Ministerial to Advance Gnosticism and Globalism

The [u.] S. State Dept. held its second Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom in July, and it trotted out some of the same subversive declarations as the year before:

We call upon all governments to respect the individual’s human right to believe or not believe, to practice any faith tradition or none.

--https://www.state.gov/statement-on-respect-for-religion-or-belief/

As representatives of the international community, we stand together in support of the interconnected freedoms of thought, conscience, religion or belief, and expression.  We stand in firm opposition to laws that, inconsistent with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, impede the freedom of individuals to choose a faith, practice a faith, change their religion, not have a religion, tell others about their beliefs and practices, or openly debate and discuss aspects of faith or belief.

--https://www.state.gov/statement-on-blasphemy-and-apostasy-laws/

How is that subversive, the typical American might ask?  Because at the heart of human life, particularly mankind’s religious life, is not the individual, but both the individual and the community. 

Mankind was made in the image of the Holy Trinity, not the neo-Platonic Monad.  Three unique Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, live in an inseparable community of self-emptying humility and love without division but also without losing their uniqueness as individual Persons.  This is how mankind is also supposed to live its life, upholding both community and the individual.  To promote one at the expense of the other leads to terrible consequences:  the smothering uniformity of socialism/communism on the one hand and chaotic republics/democracy on the other. 

The interests of both the community and the individual must be upheld in anything we do.  Therefore, when the State Dept. declares that the individual’s right to choose any faith or no faith, etc., must be upheld anywhere and everywhere, this is nothing other than a declaration of its intention to unleash chaos throughout the world.  When the freedom of the individual is made the measuring rod for morality, goodness, progress, and so on, then all communal obligations and institutions will be undermined in the end.  Absolute truth itself will be rejected eventually as each and all make the inner voice of their individual conscience the arbiter of what is right and wrong.

And what is the result of all this?  Globalism.  Mankind, uprooted from any kind of local attachments and duties to Church, family, neighborhood, and the like, will necessarily become a ‘citizen of the world’, where economic concerns and laws become the main guiding force in life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws

It is sad to say, but this kind of economic utopianism preached by Milton Friedman in this short video, this substitute church that promises to bring harmony and co-operation to all the peoples of the world, is praised by Protestant Evangelicals, libertarians, and others of a similar cast of mind, but it cannot be otherwise.  Their exaltation of the individual over the community leads inevitably to it.

Thus, it is precisely our fidelity to real community that protects us from globalism.  The concentric rings of authority, obligation, and custom of the various communities mankind has traditionally belonged to once shielded him from the advance of that demonic ideology.  But thanks to efforts like this Ministerial by the State Dept., those protecting walls are being demolished in the name of individual rights.  Unfortunately, this is simply the logical out-working of the American Constitutional Creed. 

It cannot be any plainer, then:  Americanism is Globalism; Americanism is Gnosticism.

Sam Brownback gave a very clear indication of this when he said,

Previewing the event, Sam Brownback, the U.S. government’s ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, noted that religions of all sorts are vulnerable to persecution.

“Almost every faith that’s a majority somewhere is a minority somewhere else and often gets persecuted where they’re a minority,” Brownback said at a State Department briefing. “So that’s why a big part of our effort is to get the faiths to come together and to stand for each other.”

“We’re not talking common theology here — nobody agrees on theology,” he added. “We’re talking about a common human right.”

--Associated Press (bolding added), https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/cwn/2019/july/government-restrictions-on-religion-increasing-worldwide

Human rights trump correct theology:  This is heretical gobbledy-gook.  But it is exactly what we should expect from the Universal Yankee Empire of America.

For the sake of truth, for the sake of salvation, for the sake of the true flourishing of humanity, we must therefore be bold in saying this:  The confessional state, the established religion, is the norm for any ethnos.  The faith is the country, and the country is its faith.  The individual must affirm his being in community, imitating the Holy Trinity, the angels, and the saints, or experience its dissolution in isolation from others, as Satan, the demons, and all the enemies of God do, and will, for eternity. 

