By Theodore Shoebat
Donald Trump has just declared that the United States will be helping persecuted Christians into the country as refugees. As we read in one report:
In an exclusive interview with The Brody File, President Donald Trump says persecuted Christians will be given priority when it comes to applying for refugee status in the United States. “We are going to help them,” President Trump tells CBN News. “They’ve been horribly treated. Do you know if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least very tough to get into the United States? If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair, everybody was persecuted in all fairness, but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair.”
The Brody File conducted the interview Friday morning in the Blue Room at The White House. More newsworthy clips are coming soon. The entire interview can be seen this Sunday at 11pm on Freeform (cable TV, formerly ABC Family Channel) during our special CBN News show. This is just the third interview President Trump has done from The White House and it will be the only interview that will air in its’ entirety this weekend.
We truly hope that the United States will protect and rescue persecuted Christians! 15,000 Muslims were brought in to the United States last year, while only around 90 Christians were only brought in. So we truly hope that Trump will fulfill his promise.
But the question still stands, what will the world become like in the future? I wrote a very in depth essay, on the future world war, and the spiritual roots of the evil that will bring the world to chaos….
“I do insist,” Hitler once said, “on the certainty that sooner or later — once we hold power — Christianity will be overcome and the German church established. Yes, the German church, without a Pope and without the Bible, and Luther, if he could be with us, would give us his blessing.”
In these words, we see the ideological link between Luther’s revolution and Nazi thought. In the uprising of Germany, be it in the First World War or the Second World War, we see Luther at the heart of the ideological aspiration of imperialism, Darwinism, and the desire to exterminate and conquer one’s enemies. If Germany ever rises again as an enemy of humanity, Luther will be at the center its despotic reign of terror.
The biggest barrier between denying and believing that fascism can reemerge and take power in the world, is the idea that it can’t happen again in our own times; it is the assumption that we, because of all of our innovations and nuances, are somehow distinct from those who lived before us.
We live our lives reacting to the sudden occurrences to the world, as opposed to thinking and addressing as to why they happen, and who are behind them, and for what agenda. After the Second World War, a world order was established for the purpose of preventing something like it happening again. The biggest systems of this order are NATO and the EU, but now, because of dramatic changes in political climate, happening on account of mass immigration and economic predicaments, the world order established after World War Two, is fragmenting. With the disintegration of the world order, will come new unions, and new alliances formed under militaristic and expansionist aspirations.
In this in depth study, we will delve into how the current political climate is leading the world back to the despotism of the past, and the roots of the ideologies of ultra-nationalism, and how protestantism gave birth to Nazi thought and Social-Darwinism, and how eugenics influenced the Ottoman Empire in its massacre of the Armenians.
CHAPTER ONE
THE FALL OF THE EU
DELIBERATE CHAOS FOR THE PURPOSE OF TYRANNY
Donald Trump just recently expressed his indifference on the breakdown of the EU, saying: “I don’t really care whether it’s separate or together. To me, it doesn’t matter.”
Donald Trump even made the prediction that more countries are going to be severing themselves from the European Union. According to Anthony L. Gardner, the US Ambassador to the EU, Trump aids even made phone calls to several European institutions, asking them on which European nations were next in going down the road of Brexit. Gardener affirmed that for Trump to encourage the disintegration of the EU is “sheer folly” and “lunacy”. Trump, in an interview, stated:
“If refugees keep pouring into different parts of Europe, I think it’s gonna be very hard to keep it together cause people are angry about it… Personally, I don’t think it matters much for the United States. I never thought it mattered.… I don’t really care whether it’s separate or together. To me, it doesn’t matter.”
But, this was part of the plan all along behind the immigration crises. The officials of the EU knew very well the consequences that would transpire behind bringing in millions of people from the Islamic world; they knew very well that it would lead to terrorism, and to Nazis capitalizing on the situation to leverage support and establish influence. They also knew very well, that with terrorism comes a justification to increase government power, advance military capacity, and commence arms races within Europe. This observation was in fact affirmed by a report made by AIG back in 2008. It was written by economist Bernard Connolly, a global strategist for Banque AIG and AIG Trading, who worked in the Industrial Trends and Forecasting Unit of the Confederation of British Industry, and who worked for years for the European Commission in Brussels, where he was head of the unit responsible for the European Monetary System and monetary policies. In the report, entitled Europe – Driver or Driven?, Connolly presented a bullet point list of objectives in which he wrote: “Europe Wants… terrorism: use excuse for greater control over police and judicial issues; increase extent of surveillance”, and here is the page of the actual report:
What the report revealed was that the financial crises in the EU, alongside the predicament of terrorism, was deliberately allowed and designed, all for the purpose of power. Lord Mervyne King, the former Chief of the Bank of England, revealed in an article published last year, that the economic crises in the EU was deliberately done by European elites. He wrote:
“I never imagined that we would ever again in an industrialised country have a depression deeper than the United States experienced in the 1930s and that’s what’s happened in Greece.
…It is appalling and it has happened almost as a deliberate act of policy which makes it even worse”.
For years Great Britain had impeded the creation of a unified EU army, but after Brexit, the enterprise was completely possible. In November of last year, the EU Parliament voted on whether or not to allow an EU military force. An overwhelming majority of 369 parliamentarians voted in favor for the creation of an EU military force, with 255 voting against it. This would not have been unlikely with Great Britain still in the EU. What this reveals is that the EU officials who have been seeking the creation of an EU military force, wanted Brexit to happen, and thus they want to ultimately see the further fragmentation of the EU. Using dangerous people or conducting some sort of action in order to spark a specific reaction, is nothing new in German history. During the First World War, Germany financed and facilitated the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. Or, in the words of historian, David Fromkin:
“To drive Russia out of the war, the German government financed Lenin’s Bolshevik communists, and introduced Lenin himself into Russia in 1917 — in Winston Churchill’s words, ‘in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city.'” (1)
Supporters greet Lenin on his arrival at Finland Station, Petrograd, on 16 April 1917, after a week-long journey by sealed train from Switzerland, thanks to the support of Germany
If the Germans could facilitate the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, for the purpose of empowering Germany, then it is not inadequate to assume that the Germans brought in the Muslim migrants as a way of deliberate chaos, a way to cause racial unrest, and to provide justification for fascism and despotism.
In 1917, the Bolsheviks, the Germans, the Austrians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and the Ottomans, had a meeting in Brest, in which one of the most significant agreements in modern history would be made: The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In this meeting, the Germans demanded for a huge chunk of the former Russian empire of the now murdered Czar, a demand that the Bolsheviks would acquiesce to without any serious resistance. In the same meeting, Turkey demanded Armenia, which had been under Russian rule. This demand, as well, was satisfied. The Ottomans began their brutal slaughter of the Armenian population, and it was because of Germany’s support for the Bolshevik take over of Russia, and its role in commencing the meeting in Brest. The Germans, in order to supposedly make sure that Turkey did not get too sanguinary, commissioned General Hans von Seeckt, the future leader of the Weimar Republic’s Reichswehr, to be an observer on the Caucasus front line. But Seeckt didn’t do anything to help the Armenians. On the contrary, he supported the genocide of the Armenians that was conducted by the Young Turks, writing to Berlin in July of 1918:
“It is an impossible state of affairs to be allied with the Turks and to stand up for the Armenians. In my view, any consideration, Christian, sentimental or political, must be eclipsed by its clear necessity for the war effort.” (2)
General Hans von Seeckt
Seeckt supported the Social Darwinist Young Turks who, after taking control of the Ottoman regime, sought to secularize and modernize Turkey as a way to advance the empire into a more formidable force. (3) The Germans used the Ottoman’s massacring of the Armenians to take control of Georgia. The Georgians, seeing the horrors being inflicted upon their Armenian neighbors, were terrified that they too would suffer the same ruthlessness of Ottoman imperialism. Germany told the Georgians that if they would allow Germany to control their country, that that would protect them from the Turkish warpath. The Georgians accepted without hesitation, with a Georgian delegation telling the Armenians that “we cannot drown with you … Our people want to save what they can. You too are obligated to seek an avenue for agreement with the Turks. There is no other way.” (4)
The Armenians were essentially human sacrifices for German imperialism. The Germans helped enable Turkey to control Armenia and slaughter the Christian inhabitants, and used the massacres to instill fear into the Georgians so as to make them give Germany control over their nation. The same nation that would do the Holocaust, contributed significantly to the first genocide of the twentieth century: the Armenian Genocide. If the Germans did such evils in the twentieth century, what makes us think that they are not working on a violent comeback in the twenty-first century? If they could use the Marxists and the holocaust of the Armenians to fulfill their expansionist aspirations, then what makes us think that the same evil intention is not behind the immigration crises?
The Germans have a history of using crimes — or making up stories about them — to justify military expansion. Neither the Germans nor the Austrians cared whether or not the Serbian government was responsible for the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, but they surely used it to start a war in the Balkans, and escalated it into a full on war in the rest of Europe, in the First World War in 1914. The idea behind attacking Serbia was to provoke Russia into intervening, so that Germany would have a justification to war against the Russians. Germany was, in fact, waiting and hoping, that Russia would mobilize its troops into the Balkans, so that Germany could create the propaganda that it needed to energize its people for war. Before even the Russians deployed their troops, the Germans were already thirsting for war and conquest. The Germans wanted enemies. They were even upset when they noticed that France and England were not interested in a war with Germany, with Moltke expressing this frustration. “The final straw,” Moltke exploded, “would be if Russia now also fell away.” Germany did not want to be deprived of enemies; for without enemies, there was no justification for war. (5)
Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, Chief of the German General Staff from 1906 to 1914.
Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Chancellor of the German Empire, devised ways for Germany to appear peaceful, with the intent of laying the blame of the war on Russia. He pushed the Austrians pursue dialogues with the Russians, in order to appear as though Germany and Austro-Hungary were the wanters of peace. Bethmann told his ambassador in Austria:
“In order to prevent general catastrophe, or at any rate put Russia in the wrong, we must urgently advise that Vienna should initiate and pursue conversations.” (6)
Bethmann told Austro-Hungary’s Imperial Foreign Minister, Count Leopold Berchtold, to even falsely seek peace with Russia, otherwise, in his own words, “It would hardly be possible any longer to place the guilt of the outbreak of a European war on Russia’s shoulders.” He added that if “Vienna declines everything, Vienna will be giving documentary evidence that it absolutely wants a war … while Russia remains free of responsibility. That would place us, in the eyes of our own people, in an untenable position.”
Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg
Likewise, the Germans needed an excuse to invade France through Luxembourg. The Germans claimed that French troops were occupying Luxembourg. Germany, claiming to be defending Luxembourg, invaded it, with German invasion forces sending out this proclamation: “Since France, without regard to the neutrality of Luxemburg, has opened hostilities against Germany from Luxemburg territory,” German forces had decided to do the same against France. But the Luxembourg government rejected this claim of Germany, saying in a statement: “There is absolutely not a single French soldier in Luxemburg territory.” (7) But this did not stop the Germans. They wanted their excuse, and once it was made, they conquered.
German soldiers of the Infantry Regiment 106 with gas masks in a trench on the Western Front during WWI, 1915
The German people, alongside political parties, the labor unions and the press, had been fooled into thinking that it was Russia who started the war. One German diarist, the chief of the Kaiser’s naval staff, wrote in glee of the success of German propaganda on the public: “The mood is brilliant. The government has managed brilliantly to make us appear as the attacked.” (8)
If the Germans were able to scheme up all sorts of scenarios to make things seem to be what they weren’t, it is not adventuresome to observe that Germany is doing the same with the so-called migrant crises. Interestingly, as Germany blamed Russia and France for its own aggressions, Germany now wants to blame Russian and Greece for the migration crises. One report has shown how the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has conducted investigations “to provide intelligence that Merkel can use to shift the blame over her own catastrophic migration policy onto Russia and Greece.”
