We do not mind that you should want to explain yourself. On the
contrary, for your arguments work only against you.
The so-called 'racism' of the Christian authors you take great care to
cite barely differs from the vilest rural racism, which can still be
found in places such as Sicily, Greece and Lebanon, or from the sassy
bourgeois view of two centuries ago on this matter. The question is
not whether a certain mentality is able to feel hostile towards
something: but whether the feeling of hostility rises naturally,
without the need to force it, from an inherent and conscious feeling
of superiority and differentiation. Given that the initial
pre-disposition to having such a feeling cannot be taught - especially
not from mere doctrine - it doesn't matter in the first place whether
anything is said on the matter in the Judeo-Christian texts.
But let us, for the briefest of moments, assume that the texts do
matter, one way or another. It is clear, even in this case, that the
arguments made by those so-called 'pre-modern' Christian authors are
either not even grounded in the texts, either based on highly arguable
interpretations of biblical passages, or simply pertaining to the most
zoological forms of racism, as was especially apparent in an extensive
passage from an apocryphal text you had posted.
To assert that Christianity was conscious of the value and importance
of race because "we do not find the word 'slave' in any part of the
Scripture until righteous Noah branded the sin of his son with this
name" is pathetic at best, hypocritical at worst. Even the slightest
consciousness of race would have led to being more explicit on this
matter above all matters. We're not playing hide and seek. Not to
mention, even if this doesn't make much of a difference, that your
topic pertains to Christians - hence, we should understand, the people
of the New Alliance - when the textual references made by those
authors are exclusively from the Ancient Testament. At this rate, one
can only wonder what comes next: the Aryanity of the Jews?
Why, then, you will ask, do these authors make those comments with
regards to negritude in the first place? Before one can answer that,
it is crucial to note, as was already noted by the administrator, that
such references are infinitesimal with respect to the whole body of
writings of those authors. The answer, however, is simply that it is
the authors who separately felt it necessary to pronounce themselves
on the matter of race, whether by social convention to talk about such
issues, as we think is the case, or, much less probable, because of a
consciousness of race which each of them felt individually. Their
reconciliation of racism with Judeo-Christianity is one done a
posteriori, due to their individual biases. In other words, it is
artificial and illusionary. A simple proof to that is that the authors
you quote provide completely different justifications or 'myths' to
their 'racism' - 'myth', precisely, in the current sense of the word,
because what they see in those myths is a mere product of their
imagination. On the other hand, you could have asked anyone in
National-Socialist Germany, while it lasted, what the position of
their creed with regards to 'negritude' and 'Aryanity' is, without any
doubt that you would have received a unanimous answer - which is
certainly not the case with those so-called 'pre-modern' Christian
authors - a fact that serves to show, once again, the incredible
heterogeneity and confusion of their doctrine, and, consequently, the
futility of wanting to 'restore' it.
--- In evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com, "brightimperator"
<brightimperator@...> wrote:
>
>
> It's good that you forcefully rebuke as long as its good-intentioned. I
> can explain myself.
>
> My thesis: premodern Catholic-Orthodox Christianity is not hostile to
> Western civilization or aristocratic and racial values.
>
> My claim that ancient and modern Christianity are hardly identical is
> the opposite of Protestantism. Premodern Christianity obviously has
> quite little in common with contemporary mainstream Protestant
> Christianity if ancient theologians taught that the lower negroid races
> are destined for eternal slavery and saints like Ennodius can command
> young men not to mix with "hellish-visaged blacks" while in modernized
> churches the Marxist negro demagogue Martin Luther King Jr. is
> considered an essential prophet!!
>
> For empirical documentation of my thesis, study the 'racialist' teaching
> of Origen (185-284):
>
> "For the Egyptians are prone to a degenerate life and quickly sink
> to every slavery of the vices. Look at the origin of the race and you
> will discover that their father Cham, who had laughed at his
> father's nakedness, deserved a judgment of this kind, that his son
> Chanaan should be a servant to his brothers, in which case the condition
> of bondage would prove the wickedness of his conduct. Not without merit,
> therefore, does the discolored posterity imitate the ignobility of the
> race [ Non ergo immerito ignobilitatem decolor posteritas
> imitatur]." Homilies on Genesis 16.1
>
> Or St. Ephraim of Edessa (306-378):
>
> "Ephrem the Syrian said: When Noah awoke and was told what Canaan
> did…Noah said, `Cursed be Canaan and may God make his face
> black,' and immediately the face of Canaan changed; so did of his
> father Ham, and their white faces became black and dark and their color
> changed." Paul de Lagarde, Materialien zur Kritik und Geschichte des
> Pentateuchs (Leipzig, 1867), part II
>
> St. Jerome (347-420) considered negroids as literal and metaphorical
> fiends: "Chus in Hebrew means Ethiopian, that is, black and dark,
> one who has a soul as black as his body." (The Homilies of Saint
> Jerome, vol. 1, trans. Marie Liguori Ewald, Homily 3, 28).
>
> St. Ambrose (339-397): "The color of the Ethiopian signifies
> darkness of the soul and the squalor which is opposed to light,
> dispossessed of brightness, covered in darkness, and more similar to
> night than day." De Noe 34.128
>
> St. Ambrose taught that Noah's curse of slavery of Genesis 9 applied
> to the darker descendents of Ham. See Jean Devisse, The Image of the
> Black in Western Art, vol. 2, part 1, trans. William Granger Ryan
> (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 18.