This essay on life in an Orthodox monastery illustrates very well for us what life in a country should look like, how the communal and the individualistic should relate to one another:

In the monastery, the life is a single whole. Not only do we live, work, worship and study together, but we also are welded into one body, in a communion of love. We are called to bear one another’s burdens, be patient, gentle, kind, longsuffering, and forgiving to one another. And in so doing, we not only build the community, but we grow ourselves. It is a long process to enter into an authentic communion of persons, taking years. How we treat one another has direct bearing on how close and integral the life of our community will be, how we will pray together, and how we work together. Community life is very demanding, like a marriage—only with many partners! It exposes our selfishness, our pettiness and passions, our agendas and arrogance, pride and vainglory. It makes us come to terms with ourselves. It is a context in which we work out how to love and be loved, and to elevate that love to a participation in divine Love.

The Fathers have taught us that we are not saved alone. The only thing we do alone is sin, fall, and go to hell. We are saved together, as a single body, the Body of Christ. Our communion here—not only eucharistic participation, but living bond of love—is a participation in the Kingdom of God. The monastic community is an icon of that Body, a small Church. It is a communion of persons, united by one Spirit.

When we sin, we isolate ourselves from God and from one another, from that living unity in Christ. God does not withdraw His grace and His love: rather, we turn away from it, reject it, try to hide—as did Adam and Eve in the garden. The spiritual task is to open ourselves to accept that gift of love and grace, and be transformed by it.

There is always a tension between the corporate life of the community, and the personal life of each member. There is a dynamic of entering in and withdrawing, going deeper and fleeing, participation and hiding. The core of the corporate life of the community is the celebration and participation in the Holy Mysteries, especially the Holy Eucharist. There is always a corporate, communal dimension to our participation, in addition to the personal dimension of our own preparation and entrance into the mystery. The personal dimension, how we each uniquely enter in and contribute to the whole, our personal spiritual life, is the key to this dynamic of sin and repentance, growth in spiritual maturity and regression into rebelliousness, the dark nights of the senses, soul and spirit, and our experience of prayer. Every aspect affects every other aspect, both on the personal as well as the corporate level. How I pray affects how I participate in the liturgy, and either contribute or disrupt the experience of communion and orporate ascent to the Kingdom. My moods, dispositions, sins and transgressions all directly impact how I treat my brothers.

The process of personal spiritual life in monastic context is always shared. We support, rebuke, correct, encourage, build up and scandalize each other regularly.

--Metropolitan Jonah, https://monasteryofstjohn.org/documents/abbatialessays/Why_be_a_monk.pdf, pgs. 14-5, via https://monasteryofstjohn.org/resources/articles/

For a Southland in which participation in the Divine Liturgy and the reception of the Holy Body and Blood of Jesus Christ is the touchstone of her life, both communal and individual, rather than obsession with constitutions, human rights, and the freedom of the individual - let us say again and again with all our heart and with all our soul, Lord have mercy!

As for Americanism, let all pronounce it the accursed heresy that it truly is.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

The New Ecstatic Religion of the Extraterrestrial God

Mr William Federer inadvertently reveals to us what may be in store in the near future:  a religious faith centered on encountering ‘God’ in outer space and/or on other planets in ways more powerful than we have experienced Him before:

[Astronaut Alan] Bean continued: “Jim would later say, ‘I was aware on the moon that thousands of people on Earth were praying for the success of our mission. The hours I spent on the moon were the most thrilling of my life. Not because I was there but because I could feel the presence of God. There were times I was filled with new challenges and help from God was immediate.'”

Alan Bean concluded: “Dave and Jim journeyed into space as test pilot astronauts and most of us returned the same way. But Jim changed outwardly. As he explained, ‘I returned determined to share with others that profound experience with God on the moon and lift man into his highest flight of life.'”

Astronaut James Irwin later became an evangelical minister. Of his experience of walking on the moon, he stated: “I felt the power of God as I’d never felt it before.”