The political climate in Germany is changing to a degree in which popular politicians and intellectuals are promoting a revival of militarism, as well as an anger towards remembering the Holocaust, under the guise of fighting terrorism and mass migration. For example, just recently, the German politician, Bjorn Hocke, bashed the placement of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, telling a crowd of his supporters that “Germans are the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital,” and that “We need nothing less than a 180-degree shift in the politics of remembrance” to which he received an applause from his listeners. “This laughable policy of coming to terms with the past is crippling us,” said Hocke, who also said: “There were no German victims any more, only German perpetrators,” expressing his warped view that the media makes it out to be that the Germans who died in the bombing of Dresden are never portrayed as victims.
Bjorn Hocke
In 2013, German intellectual Jochen Bittner, wrote an article for the New York Times, entitled Rethinking German Pacifism, in which he openly pushed for a revival of militarism in his country, albeit he of course writes numerous modern requalifications. Bittner writes:
“Germany is Europe’s unrivaled superpower, its largest economy and its most powerful political force. And yet if its response to recent global crises, and the general attitude of its leaders and citizens, are any indication, there appears to be nothing that will get the German government to consider military intervention: not even a clear legal basis for action, not even an acknowledged security interest, not even an obvious moral duty. … Germany should always remember its catastrophic military history. But the Germany of today is a different country from the one of 1914 or of 1939. Instead, that history has become an excuse for not doing the right things today.”
Jochen Bittner
Like Bjorn Hocke, Bittner laments of how while “Germany dwells on that past, the rest of the world has moved on. … It is simply a too deeply ingrained pacifism, one that I blame the Americans for instilling. The re-education efforts worked far too well on the Germans after 1945.”
Even if the Trump administration does not follow through in diminishing NATO (since Trump said that NATO “was obsolete”), Germany is increasing its military capacity, and NATO allies appear to be quite okay with that. A report last year showed that Germany’s plans to install 7,000 soldiers into its military by 2023, and to spend $148 billion on new equipment by 2030, “were warmly welcomed by NATO allies.” Germany is returning back to militarism, and the United States will allow it to grow further. When Trump said that NATO “countries that we’re protecting have to pay what they’re supposed to be paying”, he was merely expressing a position that is consistent with the policy of United States government. Obama, while not being as explicit as Trump, made a statement last year that essentially agreed with Trump’s position:
“I’ll be honest, sometimes Europe has been complacent about its own defense.”
In 2015, Steven Erlanger, reporting for the New York Times, wrote:
“There will be pressure from the United States for NATO members to live up to their pledge to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense, as Britain finally agreed to do this year [2015].” (9)
German soldiers in a night procession
This is exactly what the US is doing now, as is reflective in the words of Obama, and the newly sworn-in President Trump. The United States has a policy, and no matter who the president is, that policy must be fulfilled. As I wrote in 2014, the taking out of Soviet influenced leaders — such a Saddam — was planned out years in advance, before even George W. Bush was president. According to US Army General Wesley Clark, in 1991, Paul Wolfowitz told him that the US had 5-10 years to “clean up those old Soviet client regimes, Syria, Iran, Iraq, before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.”
Clinton was president when this plan was being discussed, and when Bush was in office, Saddam was toppled. Under Obama, Gaddafi and Mubarak were taken out, and the Assad regime was greatly diminished. Again, the change of presidency did not alter policy.
Although it seems that Trump’s administration — as opposed to Obama’s — will warm up to the Assad regime, the general whom he picked to be the US Defense Secretary, Mattis, has a differing opinion in regards to Syria’s leader. To Mattis, the toppling of Al Assad would be “the biggest strategic setback for Iran in 25 years”.
General James Mattis
And to Trump’s National Security Advisor, General Michael T. Flynn, Assad and Putin are no friends of the US. Flynn wrote:
“In Syria, the two allies have loudly proclaimed they are waging war against ISIS, but in reality the great bulk of their efforts are aimed at the opponents of the [Bashar] Assad regime. They are certainly not ‘fighting terrorists’ in the Middle East; theirs is a battle to rescue an embattled ally in Damascus. … “Although I believe America and Russia could find mutual ground fighting radical Islamists, there is no reason to believe Putin would welcome cooperation with us; quite the contrary, in fact.”
Michael T. Flynn,
It is true that Trump has expressed interest in giving leeway to Assad and Putin to crush ISIS, but even with that, if there is one thing America is notorious for, its betraying its allies. Lets not forget, that the US used Saddam to crush Iran, and then later had Saddam executed. Speaking to reporters on Monday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, after being asked on whether or not the US is willing to working with Assad, said: “We’re not going to get together with people under the guise of defeating ISIS if that’s not truly their guise.” He added, “So let’s not take that too far.”
Sean Spicer
In an interview done this January, General David Petraeus said:
“I think even the Russians recognize that long term Bashar al-Assad cannot be a part of the solution in Syria. The question is, how long will he be allowed to stay around and to whom do you transition power, and to what do you transition power?”
General David Petraeus
It appears that the US will allow Turkey to enter Syria under the guise of bringing ‘stability’ to the region, while at the same time continuing to encourage Turkey’s long time ally — Germany — to continue increasing its military capacity. The New York Times bureau chief in Berlin, Alison Smale, wrote last year of the United States’ encouragement of German militarism:
“It has taken decades since the horrors of World War II, but Berlin’s modern-day allies and, it seems, German leaders themselves are finally growing more comfortable with the notion that Germany’s role as the European Union’s de facto leader requires a military dimension.
Perhaps none too soon. The United States and others — including many of Germany’s own defense experts — want Germany to do even more for Continental security and to broaden deployments overseas.”
Hans-Peter Bartels, a politician for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (the SPD), and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces, said last year that Germany should expand its military “as quickly as possible, as much as possible”.
German soldiers
While the Left in Germany claims to be for peace and order, and the Right presents itself with more of an aggressive and unapologetic jingoism, both the Right (such as the AfD) and the Left (such as the SPD) will move Germany towards militarism, with the permission of the United States of course.
“The political message is that after decades of shrinking, we want to grow,” said Thomas Wiegold, an expert on defense affairs. “But how that translates practically, nobody yet knows.” And this seems to reflect the general state of the public. Germany is rising again; many say that this is a good thing, some are worried, and the rest don’t even care to know.
Thomas Wiegold
The diminishing or weakening of NATO will only empower Germany. The Italian admiral, Giampaolo di Paola, who once served as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, once said regarding the purpose of NATO:
“At its origin, the organization’s goal, as famously stated by Lord Ismay, the first NATO Secretary General, was ‘to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.” (10)
Giampaolo di Paola
Trump expressed his frustration as to how only five NATO countries are “paying what they’re supposed to,” that is, the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, Greece and Estonia. (11)
There are fears that the Trump administration will make NATO obsolete. But from reading the words of Trump’s Defense Secretary, General James Mattis, the preservation of NATO is still demanded within the realm of America’s interest. “If we did not have NATO today, we would need to create it,” said Mattis.
So, it looks like NATO will remain, but, it is probable that it will be greatly reduced. Retired military captain, Douglas Alan Cohn, has made some interesting observations and predictions in his recent book, WW4. In regards to NATO, Kohn predicts that the coalition “is going to become a near-empty shell, a US-led alliance comprised almost entirely of US forces, which had already accounted for nearly three-fourths of NATO’s military personnel and equipment.” Kohn then predicts that NATO membership will be reduced to the US, the UK, Canada, Estonia, Lativa, Lithuania and Poland, while Denmark, Iceland and Norway will be merely a “Nonparticipating Nordic NATO Remnant”. Kuhn also predicts that there will be a new union to eclipse a fragmented EU, a “Central European Union,” headed by Germany, and consisting of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Slovakia. (12)
On the morning of Brexit I wrote an article on my predictions of the future in light of Britain leaving the EU. I wrote that there will be a break between Northern and Southern Europe, and that the Southern European states will form their own union against the North. My exact words were: “Northern Europeans are already fearing a Southern European bloc, consisting of Italy, Spain and Portugal.” I then quoted Adriano Bosoni when he wrote that in Northern Europe, there are “fears of a takeover by this Mediterranean group”. I also wrote that “With Britain gone, the Germans will become more aggressive, and with this you will also see a split form between the Protestant Northern Europe and the Catholic Southern Europe.”
Kohn, in his study, to a great extent concurs with this prediction, and writes that there will be a “NATO-Disenfranchised Southern European Coalition”, consisting of Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. He also notes:
“First Greece, then Spain and Portugal, followed by Italy, lacking any other choices, must revert to their old currencies followed by a fragmentation into a Southern Europe vs. Northern Europe split.” (13)
The 19th century chief of staff for the Prussian Army, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, envisioned a conflict of “Slav East and the Latin West against the center of Europe,” (14) and this surely became a reality in the First World War, and it could be a reality in the future. Before the eruption of the First World War, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, who masterminded the German attack upon the Entente, alongside his fellow officers and Great General Staff, believed in a future apocalyptic war between the German race and the Slavic race. (15) It was this doctrine that served as an ideological aspiration for German expansionism and militarism. Before the Archduke Ferdinand was even assassinated, the Germans wanted to dominate Europe for the cause of racial superiority, the religion of Darwinism.
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
If the United States conducts a policy of isolationism, allowing for great powers like Turkey, Japan and Germany, to rise, then the world will be knocked back into a global predicament, like the eras before the eruption of both World Wars. In a recently published report written by Jasmin Ademovic, it reads:
“If Trump’s presumed isolationist stance and conciliatory tone with Moscow come to fruition, the U.S. will almost certainly cease to be a major player in the western Balkans, leaving a precarious power balance between Turkey, Russia, Germany and the United Kingdom.”
In other words, we could be going back to the WW1 era, in which the alliance of the Ottoman Empire, Germany and its Austro-Hungarian ally, rivaled with Great Britain, Russia, France and Italy for dominance in the Balkans, and ultimately, for the rest of Europe. As Otto Von Bismarck predicted before WW1:
“One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans” (16)
World War Two started from a conflict in Eastern Europe (Poland and Czechoslovakia), World War One began as a conflict in Serbia, so its possible that the future world war will commence in Eastern Europe. What we can conclude, is that the world is about to enter its darkest moment; a great cloud of darkness is about to flood the earth, and its trail will be one of blood, death and carnage.
TWO
THE WAR BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL,
IS THE WAR BETWEEN THE LOVERS OF TRUTH,
AND THE HATERS OF LIFE
GNOSTICISM VS ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY
The war between good and evil, will be a war between Orthodox Christianity and Gnosticism, or the belief that life is an illusion. To make multitudes of men into callous murderers, what better way to desensitize them than to have them believe that the evils that they are committing, are not real? In this same view of gnosticism, humanity is considered as being purely evil. To make men thirsty to destroy humanity, this system of antichrist will have them declare war on humanity, as something evil and worthy of destruction. In our study of the coming great conflict, it is pertinent for us to study Martin Luther; for it is he, influenced by gnostic thought, who began the revolt against Orthodox Christianity, a theological and political revolution that would lead the world into Darwinistic thought, and enable the nations of the modern era to commit the most horrific atrocities on mankind.
Martin Luther was the patriarch of populism and ultra-nationalism. In Luther’s ideology, political uprising and apocalyptic theology, become one. Luther made himself to be not some mere preacher, but the mouthpiece of God for the German race, commissioned to spark a most violent struggle between the Teutonic people and Christendom. As Luther himself said:
“God has appointed me for the whole German land, and I boldly vouch and declare that when you obey me you are without doubt obeying not me but Christ” (17)
“When I am angry,” said Luther, “I am not expressing my own wrath, but the wrath of God.” He ascended the German Reformation as consisting of elite prophets whose words are God’s, and thus no objections could be made against them. “They shall respect our teaching which is the word of God,” said Luther, “spoken by the Holy Ghost, through our lips.” Luther would go on to adulate his own self as a prophet distinct amongst all prophets, saying:
“Not for a thousand years has God bestowed such great gifts on any bishop as He has on me” (18)
What truly is the conflict between Orthodox Christianity and false religion? It is the conflict between the tangible and the abstract. It is between the Faith that can be touched and seen, and the religion that is but a shadow in the mind. This is truly at the center of the war between Christianity and the works of the devil, and it is this abstract religion that gave birth to not only Protestantism, but Nazism and Social Darwinism. Let me say, though, that I am not arguing that Protestants are Nazis, I am merely making an argument, based on history, that the man Luther, produced a doctrine that would serve ideologically for the Nazis, and for future Darwinists.
