How many books does a man need? Answer: not many. It is a great fallacy to think that one may attain wisdom by reading more books. Books, on their own will never provide easy access to wisdom. Wisdom is granted by looking long and hard at one’s self, and the natural world, then, gradually, coming to know the Divine in its multitudinous forms. That being said, there are books that may help one on life’s journey. Those books are the ones that can be read a number of times with benefit. It is better to read a good book a hundred times, rather than a hundred poor or mediocre books once. So, why am I writing a review of
There's nothing repulsive in Chestertonian Christianity...
If you take offense to it being against paganism, that's because it's closer to the kind of Christianity that, unlike modern protestant christianity, supercedes paganism and is born from its era and as a reaction to its dead ends.
In that sense that christianity was more paganistic (and more in touch with the original paganism, it's adoptants were literally original pagans) than much of modern paganism (which is modernity in cosplay).
I have no problem with Christ, though I see nothing in his religion, not stated as well or better in Apollonius of Tyana. My problem is with modern Christianity, both of the liberal and conservative varieties. Sure, Christianity is a religion uniquely suited to the Kali Yuga, but that is partially because Christian doctrines and practices helped to usher in the Kali Yuga. Neither Christianity, nor Islam have superceded ancient pagan religions. The ancient faiths were far more simple, direct, and vital, and all more recent religions are not advancements, but severely degraded forms of the truth. Ancient men and women saw the Gods everywhere; for them, everything that lives was holy. Even the poet-priest R. S. Thomas had to admit that the only mystical experience of his life came while sitting under a tree, not in mass. At any rate, any religion is better than none, so it is better to be a Christian than an atheist. And of course, Wicca, and some pagan revival movements are forced, mechanical, and silly. I don't subscribe, nor belong to any of those faiths. I gather inspiration from Hesiod, Homer, and Heraclitus, but it is deep in the depths of the forests that I can come to know the Gods, and feel the power of the fairies and ancestors pulsing through my veins. Tree worship was the most primeval worship, and everything since has been a descent.
Ultimately, I am of Swinburne's party on the matter of Christianity: "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath." That some portions of Christianity have unwittingly preserved a trace of the religion of Old Europe is not a credit to Christianity.
Apollonius of Tyana is a cut-rate version of paganism, a product of the tail end of the pagan Greek world's decline. His story is often pointed out for superficial similarities to the story of Christ, but manages to miss every important distinction. Rene Girard in his book "I See Satan Fall Like Lighting" does a very good god analyzing the cut-rate nature of Apollonius's case:
“APOLLONIUS OF TYANA was a celebrated guru of the second century after Christ. Among the pagans his miracles were viewed as superior to those of Jesus. The most spectacular is certainly his healing of a plague epidemic in the city of Ephesus. We possess an account of it thanks to Philostratus, a Greek writer of the following century and the author of the Life of Apollonius of Tyana.The Ephesians could not get rid of this epidemic. After many remedies that did not work, they turned to Apollonius who, by supernatural means, came to them in the blink of an eye and announced their immediate healing:
“Take courage, for I will today put a stop to the course of the disease." And with these words he led the population entire to the theatre, where the image of the Averting god has been set up. [The Averting god in this case is Hercules, as will become clear later.] And there he saw what seemed an old mendicant artfully blinking his eyes as if blind, and he carried a wallet and a crust of bread in it; and he was clad in rags and was very squalid of countenance. Apollonius therefore ranged the Epheseians around him and said: "Pick up as many stones as you can and hurl them at this enemy of the gods." Now the Ephesians wondered what he meant, and were shocked at the idea of murdering a stranger so manifestly miserable; for he was begging and praying them to take mercy upon him. Nevertheless Apollonius insisted and egged on the Ephesians to launch themselves on him and not let him go. And as soon as some of them began to take shots and hit him with their stones, the beggar who had seemed to “blink and be blind, gave them all a sudden glance and showed that his eyes were full of fire. Then the Ephesians recognized that he was a demon, and they stoned him so thoroughly that their stones were heaped into a great cairn around him. After a little pause Apollonius bade them remove the stones and acquaint themselves with the wild animal which they had slain. When therefore they had exposed the object which they thought they had thrown their missiles at, they found that he had disappeared and instead of him there was a hound who resembled in form and look a Molosian dog, but was in size the equal of the largest lion; there he lay before their eyes, pounded to a pulp by their stones and vomiting foam as mad dogs do. Accordingly the statue of the Averting god, namely Hercules, has been set up over the spot where the ghost was slain.”