--https://www.wnd.com/2019/07/americas-space-race-pride-of-achievement/

Mr Federer often treats statements about religion by anyone from the States as though they came from the mouth of a holy and trustworthy source, but that does not mean we all must do likewise.  The statements by these astronauts are not innocent, harmless professions of personal piety.  As we said in the opening, this is could be the ‘wave of the future’ now that space tourism and exploration are being enthusiastically pursued.  From Montanism to the Pentecostal movement, heresies involving ecstatic religious experiences have troubled the Church.  We would not be at all surprised to see space-focused spiritual gurus joining those ranks.  Be on your guard, and use the tested weapons of the Orthodox Church to ward off these new demonic delusions:

In the town of Phrygia, central Asia Minor, about the year 160AD, a man named Montanus claimed to be “seized” by the Holy Spirit. He began to receive “special” messages, “speak in tongues,” “prophecy,” and so forth. Two women “prophetesses” soon join him: Priscilla and Maximillia.

According to a Charismatic/Emerging Church history scheme, about 300AD generally marks the point when the Church allegedly begins to enter a time of “darkness” (see part one of this series, The Charisma of the Age …https://inklesspen.blog/2019/06/25/the-charisma-of-the-age-an-orthodox-critique-of-the-charismatic-movement/ ). Montanus’ alleged experience of a new and special “anointing in the Holy Spirit” transpired when the Church, even according to Pentecostal-Charismatic (P/C) thought, was still generally “being led by the Spirit.” Thus, for a person subscribing to a modern Charismatic philosophy of history, this incident should bear at least some weight.

The History of the Early Church by Eusebius, one of the first and earliest histories of Christianity, gives these details –

“There is said to be a certain village called  Ardabau in that part of Mysia, which borders upon Phrygia. There first, they say, when Gratus was proconsul of  Asia,  a recent convert, Montanus by name, through his unquenchable desire for leadership, gave the adversary opportunity against him. And he became beside himself, and being suddenly in a sort of frenzy and ecstasy, he raved, and began to babble and utter strange things, prophesying in a manner contrary to the constant custom of the Church handed down by tradition from the beginning … Thus by artifice, or rather by such a system of wicked craft, the devil, devising destruction for the disobedient, and being unworthily honored by them, secretly excited and inflamed their understandings which had already become estranged from the true faith. And he stirred up besides two women, and filled them with the false spirit, so that they talked wildly and unreasonably and strangely, like the person already mentioned. And the spirit pronounced them blessed as they rejoiced and gloried in him, and puffed them up by the magnitude of his promises. But sometimes he rebuked them openly in a wise and faithful manner, that he might seem to be a reprover. But those of the Phrygians that were deceived were few in number … And the arrogant spirit taught them to revile the entire universal Church under heaven, because the spirit of false prophecy received neither honor from it nor entrance into it.”¹

The Montanists also declared that they were ushering in “the age of the Holy Spirit,” and with it a supposed renewed focus on prophecy, speaking in tongues, miracles, and the other gifts of the Spirit. The modern Charismatic experience has at its foundation an almost identical claim. The Montanists asserted that to reject their message was “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.”

Let the reader take note of the canon – measuring rod – that the early Church used to discern that the Montanist experience was not consonant with the true Spirit of Christianity: The custom of the Church handed down from the beginning. Why was Montanus susceptible to this new spirit? He had arrogance – an unquenchable desire for leadership – and he allowed his own understanding … (to) become estranged from the true faith. Montanus inevitably used Scripture and a special claim of indwelling by the Holy Spirit to disregard the correcting rebuke of the Church in his time. With his unique “anointing” he was under no obligation to listen to “men.”