THE TANGIBLE VERSUS THE ABSTRACT
No reader of history can write about the Reformation without writing, at least briefly, on the pre-Reformation protestants. And what one fill find in this history, is that the roots of Protestantism is gnosticism, or the belief that Christ was not physical, but a phantom. To reject the physical Humanity of Christ, would then lead to the rejection of the Eucharist, icons, holy water, and Confession. When perusing their history, one will find that these pro-Reformation sects rejected crucifixes, icons, and the Eucharist. In other words, they rejected the tangible. But one of the most untold truths behind these sects is that they did not become this way by simply reading their Bible. The Scriptures in those days were difficult to obtain; they were quite expensive since they did not have electronic copy machines, and one had to hire a scribe for lots of money in order to get a copy of the Scriptures. It was not like now where one can simply buy a Bible from your local 99 cents store, or take one from any hotel room. Most people could not read in the Middle Ages; most were not educated in theology, and most could not afford a Bible. Thus, people had to go to church to learn about the Faith. As Alister McGrath writes:
“In the early Middle Ages, literacy was rare, and often limited to the clergy. It was common for the courts of Europe to employ clergy to handle their correspondence and archives. This was not because the clergy might bring some special spiritual quality or blessing to these matters, but simply because the clergy were just about the only people at the time who could read and write.” (19)
Moreover, Christianity, be it in the early centuries after Christ, or in the Middle Ages — the epoch in which gnosticism sprung up — was Catholic. In fact, the gnostic rejection of the Eucharist is first mentioned by a student of the Apostles, Ignatius of Antioch.
Gnosticism has been being taught since the time of the Apostles. According to Church history, there was a heretic from Arabia named Scythianus who taught the dualistic doctrine of the two principles. He was influenced — as we learn from the Church historian Socrates — by the teachings of Pythagoras, Empedocles and the paganism of Egypt. We are told by Epiphanius of Salamis that Scythianus debated with St. John himself, being thoroughly defeated by the Apostle. Gnosticism was perpetuated in the time of the Apostles and their successors.
They taught against the Cross, teaching that it was an illusion. The denial of the Cross would inevitably lead to the denial of the Eucharist. The Eucharist, according to orthodox theology, is a sacrifice, it is a presentation of the Crucifixion, “For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come.” (1 Corinthians 11:26) The Eucharist is—in the words of St. Ambrose—“the true Flesh of Christ which crucified and buried, this is then truly the Sacrament of His Body.” (20) Thus, the denial of the sacrifice of Christ, will result in the denial of the Eucharist, which is Christ’s sacrifice in the form of bread and wine. Very close to the time of the Apostles there was a heretical sect called the Docetists. They rejected the Crucifixion as a delusion, and with this rejection was also the rejection of the Eucharist as the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ. This gnostic anti-sacramentalism of the Docestists was warned about by St. Ignatius of Antioch, a direct student of the Apostles themselves, in his letter to the Smyrnaeans:
“Take note of those who hold heterodox opinions on the grace of Jesus Christ which has come to us, and see how contrary their opinions are to the mind of God… They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the Flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, Flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in his goodness, raised up again. They who deny the gift of God are perishing in their disputes.” (21)
An icon of Christ in the Chalice, illustrating the reality of Christ in the Eucharist
Thus, these groups did not learn or deduce the rejection of holy icons or the Eucharist — from Christianity, the Apostles, or even the Scriptures, but from gnosticism itself. The rejection of the Eucharist, of the Crucifix, of icons, are all gnostic beliefs. Gnosticism treats physical matter as evil, and thus any physical sacraments, such as the Eucharist, or any icons, would be rejected on account of their being physical.
There are several sects that are esteemed as pre-Reformation groups: these are the followers of Wycliff — the Lollards — and Tyndale and his followers in England. Since the 12th century, favor towards dualist and Cathar heresy had been growing, from the Lollards all the way to the poetry of Milton. The pre-Reformation dualists in England would really be the foundation for the Reformation that would be commenced in Germany by Luther. Thus, in order to demonstrate the continuity of thought, from Luther to Nazi ideology, one must elaborate on gnosticism. With the acceptance of an abstract Christ, comes the denial of the physical Christ, with this, comes the adversity towards the Humanity of Christ, and ultimately, from this arises a war against humanity itself. To say that the Humanity of Christ was not a reality, is to deny reality itself, and thus does the genocidal thirsts of the diabolical erupt without restraint, since there is no guilt when slaughtering countless lives, when killers do not believe that reality is non-existent.
There has been very little scholarship done on the gnostic roots of both Tyndale and Wycliffe. But a recent study that has been presented by Bulgarian scholar Georgi Vasilev, called Heresy and the English Reformation, has shed significant light on this reality that has been so ignored. It will be from this referenced work that will bring much of my information. Valisev actually does not write from a pro-Catholic position, but the contrary, and so no accusation of bias can be made with merit when referencing this work.
The gnostics reversed the Scriptures and the positions of God and Satan, making Satan the champion righteousness, and God to be the actual devil. They also held that God and Satan are co-eternal, in that they are the exact opposites — one being good and the other evil — but equal in power and might. The gnostics essentially believed that Satan was slandered and made to be the evil one, when in reality he was the noble protagonist. This respect towards Satan led some of the gnostics of the pre-Reformation into open devil worship. The Lollards, who were zealous followers of Wycliffe, were founded by Walter Lollard. Walter first began preaching in Germany. His doctrine went to Italy, from where a Lollard named Basnage travelled from Piedmont with his followers to England and preached their doctrines. (22) According to Louis Moreri, a renown 17th century encyclopedist who wrote a study on the Lollards, Walter “maintained that Lucifer and his associates were condemned unjustly”. (23) In the study by Moreri, he writes:
“These sectarians said that Lucifer and the angels that followed him were condemned wrongly, that is rather Archangel Michael and the good angels that deserved this punishment. They [the Lollards] added inadmissible blasphemies against the Virgin, they said that God does not punish us for the faults we commit here. The authors [or the sources] say that a girl, member of this unhappy sect condemned to perish on the stake, when asked whether she was a virgin, answered that she was one on earth but would not be under it. They [the Lollards] taught also that the Mass, baptism and the extreme unction were useless; they also denied penance and refused to obey the Church and the secular authorities.” (24)
These Lollards were the same as the Waldensians, for in a 1318 chronicle, referenced by Du Cange, “they called the lollard also a Waldensian”. According to scholar F. Litchenberger, the Lollards had a prophecy that “Lucifer and the demons unfairly chased away from Heaven will some day be restored there.” (25) The Lollards were therefore satanists; devil worshippers who made Lucifer into their god and the true God into a demon.
In a 15th century document from Ignaz von Dollinger, the Lollards did not “accept any saints.” The Cathars, the gnostics of Southern France, as well rejected the intercession of the saints of heaven. (26) The one whom the Lollards followed, Wycliffe, limited God by asserting that He could not annihilate anything, and that He could only create a limited number of souls and not go beyond that number:
“God cannot annihilate anything, nor increase or diminish the world, but he can create souls up to a certain number, and not beyond it.”
Wycliffe also taught a form of pantheism, that anyone or any creature can become God:
“Every person is God. Every creature is God. Every being is everywhere, since every being is God.”
Spread of gnosticism
The similarities between the Lollards and other gnostic sects — like the Bogomils — are so paralleled and equal that to deny the connection between the two would be quite vacuous. Both the Lollards and the Bogomils rejected the Eucharist; both were adverse to the Crucifix; both rejected Catholic respect paid to the Virgin Mary; both despised Christian icons; both saw Satan as the all powerful ruler over the earth. The Bogomils did not just read the Bible and learn these theological rejections, they learned them from the gnostics of the Middle East; and the Lollards did not just read the Bible and pick up on these ideas, they learned them from their gnostic predecessors.
What needs to be emphasized is that such ideas are gnostic, and were not deduced solely from a misinterpretation of Scripture, but learned from gnostic sects, contrary to what was being taught in Christendom through the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church was Christianity; their interpretation of Sacred Scripture was the collectively accepted interpretation. To then reject them was to reject Scripture — since it was the Church who compiled the Scriptures — and so the beliefs of the Lollards were passed down to them not by just ‘simple people reading their Bibles’, but rather they were learned from older gnostic sects like the Bogomils.
Let us peruse further the shared beliefs of the Lollards and Bogomils. Both esteemed the devil as an all powerful being, ruler of the world, even to the extent (for the Lollards) that God owed obedience to him. The 12th century Byzantine monk, Euthymius Zigabenus, wrote on the Bogomils:
“Now they say that the great king is the devil, because he is cosmocrator [ruler of the world].” (27)
Moreover, the emperor of Bulgaria, Tsar Boril, convened a council in 1211, in which was mentioned “those who claim that the Devil is the autocrat of the world”. (28) Both the Cathars of France and the Bogomils of Eastern Europe believed that Satan created human beings, and that he took angels from heaven to possess their bodies. In the Secret Book of the Bogomils, which was read by both Bogomil and Cathar, we read:
“And in addition (Satan) devised and made man in his likeness, that is his own, and ordered the angel of the third heaven to enter a body of clay. And he took from it and made another body in the form of a woman, and he ordered the angel of the second heaven to enter the body of the woman.” (29)
Seal of Emperor Boril
Paralleling this gnostic belief, Wycliff taught that the human body is possessed by an angel from heaven, equating the human soul with an angel, and admitting that he learned this belief from an outside source, the name of which we do not know, but it is likely that it was a gnostic writing:
“Thus man has a double nature … this means body and soul … and speaking of the soul, a true writing gives it as being created as a completely invisible and immortal spirit, it being possible that it is an angel in itself.” (30)
Similarly, the Lollard’s founder, Wycliffe, also taught that at times “God must obey the Devil”. This teaching, that at times God is less powerful than Satan, is really a gnostic belief, for the gnostics were devil worshippers, and being sympathetic towards the diabolical, they did not mind giving undeserved power to their lord, Satan. With the gnostic love of the devil and their hatred towards God and humanity, came open veneration for the devil.
One Cathar named Guillelme Carreria was plowing his fields and the plower’s yoke was displaced, and upon this he said: “Devil, put back that yoke in its proper place!” (31)
Martin Luther, like the gnostics before him, attributed much undeserved power to Satan, as was observed by historian Johannes Janssen, who described how Luther’s obsession with Satan helped lead his followers to abominations, iconoclasm and the occult:
“It is one of the chief characteristics of Luther that in his intellectual life, in his social intercourse, in speech, in writing and in preaching he always brought in the Devil —attributed far more influence and importance to him than is warranted by Scripture, and by his writings gained for him in Germany a popularity which he had never before enjoyed… The more the effectual methods of salvation instituted by God, the Sacraments and sacramentals were mocked and despised, the more did empty, fraudulent, absurd superstition and devil worship grow up among the demoralized people. They ridiculed the blessing of the Church in order to curse and swear more freely. They mocked the pictures and relics of the saints in order to carry on the most abominable superstitious traffic in hairs and bones of animals. They knocked off the head of the image of the immaculate Mother of God, in order day and night to give themselves up to the devil. The devil was formally enthroned in the people’s life and literature. There was more talk about him than about God.” (32)
Continuing in his depraved and twisted gnostic worldview, Luther once said: “Satan sleeps with me much more that my wife does”. (33) His gnostic hatred for God was expressed in other words. Luther once described God as “a master armed with a stick.” In one conversation, Luther said: “I look upon God no better than a scoundrel”, and “God is stupid”. (34) In more explicit gnostic terms, Luther said:
“When I beheld Christ I seemed to see the Devil.” (35)
Spite and hatred was greatly shown against any reverence towards the Virgin Mary and any of the saints, or any of the holy icons, by both the Bogomils and the Lollards. Zigabenus describes the Bogomils as such:
“They do not venerate the glorious and pure Mary, the mother of our God Jesus Christ and say malignant gossip against her.”