>
> St. Augustine defended the role of slavery in our fallen world and
> associated it with the accurst dark seed of Ham: "It is with justice, we
> believe, that the condition of slavery is the result of sin. And this is
> why we do not find the word 'slave' in any part of the Scripture until
> righteous Noah branded the sin of his son with this name." (City of God,
> 19:15)
>
> "When you serve a man, under Christ's orders, you do not serve that man,
> but him who commanded you. And this is what the apostle says: 'Be
> obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling,
> in singleness of heart, as to Christ, rendering service with a good will
> as to the Lord.' Look, he did not make free men out slaves, but good
> slaves out of bad slaves. How much the rich owe to Christ, for creating
> stability in their homes! If there were an unfaithful slave therein,
> Christ would correct him and would not say to him: 'Get rid of your
> master, for you have recognized him who is your true master; he may be
> impious and hostile, but you are faithful and just; it is unworthy that
> a just and faithful man serve one who is unjust and unfaithful.' He did
> not say that to the slave, but rather 'Be a slave.'" (Enarrationes in
> Psalmos 124.7)
>
> Augustine explains "Ethiopians" in Ps 72/71:9 as "the
> remotest and foulest of mankind", linking geographic and moral
> distance (ibid., 71.12).
>
> Augustine also idealized white skin as the archetypal feminine ideal in
> his explanation of the relationship between the Church and God: "First
> he loved us and granted us to love him. We did not yet love, but by
> loving we were made beautiful. What will a deformed and facially
> distorted person do if he loves a beautiful woman? And what will a
> deformed and distorted and black woman do if she loves a beautiful man?
> By loving can she become beautiful?" (In Joannis epistolam ad Pathos),
> etc... I could cite many more from Augustine.
>
> St. Paulinus of Nola (354-431): "The peoples of Ethiopia…are not
> burnt by the sun, but are black with vice, sin giving them the color of
> night." Carmina 28.249-51
>
> Cassiodorus (484-585): "We must interpret the Ethiopians as sinning
> people, for just as the Ethiopians are covered in the foulest
> [teterrimo] skins, so the souls of transgressors are enshrouded in the
> darkness of wicked deeds." Expositio in Psalterium 71.9
>
> The Eastern Christian apocryphal text "The History of the Creation and
> Transgression of Adam", 27, says of Eve: "Even though she had been
> stripped of the heavenly light, she was nonetheless beautiful, for her
> flesh was dazzling white like a pearl because she was newly created."
>
> Do the words of Origen, Ephraim, Ambrose, Jerome and Ennodius, etc., who
> all represent the doctrinal mainstream of the Church, sound like
> proto-Marxist egalitarian utopianism to you?
>
> The book on ancient Roman racism is just one source among others. I rely
> not on the interpretations of modern scholars but the pure data
> presented.
>
> As it happens, Abrabanel's commentary on Sarah's pure white skin, which
> you criticize as the wild fantasy of a medieval Jew, actually has a much
> earlier predecessor that Abrabanel couldn't have been aware of. The
> Genesis Apocryphon found in the Dead Sea Scrolls describes the praise of
> Pharaoh's ministers for Sarah's beauty. Here too it is identified with
> pure white skin:
>
> How lovely are her eyes! How desirable her nose and all the radiance of
> her countenance ... How fair are her breasts and how beautiful all her
> whiteness! ... [S]he is fairer than all other women...
>
> http://faculty.bbc.edu/ggromacki/deadseascrolls/bible.htm
> <http://faculty.bbc.edu/ggromacki/deadseascrolls/bible.htm>
>
> The Pauline-Christian equality of souls before God, along with the
> ultimate irrelevance of nationality and gender, is an exclusively
> METAPHYSICAL affirmation. Only the deceived and uneducated could think
> Christianity declared a psychotic war on the natural empirical facts of
> social stratification, nationality and gender; authentic traditional
> Christianity merely gives them their proper place and context. No where
> in the New Testament is material social revolution advocated; on the
> contrary, soldiers and slaves are told to be content with their earthly
> positions and rightful governmental authority is to respected and
> praised. Social and ethnic-cultural distinctions are to be preserved but
> relativized in light of the unity of common salvation. Hierarchical
> feudalism is fully in accord with the New Testament. The only thing
> real, unmodern Christianity wages revolutionary war against is decadence
> and all-too-human wickedness in all its forms: amoralism, libertinism,
> sodomy, cannibalism, human sacrifice cults, anomic nihilism, Jewish
> this-worldliness, naturalistic hedonism, idolatrous materialism,
> self-worship, etc.
>
> Haven't you already instructed me, per Guenon, that Evil is not commonly
> pure negation but the perversion and inversion of a higher order:
> "Diabolus Deus inversus"? This is the case with the abortion of
> Protestant rationalist-egalitarian abolitionism, which falsely applies
> spiritual principles (the Pauline equality of souls) to the lower orders
> of reality...
>
>
> Did you even read Abrabanel's commentary, where he cites Plato in his
> theoretical elaboration of the caste system of races? How is this
> "zoological racism"?
>
> Seemingly the only contemporary Christian denomination to have remotely
> retained the authentic Christian doctrine on race is the Orthodox one:
>
> ORTHODOX VIEW OF INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE
> Bishop Iakovos, Prof. of Orthodox Theology, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox
> School of Theology. 1987.
>
> QUESTION: "No matter what Hollywood and the Church say, I can't believe
> God smiles on such (interracial) marriages."
>
> ANSWER: I wish to respond to the brief comment on several levels. On the
> level of the issue itself, the expression "God smiles on such marriages"
> can be understood in a number of ways. If by it, you mean that you
> believe that God does not encourage racially mixed marriages, the, I
> believe we are not in disagreement. I feel I made it very clear that the
> Church does not feel such marriages are desirable, for many different
> reasons, many of which are practical and have to do with the chance of
> success for such marriages. In addition, we should also add that the
> Church holds that races and nations were created by God. Consequently,
> the total intermarriage would destroy the races which God created. The
> Church has never advocated or encouraged racially mixed marriages...
>