The Montanists also prophesied exclusively in the first person, something unheard of in the Old and New Testaments. It appears that Montanus would say, “I, the Holy Spirit, say to you …;” “I, the Lord ….” Whereas the Old and New Testament prophets all spoke in this manner, “Thus says the Lord …” (cf. Act. 21:11; Is. 8:1). They also fervently proclaimed the immediate return of Christ, even professing to know location and date. One author states, the Montanists, “Claiming to receive revelation directly from God that fulfilled and superseded the revelation given to the Apostles, Montanus emphasized direct, ecstatic, and highly emotional spiritual experiences for all believers … (they) did not claim to be messengers of God but rather claimed that God ‘possessed’ them and spoke directly through them.”²

A common claim of novel moves, which assert that they are of the Holy Spirit, is that they have the authority to superseded former Christian revelation with their new experiences. Frequently, the claim is made that the former revelation was dead, had lost its way, was only of “men,” and stood in need of renewal or to be abandoned completely. Even Eusebius states, they “revile(d) the entire universal Church under heaven.” New spirits must first deconstruct the Church, and the authority given Her by Christ the Lord, and assert that it is somehow faulty and or in darkness. This enables new claims to appear more credible.

 . . .

--Fr Zechariah Lynch, https://inklesspen.blog/2019/06/27/a-new-charisma-in-the-early-church/

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Two German Rocket Scientists

Mr Federer, as is his wont, makes much of Werner von Braun’s statement about America:

After World War II, Werner von Braun, and 1,600 German scientists, surrendered to the United States in Operation Paperclip, stating: “I myself, and everybody you see here, have decided to go West. … We knew that we had created a new means of warfare. … We felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.”

--https://www.wnd.com/2019/07/americas-space-race-pride-of-achievement/

We wonder, though, how much better it would have been for the world had he, instead of furthering the techo-sorcery of the American Empire of heresies and schisms, followed the path of his forerunner, Werner Meyer-Hellige, in renouncing all such scientific ‘advances’ for the sake of uniting with Christ’s True Body, the Holy Orthodox Church:

Werner Meyer-Hellige was born into a privileged German family in 1889. After a career in the German Army, in 1921, at the age of thirty-two, he inherited his father’s company, A.I. Eisfeld, a successful fireworks and explosives manufacturer.

The company was located on a vast estate, with its own railway, a small zoo, carp ponds, a park of exotic flora and an orchard, all meticulously maintained. Although Werner had had no formal scientific training, he had an inventive and practical mind and, with the help of one of his company’s engineers, he became the first person to test the idea of a multi-stage ignition system. This was the same technology that 35 years later was to launch the first satellites into space.

The invention could have doubled his fortune had the Nazis not come to power. Werner, a man of independent views, bristled at the changes introduced by the new regime. It in turn mistrusted him and in 1934 he was denounced as being disloyal and was forced to sell his factories. Unfortunately, all the data from his research went to the Nazis and was to help them build their rockets. As Germany fell into her greatest tragedy, Nazidom and Hitler’s War, Werner’s world fell apart.

After this dark period, in 1947 he met a young and very religious Russian, Elena Konstantinovna Radomanskaya. They fell in love, married, and she introduced him to a whole new world, the world of the Russian Orthodox Church. Werner was sympathetic towards his wife’s religion, but the deep personal conviction which lies at the foundation of true conversion took a long time to develop. Elena wrote to the future St John, then Archbishop of Western Europe, asking him to pray for her husband, and sent alms to Mount Athos and the Holy Land with the same request. Werner met Bishop Leonty of Geneva and he became closely acquainted with Fr Kornily in Munich, who in the world had been a mining engineer, and they had long discussions. Later, Werner also developed a correspondence with Fr Konstantin (Zaitsev) of Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville in the USA. The latter was a monk of great learning and fluent in German.

Under their combined influence Werner’s desire to embrace the Orthodox Faith matured. After the couple had moved to the Holy Land in September 1969, it was finally to come to fruition. Visiting the holy places, attending services at various monasteries and speaking with the monks and nuns all deepened Werner’s understanding of Orthodoxy. However, when he decided that he did not want to postpone baptism any longer, a real battle began.