Likewise the Lollards affirmed:
“Also that no honor is due to manifest to any sort of images of the cross, neither to the blessed Mary and to any of the other saints.” (36)
Protestant iconoclasm
The sign of the Cross and the Crucifix was seen with so much vitriol, both in England by the Lollards, and in Eastern Europe by the Bogomils. M.D. Lambert writes: “In East England the crucifix was attacked in terms oddly reminiscent of the Bogomils; ‘no more credence should be done to the crucifix’ it was said, ‘than to the gallows which thieves be hanged on.’” (37) The populist nature of Wycliff’s movement was manifested in the Lollard revolt of the late 14th century, in which Wycliff’s followers dragged Simon Sudbury, the Bishop of Canterbury, from the Tower of London and beheaded him.
The skull of the martyr, Simon Sudbury
The animosity for icons and saints was also directed against the Eucharist. The Cathars taught “that none should believe that the host the priest shows the people during Mass is the body of Christ for it is only bread.” (38) The former Cathar, Bernard Gui, wrote in regards to the Albigensians in France:
“The body of Christ, they say, is not there [in the Eucharist], for if we assume it could be compared to the greatest mountain then the Christians would have eaten it all by now; the Eucharist is born of straw, passes through the trails of stallions or mares. In other words when the flour is cleansed of this filth through the sieve it goes down to the end of the stomach and excreted through the dirtiest organ. That is why it is impossible, they say, for God to be there.” (39)
John Wycliffe, continuing the gnostic teaching, said “That the essence of material bread and wine remains [the same] after their consecration at the altar.” (40) Tyndale taught the same heresy, saying: “Now the testament is, that is his blood was shed for our sins; but is impossible that the cup or his blood should be that promise”. (41) Tyndale held that the Blood of the New Covenant that Christ spoke of in the Last Supper was simply referring to the teachings of the Bible, and this same belief was taught by the Cathar Bogomils, for as Zigabenus says of them: “The ‘new wine’ they say is their teaching.” (42) When Christ said, “my blood is real drink” (John 6:55), the gnostic rejects this, and believes that the blood of Christ is an abstract, intangible thought, idea or teaching. Again, the conflict is between the tangible and the abstract.
This heresy, of both the gnostics and of Tyndale and Wycliffe, is the same doctrine, and it substantiates that, in the words of Vasilev, “we have one and the same theology, born in Bulgaria and transferred to England, expressed in the 16th century with an almost identical vocabulary.” (43)
In ancient Israel, the prophet was the mediator between Man and God. Moses begged the Lord to show mercy unto the children of Israel as they were worshipping the golden calf. The people exhorted Samuel to “Pray for thy servants to the Lord thy God, that we may not die, for we have added to all our sins this evil, to ask for a king.” (1 Samuel 12:19) The people of Judea and Jerusalem flocked to St. John the Baptist, “confessing their sins.” (Mark 1:5) Jesus told the Disciples that “Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.” (John 20:23) And in his letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul wrote:
“And to whom you have pardoned any thing, I also. For, what I have pardoned, if I have pardoned any thing, for your sakes have I done it in the person of Christ.” (2 Corinthians 2:10)
While the priest in old Israel acted as an intercessor between Man and God, the priest of the New Covenant acts as a participant in the mediation of Christ. St. Paul said that there is “one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5), and while this is true, we cannot isolate man from participating in the mediation of Christ. This is what the heretics do, redefining Christ’s mediation as something almost abstract, without it ever being conduced in any incarnational manner, portraying it as only man asking God for forgiveness, in which there is no human authority confirming absolution. It is obvious from the verses just quoted that God, indeed, established a Church in which man may participate, as priest, as the mediator between Man and God, as a partaker in the mediation of Christ, in the place of Christ on earth.
The Prophet Moses, receiving the Ten Commandments from God
This teaching of the Sacrament of Reconciliation was rejected by both the Cathars, the Lollards and the later Protestant sects. In the 15th century it was declared in the Norwich heresy trial records that a certain Lollard leader, named Margaret, said: “confession is made only before God and no other priest.”(44)
Tyndale also rejected the Sacrament of Confession, preaching against the idea of a priest being “a mediator between God and us.” (45) Tyndale taught really a theological socialism, where there is no hierarchy, and all peoples, “every man and woman that know Christ and his doctrine” have the sacrament “to bind and loose”. (46)
That Wycliffe was a gnostic himself is further proven by the fact that he actually translated the gnostic book, the Gospel of Nicodemus (the Evangelium Nicodemi), one of the numerous gnostic gospels that were rejected by the Catholic Church.
The Lollard sect had eventually evolved into the Puritan cult of England. As A.F. Thomson notes: “by the time that the Roman establishment was succeeded by the Anglican, the Lollardy was developing into Puritanism.” (47)
MARTIN LUTHER AND THE GNOSTICS
Martin Luther has for centuries been touted as a champion for Biblical Christianity, a reformer who wanted to bring the Church back to its original roots and eschew the “traditions of men.” They often show how much Luther referenced the Church Fathers — especially Augustine —, with the intent of restoring their interpretation of Scripture and keeping them away from Roman Catholic corruption. But recent scholarship, based on perusing notes written by the German reformer, reveals a gnostic Luther who was adversed to the orthodox view of the Trinity, the Humanity of Christ, and Augustine’s refutations of gnosticism with sentiments more in favor towards the Manichaean heresy than orthodoxy. While it is true that Luther wrote many true statements on Christ — that would be anti-gnostic — such as that Christ is “that holy ladder by which we ascend to the knowledge of God,” (48) we cannot ignore what has been discovered in the thousands of notes written by Luther himself on the margins of books written by reputed theologians such as Augustine and Peter Lombard.
The notes were written within the time periods of 1506 to 1516, and 1535 to 1545. But, they were much overlooked until the 20th century when the German scholar Theobald Beer enduringly read through the notes, studying the patriarch of Protestantism for thirty five years. Beer’s research on Luther was eventually published in his 1980, 584 page publication, Der fröhliche Wechsel und Streit, in which he exposed and discoursed on the heretical gnostic beliefs and teachings of Luther. In fact, Melanchthon, a very close colleague of Luther and one of the head figures of the Protestant Reformation, criticized the German reformer as having “Manichean delirium”.
The central belief of Manichaeanism is that there are two principles — one good and one evil — existing co-eternally, and eternally opposing each other. The evil principle — Satan — created humanity, and thus humanity unto itself is evil; and the good principle — the god of Mani — created the spiritual world. This doctrine places humanity and God not in an intimate relationship, but rather sets them up in war against each other. By making God co-eternal with the devil, it places Satan’s power at an equal level with God’s. It is reminiscent to the Mormons — who are just modern day gnostics — when they say that Christ is the brother of Lucifer; the teaching makes Christ just another son of God, and Lucifer as also another son of God. The doctrine enables a high esteem for Satan, and a decayed view on God, and in numerous cases open devil worship. Hilaire Belloc wrote that gnosticism “bred all sorts of secondary effects. In some men it would lead to devil worship”. (49) One of these men was Luther. This gnostic precept, and its decayed and diabolical hermeneutics, is seen in Luther’s words:
“the devil must be granted an hour of divinity and I must attribute fiendishness to God”
The Wars of Religion, in which Catholics and Protestants killed one another
Luther, in his glosses, did not affirm that Christ was murdered on account of humanity’s sin — which is in accordance to orthodox doctrine — but that Christ was guilty of sin Himself. As we read from the quote just presented, Luther believed that Christ submitted to the devil. For Luther, there is no reconciliation between humanity and divinity, since the former is too evil to be worthy of union with the latter. This is why Luther rejected the hypostatic union of orthodox theology, which signifies (for lack of better words) the unification of the two natures, Humanity and Divinity in Christ. Christ is very Man and very God, and He is one, in a beautiful and sublime harmony and perfect theandric. The divinity and humanity did not mix into a composite — they were not compounded, but became one, with the flesh maintaining its own nature, and the divinity its own nature, while at the same time remaining in union in the person of Christ. In the words of St. John Damascus:
“He became hypostatically united to the rationally and intellectually animated flesh which He had from the holy Virgin and which had its existence in Him. He did not transform the nature of His divinity into the substance of His flesh, nor the substance of His flesh into the nature of His divinity, and neither did He effect one compound nature out of His divine nature and the human nature which He had assumed.” (50)
Luther went against the just quoted words of St. John of Damascus. Luther held that Christ was a compound nature. Instead of saying that Christ is a person, He called the Holy One a compositum. Now you may think, ‘What is the big deal with this? So what if he calls Christ a compositum and not a person!’ But this is very pertinent. Even Melanchthon tried to correct such errors after Luther’s death, saying: “The formulas to be rejected are: ‘Christ is composed of two natures’ and ‘Christ is the fruit of creation.'”
Christ is one, both very God and very Man, without any of these two natures mingling together or mixing, but remaining the same unchangingly. Luther on the other hand believed that Christ composed of both divinity and the diabolical, because humanity unto itself is evil and of the devil. Hence, Luther said that Lucifer “must be granted an hour of divinity”, with Christ — in His sinful Humanity — submitting to Satan in guilt of its sin. Since humanity is evil, then Christ’s humanity is evil, and thus the Word of the Father became evil, in the warped theology of Luther. In regards to the personhood of Christ, Luther writes, “[The term] ‘person’ in God is a term common to many and signifies the substance of the divinity.” This goes against the orthodox teaching that says that the person of Christ signifies both His Humanity and Divinity, and not the substance of divinity. To isolate the person of Christ to just His Divinity is to disregard His Humanity.
Christ’s Humanity remains the same; His Divinity remains the same, and they both are one, yet both are unchanged.
In fact, Luther split Christ’s two natures and made two separate christs, one human and the other divine, writing:
“So one is the Abraham who believes, one is the Abraham who works, one is the Christ who redeems, one is the Christ who works…distinguish between these two things as between heaven and earth.”
This statement of Luther is absolute Nestorianism, the heresy — founded by Nestorius — that severed Christ into two persons, one human and the other divine. One must understand that when we say that Christ is a person, that the word used signifies the union of His two natures. The person of Christ is not one nature, and nor does it signify one nature, but rather conveys the hypostatic union of His two different natures — Humanity and Divinity. St. John of Damascus wrote:
“Moreover, the Word makes human things His own because what is proper to His sacred flesh belongs to Him; and the things which are His own He communicates to His flesh.”
In Luther’s compositum Christ’s Humanity is belittled to the point that it is deemed as merely an accident. Commentating on the words of Christ, “Before Abraham was, I am,” Luther wrote:
“This is what happens in all names regarding accident, but not substance. Christ did not say, ‘Before Abraham was, I am Christ’; He said simply, ‘I am.’”
In other words, Christ did not say, ‘Before Abraham was, I am Christ,’ because His human nature is an accident mingling with His Divinity, humanity being irreconcilable to God. Thus there is no hypostatic union, but an accidental humanity merged with a divinity.
Christ’s Humanity, because it is evil, only protect’s us from the Father’s wrath, but nothing beyond that, there being no profound union with Christ’s Divinity and His human creatures through His own Humanity. Theobald Beet explained Luther’s idea of Christ as our shield:
“The first… is the function of shielding us from divine wrath and the second that of giving us an example. This is twofold justification.”
