Part I was here.

I followed the usual evolution of a reactionary thinker. Like many others, I started out as an ordinary, moderate conservative, presuming basic goodness of my country, culture, and Church and of their core (classically liberal) ideals, my conservatism being simply a wish that these be preserved against radicals on the Left. This was before I was blogging, since there wouldn’t have been anything interesting for me to say. Such conservatives must live with a certain tension that the dynamic they condemn in Leftism–eroding community with individualism, virtue and tradition with utilitarianism, piety with suspicion–were clearly factors in the formation of the nation and culture they wish to defend. Some are content to insist that our inherited branch of radicalism is different (e.g. Russell Kirk and others make much of how very different were the American and French Revolutions), but others make the leap to Reaction: if it’s bad when Karl Marx did it, it was bad when Thomas Jefferson did it. There’s a wonderful sense of relief when one drops the mental contortions of trying to hold traditional principles while affirming all the practices contemporary society regards as definitively settled. I remember how good it felt when I just cut the knot and defied the consensus with thoughts like “Of course women shouldn’t be in the military.” Suddenly, I could think freely and easily without constantly having to dance at the edge of self-contradiction. My peak reactionary days were my Throne and Altar days, which for now are preserved on WordPress as (I’d say) and excellent specimen of the genre. The reactionary is alienated from the current powers and influence centers, seeing them as, basically, Satanic, as established rebellion against the order of nature and God. You will find phrases like “Founding Traitors” and “dark and terrible Springtime of Vatican II” peppered in my writings on the old blog.

So what has changed? Not much about my alienation from the present, but a great deal about my alienation from the past.

“We are looking for a place where a successful stand may be made for the logos against modern barbarism.” Richard M Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1948)*

The great weakness of Weaver’s “we” is that it has a much clearer idea of the barbarism that it is against than of the logos that it is for.  This is why it finds unity in a fear that sometimes amounts to paranoia.  And whenever the barbarians temporarily withdraw from view, this Camp of the Saints falls out in quarrels, and slanders, and struggles to decide who is now the big banana in the Camp. 

It is a cruel irony, but these champions of the logos are in fact a motley coalition of remnants of various lost causes. I say the stand for the logos will be lost if we cannot look this cruel irony in the eye.

Alan Roebuck recently proposed that Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox unite to defend Christendom and promote the worship of Jesus Christ.  I think truth is better served if we say unite and attempt a reconquista. Many years have passed since the barbarians tossed the Christians from the windows of Christendom’s castle.  A fair number of Christians still reside on the estate as serfs, but barbarians give law to the land.

These Christian serfs are dhimmis in a modern millet system. 

“Most tourists leave their own religion behind them and amuse themselves by gazing at the externals of other religions.”  Thomas Mozley, Reminiscences Chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement (1882)*

“If any one definite conclusion stands out from the general survey, it is that all the forms, sections, and communions of our common Christianity will do well to give their first, highest, and most serious attention to improving themselves, and bringing forth the fruit of good words and good works, instead of waging war upon one another—instead, too, of passing without absolute necessity from one camp to another, and so losing half a life without quite winning the other half.” Thomas Mozley, Letters from Rome on the Occasion of the Œcumenical Council, 1869-1870 (1891).**

Tucker Carlson’s interview with Jay Dyer left me with a few impressions.  Dyer, as you may know (but I did not), writes for television and has achieved some notoriety as a Hollywood muckraker and online apologist for Eastern Orthodoxy.  

My first impression is that men like Dyer (and Rod Dreher) are more obviously Seekers than Eastern Orthodox.  I don’t say this to fault them since I, although breaking down long before reaching Mt. Athos, am a bit of a Seeker myself.  Dreher began life as a Methodist, Dyer as a Baptist, and both passed through the Church of Rome before arriving, possibly to settle, in the Orthodox Church.  

The traits of a Seeker are of course like those of a much-married man: an inordinate capacity for both hope and disappointment.

“Society has always the Scylla and Charybdis of Socialism and Individualism on its right hand and its left, and it is never without danger from the one or the other. It is sometimes, of course, in much more danger from the one than from the other” Robert Flint, Socialism (1906)

Robert Flint (1838-1910) was a Scottish theologian and philosopher who was neither a socialist nor an individualist.  As he very helpfully explains, a healthy society balances society’s need for cooperation and the individual’s need for elbow room. A sane and sensible man therefore inclines to socialism or individualism when he believes his society or local circumstances have drifted too far in the opposite direction.  

I incline to socialism if my neighbor has taken to keeping twelve howling wolfhounds chained in his back yard; I incline to individualism if he demands that every house on the street fly four American flags on the Fourth of July.

“As for myself; I am fully satisfied that, till a consummate stupidity and ignorance can be happily established and universally spread over the face of the whole land; there is nothing that tends so much to destroy all due respect to the clergy as the demands of more than can be due them; nothing has so effectually thrown contempt upon a regular succession of the ministry, as the calling no succession regular, but what was uninterrupted, and making the eternal salvation of Christians to depend on that uninterrupted succession, of which the most learned can have the least assurance and the unlearned can have no notion but through ignorance and credulity.” Benjamin Hoadly, An Answer (1718)*

I don’t have an opinion respecting the recent rift between the Vatican and SSPX, but it did set me wondering about the doctrine of apostolic succession, and the inquiry born of this wondering took me places I had not been before. The doctrine I had supposed so formidable, now appears to me a polite fiction at best.

* * * * *

The doctrine of apostolic succession is a product of the second-century struggle to suppress Gnosticism and Montanism, which might be generally described as a flourishing of speculative thought and popular enthusiasm in the disorganized Christian churches of that day.  Along with the creeds and the cannon, apostolic succession was a tool of a fundamentalist movement that aimed to get “back to the basics” and remove the luxuriant growths of doctrinal innovation.  To this end, the doctrine of apostolic succession restricted teaching authority to bishops who (a) taught only what the apostles had taught, and (b) were the latest link in an unbroken chain of ordinations whose first link was an apostle ordained by Christ.

This unbroken chain of ordinations was said to confer on these bishops a special grace that protected them against false teaching, this grace of episcopal inerrancy being transmitted through a laying on of hands.  The model for this rite is sometimes said to be rabbinical Judaism, where the laying on of the hands was also used to confer a special grace of inerrancy on heirs to the School of Hillel.  

However, even in the second century, many of the supposedly unbroken chains of ordinations in the Christian churches were dubious, or at least obscure.  There was uncertainty even over the early bishops of Rome, where Stillingfleet said “succession is as muddy as the Tiber itself,” and knowledge of past bishops in many other great Christian churches was entirely forgotten and lost.**  Writing in the fourth century, the great church historian Eusebius lamented the extremely poor record keeping of the early Christians.

If you browse the comments of certain types of online content, you will sooner or later encounter the opinion that Christianity was a Jewish psyop engineered to emasculate Rome and unbalance all white gentiles who came after.  The opinion combines elements of Edward Gibbon’s General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West (1781) and Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). It may out St. Paul as an undercover operative of the Learned Elders of Zion.  

Were it not for this Jewish psyop, professors of this opinion tell us that disciples of Jupiter and Wotan would even today be colonizing the stars.