Moments after telling his wife of his decision to be baptised, he stumbled and fell headlong on a stone floor. His wife barely managed to help him to bed. That night there was a storm and he awoke, shouting and making gestures as if fending off attackers. ‘I want to become Orthodox straightaway’, he declared. His wife explained that this was not possible, that it was the middle of the night. He calmed down, but woke up again later and said to his wife: ‘Pick up the nun’. It turned out that at that very moment a nun who had been praying for him was lying unconscious on the floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, six miles away.

The next morning Elena phoned the Russian Convent on the Mount of Olives and arrangements for the baptism were made without delay. Since Werner was still unable to get out of bed, the baptism took place in their home in Bethany. A group of nuns came together with a priest from the Convent and also Abbess Tamara, who had agreed to be Werner’s godmother. Knowing how long and diligently Werner had prepared for this occasion, they all wept for joy. Werner took the name Alexander, having been impressed by St. Alexander Nevsky’s maxim, ‘God is not in force, but in truth’ (‘Ne v sile Bog, no v pravde’). Later he said to his wife: ‘All my life I have been living at the bottom of the ocean, but now the waves have brought me to the surface, to sunlight, to freedom’.

The German pioneer of rocket technology, Werner Alexander Meyer-Hellige, was to pass away peacefully on the Feast of the Prophet Elijah, 2 August 1970, during the prayers for the departure of the soul. He was buried near the Oak of Mamre, where the Patriarch Abraham had received the Holy Trinity in the guise of Three Angels. Thus the rocketeer rose to the heavens through the charioteer.

To the Servant of God Alexander - Eternal Memory!

--Fr Andrew Phillips, http://orthodoxengland.org.uk/oegerrok.htm

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Sacred Myth and Tradition vs Profane Science and Business

Hawai’i is the latest battle ground between these forces.  On one side, the ancient folk traditions of the native Hawaiians:

The current unrest dates back to 2014, when construction on the telescope first began. A protest at the groundbreaking ceremony attracted the attention of celebrities such as the actor Jason Momoa, who is part Hawaiian. In 2015, construction was halted by the Hawaii governor, David Ige, following the arrest of 31 protesters. Then in 2018, the state’s supreme court ruled the construction legal, and Ige has said he supports building the telescope.

On Monday, as many as 500 protesters gathered at the base of the road leading up Mauna Kea in an attempt to block construction vehicles heading up the mountain to begin work. In the early morning hours while the sky was still dark, eight protesters dressed in winter clothes locked themselves to a cattle guard that crosses the road, preventing vehicles from moving past.

“Our goal is to protect Mauna Kea,” said Kahoʻokahi Kanuha, an organizer from the Hawaiʻi Unity and Liberation Institute (Huli), a group that opposes construction on Mauna Kea, who was reached by phone at the protest site. “What that means is that we do not allow the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope for that’s what would desecrate our mountain.”

The Native Hawaiian-led movement is fighting to protect spiritual and environmental aspects of the sacred mountain. Mauna Kea is associated with Wākea, the sky father, who partnered with Papa, the earth mother, to birth Native Hawaiians. The mountain is home to the endemic wēiku bug and Lake Waiau, an alpine lake that some Hawaiians visit to offer a newborn’s umbilical cord.

Kanuha mentions that Mauna Kea is on “crown lands”, which belonged to the Hawaiian kingdom before it was overthrown in 1893. Many Native Hawaiian organizations argue that these lands were stolen by the United States and still belong to the Hawaiian people. “These lands were taken from us, so we have rights to them,” he says “We have a spiritual connection to them. We have a genealogical connection to them.”

--Michelle Broder Van Dyke, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/18/hawaii-mauna-key-protest-arrests-observatory

On the other side, the forces of scientific and economic progress:

FINNERTY: In addition to the scientific benefits, many policymakers see the astronomy industry as an opportunity to diversify a local economy that is heavily dependent on tourism and agriculture, both of which suffered after last year's high-profile volcanic eruption. Miles Yoshioka is the executive officer of the Hawaii Island Chamber of Commerce. He says astronomy is a clean industry that provides good jobs for the community.