Christ’s Humanity is only a shield. Mortals cannot become in union with Christ’s Divinity through His Humanity, because His flesh unto itself is evil. This is why the concept of works in the journey of humanity’s salvation is viciously rejected in protestant theology. It comes from the gnostic hatred for humanity. Since humanity is evil, then his works mean nothing, even if they are righteous. Luther wrote that when Christ died on the Cross, “the devil had free access to Christ, and the divinity had withdrawn its power and left the humanity to fight alone.” (51)
The Humanity of Christ is tormented by Satan, while the Divinity of Christ combats the dark powers. This is utterly contrary to the Catholic teaching which says, in the words of St. John of Damascus, “Nor was He [Christ] ever deserted by His divinity — on the contrary, it was ourselves who were left behind and overlooked. And so He appropriated our appearance and prayed these things.” (52) And in another line, this great Doctor of the Church writes: “And so, even though as man He did die and His sacred soul was separated from His immaculate body, the divinity remained unseparated from both — the soul, I mean, and the body.” (53) In the Diet of Augsberg — a council between Catholics and Protestants — the Catholics present used the verse in Galatians 5:6, “faith working through love”, to expound on how faith is demonstrated by works under the Law of Love. Luther responded to this by writing:
“The relationship between God and man is like a line touched by a sphere; the sphere only ever meets the line at one point and it is at precisely this point that Christ is sited. We are always on the same path but the sphere only ever touches us at one point.”
This is taken, not from Scripture, but from the gnostic figure Hermes Trismegistus:
“God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere…God is a sphere with as many circumferences as there are points.”
The gnostic description of God as a sphere, done by Luther, evidences his own gnostic beliefs
When Luther read St. Augustine’s words, that “It was said that the Father invisible, united with the Son invisible with Him, sent that same son and rendered Him visible”, Luther, not being agreeable, wrote as a note to this: “Look, what a strange conclusion!” Luther could not see the Humanity and Divinity of Christ as being in harmony, but rather in opposition.
Luther held that it was the Divinity of Christ that saves us, but not His Humanity, writing: “Christ works for our salvation, but without the cooperation of human nature.” This goes along with the gnostic view, that humanity is evil and therefore the Humanity of Christ must also be rendered useless in the redemption of mankind. Paralleling this view, the Albigensian gnostics of southern France taught that the Christ of the Gospels was evil, because He came in the flesh, while the Christ Who Paul saw was good because He came in the spirit and not the flesh. While Luther did not teach this, it is reminiscent to his adversity to the Humanity of Christ. What we do, our actions, are part of our salvation; for since God became one with the whole of Humanity, it is the truth that humanity’s righteous actions participate in the Humanity of Christ.
There is a duality in Luther’s false christ. Just as the Cathars saw an evil god and a good god living co-eternally and in constant warfare against each other, Luther saw the two principles of evil humanity and good god in perpetual opposition. Although Luther did not subscribe to the Cathar teaching of two gods, he — just like the Cathars — saw God as evil and cruel. When St. Paul writes that in Christ “dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9), Luther responds by noting: “It is good that we have such a man, because God in himself is cruel and bad.”
Luther was also in agreement with the Albigensian Cathars in that most deranged and demonic belief, that Christ fornicated with Mary Magdalen. Luther taught:
“Christ committed adultery first of all with the women at the well about whom St. John tell’s us. Was not everybody about Him saying: ‘Whatever has He been doing with her?’ Secondly, with Mary Magdalen, and thirdly with the women taken in adultery whom He dismissed so lightly. Thus even, Christ who was so righteous, must have been guilty of fornication before He died.” (54)
This was a belief strongly held by the Albigensians in Southern France, and it does not surprise me that a heretic is in accord with them, for he, too, was a gnostic. Luther actually supported gnostic dualism against Augustine. When Augustine wrote in his Confessions against the Manichaean belief in two deities constantly warring against one another, Luther writes in the margin: “This is false. This is the origin of all Augustine’s errors.”
The nature of Christ is very specific, and at the same time mysterious, and while its majesty perplexes our mortal minds, we cannot let our pride overtake us with the desire to redefine its wonders or force it under the scope of callous sciences, but to only stand and behold in awe its ineffable beauties. For it is when we begin to change the nature of Christ for the sake of our egos, that the spirit of the diabolical enters. Leave Christ under the opinions of men, and you will no longer have Christ, but another christ — an antichrist — and you will fall to the devil. Christ is, He is the I Am; He never changes and nor does humanity have the authority to alter His majesty. For Christ unto Himself is majesty; Christ unto Himself is Life Itself, “ in Him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17); all those who hate Him are not in life but death. What useless opinion of man can change the very reason for existence itself? And to think that this wicked heretic, this corpulent bag of bile named Luther was presumptuous enough to go against the holy precepts explained and exclaimed by the holy fathers of the Church, and the councils of Christendom!
While the gnostics before him taught that the devil created the physical world, while God created the spiritual realm, Luther made God and the devil as one person, making God both the author of good and evil. But not only this. Luther would further affirm that God forces man to do evil, and that it is not of his own choice or will. He wrote: “Man, when he does what is evil, is not master of himself”; “Man does evil because God ceases to work in him”. Following his gnostic predecessors, he held man to be so evil that he had no control over himself, which is akin to the Lollard and Cathar position, that Satan is the autocrat over the earth, even over all human actions. Luther called free-will, “a mere empty name.” In his treaty, Slave Will, Luther wrote: “The world has allowed itself to be seduced by the flattering doctrine of free-will which is pleasing to nature.”
Painting depicting the 30 Years War
Luther taught on what he called the “captive will,” which he described as the “most sublime mysteries of our faith and religion, which only the godless know not, but to which the true Christian holds fast.” Luther took the evil god and the good god of the Cathars and made them into one single deity, with his god forcing man to do evil as he does good. This very observation was made by the scholar, Patrick F. O’Hare, who wrote thus:
“In the most shameful manner and without a blush, he revives the old Persian idea of two eternal principles of good and evil contending continually for the possession of man. With a slight variation of the ancient debasing doctrine of Manes [Mani], he declares that man is the merely passive subject of a contest between God and the devil.” (55)
In accordance with the gnostic view, God and Satan are merely fighting over control of man, over who will enslave humanity, and humanity is left with absolutely no choice as to whose will — that of God or Satan — he will obey. “Man,” wrote Luther, “is like a horse. Does God leap into the saddle? The horse is obedient and accommodates itself to every movement of the rider and goes whither he wills it. Does God throw down the reins? Then Satan leaps upon the back of the animal, which bends, goes and submits to the spurs an caprices of its new rider. The will cannot choose its rider and cannot kick against the spurs and caprices of its new rider. It must go on and its very docility is a disobedience or a sin. The only struggle possible is between the two riders, who dispute the momentary possession of the steed … God is the author of what is evil in us as well as of what is good, and, as He bestows happiness on those who merit it not, so also, does He damn others who deserve not their fate.” (56)
In this same book, Luther writes:
“Just in the same manner as a carpenter would cut badly with a saw-edged or broken-edged axe. Hence it is, that the wicked man cannot but always err and sin; because, being carried along by the motion of the Divine Omnipotence, he is not permitted to remain motionless, but must will, desire, and act according to his nature. All this is fixed certainty, if we believe that God is Omnipotent! It is, moreover, as certain, that the wicked man is the creature of God; though being averse and left to himself without the Spirit of God, he cannot will or do good. For the Omnipotence of God makes it, that the wicked man cannot evade the motion and action of God,but, being of necessity subject to it, he yields; though his corruption and aversion to God, makes him that he cannot be carried along and moved unto good. God cannot suspend His Omnipotence on account of his aversion, nor can the wicked man change his aversion. Wherefore it is, that he must continue of necessity to sin and err, until he be amended by the Spirit of God. Meanwhile, in all these, Satan goes on to reign in peace, and keeps his palace undisturbed under this motion of the Divine Omnipotence.”
Luther’s death mask
Luther held man to be so utterly evil to the point that he has no control over his own actions. God placed a basic morality into man’s heart, what we call the conscience. But even Luther made war with this, pushing that we utterly reject the conscience and sin boldly:
“Do not ask anything of your conscience; and if it speaks, do not listen to it; if it insists, stifle it, amuse yourself; if necessary, commit some good big sin, in order to drive it away. Conscience is the voice of Satan, and it is necessary always to do just the contrary of what Satan wishes.”
Luther wanted God to be the enforcer of sin, so much so that he called the voice of conscience as something from Satan. What Luther pushed for was, in some sense, a self-fulfilled prophecy: Man is utterly depraved, with no will to do good, and when his internal morality objects to evil deeds, he must disobey it, to fulfill the doctrine of captive will. Luther was just like the Bogomils who believed, in the words of Cosmas, that “everything exists by the will of the devil”. (57) The god of Luther is the creator of sin, a deity with a split personality, one of good and one of evil. It is the two gods of the gnostics converged into one. It is of no wonder that Pope Leo, in 1520, called Luther a new Porphyry (a ancient gnostic heretic), writing:
“For now a new Porphyry rises who, as the old once wrongfully assailed the holy apostles, now assails the holy pontiffs, our predecessors.” (58)
St. Augustine wrote against Porphyry for his gnostic heresy of — like that of Luther — deeming with disgust the flesh of Christ:
“But Porphyry, being under the dominion of these envious powers, whose influence he was at once ashamed of and afraid to throw off, refused to recognize that Christ is the Principle by whose incarnation we are purified. Indeed he despised Him, because of the flesh itself which He assumed, that He might offer a sacrifice for our purification—a great mystery, unintelligible to Porphyry’s pride, which that true and benignant Redeemer brought low by His humility, manifesting Himself to mortals by the mortality which He assumed.” (59)
The scholar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, revealed information exposing the gnosticism of Luther, and so telling was his investigation, that Cardinal Ratzinger (who would later become Pope Benedict XVI), wrote to the author himself, saying:
“The influence of neoplatonism, of pseudo-hermetical literature and of gnosis which you show was wielded on Luther, casts a totally new light on his polemics against Greek philosophy and Scholasticism. In a new, significant way you also explore, to the depths of the central point, the differences to be found in Christology and the doctrine of the Trinity.”
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Luther’s student — and later, enemy — Ulrich Zwingli, taught the god of Luther in his book, On Providence, on the god in whom are both evil and good:
“God leads and forces man into evil; that he makes use of the creature to produce injustice, and that yet he does not sin; for the law which makes an act sinful does not exist for God, and, moreover, He always acts from right and supremely holy intentions. The creature on the contrary, although acting involuntarily under the Divine guidance, sins, because he violates the law and acts from damnable motives.”
Ulrich Zwingli
This same Zwingli wrote that one can murder his parents, and still the evil act would come from God, and the murderer would be forced by God to commit the evil deed:
“I will indulge my sinful desires and whatever I shall do, God is the author of it. It is by the ordination of God that this man is a parricide and that man is an adulterer.” (60)
THREE
LUTHER AND DARWINISM
Free-will is what separates man from all other creatures. Animals are confined within a natural impulse, and will always act in submission to their inborn inclinations. Man, on the other hand, was conferred with the mental faculties to choose to eschew his lower nature. To then say that man has no freedom to spurn evil and sin, then reduces him to the level of the animal. Humanity is now at an equal level with animals, and thus the Protestant heresy is akin to Social Darwinism.
To reject free-will is to reduce man to animalism, for what is man without choice, but a slave to impulse? What is an animal but a creature confined by its own impulsive inclinations? This is the mission of all false religion, simply put in one line: to reduce man to an animal. Thus Islam does not stir a man to rise above his impulses, but rather promises him an eternity of sensualism; Buddhism enables murder quiet easily, by teaching that man is the designer of his own reality, that if he murders, it is only murder if he says it is; the Mormon heresy instills into its followers that man will become his own god with his own celestial harem after death, as opposed to eternally living in God in Heaven; Odinism, like Islam and Mormonism, teaches that there will be eternal pleasures, with wine and fornication, in the realm of Valhalla; Hinduism pushes its followers into all sorts of perversities and violence. Only Christianity stirs in its followers the inner volition to rise above impulses, fears and concupiscence.