A more horrible miracle would be hard to find! If the author were Christian, he certainly would have been accused of slandering paganism. But Philostratus is a militant pagan, resolved to defend the religion of his ancestors. He obviously viewed the murder of the beggar as able to lift up the morale of his coreligionists, to reinforce their resistance to Christianity. From the standpoint of public opinion, his calculation was sound. His book was so successful that Julian the Apostate put it back into circulation in the fourth century, as he made his last attempt to save paganism.”
(referring to the book for the rest 24 pages of analysis)
> The ancient faiths were far more simple, direct, and vital
True, but their inner world was also more flat and with less psychological depth. Their inability, for example, to conceive (as a culture, not as individual cases here and there) the defeated and the victim as anything than just "the way things are" and deserving their fate for their inferiotity - as opposed as to an injustice, is one such example. This, in fact, wasn't one of the big innovations of Christianity, which Nietchze recognised, but despised (he called it the "reversal of values").
As they developed more psychological depth (that modern people's take for granted), they understood that the simple, direct, and vital faiths didn't cut it. They were crude, fit for a more black and white world. They also didn't answer their problems, they were evolutionary cultural dead ends.
"The Gods have proclaimed Christ to have been most pious, but the Christians are a confused and vicious sect." -- Porphyry
"No wild beasts are so dangerous to men as Christians." -- Julian
"Christ can very well stand as an heroic figure. The hero need not be of wisdom all compounded. Also he is not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on to him." -- Ezra Pound
"Heaven AND earth / nothing cd / be more idiotic than a religion that has put corsets on the holy mystery of fecundity.
In fact Xtianity is one of the worst hoaxes . No hoax ever worked without enough truth in it to be plausible." -- Pound
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." -- Gandhi
"The Christian god is a being of terrific character - cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips." -- Yeats
I'm surprised to see you being so silly about Christianity, Farasha. You should know better.
If you're reduced to worshipping trees you're going away from the centre, not towards it. The 'old gods' will lead you wildly astray, and laugh while they do so.
I am not a Nietzschean, and therefore have no innate hatred for Christ. Christ was a minor prophet and a major reformer of the Jewish religion. I see very little to dislike in the actual words of Jesus, but I strongly dislike the abhorrent Old Testament, and right from Paul on down the followers of Jesus have been rather despicable people. There is nothing in Christianity that one cannot find stated or practiced better elsewhere. Christianity should have stayed in the Levant, since it would have suited that place's Spirit of Place, but it was never meant to colonize the hearts and minds of the European peoples. Certainly, Christianity preserved some ancient forms through the Orthodox liturgy, and the Roman mass prior to Vatican II, but I have no desire to thank the Christians for that, since the loss of ancient forms is wholly due to Christians in the first place.
I have never been able to worship pale-faced Christ: Christianity is too much a death-cult, and it has been denying life for the last 2000 years. If some people want to worship Jesus, especially the Jesus of the resurrection, then I have no problem with that, but to say he is the only way and truth is pure foolishness. As Hölderlin stated: "Being at one is godlike and good, but human, too human, the mania which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and one way." As soon as the Christians burned their first heretics and ransacked the first temples, they ceased to have any moral standing and became a great force for evil in the world.
And, the Christians of today are less the offspring of gentle Christ and more the bastard sons and daughters of those who perpetrated the cultural genocide of the traditional peoples of Europe and the inquisition. There are few groups of people who incite me towards active hatred than modern Christians, save for modern Hindus,... and modern atheists. Most today are damn evil but at least the atheists are supposed to be evil, yet one can find decent, goodhearted atheists. It is much rarer, at least in Anglo countries to find a decent Christian. If the Christians really loved their "god" so much, maybe they should all follow him to the cross, rather than using bits and pieces from their scriptures to justify the rape of Mother Earth.
