A Strange Convergence

Palamidessi & Bardon.

Boredom

Boredom for a subject does not reflect a defect in the subject, but in our understanding of it. In the ears of the ignorant, a foreign language is a monotonous barrage of meaningless intonations, but knowledge of its grammar transforms sound into speech, capable of conveying Shakespeare's or Plato's meaning. The surface of Mars seems to me a tiresome landscape of red dirt, but to an astrophysicist who speaks the obscure language of rocks, it is a crossword puzzle written by the Big Bang. We protest to the passionate not to bore us with details, not realizing that lack of details is precisely what bores us, for details reveal the richness and inner coherence that are invisible from a distance, as a microscope reveals teeming life in a drop of muddy pond water.

Paging through an accounting textbook, walking past a wig shop, or listening to a lecture on early American basket-making, I never say "that is uninteresting" but rather "I am uninterested", for it is always more reasonable to assume that I fail to see what is there than that devotees see what is not there. I love to hear of people devoting their lives to pursuits that sound dull to me, for I know that their enthusiasm is right and my boredom is wrong, and I am happy for the rebuke. I convert my specific boredoms into general fascination with passion's possibilities, reflecting that, under altered alignments of choice and chance, I might have given my days to different causes. There is more worth loving than we have strength to love.

A foolish trope of modernity is that experience leads to disenchantment and ennui. Boredom with life does not result from exhausting life's riches, but from skimming them. Nothing is boring, except people who are bored.

Source

Melchizedek

White Southrons

Guess Who Said? :

If a “racist” is someone who prefers the company of members of his own ethnic group as opposed to others, why isn’t this an individual choice that a true conservative would endorse? Apparently it is not, for such a person, no matter how benignly he expresses his preference, is generally attacked by conservatives just as belligerently as liberals. After all, doesn’t he understand that rejection of others might result in “hurt” feelings? And isn’t it “feelings” that count over individual rights?

Is a “sexist” someone who rejects the notion that Nature made the two sexes equal? The rejection of this notion was, until very recently, a foundation stone of conservatism….

[T]he only reason that the word “colored” has been tinged with the charge of “racism” is because the left/multiculturalists discovered that they could make Whitey jump through hoops by denigrating any term they chose, and claiming that a new one is in order. There was no ignominy attached to the word when ordinary blacks used it to refer to themselves. It is only when the clever elites learned that they could use it as yet another bludgeon against whites, along with a host of other words and terminologies, that it was given a “racist” meaning…

[Rand] Paul felt the need to reassure us that he is not a racist by revealing that he gets emotional and weepy when listening to a Martin Luther King Jr. speech. That may tell us something about his vulnerable mental state, but nothing else…

Even as other groups gradually dispossess them in the country whose political system was constructed by their forebears, conservative Whites persist in their obstinate assertion that their apparent discontent is “not about race.” What hogwash. Of course it’s about race and culture. Why shouldn’t it be? No matter how assiduously they deny it, resentment is growing over the ever-looming fact that this country, due to swiftly altering demographics, will no longer be the product of those Founders…

The media and academia are escalating the negrification of American culture and the feminization of its men, while teaching new generations to care more about strangers in foreign lands than for their own. Where can this possibly lead? Black elites now see power on the horizon that they never dreamed possible, and they’re going to go for it all. The real culture war is just getting under way, and so many whites do not even realize it…

How is it possible to win the respect of others if you produce nothing?…

Who started the lie that the Founders of this nation expended their energies in order to create a haven for the rescue of the world’s displaced populations? Did it come about chiefly from cynical 19th century industrialists eager only for cheap labor, who sought to soften their true motives by wrapping them in sentimental bombast?…

Why it would be normal behavior for any group of men who have been dominant in their society to allow themselves voluntarily to be displaced is never a subject for discussion by [the] arbiters of castration politics…