This is what the devil has been striving to do through the heresy of Luther and Darwinism: to have man forsake that holy ark that elevates us above the capricious waters of original sin, and to lower ourselves to the disposition of the animal, and romanticize it into something that it is not, making it as though it be glorious and honorable. Hence, Luther takes human will away, and makes man to be an animal, portraying him as one that can only choose his actions based on what is going to pleasure himself, to make him superior, as beasts always strive to dominate. And likewise in the Darwinist religion, man can only choose what is going to advance himself, what is going to maintain his dominance, his survival, his pleasures, and thus man can only pursue his own self, while Christ taught to deny the self. While Luther rejected free will for a belief that we are controlled by our sin nature, Charles Darwin, like Luther before him, rejected free will for a belief that our actions are dictated by our selfish genes. He once wrote:
“Now it is not a little remarkable that the fixed laws of nature should be universally thought to be the will of a superior being, whose nature can only be rudely traced out. When one sees this, one suspects that our will may arise from as fixed laws of organization. M. le Comte argues against all contrivance — it is what my views tend to.”
Luther and Darwin. One taught that man is a slave to sin, while the other taught that man is a slave to sin. The only difference between the two teachings is that while one conveys the teaching through theology, the other does the same under scientific terms
Darwin took the Protestant term, predestination, and reformulated it into an atheistic predestination, an atheist’s calvinism:
“free will (if so called) makes change in bodily organization of oyster, so may free will make change in man. — the real argument fixes on hereditary disposition & instincts. — Put it so. — Probably some error in argument, should be grateful if it were pointed out. My wish to improve my temper, what does it arise from, but organization, that organization may have been affected by circumstances & education & by the choice which at that time organization gave me to will — Verily the faults of the fathers, corporeal & bodily, are visited upon the children.— … The above views would make a man a predestinarian of a new kind, because he would tend to be an atheist. Man thus believing, would more earnestly pray “deliver us from temptation,” he would be most humble, he would strive to improve his organization for his children’s sake & for the effect of his example on others. It may be doubted whether a man intentionally can wag his finger from real caprice. it is chance which way it will be, but yet it is settled by reason.”
The predestination of Luther is taught with theological words, while the predestination of Darwin, is done taught under scientific terminology. Herbert Spencer, the sociologist who actually coined the term, “survival of the fittest,” also rejected free-will as something contrary to evolutionism:
“To reduce the general question to its simplest form:- Physical changes either conform to law or they do not. If they do not conform to law, this work, in common with all works on the subject, is sheer nonsense: no science or psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be any such as free-will.”
Herbert Spencer
Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and the coiner of the term “eugenics,” rejected free-will and maintained that man is completely unable to change himself, since he is controlled by his genetically inherited nature. As he wrote: “man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world.” As Luther compared man to a horse, Galton also paralleled human beings with horses: “Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding those limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.”
Francis Galton
The enemies of this idea of a perfect race, to Galton, were charities, or “social agencies”: “social agencies of an ordinary character, whose influences are little suspected, are at this moment working towards its improvements.” (60) Darwinism makes man a slave to his nature, and so Luther makes man a slave to his sinful nature. They are, essentially, the same thing; they are both two faces of the same essence. As Ludwig Ihmels, the Lutheran bishop of Saxony, wrote: “We can do nothing, we have nothing, we are nothing.”
Ludwig Ihmels
Darwin and Luther, once their doctrines are stripped of their scientific and theological sophisms, essentially taught the same thing. Darwin’s teachings are wrapped with secular explanations, while Luther taught through theological terminology. Regardless of these differences, their teachings can be summed up in one line: man is a slave to his animalism, and he cannot be free. Luther taught that man was a slave to his sin nature, and could not be liberated; Darwin taught that man was a slave to his animal nature, and could not be free. Both men advocated and encouraged for the enslavement of self to animal impulses. Whether you call it Lutheranism or predestination, or Darwinism, the end is the same: embrace bondage, embrace slavery, and while you’re at it, be sure to enslave the whole world, to destruction, to death, to chaos. The Catholic Faith, on the other hand, admits that man is a slave to sin, but it does not glorify this, it does not encourage man to remain in his state, rather it exhorts him to endure against it, to pursue liberation, to walk the path of the soul’s ascendancy to God. In the Catholic Faith, unlike the heresies of Luther or Darwin, there is choice. The Catholic Faith teaches that choice is is a decision to do something that pertains to the soul. As the great Catholic Church Father, St. John of Damascus wrote:
“Those things, then, depend upon us which are contingent — as, for example, to move or not to move, to start or not to start, to desire things that are not absolutely necessary or not to desire them, to lie or not to lie, to give or not to give, to rejoice when one should and, similarly, not to when one should not, and all such things as imply virtue or vice — for in these things we are free.” (61)
St. John of Damascus
What makes the Lutheran precept against humanity is its war against the human element in the plan of redemption. God the Son became one with Man in the Hypostatic Union, uniting with Humanity to save humanity. God created man without his participation, but, as St. Augustine says, “He will not save without it.” There needs to be a human participation in the work and appurtenances of redemption. So much does God want humanity involved in his own salvation, that a Virgin gives birth to God — Jesus Christ — so that He, through His sacrifice, would save Man from bondage to the devil and his wiles. The animosity towards any mention of Mary’s role in mankind’s salvation, the rejection of the intercession of saints, the hatred for the Eucharist and for icons, all stems from a gnostic enmity against the physical world, and ultimately, against humanity itself. If I could sum up all heresies, all evil ideologies and beliefs in one description, it would be: The hatred for the physical world.
Look at any evil idea, and you will see this. In Darwinist thought, destruction is embraced and a thoughtless process of selection for who dies and who lives is adulated; in Buddhism, murder is relativized; in paganism, humanity is but a body of numbers, disposable to an atavistic religion; in Protestant thought, physical sacraments are rejected for an abstract notion of random selection for who is damned to eternal hellfire, and who is amongst the glorious chosen ones for salvation. The results of all of these are disarray, confusion, cruelty, and destruction, only to to later be glorified by future romanticists. Faith as incarnational was utterly rejected by Luther, who taught: “It does not matter what people do; it only matters what they believe.” He also taught: “It does not matter how Christ behaved — what He taught is all that matters”. (62)
In the Sacrament of Confession, the priest stands as a representative of Christ on earth, between God and Man, being as a human partaker of the mediation of Christ. This is the human element working within the eternal ways of salvation. The Protestant worldview rejects this. In the intercession of saints, God loves Man so much, that even death does not separate him from reaching the Deity, death does not prevent nor preclude humanity from reaching the summit of the divine, where the angels, the souls of righteous men, and the Holy Trinity, stand in effable glory. They will say that once death comes, that is it, it is final, there is no more praying for one’s fellow man, nothing can go beyond death, and the relationship between the living and the deceased is utterly severed. This is a materialistic perspective, a position closer to Darwinism than to the Christian Faith. To those who argue in such diabolical ways, let us ask them: Who in heaven is dead? Let them read the holy Apostle when he wrote:
“Who then shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation? or distress? or famine? or nakedness? or danger? or persecution? or the sword?” (Romans 8:35)
Let them reads the sublime words of St. Paul, when he wrote:
“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)
The Hebrews of old partook, under Judas Maccabees, in a holy war against the pagans, and the Prophet Jeremiah, from heaven, “loves the Jewish people and offers many prayers for us and for Jerusalem, the holy city. Then Jeremiah stretched out his right hand and gave Judas a gold sword, saying as he did so, This holy sword is a gift from God. Take it and destroy your enemies.” (2 Maccabees, 15:14-16) What is all this, but humanity partaking in the war of God against Satan, with death never preventing this sacred participation? It is that which Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote of:
“Loving, we wish to be the instrument of his [God’s] action so that his love can operate in and through us.” (63)
The rejection of this is the severing of God from humanity, the isolation of God from humanity, and thus a belief in a deistic god, cold and mechanical. “Luther thus treats us,“ says Vedder, “to the ultimate absurdity of his system, a God who is wholly irrational, and acts without any reason, or else He could not be God.” It is the rejection of the human element, the reducing of man to that of a slave or an animal. The participation in God, signifies human freedom; the rejection of free-will, is a means of manipulation by which man is reduced to a slave of animal impulses, and conditioned into a callous mechanicalism. “Free-will,” writes St. Augustine, “is not destroyed because it is assisted by grace; it is assisted because it has not been destroyed.” The freedom of Catholicism is reflective in the physicality of Her Sacraments. Man must show his effort, his will to be with Christ, and not to be as the Disciples once were, sleeping in the presence of Christ as blood dripped from His holy flesh. Actual participation in one’s salvation, in the Sacraments, signifies that man must do, he must act, and thus it means that he has freedom. Take away the Sacraments, and you have no obligation to do and to act. In this case, a new belief is established, one absent of freedom and trumping predestination, and the enslavement to one’s impulses. The fact that we partake in the sacraments, means that there is a liberation within man’s existence to work out his salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), there is therefore freedom to rise above enslavement to animalism. But if the sacraments are made no more, then what will replace them are doctrines of bondage, in which the idea of free will is warred upon. God the Son is one with Humanity, and thus any participation in Christ’s Salvation, must consist of a physical nature, it must partake in the physical world. Thus, an attack on the Humanity of Christ, is an attack on humanity itself, for anything we do in the journey of salvation, requires human nature, that is, it requires our wills, it requires us.
All of the attacks made against the Catholic Church, against Her exhortations towards penance, Confession, Baptism, and all things pertaining to the path towards God, is all, ultimately, an attack on the Eucharist, for it is around the Eucharist that all other sacraments revolve, and it is for the Eucharist that they are done. You cannot partake in the Eucharist without Confession, without baptism, without penance. The entire priesthood of the Catholic Church was established to administer the Eucharist, alongside the other sacraments that revolve around the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. It is no wonder that Hegel, the most praised philosopher of the German Enlightenment and German idealism, and who influenced both Nietzsche and Marx, declared that everything that he saw as disgusting with the Catholic Church, had flowed from the Eucharist. (64) From Luther to Hegel, from Luther to Darwin, we see a continuity of thought, all containing the escalating hatred for Catholic truth.
Hegel
What Hegel hated so much about the Catholic Church is what he called, “externality,” that is the physical and tangible sacraments, and he saw all of these as stemming from the Eucharist. It was because of Catholic externality that, in the words of Hegel, “Luther therefore could not do otherwise than refuse to yield an iota in regard to that doctrine of the Eucharist in which the whole question is concentrated.” (65) Take away the Church, and the State becomes the Church, and its representatives, gods on earth. Hence, Hegel once said: “The State is the march of God in the world” and “The State is the divine idea as it exists in the world”. (66) The fullness of this imperial religion was manifested in Nazi Germany, and its incipient state was conceived in the German Reformation. For example, the Reformation placed the State as God’s theological representatives, as opposed to the bishops holding this position. Melanchthon, one of the most prestigious of Protestant Reformers, said that “The prince is God’s chief bishop (summus episcopus) in the Church,” (67) and from this idea, statism arises and evolves into more and more fanatic forms. From the prince being the bishop, the prince soon becomes divine.
