How did our Western Culture become what it is today? Let’s wind back a little bit in time. You are in the 15th Century, the West is Christendom. No, not everyone in Europe is a pious Christian, but many, many are. The Church, being both the structure of leadership and the people, are an integral part of the culture. All aspects of life are informed by the Scriptures and the long body of tradition of past saints understanding of those Scriptures. Christianity has advanced from its origins in the outskirt Roman province of Palestine to being the dominant religion in the regions of the ancient Roman Empire and beyond. There are churches in Briton and there are churches in the deserts of Arabia, as far as the eye can see and more. In virtually all of Europe kings reign under the assumption that they will face the King of Kings, Jesus, who is considered the true ruler of Europe. This is Christ’s kingdom, Christ’s dominion; Christendom. Indeed, this supremacy of the Christian Church in the West has existed for many centuries and would remain for many centuries. Any philosopher who would propose a system of thought would have to contend to some degree with Christian thought and writings. The Church truly did stand alongside kings, indeed in some ways over them.
This Christendom was not perfect, it
was not the millennial reign of Christ, though there were perhaps many
churchmen who expected it to lead into that. But it was truly a golden age of
enquiry, of discovery, of extension of the Church. As with other golden ages,
it had it’s draw backs, but it was a time where Europeans were ardently working
out how to live as Christians in this fallen world, not just as individual churches,
or even Christian movements, but as a whole society. Paganism was in many ways
both overcome and receding, though it would feed into different aspects of
church life, Islam was a threat in various parts of Christendom, but it was
being managed, and Judaism, a long and indeed original opponent of the Church,
was mostly situated outside the West in the Eastern lands of Europe. Christian
thought had been given a chance to flourish and show what it could do.
Despite what you have been told, intellectual
thought was flourishing. Universities, founded in the 12th century
were dedicated to higher education, and unlike eastern
academies, were places of innovation.[1] Scholars did not just hand down received wisdom, they investigated new
and exciting avenues of knowledge.
The first two universities appeared
in Paris and Bologna, in the middle of the twelfth century. Then, Oxford and
Cambridge were founded about 1200, followed by a flood of new institutions
during the remainder of the thirteenth century: Toulouse, Orléans, Naples,
Salamanca, Seville, Lisbon, Grenoble, Padua, Rome, Perugia, Pisa, Modena,
Florence, Prague, Cracow, Vienna, Heidelberg, Cologne, Ofen, Erfurt, Leipzig,
and Rostock.[2]
These were the institutions where
science was born.[3] Contrary to much modern propaganda which portrays this era as a dark
age, it was actually an age where progress was being made in many of the
scientific disciplines that would make our modern world possible.
This is because scientific enquiry
was part of the culture of these institutions. Building on the work of the
ancient Greeks, rather than just preserving it, brilliant men made much
progress on various aspects of the scientific body of knowledge.
Then came Bishop Nicholas of Cusa
(1401–64), who argued that “whether a man is on earth, or the sun, or some
other star, it will always seem to him that the position he occupies is the
motionless centre, and that all other things are in motion.” It followed that
humans need not trust their perceptions that the earth is stationary; perhaps
it isn’t. From here it required no leap in the dark to propose that the earth
circles the sun.[4]
The rest as we know is history.
The popular view is that in this age political
philosophy was a suppressed art, but really from Bede to Aquinas, from William
of Ockham to Nicholas of Susa, and more, there were brilliant men writing
about, theorizing, and teaching about philosophy and law and how society should
be structured. As, Tierney has shown, the great thinkers like Thomas Aquinas,
built on the foundation of Roman law and Scripture to develop advanced
philosophies of law.[5] Our society stands on the shoulders of intellectual giants from this era,
more than most westerners know. Ideas like natural rights, liberty, justice for
all, and all manner of other philosophical topics were being investigated. As
Rodney Stark says, “So much progress took place during the so-called Dark Ages
that by no later than the thirteenth century, Europe had forged ahead of Rome
and Greece, and ahead of the rest of the World as well.”[6] This is a significant achievement.