I ask what the likelihood is that any group would form a nation for a people other than their own kind. Why would these men not desire to retain the cultural integrity of their lineage? Other than today’s self-consciously de-racinating whites, what people do not possess this very preference? Would the Hutu be likely to expend their energies to develop a society to benefit alien tribes and foreigners? Would the Tamil? Those who claim that the world has now moved beyond ethnocentric loyalty, or ought to, might do well to take a look at the real world…

In their quest for power and prestige among whites, black elites help to unravel the bonds of the black community… [Booker T.] Washington claimed that as soon as some black men “halfway learn to read and write,” they grabbed a Bible and ran to open a church, or they took to the political stump. Or they did both. He viewed this behavior as setting a precedent that could ultimately weaken the race. For, instead of playing economically productive roles, as did their counterparts in other ethnic groups, such men removed themselves from the critical task of economic development. As solo operators, and heads of their own little private church entities, they thus avoided the risks of economic competition with other men… From early on, there were blacks expressing the concern that every time a black man built a church, instead of a business, he established his own personal “cathedral of commerce,” to benefit himself and a few others…

As a faithful follower of the agendas set by white liberals [Jews], there is no reason to believe that King would not have joined with those who are responsible for encouraging the almost daily appearance of a new group of people who style themselves as “victims”…

[S]lavery is the price I paid for civilization…

I am not fooled by the “diversity” folk into believing that the institutions of this society will be preserved and honored by those who happen to share my gene pool… The multicultural ideologues…make it clear that they view these institutions with contempt. They are working for nothing less than total control…

When these people [minorities] come to power, their major aim will be to institute their Enlightenment policies in all quarters of society. I have heard them refer to liberties such as freedom of speech as no more than jive-ass claptrap. I predict that once in power they will actually create laws to impose interracial unions in order to finally bring about the raceless dream society. He who insists on union with his own kind will be dubbed an intractable racist and sent off for further reeducation… [There is] no deep-seated heartfelt opposition to this trend except among white Southrons. Other types of conservatives talk tough until an epithet is hurled their way. Then they fold… Who is most likely to fight the hardest to maintain and conserve this extraordinary experiment in freedom? Who else but the actual descendents of those founders…. That means you, white Southrons. Once you lay down the sword, that will be the end of resistance. I view the battle as one that can be only accomplished by white Southerners. I would think that most whites would want to be among the last who would destroy that which came out of the genius of their own ancestors. So if a white South would guarantee the preservation of those institutions, then let’s have a white South.

Elizabeth Wright

Zenit speech

Speech by the Pope on Francis de Sales

Baffle them with your Tenured BS

This is fascinating. Reminds me of Slavoj Zizek. Slavoj even tells you what he is about to do. Slavoj, he's so hot right now!

Eastern Orthodoxy is Just Orthodox

How is St. Maximos' version of reality anything other but "mere Christianity"? This isn't a sectarian branch called "eastern", this IS the Faith.

3.93 & 27: The clean nous sometimes God himself comes into and teaches, sometimes the holy angelic powers suggest the right things, sometimes the vision of the nature of things.... But to participate or not in His goodness and wisdom, depends to the will of the creatures who have reason.

3.79: Do not dishonor your conscience, perfectly instructing you always. Because she suggests you the divine and angelic opinion, she sets you free from the hidden infections of the heart and she gives you uprightness before God when you depart.

3.80: If you've known yourself, you will understand many, great and wonderful things. Because, thinking that you know doesn't let you progress in knowing.

1.95: The sun of righteousness, rising into the clean nous, reveals himself and the reasons of all that He created and will create.

4.61: Love defeats those three: self-deception, because she is not proud; interior envy, because she is not jealous; exterior envy, because she is generous and serene.

4.70: All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are inside our hearts hidden.

1.31: Faith without love does not act in the soul the illumination of the divine knowledge.

3.97: When the nous receives the ideas of things, by its nature is transformed according to each and every idea. If it sees the things spiritually, is transfigured in many ways according to each vision. But if the nous becomes in God, then it becomes totally shapeless and formless, because seeing Him who has one face it comes to have one face and then the whole mind becomes a face of light.