We therefore can see a continuity in the history of German thought, from the gnostics, to Luther, to Hegel, and to one who he would later influence, Nietzsche, the prophet of the German tyranny of the First World War, and for the Nazis. It is no wonder then, that the Nazis — being amongst the greatest haters of humanity — praised Luther’s war against the priesthood — and thus — in hating the physical nature of Catholic dogma, they hated humanity itself. Alfred Rosenberg, the head ideologue of Nazi ideology, wrote:
“the greatness of Luther’s deed does not consist in merely founding a church, but is much more important than the introduction of a division between two versions of faith. However much Luther may still have been deeply embedded in the middle ages, his deed signifies the great revolution in the history of Europe after the penetration of Roman Christianity. Luther denied the priesthood as a power in itself, that is, denied the right of justification by a caste of men who claimed to be in closer relationship with the godhead than others, and who on the basis of alleged knowledge of god presumed they possessed better insight concerning god’s plans for salvation and conditions in heaven. As a result, Martin Luther hindered the further advance of that magical monstrosity [the Catholic Church].” (68)
After reading this, it is not surprising that the Nazis tried to replace the Eucharist with their own. In 1938, the Italian publication, Osservatore Romano, took a photo of a Nazi procession in which an altar was presented, and on top of it was a replica of a Catholic monstrance, but instead of a Eucharist being at the center of it, there was put in its place a Swastika. Under the photograph, the Osservatore Romano noted: “Doctrinal parodies; a parody of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar displayed in Hamburg.” (69)
The Nazis’ false monstrance
The violent and fanatic advancement of Luther’s “Slave Will” doctrine is an obvious outcome of his theology, since the bottom line of Luther’s doctrine is the rejection of free-will. For man’s participation in his salvation means that he is free, because he is in God; but the rejection of the human element in salvation, only means that man is a slave. For what greater freedom is there, than the liberty to partake in redemption? To do so only signifies a God Who loves man so much that He unites with him, and allows him to partake in the plan of redemption. But the absence of this only means that man has will over nothing, that he is like dry leaves in the winds, being swayed here and there, moved to good and to evil. So fanatical was Luther in his devotion for his rejection of free-will, that he wrote:
“To me, the defense of this truth [predestination] is a matter of supreme and eternal importance. I am convinced that life itself should be set at stake in order to preserve it. It must stand though the whole world be involved thereby in strife and tumult, nay, even fall into ruins.”
And indeed, the whole of Europe fell into ruins on account of Luther’s veneration of his “slave will.” The bloodiest war in Europe’s history, before the two World Wars, was the Thirty Years War, in which Catholics and Protestants slaughtered one another for three decades, with entire cities and nations ruined, and with ten million lives taken.
Painting depicting the horrors of the 30 Years War
Luther was merely continuing the theology of John Hus, a Bohemian heretic who was simply perpetuating the heresies of the gnostic John Wycliff. Luther himself wrote:
“Until now I have held and espoused the teachings of John Huss without knowing it. …In short we are all Hussites without realizing it.”
Luther spitefully remembered how the Catholic Council of Constance condemned Wycliffe for his rejection of free-will, writing:
“For I confess that that article of Wycliffe, ‘all things take place from necessity, that is, from the immutable will of God, and our will is not compelled indeed, but it cannot of itself do good,’ was falsely condemned by the Council of Constance, or that conspiracy or cabal rather.”
Luther, in his rather mindless, diabolical and chaotic writing, mockingly wrote of the Church’s condemnation of him and John Huss:
“Thus are the Scriptures fulfilled.—Blessed are ye who persecute Luther, for yours is the kingdom of heaven! Blessed are ye who curse and say all manner of evil against Luther; rejoice and be exceeding glad in that day, for great is your reward in heaven; for so persecuted they the apostles, the holy bishops, John Huss, and others who were before Luther!”
Luther’s rejection of free will and his belief that God created evil and forced man to sin, corresponds with a gnostic deity, one of good and evil. This animosity for law, and this embracing of chaos, would coincide with Luther’s hatred for Moses and the Decalogue. Luther once said:
“If Moses should attempt to intimidate you with his stupid Ten Commandments, tell him right out: chase yourself to the Jews.” (70)
Luther also exclaimed: “To the gallows with Moses.” He asserted that Moses “was sent to the Jewish people only and had nothing whatever to do with Gentiles and Christians.” His advice was to “chase that stammering and stuttering Moses,” and moreover affirmed that “Moses must ever be looked upon with suspicion, even as upon a heretic, excommunicated, damned, worse than the Pope and the devil.” (71) Luther’s hatred for Moses was shared by the early gnostics, who rejected the Old Testament as the work of the “evil god.” The gnostic hatred for Moses, by both Luther and his predecessors, was continued through Nazism. Utilizing Luther as a symbol of German identitarianism and nationalism, the head ideologue of National Socialist ideology, Alfred Rosenberg, expressed his admiration for Luther’s rejection of Moses, writing: “Luther did cast aside the Jews and their lies, and declared that he no longer had anything to do with Moses.”
Alfred Rosenberg
The rejection of the Old Testament is utterly contrary to the Catholic truth, but it was accepted by both Luther and the Nazis, but at the root of it all, it was taught and pushed for by Marcion and the gnostic heretics of old. Rosenberg acknowledged the Marcionite and gnostic rejection of the Old Testament books and upheld it in opposition to the Catholic Church:
“About the year 150, Marcion, who was a Greek, once again represented the Nordic idea of a world order based on organic tension and hierarchical structure. This was in direct contrast to the Semitic conception of a capricious god who exercised a boundless despotism. Marcion therefore rejected the old testament as the book of laws of so false a deity. Similar efforts were made by a few of the Gnostics. But Rome, now racially polluted beyond redemption, was utterly committed to Africa and Syria, and smothered the simple essence of Jesus with the accretions of late Roman goals of world empire and ecumenical church.”
From this we can see the peregrination of the influence from the gnostic sects, to Luther and to later the 19th and 20th century Germans.
FOUR
SOCIAL-DARWINISM AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Charles Darwin learned of the idea of evolution from his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a major figure of the Enlightenment. Erasmus rejected Christianity and adopted the heresy of deism, a belief that states that God simply created the world and set the processes of nature as the clockmaker sets the clock, being separate from His creation, leaving man to be governed by reason and not any of the divine inspirations that we find in the Scriptures. Erasmus Darwin was not just a deist, but an occultist Freemason. In Darwin’s memoirs he writes:
“My father told me two odd stories about bleeding: one was that as a very young man he became a Freemason. A friend of his who was a Freemason and who pretended not to know about his strong feeling with respect to blood, remarked casually to him as they walked to the meeting, ‘I suppose that you do not care about losing a few drops of blood?’ It seems that when he was received as a member, his eyes were bandaged and his coat-sleeves turned up. Whether any such ceremony is now performed I know not, but my father mentioned the case as an excellent instance of the power of imagination, and he distinctly felt the blood trickling down his arm, and could hardly believe his own eyes, when he afterwards could not find the smallest prick on his arm.”
Erasmus Darwin
Before Charles Darwin was even born, Erasmus Darwin wrote in his book, The Temple of Nature, that “mankind arose from one family of monkeys on the banks of the Mediterranean; who accidentally had learned to use the adductor pollicis, or that strong muscle which constitutes the ball of the thumb, and draws the point of it to meet the points of the fingers; which common monkeys do not; and that this muscle gradually increased in size, strength, and activity, in successive generations; and by this improved use of the sense of touch, that monkeys acquired clear ideas, and gradually became men.”(72)
Before Charles Darwin ever wrote on natural selection, Erasmus Darwin wrote that “the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become improved.” (73) Much of Erasmus’ scientific works were written in the form of poetic, religiously pagan verse, alongside his own commentary on what the verses signified. In these writings he affirmed that all life sprung from the sea and evolved. In his book, The Temple of Nature, he wrote:
“ORGANIC LIFE beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.” (74)
Erasmus then wrote of how mankind, while declaring he is made in the image of God, evolved from microscopic animals:
“Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,
Of language, reason, and reflection proud,
With brow erect who scorns this earthy sod,
And styles himself the image of his God;
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point, or microscopic ens!” (75)
Erasmus Darwin was a product of the Protestant Reformation — or rather, the Protestant Revolution —, rejecting Catholic doctrine, such as that of Transubstantiation, while subscribing to deist and mechanical theology. On March 15th, 1790, James Keir, a prestigious chemist of his time, wrote to Erasmus:
“You are such an infidel in religion that you cannot believe in transubstantiation, yet you can believe that apples and pears, &c., sugar oil, vinegar, are nothing but water and charcoal, and that it is a great improvement in language to call all these things by one word—oxyde hydro-carbonneux.”(76)
Commentating on this letter, British academic and professor at the University of East Anglia, Rebecca Stott, makes a very interesting observation:
“It was an astute comment. What Keir saw was that Erasmus Darwin was replacing the mystery of the Catholic belief in transubstantiation (the bread being transformed into Christ’s body in the sacrament, the wine into his blood) with his own materialist chemical transubstantiation. It was a dangerous kind of heresy but so disguised as to have gone unnoticed.” (77)
With his mechanical and Protestant theology, filled with a deism projected through the lens of a callous, Masonic, systematic worldview, one that rejected the sublime mystery of the Catholic Faith and imposed a mythological, pagan and pseudo-biological philosophy, it is really of no wonder as to why Erasmus supported the genocide of Catholics, their priests and their governors, in that most diabolical French Revolution. That Erasmus was a Freemason makes this less surprising, since the philosophers who would have provided the ideological framework for the sanguinary revolt, such as Rousseau and Voltaire, were Freemasons. To rival the violence and carnage of the French Revolution is almost an unsurmountable task. Mme. Roland, an adamant supporter of the revolution, whose husband was France’s Minister of the Interior, was herself horrified and recounted the cruelty done by the rebels:
“Women were brutally violated before being torn to pieces by those tigers; intestines cut out and worn as turbans; bleeding human flesh devoured.”
A man was about to be executed, his daughter begged the slaughterers to have mercy on him. The killers murdered another man, drained out some of his blood into a cup and told her, that if she wanted to save her father, she must drink the blood. To save her father’s life, she drunk the blood. The murderers took another woman, and with sadistic pleasure, finished her off by setting a fire between her swollen legs. Within this same time, in the bloody year of 1792, two hundred and fifty priests were rounded up and slaughtered, although they embraced death with joy, leaving one witness to write: “I do not understand, they seemed happy. They went to death as to a wedding.”
Daughter begs for her father’s life
1794, sixteen Carmelite nuns were brought to the execution stand. One of them asked why they were being executed. The answer was: “foolish attachment to your stupid religious practices,” upon which the nun looked to her fellow monastics and said: “There you are, sisters: we have been condemned for our religion. …What a happiness to die for our God!” They began singing Veni Creator, and the last one to continue the song was to final nun to be beheaded in the guillotine. (78)
Cannibalism, cruelty, massacres, and the genocide of Christians, would have all fit in within the darwinian utopia of Erasmus Darwin, wherein mankind is nothing but creatures evolved from lower oceanic animals. Erasmus Darwin praised the anti-Catholic cause of the revolution in his 1791 book, The Botanic Garden:
“The Warrior, LIBERTY, with bending sails
Helm’d his bold course to fair HIBERNIA’S vales;—
Firm as he steps, along the shouting lands,
Lo! Truth and Virtue range their radiant bands;
Sad Superstition wails her empire torn,
Art plies his oar, and Commerce pours her horn.
“Long had the Giant-form on GALLIA’S plains
Inglorious slept, unconscious of his chains;
Round his large limbs were wound a thousand strings
By the weak hands of Confessors and Kings;
O’er his closed eyes a triple veil was bound,
And steely rivets lock’d him to the ground;
While stern Bastile with iron cage inthralls
His folded limbs, and hems in marble walls.
—Touch’d by the patriot-flame, he rent amazed
The flimsy bonds, and round and round him gazed;
Starts up from earth, above the admiring throng
Lifts his Colossal form, and towers along;
High o’er his foes his hundred arms He rears,
Plowshares his swords, and pruning hooks his spears;
Calls to the Good and Brave with voice, that rolls
Like Heaven’s own thunder round the echoing poles;
Gives to the winds his banner broad unfurl’d,
And gathers in its shade the living world!
Notice how Erasmus refers to the Catholic world: one of “sad superstition” and “Confessors and Kings,” that is, the Catholic Church, Her teachings, Her priests and monarchs. Erasmus Darwin praised the destruction of all of this, as did his Protestant predecessor, Martin Luther. Martin Luther began a revolution against the Catholic Church, and Erasmus simply continued it. The relationship between the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment heresy was astutely observed by Anglican theologian and priest, Alister McGrath:
“It was Protestant, rather than Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, theology which was especially open to influence from the new currents of thought which arose from the Enlightenment and its aftermath.”
