Taki Magazine

...And the Faith is Europe

by Mark Hackard on October 07, 2009

Thanks to Richard, Christopher Lyons and Tom Piatak for their responses in the discussion on Christianity, paganism and the West. There are just a few points I’d like to focus on.

First of all, as Richard points out, there undeniably existed a pagan sense of the sacred. Their ancient religions and folkways indicate a fragment of primordial wisdom as well as their aspiration to the Transcendent. This also reflects a consciousness of levels of supra-human reality, and acknowledgement of order to the Cosmos. Mankind’s encounter with the sacred, however, could only be fulfilled through the revelation of Truth in the form of Christ.

While having excellent pagan sensibilities, there was a crucial difference between Nietzsche and his Germanic ancestors. The “philosopher with a hammer” negated the divine and set upon a quest for divinity by his will alone. Seeking to take the human relation to fate a step further than the pagan heroes, he shifted their amor fati (“love of fate”) into ego fatum (“I am fate”) in his doctrine of eternal return, his own search for immortality and godhood. Nietzsche sensed that a simple return to the old pagan wisdom could never suffice; he knew that Christ’s entry into history had transformed the life of the spirit, and he chose to set himself in most ferocious opposition to Him. The entire teaching on slave morality, even in light of Nietzsche’s brilliant formulations, stems from the desire to overthrow Christ, to be Antichrist. 

Nietzsche rejected Logos, Truth and any objective truth. In doing so, no matter his intuition of the sacred, he dragged transcendence down wholly into the confines of this world. Metaphysical reality is effectively denied. His search for exalted, superhuman states would be brought to the level of a cruel animalism. The war cry of “only the earth!” ushered in the earthly reign of futility and absurdity.

Finally, Belloc’s identification of the continent with Christianity is far from an assertion of ethnocentrism in religious trappings. It is a reflection on Europe’s fate, bound forever to the faith. Belloc saw Truth as universal: each individual nation, whether of Christendom or the Global South, has its role to play in the cosmic order, ultimately oriented toward the glorification of its Creator.

Faith cannot be reached by pure intelligence alone; it is truly a matter of the heart’s receptivity to the divine message. Either one sees the utter incoherence of the world and flails in meaningless rebellion, or one believes in the miraculous and aligns one’s will with higher Love and higher Reason. Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat. 

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