The Makropoulous Affair

Gornahoor guest post, on Janacek's famous opera.

Word Becoming Flesh

We must all carefully examine our collective addictions to text-based mysticism. Man is engaged in a vigorous worldwide enterprise of turning flesh into words. Instead, we must consider how words can become flesh. The essential mystery of the Christ lies within this question.

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The Holy Vehm

One of the concepts that conservatives need to rethink is the idea of self-government. An ancient institution which might help them in this meditation is the Vehm. Self-government (if it means anything) can only be subordinated within a system to either something "higher" (the sacred King or Imperial ethos), or within a properly constituted and organic federal structure. It goes without saying that modern America is neither, but is a Dystopia, a dysfunctional patronage-state controlled (to the extent it is) by special interest groups and a common illusion. Culianu's "sorcerer-state" comes to mind. Self-government under these conditions will have to look elsewhere to see what real self-government looks like.

Martha Nussbaum & Criticism

Martha Nussbaum is a perfect example of the new elite that operates today in the high echelons of polite & civilized (not to mention educated) society. After scanning her Wiki entry, I wanted to ask, what was the big deal about being denied Classics tenure at Harvard? She wasn't even a Classicist? Maybe there is something I am missing here, I thought her specialty was Philosophy. A list of her credentials are here.

The popular reactions to her work tell me a lot about her:

Fragility made Nussbaum famous throughout the humanities. It garnered wide praise in academic reviews,[24][25] and even drew acclaim in the popular media.[26] Camille Paglia credited Fragility with matching "the highest academic standards" of the twentieth century,[27] and The Times Higher Education called it "a supremely scholarly work."[28] Nussbaum's fame extended her influence beyond print and into television programs like PBS's Bill Moyers.[29]

Her work is based on a rejection of Plato, and an affirmation of the traitor, Aristotle, so this, too, demonstrates what we can expect. Aristotle only affirmed tragedy as a category, and addressed the issue of "human flourishing" as a response, exactly what Nussbaum wants to do. Tragedy as an epic, as a religion, as metaphysic, is alien to her. Thus, one bases one's entire corpus on an understanding of something fundamental that is flawed - exactly man's problem to begin with.

Roger Kimball dissects her fairly well.

Professor Nussbaum finds this a thorny problem. Who, after all, is harmed in the transaction? Professor Nussbaum wonders “whether necrophilia ought, in fact, to be illegal.” She acknowledges that there is “something unpleasant” about a person who rapes a corpse, but it is “unclear” to her whether such conduct should be “criminal.” Possibly, since a corpse is generally the property of its family, there should be “some criminal penalties” where “property violations” are involved, but otherwise not.

It's hilarious she should use this example. Is this a poorly-veiled attempt to co-opt Aeschylus' play? This next quote is downright elitist (something the Left professedly hates)- who's being "elitist" now? The point is not that she may or may not be right - the point about the following elitism is that it is something she claims to be opposed to it on the face of it.

Professor Nussbaum doubts “whether the disgust of the ‘average’ man would ever be a reliable test for what might be legally regulable.”

So I guess the average person is below the Law.

From public nudity to poverty, the global AIDS crisis, and homosexual marriage, Professor Nussbaum has embraced the entire menu of politically correct causes. Poverty, she says, is “one of the most stigmatized life-conditions, in all societies.” Therefore it must be removed. And not just poverty: we must also supply items that are “part of the social definition of a decent living-standard,” e.g., “a personal computer.” AIDS is “a major cause of stigmatized lives.” Something must be done!

This is the nub. Actual, finalized equality.

