The religion of the 19th century, that grotesque materialization of the spiritual, profanation of divine, mechanizing of the organism and insolent disrespect to the Awful and the Unknowable

 

Perhaps there are a few souls in Europe who feel within them the religious imperative of the future. Unlikely, but possible, just as Nietzsche and Carlyle were utterly improbable in the desert of mechanistic criticism that was the 19th century. If so, they are the summit of the religious pyramid of Europe. Beneath them is the stratum of our precious and strong interim religion, making out of skepticism a Faith, and out of History a sacred philosophy. Beneath this is the great mass of the population which is still, in the religion of the 19th century, that grotesque materialization of the spiritual, profanation of divine, mechanizing of the organism and insolent disrespect to the Awful and the Unknowable. This god-killing mockery took two forms, in Europe, Christian-social politics, and in America, compulsory social entertainment in the Sunday meeting-houses. These forms it still, has, and this is today what calls itself religion in the Western Civilization. Below this stratum in the religious pyramid—not in any absolute spiritual sense, but only in a chronological sense—is the Jesuit level, the plane that regards religion as a matter of knowledge, formula, law, and in case of doubt, of authority. This is simply the Counter-Reformation, and includes members of both sides of that era. Below this is the Reformation level. Still today in Germany there are many, and elsewhere there are some who have remained permanently in the Lutheran stage. To that they attained in their personal forming, and there they stay. Below them—are there any left who feel the old, pure, monastic religiousness of the pre-Renaissance period of true religion? Yes, there must be, although they are not to be found in the offices of the church, wearing the purple, or engaging themselves to the hilt in those banking operations which constitute religious administration today. They would be in some monastery, in an isolated rural district, the plains of the Romagna, or the Spanish Sierras. This type simply, could not survive in a city. But these, together with those others of problematical existence, the religionists of the 21st and 22nd centuries, are the only true religionists in Europe; for these two groups—and for them alone—religion is directed to the transcendent, it knows and loves the Unknowable, it personalizes the impersonal, it cares for the indifferent.

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For the other aspect of our interim religion is that the object of its tremendous feelings is unworthy of it. God and the Gods are still asleep, still in the deep slumber into which the Counter-Reformation lulled them. For when Western man introduced militarism and politics into religion, he expelled God and the Gods. Religion is the window of the Culture looking out into the cosmos, and when the culture becomes obsessed with the surface of the earth, that window is closed. But it is only the cosmos—the entirety of all things, organic, inorganic, man, culture, and meaning—that is the proper object of religion. Culture is not worthy. But there is nothing else; the divine aspect of the cosmos—god and the gods—cannot be violently reawakened. It is slowly awakening, but not for us, for those who come 2 or 3 generations after us. Every religion has its mysteries, its idiom, and even its painful point. This is ours, that our religion takes the form of a yearning which sees its satisfaction beyond its grasp, that the last perfection of religious feeling is forever denied us, moving across our dark golden-brown autumnal bridge of culture-religion, bathed in the dying light of the second twilight of our superpersonal Western life.

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And so, nobody tells us, that to put into effect the Brotherhood ideal which our One-World apostles shower upon us from the pulpits, requires dictatorship, a reign of terror, armed force, the inequality of a system of slaves and masters, men in command and men in obedience – in short: Moscow. – (text from 1953)

When Jesus was taken before Pilate, then two worlds were facing each other in immediate and implacable hostility: a world of facts and a world of truth. At this appallingly distinct scene, overwhelming in its symbolism, human tragedy took the highest conceivable form. In the famous question of Pilate: “What is truth?” – lies the entire meaning of history, the exclusive validity of truth, the prestige of State and war and blood.

“What is actuality?” – for Pilate actuality was all; for Jesus nothing. How – otherwise – could pure religiousness stand up against history or sit in judgment on active life?

“My Kingdom is not of this world.” This final word admits of no gloss. A statesman can be deeply religious, a pious man can die for his county – but they must, both, know on which side they are standing. When the statesman ridicules the inward thought-process of the ethical philosopher in a world of fact . . . or the pious man discards all ambition in the historical world as sinful and as lacking any lasting value . . . then for the onlooker it is meaningless to argue which one of the two is right or wrong.

But if our present administration wishes to “improve” the religious feeling of our masses in the direction of political, practical, purposes – then these ten, twelve, or fourteen point acrobats stand before History as absolute fools.

And equally, when our Brotherhood Preachers try to bridge the course of History and the existence of a divine world-order – they are fools also. They’d better leave this experiment to those champion prestidigitators whose nation-feeling over the last four millennia comprised neither more nor less than what was and is covered by the Ideas of the Church of their landless, boundless Consensus.

Francis Parker Yockey