Oh, the Gods are in the trees I tell you! If you can believe that the divine is in the host and not in a tree, you have become more deluded by your teachers than I originally thought. An Irish Catholic priest answered Kathleen Raine, when she asked how God could be in the host, by stating "how could He not be?" Exactly: the divine manifests in all things, and the sane Christians of the past two-thousand years, such as Eriugena, Richard of Saint Victor, Saint Francis, and so on, knew that the reality of the divine is immanent. Based on your recent writings, you no longer seem to believe that, so I would strongly encourage you to stay closer to the indigenous Irish tradition; to Eriugena, to Moriarty, and to leave the clutches of the Romanian brain-washers.
Well, at least you still seem to believe in the Old Gods, though it seems you now feel they are demonic forces. How strange. Little did I know that the old phrase "Quos vult perdere Deus, dementat prius" could refer to an entire collective psychopathy brought to the world through the perversions of the sayings of a simple man who died.
Wow, Farasha. What has happened to you? The last time we spoke, you were saying very different things, and displayed a much more respectful attitude towards the ancient Christian faith. Where did this fury come from?
Obviously if you had been reading my recent work you would know that it was very much about divine immanence, which is of course a fundamental Orthodox teaching. That has always been at the root of my work.
As for Islam: well, another fundmanetal Christian teaching, of course, is the Trinitarian nature of God, which Islam denies, hence my comments about the differing nature of the Islamic and Christian God. This is very basic stuff.
Serious Muslims, of course, even though they deny Christ's divinity, do know very well that he was much more than 'a simple man who died.'
But then your attitude to the thick, idiotic mass of Christians displayed here seems to mirror your general attitude towards humanity, whom you consider to be a sheep fold of deluded morons, to be abused or pitied.
This is of course why the world needed Christ in the first place.
And by the way, Philip Sherrard would be rolling in his grave reading some of your recent statements, such as claiming the Christian and Muslim God are not the same God. Of course they are. You want a sane Christianity, look to Sherrard or William Blake, not some crazy modern-day Orthodox priests who wouldn’t know Christ if he bit them in their asses!
Thanks for the recommendation. I may give it a read.
I like this: "We already live in a place and time where the 'new' is reified and fetishized. What we need is not more new things, but old things made new. "
There's nothing repulsive in Chestertonian Christianity...
If you take offense to it being against paganism, that's because it's closer to the kind of Christianity that, unlike modern protestant christianity, supercedes paganism and is born from its era and as a reaction to its dead ends.
In that sense that christianity was more paganistic (and more in touch with the original paganism, it's adoptants were literally original pagans) than much of modern paganism (which is modernity in cosplay).
I have no problem with Christ, though I see nothing in his religion, not stated as well or better in Apollonius of Tyana. My problem is with modern Christianity, both of the liberal and conservative varieties. Sure, Christianity is a religion uniquely suited to the Kali Yuga, but that is partially because Christian doctrines and practices helped to usher in the Kali Yuga. Neither Christianity, nor Islam have superceded ancient pagan religions. The ancient faiths were far more simple, direct, and vital, and all more recent religions are not advancements, but severely degraded forms of the truth. Ancient men and women saw the Gods everywhere; for them, everything that lives was holy. Even the poet-priest R. S. Thomas had to admit that the only mystical experience of his life came while sitting under a tree, not in mass. At any rate, any religion is better than none, so it is better to be a Christian than an atheist. And of course, Wicca, and some pagan revival movements are forced, mechanical, and silly. I don't subscribe, nor belong to any of those faiths. I gather inspiration from Hesiod, Homer, and Heraclitus, but it is deep in the depths of the forests that I can come to know the Gods, and feel the power of the fairies and ancestors pulsing through my veins. Tree worship was the most primeval worship, and everything since has been a descent.
Ultimately, I am of Swinburne's party on the matter of Christianity: "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath." That some portions of Christianity have unwittingly preserved a trace of the religion of Old Europe is not a credit to Christianity.
