Secular Calvinism

I was surfing the manosphere yesterday, when over at Vox's place I noted this comment by "artie" in response to Vox's  post, "Democracy vs Aristocracy".

It will be interesting to see how long this farce will go on.

I also on the sceptical side. The EUcrats always have the righist hammer to throw down to the people. It has been the most effective political weapon in Europe since the end of WWII.

That's why I think the work of Kuenehlt-Leddihn is so important....and ignored.

Now, I've never heard of Kuenehlt-Leddihn before and I thought I would read up on him.
His Wikipedia entry is here.

What a find!

He appears to one of those freaky bastards* that the educational system of the old Hapsburg empire seemed to produce. The last of the great renaissance men and a man who also liked to thump some of themes pushed by this blog. Anyway, he wrote a rather influential book in the 40's, The Menace of the Herd. It's available, from the Mises Institute, as a pdf here.

I was having a browse through the book, when in the appendix I noticed this:  



All I can say is wow!

It seems that whilst Hitler was a bad Catholic, all those nice Protestants really liked him........ a lot. Much more than his fellow Catholics actually. No seriously, I mean, WTF?

The reason I bring this up is because of a comment thread over at Ferdinand's. Commentator Thursday, for whom I have very much respect, says:

It is time to get off this “liberalism is the result of Calvinism/Christianity/Nominalism/whatever” nonsense.

Now, this is not a dig at Thursday but rather a spectacular demonstration of the opposite. I'm sorry but religion matters. Big time.

Kuenehlt-Leddihn was no fan of Protestantism, but he did recognise that sound Protestantism would have probably prevented the rise of Hitler. It's the watered down version of it that is toxic.

And by the way, Kuenehlt-Leddihn correctly diagnosed Nazism as a leftist phenomenon.

Mea Culpa

I my previous post, commentator mdavid made the following comment;

SP, Charity, for example, does not permit divorce (at least frivolous ones)
 
Ahh, the seeds of relativism are planted deep! Even SP's blog offers no relief...:-) 

Now, I really didn't want to get into a theological discussion about the matter of marriage, but if you take the approach of charity as "a perfecting force" instead of an emotive type of benevolent act,  several contentious theological issues can be approached from a fresh perspective. I'll just stick to marriage for the moment.
 
Firstly, without any reference to the text, if charity is a benevolent perfecting force, it follows that charity will always attempt to restore something that is broken or deficient. The operation of charity on a Christian marriage, in other words a union blessed by charity, will be to keep it together.  If we take the view that God is Charity, i.e Deus Caritas Est, then there is no way in hell that God will approve of divorce, because His very nature is to perfect, not to destroy. It's not only that He does not permit divorce, he can't actually divorce anything because of His nature.

Now, I wasn't hoping to put up a defence of Catholic teaching, ruminations on Houellebecq's  "problem of love" led me to this conclusion, but the fact of the matter is that charity can never permit divorce and the Catholic approach to divorce displays the correct understanding of the nature of God. God can't break any sanctified union. No reliance on scripture is necessary.

I was wrong. There is no way that divorce of any kind is permissible. Mea Culpa.

Still it is important to test my thinking. In my previous post, I mentioned to commentator Spandrell that the way that the intellect can gain an understanding of God's will for things is either through revelation or reason. As I get older I tend to put more trust on revelation than reason, and with regard to the subject of divorce, pretty much all of the New Testament confirms the prohibition of divorce.

Except Matthew 5:32;

But I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, excepting for the cause of fornication, maketh her to commit adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery.

Like everyone else who read this passage,  I concentrated on the exceptive clause, "excepting for the cause of fornication",  believing that this provided some "wiggle room" for divorce. But on further reflection, thanks to mdavid, now I think that I've read this passage all wrong.

Now the Greek word from which fornication is derived from is pornea.  The term pornea seems to have a wider connotation of sexual immorality including adultery, whilst the specific biblical Greek word for adultery is moichatai. It's interesting that the text uses both words and seems to be an indication of intention in precision of meaning. This is important.