I don’t want to oversell my case, it
was not heaven on earth, many aspects of science and medicine were in their
infancy, it was still a very violent era. But it was a kingdom based on the
principle that on earth as it is in heaven, with different expressions varied
among the nations, and definitely the 20th century, the era of
“secular liberal democracy” has more blood on its hands than any other era,
outside of maybe the Mongol conquests. The Church was an integral contributor
and facilitator of much of this advancement. It was not the stark overlord
suppressing innovation, it was the shepherd creating green pastures for it to
be nourished. Remember it was churchmen who started universities, not secular
free thinkers.
Fast forward to the now decadent 21st
century and the Church is a marginalized character in Western society. It still
hold’s influence, but rarely any real power. The Church that in the 11th
century under Pope Gregory VII was able to make Henry IV, heir of Charlemagne,
wait in the cold barefoot for three days is a shadow of its former self.[7] Indeed, if you speak to many Christians they don’t want the Church to
have political power. It is common for Christians to say something like this: “Do
you want to return to the witch burnings of Middle Ages, the Church persecuted
many people, it is better for the state to be non-religious, or at least
secular in its approach to religion.” I know this position well, because I have
engaged with many well-meaning Christians who held it, in fact it used to be my
position.
One of the unavoidable aspects of
growing up in a particular culture, is that you find it hard to critique it
honestly. It is hard to critique a culture when you are given your tools by
that culture. It is for this reason, that as the son of an Englishmen, who grew
up in the thriving former British colony of Australia, that I was a big fan of
English Imperialism (and by extension American imperialism). I was a big fan of
the secular culture that I believed Australia had successfully forged. I was a big
believer in absolute free speech, and absolute religious tolerance which I held
to be part of the success of the West. I was a big fan of many aspects of our
culture on which I have now heavily qualified my views, or have completely
flipped on. Why is that?
Because history shows that much of
our Western culture has been degraded and deliberately so. There are many ways
to demonstrate this. I was once asked by a maths teacher to give a statistical
demonstration that egalitarianism is bad for the Church, I showed him that in
100% of egalitarian societies the Church had drastically declined in the last
century. One, even ten examples are correlation, but 100%? This goes beyond
correlation, it points to a reason why the Church struggles in modern society.
And this makes complete sense, as egalitarianism is neither taught or
encouraged in the Bible, indeed it is absolutely rebuked (see here). If something is rebuked in
scripture, it stands to reason that such a thing, if employed by the church
would have a terrible effect. But he did not find this argument convincing,
because he wanted detailed demographic statistics, not just historical trends.
Well, I am not going to get deeply
into historical statistics in this series, what I am going to do is point to
historical trends, historical designs of certain individuals and
movements, and then compare what was, to
what now is, and ask this simple question: is our culture now more like the
Christian one that proceeded us, or like the Satanic one that sought to push us
in a new direction? I think the answer is resounding; we live in Satandom. Conclusively,
unequivocally, this is demonstratable, and I am going to demonstrate it with
this series.
But I want to go beyond just proving
this, I want to show you in this series that our culture was deliberately,
cleverly, and systematically subverted, much of that which we call virtuous
today was considered the utmost of wickedness not very long ago. Today we
consider a woman who sends her children to child-care a strong independent
woman, not so long ago this sort of woman would have been challenged by polite
society. Today we consider abortion a right, not so long ago it was considered
the utmost of wicked crimes. Today we consider a man who sends his daughter off
to war a progressive, indeed even conservative men brag about this, not so long
ago this man would not have been considered a man. Today we consider many
things to be virtues which as I said would have been considered the utmost
wickedness not so long ago.