One saw this at work a decade ago when she was called upon to give expert testimony in Evans v. Romer, which challenged a state constitutional amendment in Colorado that prohibited any official body from adopting a law or policy that grants homosexuals “minority status, quota preferences, protected status or claim of discrimination.” As the philosopher John Finnis showed in an article for Academic Questions, Professor Nussbaum, by deliberately misrepresenting the meaning of Greek words and the work of other scholars, engaged in “wholesale abuse of her scholarly authority and attainments.” Among other things, she went back to a nineteenth-century edition of the standard Greek-English lexicon because it did not include a morally opprobrious definition of a contested Greek term. She took the trouble to white-out the name of a contributor to the later edition of the lexicon that the lawyers, unaware of her subterfuge, had supplied in the footnotes of a court document. Challenged about this, she claimed that she was simply correcting a clerical error because the earlier edition was “more reliable on authors of the classical period” than later editions. I asked a former Regius Professor of Greek about that and it took him about five minutes to stop laughing. It’s clear that Professor Nussbaum doesn’t believe it either, since it has been shown that her own work regularly relies on later editions.

If this means what I think it means, it shows her true colors.

Moral evasion is typical of the Left. They are good at it - the Right is obtuse, but the Left is corrupt. Camilla Pagila revised her opinion of her, apparently (and Paglia is a "feminist", and yet a very reputable scholar).

Nussbaum's exposé is long overdue. Of course, if she had real courage or disinterested motivation, she would have written it seven or eight years ago -- just as she would have publicly allied with me in the campaign for academic reform instead of doing the opposite (as when she denounced the editor of Arion, Herbert Golder, for publishing my essay). Nussbaum isn't squeamish about borrowing my ideas without acknowledgment, however, as in her proposal in her most recent book to put world religions at the center of 21st century multicultural education. (Cooking dinner one night, I laughed out loud when David Gergen, interviewing Nussbaum on PBS's "Newshour With Jim Lehrer," gushily singled out that idea in her book, as she smiled winsomely and flashed some more leg.)

In a perfectly Leftist society, only people like Robert Bork suffer the moral "shame" (the liberals would say "opprobrium" - so much more dainty) they deserve to suffer, while opportunists like Nussbaum (if she is what she appears to be) simply move to greener pasture before the chickens come home to roost - not a hard thing to do, when you are in the glitzy set and have maximum academic (including honorary) credentials. This is exactly the kind of behaviour which they DEPLORE in any other context - someone apparently above the social Law, who can always move on to new opportunities, new horizons, new cutting-edges, while even her comrades in Revolution and Progress can see her for what she has become.

How prevalent is this in America today?My guess is very.

Here is Butler's award-winning sentence:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the questions of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural tonalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of therearticulation of power."

Can you decipher this? Can anyone be sure what it means?

I think what she is trying (very badly) to say is that late stage capitalism operates in a more sophisticated and subversive manner than even the Left had anticipated - however, it's unclear as to why this would be not just a concern contra capitalism, but contra the Left. Don't they use PC for just this purpose? Or perhaps she's being deliberately vague. If so, good job.

But it is horrendous English.

Gurdjieff, Hypnosis, Faith

Gurdjieff's work can be viewed as one man's experimental search for a new Christianity which was (simultaneously) the actual old one. Likewise, "Faith" can be seen as an exercise in self-hypnosis, induced by the split & deformed old personality in a desperate bid to re-unite the soul to the higher "self". Rather than seeing all religion (and by extension, most of man's real faculties as psychoses or neuroses - the more modern one is neuroses), we can view religion as an effort to establish 'rites' which can assist man in a path of self-hypnosis designed to aim at re-establishing inner (and outer) Paradise. The cunning man (as he might say) will not rely on one path alone (and one can apply this to "Faith alone") but will pursue whatever line of attack is appropriate to his nature (thus the need to "take heaven by storm"). Obviously, excesses, dangers, and perversions could abound here, but where do they not?

Mouravieff Continues

Gnosis, of true & false. An explanation of the parable of talents which will not please the materialists.

