who can be safely put in the category of compliant citizens of a sustainable Europe, i.e. people who are so advanced in their delusions that they actually believe in the syncretic ideological system prescribed by this supra national structure and, most importantly, that the task of inflating and enforcingthe truths contained therein has all the urgency and necessity of a crusade.
Naturally, unreality incites this peculiar mood of feverish zeal, because creating something out of nothing is an impossible task and as such it requires an ever intensifying maniacal activity to obfuscate the fact.
For these people – or dare we say: peoples, because among some Western European nations the populous seems to be quite accepting of this ideology en masse, i.e. it ticks all the boxes of being a (super) state religion – the purpose of Notre Dame can be nothing but a reminder of how far removed they are from even resembling the inheritors of anything real, something they nevertheless secretly crave with the insistence of a spoiled child: namely, identity and history.
The spoiled child wants to have without having to give and this is what is at work among secular Notre Dame mourners. They want the catastrophe to unite “us” around a “common” symbol of “our” identity and history, a building even more beautiful (and even more ancient?) Notre Dame.
Well, they omit to notice that the Cathedral of Notre Dame is in itself symbol of no one’s identity.
It is a shrine devoted to the Mother of God.
This, let us repeat, is what this gothic cathedral is.
If there is no Mother of God, there is no intrinsic purpose to Notre Dame.
Obedient believers in the EU secular religion prescribing such numinous acts as recycling, jogging, waiting on the ecological Judgment day, celebrating and preferably indulging in buggery, etc. of necessity do not believe in the existence of the said Lady or, if they still do somewhere deep down , they hate her with a passion.
Therefore, they have neither the right nor the obligation to appropriate Notre Dame as theirs in any conceivable sense of the word.
It’s as simple as that.
The craving for identity, so obviously unattainable by the EU uncivil religious zealots, displays all the qualities of tragicomedy. The adherents of the identitarian metaphysics that endeavours to melt everything into one homogenous culture – more in the sense of bacteria than human culture, by all accounts – created not by history but by the ad hoc strategic plans of think tanks and committies, all of a sudden want to have a history, and the Christian one to boot.
With all due reservations of politeness, a committed Christian, that is the one who is disposed to receive his inheritance and to bear all the burdens included in the package, has no alternative but to invite them to go and shove their heads up their asses just a little bit deeper, so it muffles the sound of their voice because it is becoming so unbearably irritating.
I don’t believe in the right not to be insulted but this once I claim the right to get even for it and to say clearly that I can count on top of my head at least a dozen villages from Bosnia to Croatia that today have a better claim to Notre Dame than contemporary Paris does.
There is no inheritance without life and if the great cathedral would be destined to live on as a mere tourist attraction and symbol of EU unity, which is in turn built upon the negation of the European inheritance embodied in the fruits of the spirit of the peoples united, however loosely, in the eternal Easter of resurrection, then perhaps it should’ve gone down in flames altogether; if the Christian era is over, as some claim, then ditch everything it preserved – not only Christian civilization, but all the past itself; because, the past of antiquity lives on in Christianity which grew its natural social and cultural roots in it as was clearly understood by the Church Fathers and can surprise only those people thoroughly detached from any semblance of a traditional mode of living, i.e. the way of life that is based on the continuity of, not only the temporal products of culture, but on the essential temporal vector of Being itself, the past age.
People whose political, anthropological and clandestinely religious project is based on the utter and final negation of the ontological reality of the past have no right to mourn the fruits of the past, let alone use them for their symbols.
All they can do is steal them and thereby deprive them of any original meaning they contained.
They don’t understand that the past and inheritance, which is a historical contraction, i.e. individuation of its energy, survives as the living reality only in the lives of those who are aware that its true gift and the burden is best modelled in the shape of the cross.
Therefore, let the failures of Europe keep their tears, no inheritor of One Holy Apostolic Church needs them.
And let them keep their heads deeply up their asses.
Their voices are getting far too irritating to be suffered without thought of violence.
Branko Malić
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Branko Malić
This Cathedral is to be seen as yet another fruit of our Faustian spirit. Christianity, in particular Catholicism, has been present across the world, yet only the Europeans could produce grand Cathedrals… Because of who we aryans are, because we have the same promethean impulse that made us go to the moon, not because of any religion. Don’t reduce a purely EUROPEAN achievement to Abrahamic religion.
As to every other Aryan rejecting “desert religions”, etc. I extend to you a permanent invitation to go all the way as Nietzsche did before you.
It is interesting how these “white nationalist”, alt/new right groups end up being very similar in nature to the EU technocrats and to the whole liberal democratic establishment.
He posits an alleged European common identity outside (even opposed to) Christianity. Of course, this is not techno-bureaucratic like the EU, but a sort of “organic”, racial identity. Of course, unlike the EU- who tries to embody its utopia in its institutions- this “aryan identity”, on the other hand, exists only at the level of imagination.
As for the Nietzschean invitation, there is no chance for that: these post-modern right wing movements are on the level of Scooby-Doo cartoons.
But they can hug a horse in the end, too.