Now,  if we analyse the text by first getting rid of the exception clause we get;

But I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife....maketh her to commit adultery and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery. 

Here the text would imply a degree of agency on the part of the husband in any adultery by the wife by the use of the term maketh . It's this attribution of agency on the part of the husband with regard to the wife's sins that's interesting. Now, moral culpability is only applicable to creatures with agency and it would therefore imply that Jesus will hold the husband responsible (to an unknown degree) for any future adultery of the wife.

It would also seem to imply that the involuntarily divorced wife may not be full culpable for any future adultery but anyone else that sleeps with her is. Hence if she is kicked out of the house and shacks up with another man she still sins, but maybe not mortally. (This has significant practical implications for innocent divorce victims but I'm speculating here, and could be way out of whack.)

If substitute a more expansive phrasing of the word pornea  into the exception clause we get;

 excepting for the cause of her own sexual immorality( including her own adultery),

We see that within the exceptive clause agency is attributed to the woman solely.

But I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, excepting for the cause of her own sexual sins, maketh her to commit adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery.

The way I interpret this is Jesus saying, if you divorce your wife, except with case of her freely chosen sexual sins, you will be partially responsible for her future adultery. In other words, this passage is not about justifying divorce but rather an exposition of how Jesus will assign blame in the case of a separation.  If a woman commits adultery or some other freely chosen sexual sin, she will bear the guilt, otherwise the initiator of divorce will bear some of  the responsibility.

And finally to put a nail in the coffin, so to speak;

and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery.

If the traditional non-Catholic interpretation of this passage was correct, in that divorce was permissible as a consequence of some type of sexual sin, then this last segment of the text would be contradictory. Since, if she was lawfully put away by right of the exception, it would be impossible to commit adultery with her if married to her.

Charity

I thought I would put up this post on Charity as Commentator Spandrell has asked me to elaborate on the matter further. These are my thoughts.

The first thing you have to understand is that Charity cannot be explained within a materialist philosophy.  This was Houellebecq's (an atheist) point, materialism makes love, especially permanent love impossible for the reasons enumerated in the previous posts. Atheism, on the other hand, facilitates hedonism but it kills love. 

Therefore, Charity cannot be described in material terms but needs to be recognised as an immaterial thing. You've got to think of Charity as a property, much like magnetism or radioactivity.  Now, you can't tell if a piece of steel is magnetic by looking it, the way you can work its magnetic is by its effects; it's the same with Charity.

Secondly, in order to understand Charity, any emotional associations must be stripped from it.

I want to start with a silly example. Imagine that you are in possession of a charity ray-gun. In other words by pointing your gun at an object and firing, Charity will exert its effect.

Imagine we found this old Beetle and aimed our charity ray-gun at it.

Before,

After,

The effect of Charity would be to restore the vehicle to its idealised condition.  Take a second example.  Here we have a picture of a girl with acne and let's say we aimed our ray-gun at her. This would be the effect;

The effect of Charity is to restore things to their idealised state by removing their privations. The last example is particularly pertinent. I mean if you look at the life of Jesus, he's always going about curing the sick and the disfigured, in other words, restoring them to their idealised states.  The objective of the charitable act is the perfection of the target. Other examples would be providing a hungry man with food,  any method which decreased ignorance, taking away pain, etc.

Perfection needs to be understood as being perfect in the way that God intended it. When Jesus is curing the sick and disfigured, his charitable act never results in the recipient getting two noses or three ears, no matter how interesting a demonstration of his power this would be; the being is always restored to his proper human form.  The effect of Charity then is to bring the effected target in alignment with God's idea of it.

It also needs to be understood that this force is not something apart from God, but something that is intrinsic to His nature. The charity-gun literally shoots "God-ness" from it.

Now, there is no such thing as a charity ray-gun, but the way that Charity operates in the real world is by being implanted in our human selves and thereby directing our will towards charitable acts.  God, through charity, directs men to perfect the world. A man with charity literally has a bit of "the stuff of God" in his nature. 