Mount Athos & English Literature (reprint)

Source

"Images of Mount Athos in English Literature

A Talk Delivered to World Public Forum, "Dialogue of Civilizations" in Salzburg (Austria) July 2011

It is easy to forget that the British are an Island people. Yet, bounded as we are by sapphire and icy Atlantic seas, we ourselves remain ever mindful of this fact. Equally, it is often convenient to put aside the evidence that our “septred Isle”, to quote Shakespeare, is openly analogous to other, similar, lands. Indeed, Japan instantly springs to mind for the purposes of comparison, on both a literary and artistic level. We are, after all, two small, proud, nations at the edge of a mighty continent, whereon most of the major cultural and scientific advances take place; innovations, which slowly trickle to our mutually emerald shores. The Renaissance, of course, provides us moderns with an obvious example of monumental developments proceeding at their own pace in English society during the Tudor period. However, once such progressions find root in Island soil, the necessary genius of geographical restriction transmutes these materials into something quite unique. This may be why Japan looks with fear as well as admiration at China, as do the British at the Continent of Europe. If we are, therefore, truly gathered here today in this stunning city of Salzburg to explore the influence of Holy Mount Athos on wider aspects of European cultural life, then neither clerical nor academic opinions will suffice to fully investigate this extraordinary spiritual phenomenon.

Confessedly, in ages past, the perceived exoticism of mainland society was a perennial cause for moral concern; perhaps particularly among the British. Innate puritanical tendencies (deemed vital to island survival), understood more ancient and sophisticated cultures either as decadent, or in terms of faraway fairytale. And Byzantium was a place in point. It was a long way away from the North in every sense of the phrase, and known for its elaborate customs. Moreover, its bejeweled spirituality was held with a deep suspicion. It could not be condemned as pagan, but neither was it seen as honestly Christian. Hence, with a modality usually bewildering to non-islanders, even its glittering sanctuaries of prayer were viewed as threatening; wellsprings of potential glamour, full of dangerous, or archaic, ideas. A reflection shared by British travel writers such as Dr. John Covel (1638-1722), and the actual source of irony penned by Edward Lear (1812-88) regarding monastic life on Mount Athos itself. Undeniably, a letter to Lady Waldegreen records the satirist’s remark, “so I am looking forward to escaping from the hustlefusledom and perhaps may settle down as a monk at Mount Athos eventually.” Nonetheless, this is “nonsense”. Lear, himself, could only see superstition coupled with a sever form of evasion from worldly responsibilities within its monastic institutions.

Exceptions to these prejudicial pronouncements are, however, to be found amongst British visionary and Romantic Poets. As the Second Great Tradition, English Literature frequently thirsted towards the Metaphysical and the Sacred in a manner reminiscent of ancient First Tradition Greek philosophers. Unequivocally, the demanding disciplines of an Aristotelian lifestyle devoted to qualitative consciousness, coupled with the complex and rigorous religious practices of the holy men, became a focus of inspiration - as well as an unsettling reminder of the Numinous - to many writers. For Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), Mount Athos was the embodiment of an immortal witness to fleeting human affairs. As he writes in his The Apologie for Poetrie; “Under Mount Athos in 492 BC, so Xerxes cut a canal through its isthmus”. With these telling and evocative lines, this Elizabethan gallant enchants his readers with a sense of historical significance, while alluding to uncomfortable inhuman realities beyond Court politics. During the same period, Edmund Spenser (1552-99), famed author of The Faerie Queene, wrote an eclogue drawn almost entirely from Virgil, which describes Mount Athos in terms of disturbing conundrum. Overtly, this other Elizabethan gallant almost chants the lines, “Nor how Mount Athos through exceeding might/ was digged down” in order to draw attention to its enigmatic nature. A theme Dr. Johnson (1709-84) elaborated in the renowned Samuel Johnson Collection when reminding his own readership that, although sometimes obscure, Spenser’s translation of the Virgilian Culex remains an evocation of neglected lore.