MILES YOSHIOKA: And we hope clear heads will prevail and realize that this is something that will help the next generations and build up an economy where we can have higher-paying jobs for our island.

FINNERTY: Yoshioka says Hawaii's astronomy industry already employs 1,600 people statewide and is responsible for $170 million in economic activity.

--Ryan Finnerty, https://www.npr.org/2019/07/19/743599260/hawaiian-activists-protest-construction-of-worlds-largest-telescope-in-state

The condescending tone toward an agricultural way of life is difficult to miss.

May the forces loyal to tradition win out, through the prayers of the Most Holy Mother of God, whose miraculous, myrrh-streaming Iveron Icon adorns and blesses the land of Hawai’i:

https://www.orthodoxhawaii.org/icons.html

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Offsite Post: ‘The Frontier Is Essential for the American Project’

Key to the survival of the modern American project is never-ending motion, an eternal advance toward new horizons, new discoveries, greater progress.  If folks in the States ever had to settle down and be content with where they were and what they had, many of them would, to quote The X-Files’s Dana Scully, ‘lapse into catatonic schizophrenia’ (‘Home’, http://www.insidethex.co.uk/transcrp/scrp403.htm).

Thus, some new frontier, some new challenge, must always be laid before them to overcome.  Sacvan Bercovitch in The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wis., U of Wisconsin Press, 1978) traces the development of this mindset.  In the early nineteenth century we find sentiments like this:

 . . . Politicians justified annexation and the Westward movement as part of America’s duty to “manifest to mankind the excellence of the divine principles of our Revolution”: “For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen” (p. 142).

 . . . Under Jefferson’s administration, and then Jackson’s, the expansion across Indian land proved beyond any doubt what all those terms implied – that America was not a territorial definition (except in the vague sense of “New World”), but the symbol of an ideological consensus.  “From the analogy of reason and providence,” as well as “from prophecy,” said Thomas Blockway in 1784, in a sermon commemorating the Revolution, “it is apparent that [the] . . . three thousand miles of Western territory” constitute the “stage on which [God means] to exhibit the great things of His Kingdom.”  Forty-two years later, Daniel Webster declared that the “principle” of the Revolution “adheres to the American soil.  It is bedded in it, immovable as the mountains.”  By 1856, Charles Dana could confidently announce that “the region which, commencing on the slope of the Alleghanies, broadens over the vast prairie” is “the Land of Promise, and the Canaan of our time”; if only the proper “New England minds” would direct the Westward migration – and if only they would keep “the enemies of our Revolution” from “making us a by-word and a scoff for mankind” – then the “wildest dreamer on the future of our race may one day see actualized a destiny far outreaching in splendor his most generous visions” (p. 161).

 . . . In “this chosen land,” ran the argument, God “has been for ages watching and preparing.  . . . The elements of a glorious order of civilization are now ready”; “we have increased beyond all previous calculations: we are surrounded by all comforts”; man’s “highest destiny” lies before us – “the untransacted destiny of the American people . . . to subdue the continent – to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean . . . to carry the career of mankind to its culminating point” – and this divine “right of manifest destiny to spread will not be admitted to exist in any nation except the universal Yankee nation.”  Implicit in all these statements . . . is the vision first expressed in God’s Promise to his Plantations:  “Others take the land by His providence, but God’s people take the land by promise” (p. 162).

 . . . “By promise,” they believed, the land belonged to them before they belonged to the land, and they took possession, accordingly, first by imposing their own image upon it, and then by seeing themselves reflected back in the image they had imposed.  The wilderness/garden became their mirror of prophecy.  They saw themselves revealed in it as the New Israel that would make the desert blossom as the rose.  They also discerned in it those who did not belong to the land:  Indians, heretics, opponents of the New England way, adherents to the ways of the Old World.  . . . Romanticism added the dimension of the sublime to wilderness and garden.  . . . American romantics looked to nature, as the New England Puritan had to Scripture, as a confirmation of the destiny of the New World.  What they saw there was the vast frontier, mirroring, come iri da iri, by the light of prophecy, “the universal Yankee nation.”

