Offsite Post: ‘Escaping Gnosticism’

In some foregoing essays we have seen how New England fell into the pit of Gnosticism and how she has dragged the other States down into it with her.  This was made possible and remains the current status of things because of a fall into spiritual delusion, first by New England and then by all the other regions of the American Union whom she forced to drink of the cup of her madness after the War to Prevent Southern Independence.  To change this political state of affairs, then, the religious foundation on which it rests needs a thorough-going renovation.  We will look to that momentarily, but first let us summarize how the States came to their present woeful condition.

Prof Richard Weaver says at the end of his important essay ‘Two Diarists’ about the prototypical New England Puritan Cotton Mather and the representative character for the South William Byrd II,

‘The Puritans recovered one strand of the Hebraic spirit, but they added a special conviction about what was material, which narrowed and one may say fairly warped their view of what was before their eyes.  The religious tradition and the social class that Byrd represented, on the other hand, had little of the spirit of condemnation and was far more receptive to the Graeco-Roman part of the Judaeo-Christian heritage.  This did not begin by rejecting the material order, and it balanced the metaphysical idea of becoming with that of being.  Moreover, it contained another idea very dear to the classical mind, that of measure.  The maxim for human life must be “nothing too much,” and to imagine that one can think as a god is, in the wisdom of antiquity, madness.  Byrd’s adjustment to the world is a display of this ideal; it is an acceptance qualified by distance and measure, in response to a sense of man’s dual nature.  Egotism is held in restraint by an awareness of other things.  Hence his poise, his urbanity, his willingness to let live.  He moved in a world which appreciated these virtues and rewarded them.  But when they met Puritanism in a wider struggle, it developed that the Puritan temper possessed a power of aggression which classical balance and tolerance could not withstand’ (In Defense of Tradition, ed. Ted Smith III, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, Ind., 2000, pgs. 747-8).

One of the key differences shown here between the two peoples, North and South, is that of humility.  The South, in accepting the boundaries placed on her thought and action by the classical Greek and Roman maxims, was able to steer a safer course through the temptations thrown up by Promethean Modernity.  The North on the other hand rejected all such restraints on her reasoning, which led her to deify herself and to invest herself with the mission of redeeming mankind from all his errors.  Richard Hooker, whom we also heard from earlier in this series of essays, illustrates the danger of rejecting humility and tradition in favor of what one perceives as special revelations in his book Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.  There, he examines this selfsame Puritan spirit that has spread so much moral and physical destruction across the States and the world.  This is how it began its development in earnest:

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The rest is at https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/escaping-gnosticism .

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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!