Most surprisingly, a few centuries later it was Lord Byron (1788-1824), who succumbed to the presence of the Holy Mountain. Anecdotal testimony still holds that, although never setting foot on its slopes - and probably only having seen the mountain from a distance - this leading Romantic felt moved to compose his fragmentary poem, The Monk of Athos. As we may read in this strangely pious and somewhat uncharacteristic work:

Beside the confines of the Aegean Main,
Where northward Macedonia bounds the flood,
And views opposed the Asiatic plain,
Where once the pride of lofty Ilium stood,
Like the great Father of the giant brood,
With lowering port majestic Athos stands,
Crowned with the verdure of eternal wood,
As yet unspoiled by sacrilegious hands,
And throws his mighty shade o’er seas and distant lands.
And deep embosomed in his shady groves
Full many a convent rears its glittering spire,
Mid scenes where Heavenly Contemplation loves
To kindle in her soul her hallowed fire,
Where air and sea with rocks and woods conspire
To breathe a sweet religious calm around,
Weaning the thoughts from every low desire,
And the wild waves that break with murmuring sound
Along the rocky shore proclaim it holy ground.
Sequestered shades where Piety has given
A quiet refuge from each earthly care,
Whence the rapt spirit may ascend to Heaven!
Oh, ye condemned the ills of life to bear!
As with advancing age your woes increase,
What bliss amidst these solitudes to share
The happy foretaste of eternal Peace,
Till Heaven in mercy bids your pain and sorrows cease.

Curiously, Byron is on the verge of adopting a view sub species aeternitatis in these lines. Beyond argument, it is additionally one of his many (frequently overlooked) attempts to describe Sublime feeling within his corpus. It may be wise to remind ourselves at this juncture that Edmund Burke (1729-92), defined the Sublime in terms of delight mixed with terror or pain, and produced by an “infinite object”. In other words, it is an aesthetic value closely akin, and perhaps leading to, the Beatific Vision; whereby a glimpse of the Noumenon is vouchsafed to the favoured. Nevertheless, it is reasonably certain that Byron was not seriously tempted to retreat to Mount Athos and take up a life of religious contemplation.

In more recent years, British writers visiting the Holy Mountain included figures such as Frederick William Hasluck (1878-1920), an archaeologist of note who worked at the British School in Athens. For his part, Hasluck published a book on Mount Athos and its monasteries within which he confronted his own preconceived repugnance of monasticism in general, along with “Greek” monasticism as non-productive and socially “parasitic” in particular. Curiously, it was a quarrel with one of the Brothers that defused this potentially explosive situation and deconstructed his rancor towards the sanctity of these cloisters. Undoubtedly, the existential encounter of actually meeting a member of the Community led to a wider recognition of spiritual authenticity.

Perhaps the most neoteric visitor to the Blessed Mount in the last few years was the impulsive and rather restless Critic Peter Levi (1931-2000). At one stage, he had been a Jesuit priest himself, having received theological training at Heythrop College in London. Beside this, he is known as Bruce Chatwin’s (1940-89), companion to Afghanistan in the 1970’s, when Chatwin was searching for traces of Greek culture in this sadly overlooked region. At the risk of digression, maybe I should mention Chatwin himself is said to have made arrangements for his own Baptism on Holy Mount Athos just prior to his untimely passing. Be that as it may, as a Professor of poetry, biographer, and gadfly about Oxford, Levi treasured his stay amongst the holy men of Athos. In fact, he eventually stated that monks across the world attract fewer suspicions these days than in the past, due to the fact that conflicting Church passions had cooled. Somewhat contrarily, his evocative book The Frontiers of Paradise: A Study of Monks and Monasteries, demonstrated an unabated enthusiasm for the monastic life, which stands previous British apprehensions on their head. Levi even chides Henry VIII over the dissolution of the Monasteries and remarks upon the intellectual and cultural contributions to our society made by men called to continual prayer through realized vocation.