Their concept of the frontier is a measure of their debt to the Puritans.  Traditionally, frontier meant a border dividing one people from another.  In a sense, the Puritans recognized those differences – their “frontier” separated them from the Indian “outer darkness” – but they could hardly accept the restriction as permanent.  America was God’s Country, after all, and they were on a redemptive errand for mankind.  In effect, their motive for colonization entailed a decisive shift in the meaning of frontier, from a secular barrier to a mythical threshold.  Even as they spoke of their frontier as a meeting-ground between two civilizations, Christian and pagan, they redefined it, in a rhetorical inversion characteristic of the myth-making imagination, to mean a figural outpost, the outskirts of the advancing kingdom of God.  It became, in short, not a dividing line but a summons to territorial expansion.  And when after the Revolution the holy commonwealth spread westward across the continent, bringing light into darkness – or in one of Cotton Mather’s favorite phrases, “irradiating an Indian wilderness” – the frontier movement came to provide a sort of serial enactment of the ritual of the jeremiad.  It was the moving stage for the quintessentially American drams of destined progress, of process as order and control.  By the time of Jackson, the Puritan-Revolutionary inversion was standardized.  What in Europe signified history and restriction, came in America to signify prophecy and unlimited prospects.  This reading of frontier altered the Puritan concept, to be sure, from threat to promise; but in doing so it amplified (rather than changed) the old sense of errand.  In part at least, Jacksonians also regarded the frontier as a savage domain awaiting liberation, and they also invoked it, as we have seen, as a vehicle of the jeremiad: to create anxiety, to denounce backsliders, to reinforce social values, and (summarily) to define the American consensus.

This vision of the frontier had its chronometrical side in the American sublime.  The Puritans had sought correlations between their environment and Scripture; the Jacksonian romantics, expanding the outlook of the Revolutionary era, read the biblical promises in nature itself.  The Alleghenies, the prairies, the Hudson and Mississippi rivers became their Book of Revelation.  “Never before,” David Huntington has observed, “had the landscape painter known such urgency.  He had, for the first time in the world, been asked to paint the myth of human destiny,” to find an “iconology” through which the “spectator could slough off the Old World psyche and be spiritually reborn into the New World.”  And that new birth, be it noted, was not “Adamic” or “prelapsarian,” as our literary critics have told us, but (like the “National birth-day”) progressive and redemptive.  Its purpose was precisely to turn the nostalgia for paradise lost into a movement toward the future.  It was shaped not by Rousseau but by New England Puritanism (pgs. 162-5).

It is important to note before going on that this sort of thinking about the frontier is mainly a product of the New England soul, which embraces change and progress as virtues.  The Southerner by contrast has always been defined by adherence to sameness and tradition.  The latter ought to be as eager as any to throw off the Yankee ideology as something foreign to his way of life.

Withal, many from the Southern and Western States have gotten themselves bound up in the fast-paced Yankee lifestyle and have even entered the circles of the Elite alongside their Yankee cousins.  And it is here that we pick up the history of the idea of the frontier.  By the latter half of the 20^th century, the old New England Elite, having enriched themselves over the last hundred years or so by exploiting the peoples and lands beyond the frontier (i.e., the South and West), were ready to close the frontier, to cut off the ability for social advancement of the lower classes to the Elite circles.  But the New-Rich Elite from the South and West wanted to keep the frontier open and social mobility possible.  This conflict between Old and New Elite over the frontier, and its consequences for Americanism, is well-described by Carl Oglesby in his book The Yankee and Cowboy War (New York City, Berkley Publishing, 1976, https://ia800204.us.archive.org/8/items/OglesbyCarlTheYankeeAndCowboyWar/Oglesby,%20Carl%20-%20The%20Yankee%20and%20Cowboy%20War.pdf, via https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/george-herbert-walker-bush-3/).  Mr Oglesby says,

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/frontier-essential-american-project .

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!