The Reason for the Season: Following the Followers But Failing the Faith

Secretary to an anti-Pope. I’m not among the very few people on earth who can claim to be one. But I am among the few who can claim to have corresponded with one. It was by email around the turn of the century, after I came across the website for a tiny schismatic Catholic sect in Montana. As I’ve said before at the Occidental Observer, I’m fascinated by islands, both real ones and metaphorical ones. An anti-Pope, or rival to the generally accepted Pope, is like an island of self-assertion in a sea of hostility, ridicule and indifference.

Core to Christianity

The anti-Pope for the sect in question was Lucian Pulvermacher (1918–2009), who was elected as Pope Pius XIII by the True Catholic Church in 1998. I can’t remember the name of his secretary, but I can remember that I was impressed by that secretary. He genuinely seemed to possess something that is supposedly central to Christianity but seems rarely practised by Christians. What is it? Humility. Christ urged it on His followers, but my experience is that they often turn a deaf ear to that and much else urged upon them by their Lord. The anti-Pope’s humble secretary gave me a good example of Christians ignoring Christ when he told me that he used to get mocking emails from staff at the Vatican. They found him and his master supremely ridiculous. After all, they were working for a continent-spanning colossus at Rome, where all roads lead, and he was working for a tiny schismatic sect in Kalispell, Mt. And yet he had the spirit of the Christ-child and they didn’t.

The Virgin of the Lilies (1899) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (image from Wikipedia)

The Christ-child is, of course, the reason for the season of Christmas. He was born of a virgin after a miraculous conception by the Holy Ghost. According to true Christians, that is, but I’m not one of them. Like Hell, the Resurrection and Transubstantiation, the Virgin Birth of Christ is one of the scandals that prevent me from becoming a Christian. Skandalon, σκάνδαλον, is a New Testament word and literally means “stumbling-block.” I stumble and fall when I try to believe that Christ was born of a virgin and rose from the dead. And yet I once believed in something far more supernaturally extravagant than those two doctrines in Christianity. That is, I once believed in the Psychic Unity of Mankind, namely, that all races, from Swedes to Somalis, from Tibetans to Tongans, have the same fundamental psychology and cognitive potential. According to leftists, it’s nurture, not nature, that explains why, for centuries, tiny numbers of Jews have effortlessly outperformed vast numbers of Blacks in cognitively demanding fields like science, mathematics and chess.

A risible superstition

The same leftists will usually reject the Virgin Birth of Christ with scorn. And yet accepting the Virgin Birth of Christ demands belief only in the miraculous conception of a single child in Palestine two thousand years ago. Accepting the Psychic Unity of Mankind demands belief in the miraculous conception of billions of children for thousands of years in places as wildly different in climate and geography as the icy, oxygen-starved plateau of Tibet and the sea-clasped, sun-kissed island of Tonga. In other words, those who believe that all races are cognitively equal must believe that the human brain was miraculously exempt from the evolutionary forces that have shaped all other aspects of human physiology, from skin-color to blood-chemistry to lung-function to bone-structure.

The brain isn’t exempt from evolution, of course, and the Psychic Unity of Mankind is a risible superstition. But my brain was once one of the millions that housed that risible superstition, while rejecting the Virgin Birth of Christ and being thoroughly hostile to Christianity. Fortunately, my brain was also capable in time of recognizing the contradictions and absurdities of leftism. And of becoming much less hostile to true Christianity. I sometimes feel as though my small feet are treading in the giant prints of C.S. Lewis, who wrote this in his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955):

Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. You will remember that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive “apart from his Christianity”. Now, I veritably believe, I thought — I didn’t of course say; words would have revealed the nonsense — that Christianity itself was very sensible “apart from its Christianity”. (Surprised by Joy, chapter XIV)

I feel about Lewis what Lewis felt about Chesterton: that he is a very wise and insightful writer “apart from his Christianity.” But what if his wisdom and insight had brought him to Christianity and been nourished and strengthened by his Christianity? I ask the same question about the more forbidding figure of Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), the great Catholic writer who published these powerful words in 1938:

[T]here is (as the greatest of the ancient Greeks discovered) a certain indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. You cannot deny or attack one of these three without at the same time denying or attacking both the others. Therefore with the advance of this new and terrible enemy against the Faith and all that civilization which the Faith produces, there is coming not only a contempt for beauty but a hatred of it; and immediately upon the heels of this there appears a contempt and hatred for virtue. (The Great Heresies, chapter 6, “The Modern Phase”)

Belloc was right. Christianity in the true sense welcomes, nurtures and creates Truth, Beauty and Goodness. Leftism — and Christianity when corrupted by leftism — hates all of those things. Among the beauties nurtured by Christianity is the poetry of John Betjeman (1906–84). He didn’t create anything to rival the music of Bach or the architecture of the Gothic masters, but he did — and does — move the heart with verses like these:

And is it true? And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?
And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare —
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine. (“Christmas,” 1954)

Betjeman believed but had doubts. I have doubts and can’t believe. The doctrines are too much for me. I can’t believe in the Virgin Birth and I can’t believe that the flesh and blood of Christ are literally, but undetectably, the bread and wine taken by Christians at Eucharist. But again I can see that the Christian belief in transubstantiation is much less irrational and superstitious than the leftist belief in transgenderism. Christians believe that Christ becomes bread and wine because God so wills it. Leftists believe that men become women because the men in question so will it. The men might have beards and balls and ten-inch todgers, but they’re fully female all the same. Only heretical haters deny this great and glorious truth.

“A slender elf-woman”

Okay, leftists don’t call the deniers “heretics” or “witches” or “blasphemers.” But it’s clear that religious psychology is at work in leftism, which is an ugly parody of Christianity rather as transgenderism is an ugly parody of transubstantiation. Tolkien put it like this: “The Shadow … can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own.” Tolkien is another great Christian writer whom I revere but can’t follow into Christianity. The Virgin Mary appears in Tolkien’s masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings (1954–5), but under another name: Galadriel. She’s the awe-inspiring Elven lady who nevertheless has the humility to resist the golden temptation of supreme power:

She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.

“I pass the test,” she said. “I will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954, Book II, chapter 7)

That is Tolkien’s portrayal of the Virgin Mary, who bore God but did not aspire to godhead herself. The Star of Bethlehem appears in Lord of the Rings too. I think so anyway. I think it’s the hope-lifter and heart-raiser seen by the humble hobbit Sam from the ash-choked death-land of the Dark Lord Sauron:

Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. (The Return of the King, 1955, Book VI, chapter 3)

But where is the Christ-child in Tolkien’s masterpiece? Nowhere and everywhere, I would say. Tolkien could not have created the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of his trilogy without believing in the Christ-child and the Virgin Birth. But beliefs can do good, can inspire great art and literature, without being true. And I think one thing is more certain about Christianity than the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection. In its highest, best, and most inspiring forms, Christianity is a White religion, indissolubly bound to the pale-skinned folk of Europe and her diaspora. Whites created Christianity and Christianity created Whites by influencing their evolution. Belloc put it like this, perhaps with deeper meaning than he intended: “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe.” That’s why the enemies of Whites, like Jews and leftists, are also the enemies of Christ. And why there’s a war on Christmas. In this war, we should side with Belloc, Tolkien, Lewis and Betjeman. And they all followed the Christ-child, Maker of the stars and sea.

True Christianity is beautifully White: Madonna of the Magnificat (c. 1483) by Sandro Botticelli (image from Wikipedia)