Seeing that our human acts are limited by both temporal and physical factors, as well as personality and knowledge,  our expressed charity will therefore always be limited by these factors.  That's why Christian writers have always said that the expression of Charity is contingent upon other virtues such as Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance and Justice.

These virtues are important because Charity has to compete with our intelligence and emotions in directing the will. Charity is easy when both reason and emotion are on board but the real test is when they are in opposition. As the Master says:

You have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thy enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust. For if you love them that love you, what reward shall you have? do not even the publicans this? And if you salute your brethren only, what do you more? do not also the heathens this? Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect. 

When you first look at this passage, the commands runs contrary to our natural inclinations and require a certain opposition of the will in order to abide by them. In fact, in addition to the scorn the Romans poured onto the Christians, they also thought that they were weird.  So unnatural did their actions  appear to them. To the pagans, the Christian behaviour seemed to run against affection and reason, and indeed, upon a superficial reflection of the passage, Christianity seems to direct people towards doing stuff that is disagreeable. But this approach is a trap since it conflates Charity with emotion and it's that conflation that confuses the issue. 

It also needs to be remembered, especially amongst the po-faced masochistic Christian types, that sometimes charity works with our reason and emotions.  To these types, Christianity is all about crosses, suffering, denial, etc. But this is warped view of  Christianity, and it's a view of Christianity based on a negative emotional association with charity.  What people need to understand is that while charity compels us to do our duty sometimes the duty is a pleasure. A man sharing a beer with his friends is being charitable, as is a man giving gifts to friends he likes, as is a man enthusiastically shagging his wife; all these things are the way that God intends them to be.

To paraphrase Nietzsche, Charity is beyond emotion and reason. Charity seeks to impose its will across the human experience

Now, there are several reasons why charity binds. Firstly, charity aims to strengthen and restore broken bonds. Charity, for example, does not permit divorce (at least frivolous ones) because the institution of marriage is privated by the practice of it. Charity directs the will to keep a marriage together even if the "heart isn't it", since once a legitimate bond is set, charity tries to keep it intact. This is why when religion is taken seriously, instead of given lip service, divorce rates plummet. It's also why Christian virgins are better bets at marriage, because the charity that keeps them virginal also keeps them married: they posses and a quality that works against failure.

And if we take the Bible as expressing the will of God, then one will notice a whole bunch of obligatory relations that God wants us to have; respect for parents, lawful authorities and to Him. There is a whole bunch of "binding" going on and it would appear that God wants us to interact with others, especially to those with whom we have the closest biological and community links. It would a appear that there is a meta-imperative to de-atomise.

It's also why the charitable man is a patriot to his country and its institutions, even though they may revolt him in their corruption and evil. His will is directed to repair the malady, not out of any feelings he has for the country or some imagined good, but because his charitable nature compels him to work to restore it to its perfection.

The second reason why charity binds is because charity is expansive. If it finds a privation it attempts to remedy it. The parable of the talents refers to this, charity being the talent. Once given Charity, a man is expected to get of his arse and put it to good use in perfecting the world. It's why a man with charity who fails to express it is a dead man walking: charity's nature is thwarted by his passivity. It's the whole faith without works thing. Christianity is not just an epistemological thing, it's a force.

Being a remedial force, it means that it is the force through which renewal takes place. This is why there will be no western revival until the knee bends before the altar. Because charity is an immaterial power given by God,  beyond the grasp of materialism.  You can't make it, you can't will it any more than a man can will away magnetism or colour or will gravity. It is beyond materialism. In order to posses it you must either ask for it by acknowledging God and thereby disavowing atheism or He will thrust it onto you.

Finally, what charity allows is the possibility of true love. Unlike hedonism, which loves for the pleasure it receives and fades when it there is no longer any pleasure, charity binds regardless and raises the possibility of eternal renewal. 

I want to be loved despite my faults. It isn’t exactly true that I’m a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn’t think, just to shock. I try to say what I think."

(Michel Houellebecq)