Bad and evil ideas have been far more virulent in history than silver, gold, or geopolitical schemes. Our modern errors arose out of the weeds of bad Christian soil, fueled by concupiscence and backed by diverse and mighty powers. King Henry VIII’s ecclesial revolution in England, born in lust and ending in the vast dissolution of the monastaries was the first major frontal assault. This was aided in no small part by schizoid Reformation errors culminating over time in the age of the so-called Enlightenment, in concert with all the ideas and mixed brews of the ancient mystery religions and pagan practices which, as if risen from the dead, assaulted Catholic Christendom. All of this anticipated and refracted the evil light to come and which we are living through.
Apostate Catholics and other bad quasi-Christians on both sides of the Atlantic were the major and primary protagonists, together with some important Jews, and especially the Lodges where the Revolutionary dreams of finishing off the Church percolated. A new Antichristic philosophy was being born in the name of “Science,” especially in Britain, France, and above all, America, and it set itself against the teachings of Jesus Christ and His Cross.
“For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.” —Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Immanuel Kant wrote, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage.
[‘Nonage’ is the immature inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance].
He continues: “This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.” — Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?(3)
Here Kant lays out the plan, the “daring” emergence from thousands of years of knowledge, knowledge both received and conceived, to begin the project of building a New World from the ground up without the “tutors” and “guardians,” i.e., specifically without Christendom’s priests, philosophers and authorities of the past in order to emerge into the wholly New.
“Once such men have thrown off the yoke of nonage,” Kant continues, “they will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable appreciation of man’s value and of his duty to think for himself…This enlightenment requires nothing but freedom–and the most innocent of all that may be called “freedom”: freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.”
As if none had ever heard of reason or freedom before, and as if this New World would not impose its own authoritative tutors and guardians, backed up by forces the likes of which have never been seen in human history (*).
It all happened more slowly on this side of the Atlantic, but to the same ends. The “Novus Ordo Seclorum” which we see etched on every dollar bill today was underway all over the West after 1776. Here was a new, secular, syncretistic and powerful messianism set in ideological opposition to two thousand years of Christianity. The American Founders were more sophisticated in the weaponization of deception than the French. They knew how to wait on “progress” until the formidable opposition (all those Presbyterians, Baptists, Catholics and others) slowly weakened over time under the pressures of incessant propaganda.
The licentious Marquis de Sade was one of the prophets. A false rationalism and specious revaluation of “Science” was substituted for genuine hard science, Christian revelation and metaphysics, and the teaching of every traditional moral precept. A new gospel was announced to all humankind, where “human rights” and “equality” slowly eclipsed traditional human obligations.
Today, a phenomenaly licentious and propagandistic media is the Revolution’s handmaid and is the main means of indoctrination, although Kant opposed democracy – which, in that era, meant direct democracy. He believed that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He wrote, “…democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which “all” decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, “all”, who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom.” [Wikipedia]
Futurism. A new transhuman view of “progress” was superimposed over all previous certainties and institutions. The Future alone was now to be heralded in glorious Utopian terms and concepts. Those who do not agree may be sanctioned, targeted, or worse, often at first in subtle ways.
The Final Revolution. Man: the Measure of All Things.
“…the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” — Treaty of Tripoli, President George Washington
“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away [with] all this artificial scaffolding…” —Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 11 April, 1823; Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon II, 594
The New Man today collectively seeks to act as God (Gen.3:5), the New lawgiver, the Creator and Parent of all new values, now and into the Future. The goddess Reason, per French Revolutionary propaganda, is the symbol which embodies and participates in the sign to which divine reason, so-conceived, points. And all reason in the end points to Man. Man alone is now the embodiment of all that is divine.
And Reason? Whose reason? What kind of reason and reasoning? To what ends?
Evil in Scripture, is the unnatural opposition to our Creator, to His Commandments, to creation’s natural and moral order; and today this spiritual war extends even to the biological order, to gender and family.
This is the “New World,” the new gospel, “Enlightenment,” “Science”… announced first in the blood of the French Revolution and then through the schools, a Novus Ordo Seclorum. Young ‘men’ and ‘women’ would be expected to kill and die for it because the Revolution worships only itself; worships itself as “progress” for the whole of humankind.
And it is taught that if nations and peoples cannot be persuaded of these “truths” nonviolently then they must be persuaded by other means.
We did not create ourselves however. And, despite all the variations of the New Order’s practical atheism, nothingness is nothing, and therefore is impotent to “create” anything but speculative delusions. Nothing emerges from nothing.
And because we sow to the wind we will inevitably reap the whirlwind, sooner or later. We must choose. Not to choose is to choose. Signs and wonders are manifest every day everywhere as the new “Science” (Scientism) and Magik, more and more, converge into one.
True “Liberty”
Pope Leo XIII wrote, “Those who are in authority owe it to the commonwealth not only to provide for its external well-being and the conveniences of life, but still more to consult the welfare of men’s souls in the wisdom of their legislation. But, for the increase of such benefits, nothing more suitable can be conceived than the laws which have God for their author; and, therefore, they who in their government of the State take no account of these laws abuse political power by causing it to deviate from its proper end and from what nature itself prescribes.’ — par. 18 of Libertas, encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, On the Nature of Human Liberty. June 1888.
Politics in itself, which in the American dialectic is ever changing and evolving, cannot save our souls; and so, despite what we see on Social Media and elsewhere, we cannot make the “political process” ultimate, even if we must try to block the march of evil—and advance the Good whenever we can—by means of it, and with ardent prayer. And we must never forget the biblical view of history itself, which tells us that the ultimate victory over the Antichristic will only come from Jesus Christ, at the end of history.
In Catholic-scriptural teaching there cannot be a justifiable “liberty” to sin. Only to prevent even greater disorders can some evils be tolerated within carefully circumscribed limits. But evil can never be accommodated in principle, or rationalized as not evil.
Jn. 8:12: “Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.
Freedom: Jn. 8: 31 Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” 33 They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to any one. How is it that you say, ‘You will be made free’?”
34 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, every one who commits sin is a slave to sin.”
“The prophet foretold that He would be so scourged that the bones of His body would be numbered. We are saved by other stars and stripes than those on the flag; namely, by the stars and stripes of Christ, by whose stars we are illumined—by whose stripes we are healed.” —Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Meditations on the Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary.
SH (**)
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(*) Napoleon in this respect was a sign.
(**) Update Note. I must add that I gratefully acknowledge that America like all Western nations has many good legislators in all branches of government who do the best they can within this system of things and despite these philosophical undercurrents. Without them there would be little or no resistance at all to abortion, euthanasia, other depopulation legislative efforts, gender and transgender revaluations, and so on. These good legislators of all faiths are in constant moral pain due to policies they recognize to be irrational and anti-human, and so for the love of God seek to mitigate such policy initiatives year in and year out.
+ C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton and George Orwell on Scientism the “Magicians Twin”.
+ Dr. Ralph Martin on the Rise of the Antichrist
+ Pope John Paul II, Benedict XVI and a New World Order
Catholic Critique 