Apollonius of Tyana is a cut-rate version of paganism, a product of the tail end of the pagan Greek world's decline. His story is often pointed out for superficial similarities to the story of Christ, but manages to miss every important distinction. Rene Girard in his book "I See Satan Fall Like Lighting" does a very good god analyzing the cut-rate nature of Apollonius's case:
“APOLLONIUS OF TYANA was a celebrated guru of the second century after Christ. Among the pagans his miracles were viewed as superior to those of Jesus. The most spectacular is certainly his healing of a plague epidemic in the city of Ephesus. We possess an account of it thanks to Philostratus, a Greek writer of the following century and the author of the Life of Apollonius of Tyana.The Ephesians could not get rid of this epidemic. After many remedies that did not work, they turned to Apollonius who, by supernatural means, came to them in the blink of an eye and announced their immediate healing:
“Take courage, for I will today put a stop to the course of the disease." And with these words he led the population entire to the theatre, where the image of the Averting god has been set up. [The Averting god in this case is Hercules, as will become clear later.] And there he saw what seemed an old mendicant artfully blinking his eyes as if blind, and he carried a wallet and a crust of bread in it; and he was clad in rags and was very squalid of countenance. Apollonius therefore ranged the Epheseians around him and said: "Pick up as many stones as you can and hurl them at this enemy of the gods." Now the Ephesians wondered what he meant, and were shocked at the idea of murdering a stranger so manifestly miserable; for he was begging and praying them to take mercy upon him. Nevertheless Apollonius insisted and egged on the Ephesians to launch themselves on him and not let him go. And as soon as some of them began to take shots and hit him with their stones, the beggar who had seemed to “blink and be blind, gave them all a sudden glance and showed that his eyes were full of fire. Then the Ephesians recognized that he was a demon, and they stoned him so thoroughly that their stones were heaped into a great cairn around him. After a little pause Apollonius bade them remove the stones and acquaint themselves with the wild animal which they had slain. When therefore they had exposed the object which they thought they had thrown their missiles at, they found that he had disappeared and instead of him there was a hound who resembled in form and look a Molosian dog, but was in size the equal of the largest lion; there he lay before their eyes, pounded to a pulp by their stones and vomiting foam as mad dogs do. Accordingly the statue of the Averting god, namely Hercules, has been set up over the spot where the ghost was slain.”
A more horrible miracle would be hard to find! If the author were Christian, he certainly would have been accused of slandering paganism. But Philostratus is a militant pagan, resolved to defend the religion of his ancestors. He obviously viewed the murder of the beggar as able to lift up the morale of his coreligionists, to reinforce their resistance to Christianity. From the standpoint of public opinion, his calculation was sound. His book was so successful that Julian the Apostate put it back into circulation in the fourth century, as he made his last attempt to save paganism.”
(referring to the book for the rest 24 pages of analysis)
> The ancient faiths were far more simple, direct, and vital
True, but their inner world was also more flat and with less psychological depth. Their inability, for example, to conceive (as a culture, not as individual cases here and there) the defeated and the victim as anything than just "the way things are" and deserving their fate for their inferiotity - as opposed as to an injustice, is one such example. This, in fact, wasn't one of the big innovations of Christianity, which Nietchze recognised, but despised (he called it the "reversal of values").
As they developed more psychological depth (that modern people's take for granted), they understood that the simple, direct, and vital faiths didn't cut it. They were crude, fit for a more black and white world. They also didn't answer their problems, they were evolutionary cultural dead ends.
"The Gods have proclaimed Christ to have been most pious, but the Christians are a confused and vicious sect." -- Porphyry
"No wild beasts are so dangerous to men as Christians." -- Julian
"Christ can very well stand as an heroic figure. The hero need not be of wisdom all compounded. Also he is not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on to him." -- Ezra Pound
"Heaven AND earth / nothing cd / be more idiotic than a religion that has put corsets on the holy mystery of fecundity.
In fact Xtianity is one of the worst hoaxes . No hoax ever worked without enough truth in it to be plausible." -- Pound
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." -- Gandhi
"The Christian god is a being of terrific character - cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust." -- Thomas Jefferson
"The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips." -- Yeats
"In truth there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross."
-- Nietzsche
I'm surprised to see you being so silly about Christianity, Farasha. You should know better.