I always hear the words Faustian spirit repeated ad nauseam over at places like CC. My question is to these folks – did you ever read Faust? The entire metaphor of Faust as used by Goethe (when it went further than a mere cautionary tale) was a thinly veiled disillusionment with the promises of the Enlightenment. Later on Spengler would cite this phrase to describe in his pessimistic tone, the complementing hubris to European success and achievement that resulted in exhaustion and decline. Given the context of this metaphor, to place the “faustian spirit” at the helm of Europe’s successes and achievements is to literally ascribe them to the “Judeo-Christian” devil. Even more ironic is to note that the Faustian tale shares the same premise as the earlier Jewish Golem myth.
I do not necessarily agree with Mr. Malic that the West owes everything to the post-Chalcedonian faith, especially which authoritatively prevailed there after 1054. But since he’s a Christian, he can be at least justified by seeking answers in his country’s clearly defined tradition that dated back millennia.
My view is that the tradition which Christianity springs out from, and the way it took hold in Europe was deeply European in the most sincere sense of the word. The pagans who claim that Christianity assimilated much of the pagan custom and belief at least understand half of the question, though they don’t realize to what extent they underwrite their own position by admitting this. The bottom line is that there is no more such thing as “desert religion” as there is “judische physik”.
I believe that difference between Latins and the Greeks, as they called each other at the time of the first formal schism, was minimal and, if not, it was not a difference one would recognize today, especially if trying to find that one, individual, moment that formed subsequent history. As for Faust, yes that’s the thing with slurs – everybody’s talking about poor doctor and no one read Goethe’s work, which is itself drenched in Middle Ages. By this I mean the mentality Goethe lays out in his tragedy: it is genuinely different from modern one, or, perhaps you kinda get a glimpse of how the modernity emerges from the Middle Ages. “Faust” is a modern work through and through, make no mistake. But there’s a distinct connection to the past in it that is not merely reiterating symbolism of the age – you actually have a feeling of being there throughout the first part of the book. You have something like this in Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” also, believe it or not. It’s not easy to rationally lay out how they accomplish to conjure this feeling of continuity, but I think that with effort, literary critic would even be able to explain it to some extent.
In my view, the thing is that Goethe was a man immersed in time, the very opening lines (Zueigung – dedication) of “Faust” are about this (this English rendering butchers the original, but I don’t have time to translate it myself:
Again you show yourselves, you wavering Forms,
Revealed, as you once were, to clouded vision.
Shall I attempt to hold you fast once more?
Heart’s willing still to suffer that illusion?
You crowd so near! Well then, you shall endure,
And rouse me, from your mist and cloud’s confusion:
My spirit feels so young again: it’s shaken
By magic breezes that your breathings waken.
You bring with you the sight of joyful days,
And many a loved shade rises to the eye:
And like some other half-forgotten phrase,
First Love returns, and Friendship too is nigh:
Pain is renewed, and sorrow: all the ways,
Life wanders in its labyrinthine flight,
Naming the good, those that Fate has robbed
Of lovely hours, those slipped from me and lost.
They can no longer hear this latest song,
Spirits, to whom I gave my early singing:
That kindly crowd itself is now long gone,
Alas, it dies away, that first loud ringing!
I bring my verses to the unknown throng,
My heart’s made anxious even by their clapping,
And those besides delighted by my verse,
If they still live, are scattered through the Earth.
I feel a long and unresolved desire
For that serene and solemn land of ghosts,
It quivers now, like an Aeolian lyre,
My stuttering verse, with its uncertain notes,
A shudder takes me: tear on tear, entire,
The firm heart feels weakened and remote:
What I possess seems far away from me,
And what is gone becomes reality.
The last line in German: “Was ich besitze seh’ ich wie im Weiten, Und was verschwand wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten” or “What I have, I’m watch now as if in distance, and what passed away is coming by me as real”, frankly says it all for me.
I wonder whether anyone nowadays reiterating that “Faustian spirit” formula can evoke in himself this mood of flowing back to the root of time. And this is something a lot of German authors share as a motive, from Spengler to Mann. For my money, German liberal Thomas Mann captures and partly fulfills it better than most in his “Dr. Faustus”. So one might ask, how liberal was him if he was so drenched in the times long gone that came to speak through him? And isn’t being liberal just a label of identity, used for day to day superficial purposes, while deeper down a whole different thing is going on?
The trouble with 20th Century philosophy and/or theology of history, whether the one “reacting” to rationalism or the one embracing it, is that it seems to be moving on the flat surface: supposedly given the idea, the consequence must follow systematically; if Mann is a liberal, Protestant and homosexual he is to produce something ideologically liberal, Protestant and homosexual; if Scholastics uses syllogism, than it is rationalizing and paganizing the Divinity, because all this modern rationalism must have some discernable root so why not pinpoint it there. Every time you start to look into details, those historical constructs start to fall apart.
So goes for the “Faustian man” also.
Oscar Wilde remarked about “desert religions”:
These people believe in what they don’t see, and don’t believe what they see.
As inheritors of Christianity, European consciousness is a spiritual power house. They’ve done away with any sort of relation to nature long ago. Therein lies their magnificence and utter danger when they lose their way.
Now they wish to do away with God but their spiritualized consciousness remains.
Throw your self on a cause. Die/kill for it, that’s your prerogative.
They wish they had a relation to nature, but their science betrays them.
Science as a spiritual practice – this is Faustian. TRUTH always was the objective ie God always was the objective.
What is a spiritual super charged consciousness without spirit?
Just a burnt out cathedral. That no one can recognize. Ironically that was the only progress from their brutality.
What a tragedy.