The usual answer to this by moderns
and post-moderns, is that we have progressed, and because we have progressed we
are therefore superior to those who came before us. I refer to this as modern
supremacy, the idea that an idea or people is superior by virtue of it’s
existing in current year. C.S. Lewis called this chronological snobbery. But
this is foolish, current year does not equal better, it’s just a reference to
placement in time.
Especially not if we are aware of
this: the Bible is a vital column underpinning true Western society. It is
common for modern Australians, and other westerners, to be ignorant of this
fact, but the Bible is one of the cornerstones of Christendom and our entire
heritage.
For example, Faxneld, author of Satanic
Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in
Nineteenth-Century Culture[8], writes:
Of course, Genesis 3 is a central
story in our culture even pertaining to matters that do not relate to gender.
R. W. L. Moberly asserts about the fall narrative: ‘No story from the Old
Testament has had a greater impact upon the theology of the Christian Church
and the art and literature of Western civilisation.’ Tryggve Mettinger views
the issue at stake to be ‘whether the two humans will respect the line of
demarcation between themselves and the divine world’, since [w]isdom
(knowledge) and immortality are divine prerogatives’. The hubris theme is, in
fact, recurrent throughout the chapters of Genesis. For example, we see it
again in the Tower of Babel story (Gen. 11:2-9), where mankind tries to
construct a tower reaching in the heavens and is punished by God, who creates
the different languages so that men can no longer understand one another and
cooperate on this blasphemous building project.
In other-words a foundational aspect
of Western society is knowing our place in relation to God, and Genesis 3, and
Genesis 11, and other biblical accounts, have played a vital role in making
this a foundational idea. This is the reason why since Constantine, kings and
emperors could not get away with claiming to be divine, and is a big part of
the reason that historically Western men led the Church, the political
structures, and other aspects of society, not women. If a Western king forgot his place in
reference to God, the rest of society would shout: know your place! Indeed,
this shout was led by the Church. And men are reminded by Genesis 3 that when
the first man neglected his duty to lead, this led to the fall of humanity into
doom. A powerful warning!
Of course, wicked elements in the
West knew that to change the West, foundational passages like this needed to be
subverted. Hence Paxneld also tells us,
Nineteenth-century feminists often
felt they somehow had to deal with male chauvinists’ use of the story in Genesis
3. One way of doing so, which seems to have been quite widespread, was to turn
the tale on its head, making Eve a heroine and the serpent benevolent. The
present study tells the history of how this type of tactic – a counter
hegemonic interpretation, or counter reading – was also used to subvert various
other aspects of the mythology of woman as Lucifer’s confederate.[9]
Paxneld’s work explains how western
society was successfully subverted, and I want to share with you what I have been
learning on that very subject, with the help of Faxneld and other works.
We live in a Satanic era. The Devil
is the ruler of this world, and hence we should expect him to have a level of
supremacy in the culture of the fallen world. But there are degrees to which
his evil can be pushed back. The West of the past is an example of that push
back, the West of today is an example of how clever the Devil is in gaining
back ground.
Over the next few months I will share
more of this story, and look at how we can fight back. We who believe in Christ
are called to stand against evil, and those who don’t, well even many of them
are waking up to just how evil, evil is. Evil must be resisted. Deus Vult!
References
[1]
Stark, Rodney, 2006. The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom,
Capitalism, and Western Success. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle
Edition. Chapter 2.
[2] Ibid.
Chapter 2.
[3]
Ibid. Chapter 2.
[4] Ibid.
Chapter 2.
[5] Tierney,
Brian, 1997. The Idea of Natural
Rights. William B Eerdmans. p.27.
[6]
Stark, Rodney. The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom,
Capitalism, and Western Success . Random House Publishing Group. Kindle
Edition. Chapter 2.
[7]
Philip Schaff, 1988, History of the Christian Church: Volume V, The Middle
Ages A.D. 1049-1294. William B. Eerdmans: Michigan. pp47-59.
[8]
Per Faxneld, 2017, Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of
Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Oxford University Press: New York. pp35-36.
[9] Ibid.
pp72.
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