On a personal level, the intricate ritual of Orthodox Christianity has always been a source of elation for me. Already implicit in the re-enactments of Sacred story: the liturgical adornments of eucharistic vestment, portable lights, incense, icons and choral chants, are the aesthetic structures that allow participation in the transcendently Beautiful. In addition, the pains of our world seem to be subsumed in these ornamented metaphors. Mistakes, they sadly say, colour the contours of our lives. Many a man, they testify, bitterly regrets the time he had seen “red”, while intoxicated in a Tavern. Equally, these analogies admit, the “blues” of domestic vacuity often haunt long-term relationships through a dangerously numbing drudgery. Such metalinguistic opulence, consequently, asserts that our misdemeanours invariably lead to moments of Faith as well as Heroism. In a manner reminiscent of a diamond-encrusted Byzantine alter piece, there is the prismatic suggestion that human life can be understood from three radically contrasting angles. As a scientific problem needing to be solved; an act of abstract Creation; or a dazzling Mystery within which the truly courageous choose to battle. Focusing intelligently appears to be our single choice. Thereupon, it may be British playwrights who offer more insightful comment on the dialogue of civilizations than English clergymen. This is because performers are aware that Truth, Compassion and Beauty are never captured by a system of ideas and that textual rigor simply cannot present the only significant method by which the spiritually enlightened can express their pilgrimage into higher states of Being.

Having claimed that, I will leave the last authorial comment of my literary ramble to a soldier. Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) is known to have celebrated his twenty-first birthday on Blessed Mount Athos with the Russian monks. Indeed, from an early age he admired the fact that these holy men lived a Spartan life of prayer, practically unchanged for a thousand years. Moreover, Sir Patrick, or Paddy (as he is universally known), respected their determination to embrace the challenging conditions of this Greek peninsula as one of their principle teachers in the religious life. Like them, he too seems to have perceived Holy Athos as a teacher. And there we have it! British writers have viewed the Mount as a danger to piety; a pleasant place to visit while travelling through Greece, an escape from the grinding demands of the world, a witness to human folly, a treasure-trove of ageless lore and even a lens through which we can glimpse Eternity. But it takes a military man to grasp the essence of the issue. The impact of Mount Athos on the world of British Letters is discernible in its ageless lesson of vigorous endurance. It is a symbol of unchanging, but Radical Tradition. It is, coequally, a clarion call reminding us of the cultural treasures our disparate (even though ultimately united) peoples have gifted to history. Lastly it is, as Paddy reminds us, one of the principle spiritual tutors of a continuous European identity."

Entering the Kingdom and Hindering Those Who Do

"LET GOD KILL HIM WHO HIMSELF DOES NOT KNOW

AND YET PRESUMES TO SHOW OTHERS THE WAY

TO THE DOORS OF HIS KINGDOM"

--2nd Series, Ekim Bey

Make the most, meanwhile, of your time...

Globus Preliator

No wonder I like this music:
"
Savior Mine
Blessed God
Eternal One
Mysterious One, Death, Holy One go before us.
Hosana Meus
Fortuna Deus
Aeterna Teus
Mystre, Morte, Sancte Pior

Blessed Savior God
Legion as the hairs of my head
Blessed, blessed indeed
Are the warriors of truth
Fortuna hosana deus
Legionus ab comae
Fortune fortuna equis
Ad pugnatoris in veritae

Savior Mine
Blessed God,
Protected by your cause
Of holiness.Hossana meus
Fortuna dues
Protego causa
In sanctus

Eternal in the past
Enduring always (i.e. God that was and is and will be)
Coryphaeus (a Greek drama term meaning the leader of the choir)
Regal King of all
Aeternus praetor
Firmitas semper
Coryphaeus
Rex Regis univers

For your whole self, savior
Protecting your holy cause
Bright Father
Celebrate resurrection
(Pro se solis hosanna
Protego sanctus causa
Padre illuminata
Gloria in resurrectem)

For your whole self, savior
Protecting your holy cause
Bright Father
Celebrate that day
(Pro se solis hosanna
Protego sanctus causa
Padre illuminata
Gloria in unum diem)

The land shadowed
The Earth evil,
Those who sow seeds of his travel
Why be guilty?
Terra tenebrae
Telluris malus,
Qui sere pere
Cur reatus.