If you're reduced to worshipping trees you're going away from the centre, not towards it. The 'old gods' will lead you wildly astray, and laugh while they do so.
I am not a Nietzschean, and therefore have no innate hatred for Christ. Christ was a minor prophet and a major reformer of the Jewish religion. I see very little to dislike in the actual words of Jesus, but I strongly dislike the abhorrent Old Testament, and right from Paul on down the followers of Jesus have been rather despicable people. There is nothing in Christianity that one cannot find stated or practiced better elsewhere. Christianity should have stayed in the Levant, since it would have suited that place's Spirit of Place, but it was never meant to colonize the hearts and minds of the European peoples. Certainly, Christianity preserved some ancient forms through the Orthodox liturgy, and the Roman mass prior to Vatican II, but I have no desire to thank the Christians for that, since the loss of ancient forms is wholly due to Christians in the first place.
I have never been able to worship pale-faced Christ: Christianity is too much a death-cult, and it has been denying life for the last 2000 years. If some people want to worship Jesus, especially the Jesus of the resurrection, then I have no problem with that, but to say he is the only way and truth is pure foolishness. As Hölderlin stated: "Being at one is godlike and good, but human, too human, the mania which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and one way." As soon as the Christians burned their first heretics and ransacked the first temples, they ceased to have any moral standing and became a great force for evil in the world.
And, the Christians of today are less the offspring of gentle Christ and more the bastard sons and daughters of those who perpetrated the cultural genocide of the traditional peoples of Europe and the inquisition. There are few groups of people who incite me towards active hatred than modern Christians, save for modern Hindus,... and modern atheists. Most today are damn evil but at least the atheists are supposed to be evil, yet one can find decent, goodhearted atheists. It is much rarer, at least in Anglo countries to find a decent Christian. If the Christians really loved their "god" so much, maybe they should all follow him to the cross, rather than using bits and pieces from their scriptures to justify the rape of Mother Earth.
Oh, the Gods are in the trees I tell you! If you can believe that the divine is in the host and not in a tree, you have become more deluded by your teachers than I originally thought. An Irish Catholic priest answered Kathleen Raine, when she asked how God could be in the host, by stating "how could He not be?" Exactly: the divine manifests in all things, and the sane Christians of the past two-thousand years, such as Eriugena, Richard of Saint Victor, Saint Francis, and so on, knew that the reality of the divine is immanent. Based on your recent writings, you no longer seem to believe that, so I would strongly encourage you to stay closer to the indigenous Irish tradition; to Eriugena, to Moriarty, and to leave the clutches of the Romanian brain-washers.
Well, at least you still seem to believe in the Old Gods, though it seems you now feel they are demonic forces. How strange. Little did I know that the old phrase "Quos vult perdere Deus, dementat prius" could refer to an entire collective psychopathy brought to the world through the perversions of the sayings of a simple man who died.
Wow, Farasha. What has happened to you? The last time we spoke, you were saying very different things, and displayed a much more respectful attitude towards the ancient Christian faith. Where did this fury come from?
Obviously if you had been reading my recent work you would know that it was very much about divine immanence, which is of course a fundamental Orthodox teaching. That has always been at the root of my work.
As for Islam: well, another fundmanetal Christian teaching, of course, is the Trinitarian nature of God, which Islam denies, hence my comments about the differing nature of the Islamic and Christian God. This is very basic stuff.
Serious Muslims, of course, even though they deny Christ's divinity, do know very well that he was much more than 'a simple man who died.'
But then your attitude to the thick, idiotic mass of Christians displayed here seems to mirror your general attitude towards humanity, whom you consider to be a sheep fold of deluded morons, to be abused or pitied.
This is of course why the world needed Christ in the first place.
And by the way, Philip Sherrard would be rolling in his grave reading some of your recent statements, such as claiming the Christian and Muslim God are not the same God. Of course they are. You want a sane Christianity, look to Sherrard or William Blake, not some crazy modern-day Orthodox priests who wouldn’t know Christ if he bit them in their asses!
Thanks for the advice ;-)
Thanks for the recommendation. I may give it a read.
I like this: "We already live in a place and time where the 'new' is reified and fetishized. What we need is not more new things, but old things made new. "