Our Father ate the meat
Of our Lord,
Bright Father
Regal King of all.
Genitor edo
In ex domino,
Patris illuminata
Rex Regis universe.

For your whole self, savior
Protecting your holy cause
Bright Father
Celebrate resurrection
(Pro se solis hosanna
Protego sanctus causa
Padre illuminata
Gloria in resurrectem)

For your whole self, savior
Protecting your holy cause
Bright Father
Celebrate that day
(Pro se solis hosanna
Protego sanctus causa
Padre illuminata
Gloria in unum diem)

Tearful, Tearful,
Being away from our Lord
Lacrimosa, lacrimosa
In ex dominum

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/English_lyrics_to_Preliator_by_Globus#ixzz1X29EIzcI

Sacred Technique

“Nothing belongs any longer to the realm of the gods or the supernatural. The individual who lives in the technical milieu knows very well that there is nothing spiritual anywhere. But man cannot live without the sacred. He therefore transfers his sense of the sacred to the very thing itself that has destroyed its former object: to technique itself.” Jacques Ellul

By contrast, the noble man seeks the Grail, which is the heavenly Europe. No technological technique can guarantee this - it is a conquest of soul, first the self - the noble man loves to dominate himself, and is capable of dominating others, but prefers not to. Rather, he shows clemency, insofar as possible, but is capable of whatever action is needed in a crisis, because he rules himself.

Plato and Fool's Gold

"The pursuit of gold (chrematistics) became the all-powerful incentive for action for at least a part of society. This change in the public spirit, according to Plato, gives rise, even in an aristocratic society, to a class of people whose gods are money, which they honor secretly with crude passion. The money chest of the rich, filled with gold soon begins to exert its fascination on the whole community. A substantial competition for material possessions is unleashed which constantly increase the avarice; whereas on the other hand, the ideal goods (the arete) sink in the public esteem. For where one bows down before the riches of the rich one must naturally look with disdain on the virtue of the good." - Plato, quoted on From Egypt to Eire

The Church that was Left Behind

The Ekklesia - Whither? or Wither?

Strong Words about the Medieval Era

A rather bizarre theory, Exit. How can something “imaginary” have such real world effects such as to overturn a great traditional pagan civilization as you describe in your manifesto? Rather than believe that “everyone” else is imagining things, it is much more likely that you are imagining things.

We have made this point before, we have described real events, yet it is something you have been unable to grasp and respond to intelligently. But one last time.

The Middle ages was, in the view of all the writers you consider traditional, a traditional civilization, as a matter of fact, the last one in the West. We can see that it was the creation of the Nordics and Germanic tribes in their confrontation with Rome. They feudal society was created by them and was a reflection of their own tradition. They carried over their warrior ethic into the medieval aristocratic, knightly, chivalric caste. Everything in this account points to a continuation or their own tradition, even if it required a “rectification” as Evola put it. We lately posted a short piece by Aquinas wherein he wrote “we ought to begin with man’s earliest conjectures about the angels’, and proceeded to take account of everything the pagans had written about it.

Dante followed Virgil. You hold Coomaraswamy in high regard. We have pointed out in Vedanta and Western Tradition how he pointed out the native path for Europeans to approach the Vedanta. If you cannot even understand the European Tradition, we are quite skeptical about your accounts of the Veda. We could continue, but there are a few hundred articles on Gornahoor that you could read instead of cramming everything here.

Unfortunately, Exit, the half-educated ideologues of the world will not be the ones to continue the ancient ways. We urge you, if you are sincere, to cast off those unsubstantiated opinions of yours and approach Tradition in reverence and the spirit of Truth.

Cologero defending Christianity and the Middle Ages