Several factors were significant in Protestantism’s role in the Enlightenment, but it can all be summarized into one element within the heresy, and that is the very nature of Protestantism itself. The whole of the movement was established to uproot the very authority of the Catholic Church, the cause of which was the fragmented churches scattered about, free to devise their own doctrines and councils, confined within their own distant lands, and infused with no specific theology but the call to rebellion against the Catholic Church. With no order, comes disorder, and thus there was no centralized authority to impede the spreading of the Enlightenment heresy. Moreover, the Enlightenment heresy was just another theology brought about by rebels amongst other rebels, protestants in the midst of other protestants. “While the ‘essence of Protestantism’ remains disputed within scholarly circles,” writes McGrath, “there is agreement that a spirit of protest is part of the birthright of the movement. The Protestant predisposition to challenge authority, and the commitment to the principle ecclesia reformata, ecclesia semper reformanda (‘the reformed church must always be the church which is reforming itself’), encouraged a spirit of critical inquiry concerning Christian dogma. This attitude resonated with the ideals of the Enlightenment, leading to an alignment of many Protestant writers with the movement, and a willingness to absorb its methods and outlooks.” (79)
The way in which Protestantism sees the Bible, is the same way that the United States views its Constitution: as a living document, ever changing to the times and trends.
From one rebellion, comes more rebellion. Chaos only births chaos. And so the Enlightenment was just a mere continuation of centuries of rebellion against the Catholic Church and Her teachings. In ancient Israel, God commanded that if controversy ever arose amongst the people, “thou shalt come to the priests of the Levitical race, and to the judge, that shall be at that time: and thou shalt ask of them, and they shall shew thee the truth of the judgment.” (Deuteronomy 17:9) It does not say, “go to the Scriptures,” or to an individual interpretation, but rather, to go to the priests and trust in their authority. The Scripture goes on to say that “he that will be proud, and refuse to obey the commandment of the priest, who ministereth at that time to the Lord thy God, and the decree of the judge, that man shall die, and thou shalt take away the evil from Israel” (Deuteronomy 17:12).
The religious institution established by God, then, is to be the authority, and not the individual. And the fact that God commands that protestors against the priesthood are to be put to death, shows that the Catholic Church was right when She would execute Protestants. When the earliest heretics argued that circumcision was obligatory, they used the Scriptures to prove their point. But the Apostles, still, gathered together in the Council of Jerusalem, and declared that circumcision was not obligatory. To have been a Jew in those days and believe this judgements would have been very difficult, because the heretics had the Scriptures, and the Apostles had their authority. It was those who trusted in the authority of the Apostles — that is, the Church — and not in judaizers’ interpretation of the Old Testament, who would have been on the side of Orthodoxy, and not vice-versa. But Protestantism desires to destroy this faith, to revolt and obliterate the Councils and the Fathers of the Church.
The toppling of ecclesiastical authority and the elevation of individualist anarchy, is truly the core of all Protestant thought, and the precursor to the bloody tempest of the Enlightenment reign of terror. One of the most famous thinker of German idealism and the Enlightenment, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who was called a “Protestant Aquinas” by Karl Barth, defined Protestant thinking, bridging it with the Enlightenment individualistic position:
“It is the fundamental principle of the Protestant church that its contract shall rest on the unanimity of all its members, that no one shall be required to enter an ecclesiastical contract whose terms insist on his subjecting his faith to a majority vote. At the start of his great work, Luther did appeal to a free General Council, but the great foundation of Protestant freedom, the Palladium of the Protestant church, was discovered when men refused to appear at a Council and repudiated all part in its proceedings, not because they were assured in advance of losing their case there, but because it would contradict the very nature of religious opinions to decide them by majority vote, and because everyone has the right to settle for himself what his faith is. Thus the faith of every individual Protestant must be his faith because it is his, not because it is the church’s.” (80)
From the gnostics of the Middle Ages, to the Reformation, to the Enlightenment, violent revolt continues like a torrent of blood and carnage, for its trail is crimson and its song is one of confusion. “The Catholic Church as a whole was very critical of the Enlightenment,” writes scholar Gottfried Adam, “whereas the Protestant side was much more open-minded and reacted positively to the educational impetus of the Enlightenment.” (81)
The calls for death of Catholics by Luther are no different than statements made by numerous of the “Enlightenment” thinkers. Martin Luther declared:
“If I had all the Franciscan friars in one house, I would set fire to it, for, in the monks the good seed is gone, and only the chaff is left. To the fire with them!” (82)
Now compare this sort of talk to that of the Enlightenment writer, Denis Diderot:
“Let us strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest.”
Denis Diderot
In 1540, a series of fires broke out in North and Central Germany. It is said that some persons were apprehended, and under torture, confessed that they were sent by the Pope and the monks. Without any conclusive evidence, Luther immediately used the story as a pretext to foment the slaughter Catholic clergy, saying:
“If this be proved, then there is nothing left for us but to take up arms against the monks and priests ; and I too shall go, for miscreants must be slain like mad dogs.”
It was the anger of the opportunist, and not the anger of the just; it was the anger of those who, on any notice or utterance, on any report, rages like a mad dog. After making his statement, Hieronymus Schurf, a lawyer who was present with Luther, said that it would be most unjust if one is tortured after being accused too hastily, to which Luther said: “This is no time for mercy but for rage!” In a 1520 letter written to Spalatin, Luther wrote:
“The die is cast; the despicable fury or favour of the Romans is nothing to me; I desire no
reconciliation or communion with them. … I shall burn the whole of the Papal Laws and all humility and friendliness shall cease.”
Both the Protestant revolution and the Enlightenment led to violence against the Catholic Church. The horrific violence done by the early Protestants on account of the calls for rebellion by Luther and other “reformers,” was well documented by contemporaries of that time. At the Diet of Worms in 1545, the Catholics made this report:
“The Protestants have made themselves masters of churches and monasteries and have driven into misery all who wished to abide by the old faith. They have invaded bishoprics and have been reckless of justice and peace ; have constrained the poor inhabitants to embrace their religion, as, for instance, in the land of Brunswick, where they had no other right than the might of the sword. They trample under foot and oppress everything, and then complain of being themselves oppressed.”
“They are insatiable in their demands and are for ever producing fresh cards to play, at every Diet putting forward fresh claims which they insist on having conceded to them before they will take part in the transactions or vote supplies.”
“Scandals and abuses innumerable certainly existed and were openly flaunted, and were growing worse and worse nowadays, because, owing to the perilous times and the teaching of novel sects and preachers, all good works were being abandoned, and unbelief and contempt for religion was becoming the custom among high and low. Many thousand livings stood vacant and the people were without helm or rudder.” (83)
Carl van der Plassen, a doctor of Cologne, wrote a letter in 1545 to the Diet of Worms in which recounted the horrors done by Protestant leaders and thugs:
“…we must bear in mind all that has happened in Germany since the subjugation of the peasants by the Princes and municipal authorities, all the countless violations of human and Divine law, of the public peace, of property, civic rights, conscience and honour. Let us but reckon up the number of churches and monasteries which have been destroyed and pillaged during these twenty years, and all the accompanying crime and iniquity. And to what purpose have these stolen goods been applied ? What has become of all the Church property, all the treasures ? . . . A new religion has been forced upon the people by might and by stratagem, and they have been forbidden under threat of punishment to carry on the old service of God, with its rites and Christian usages. Is this the vaunted freedom of the Gospel, to persecute and coerce others, to imprison them or drive them into exile ? Everything that was formerly reverenced has now fallen into contempt, with the result that right and property are no longer respected ; the endless disturbances in matters of religion have upset the whole national equilibrium ; discipline, loyalty and respectability have vanished. . . . What misery results from want of clergy and schools even in the lands which have remained Catholic ! Princes and towns, making their boast of the Gospel, have not been satisfied with introducing the new Church system into their own territories, but have invaded the Catholic bishoprics and secular dominions and turned everything topsy-turvy in order to set up their own institutions. The Schmalkalden confederates extend their operations from year to year and grow more and more audacious. At this moment they are actually preaching a war of extermination against the Pope and his adherents. There will be no checking them if the sword of the Emperor is not used to restrain them, as it ought to have been long ago.” (84)
Another Catholic contemporary protests in similar fashion :
“Religion is perverted, all obedience to the Emperor destroyed,
justice set aside and insolence of all sorts everywhere encouraged.” (85)
The eminent Protestant historian, Karl Hagen, wrote of the violence and bloodshed called for by Luther against Catholics:
“Even Luther… in his earlier writings, contributed to foster the rebellious felling among the people; for one he actually incited the German nation to bathe itself in the blood of the Papists, and he declared that they would do a thing agreeable to God who would make away with the Bishops, destroy churches and convents!” (86)
This violent sea of anti-Catholic hatred flooded Europe in modern times, when German troops attacked cathedrals and Catholic monuments. In 1917, during the First World War, Canon William Barry, in the fourth centenary of Luther in London, declared the evils of German soldiers against Catholic Christendom:
“The heart of Luther, German to its last fiber, is beating still in those armies which are attempting to ruin our Western civilization, are attacking our faith as inherited from Christendom of old time. It was Luther, multiplied, like Southey’s monstrous creation, Kehama, into a myriad of furious assailants, that burnt Louvain, shattered Rheims, and desecrated nearly thirteen hundred Catholic churches in its onset, East and West. For negation with arms in its hands cannot fail to be destructive. This “justifying faith” in the virtues of Teutonism, which wrought havoc all round four centuries ago, to-day strikes hard, strikes without pity, at our Christian monuments. It has not spared French cathedrals; it aims, with malice worthy of Luther him-self, at St. Mark’s, Venice. And who believes that it would show mercy to Rome, if it could take the Holy City by assault, now, in November, 1917, any more than it did in May, 1527? Rage knows no law. And it cannot stay to argue. ‘Why should we not wash our hands in the blood of popes and cardinals?’ was Luther’s top note in the diapason of his fury. ‘If any man resists me, him I will smash,’ exclaimed the Kaiser, while Germany heard and trembled. The Teuton ego is feeling, not reason, will rather than law.” (87)
A Crucifix stands amidst the destruction of WW1
Thomas Paine, one of the great prophets for the Enlightenment, praised the French Revolution for its violently intolerant abolishment of the Catholic Church:
“In countries under despotic governments, where inquiry is always forbidden, the people are condemned to believe as they have been taught by their priests. This was for many centuries the case in France: but this link in the chain of slavery, is happily broken by the revolution; and, that it may never be rivetted again, let us employ a part of the liberty we enjoy scrutinizing into the truth.” (88)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, another one of the Enlightenment teachers, advocated for the execution and expulsion of all Catholics within his own utopian vision, a vision which became a reality in late 18th century France:
“There is therefore a purely civil profession of faith of which the Sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject. While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the State whoever does not believe them–it can banish him, not from impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty. If anyone, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law. …The existence of a mighty, intelligent, and beneficent divinity, possessed of foresight and providence, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the law: these are its positive dogmas. …Now that there is and can be no longer an exclusive national religion, tolerance should be given to all religions that tolerate others, so long as their dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of citizenship. But whoever dares to say: ‘Outside the Church is no salvation,’ ought to be driven from the State”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
And of course, anyone who says “Outside the Church is no salvation,” is emphatically Catholic.
Voltaire, another teacher who was very significant in forming the ideology for the French Revolution, believed in a form of evolutionism, teaching that Africans were still at a lower state of the evolutionary process. He wrote:
“It is a serious question among them whether the Africans are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence. A time will doubtless come when these animals will know how to cultivate the land well, beautify their houses and gardens, and know the paths of the stars: one needs time for everything.” (89)
Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, whose mother and sister were both murdered by the deist rebels, wrote a brief history on how the French revolution commenced, in which he recounts on the nascent stages that led to the violent torrent, on how it was Voltaire and his fellow sophists who influenced it:
“Voltaire renewed the persecution of Julian. He possessed the baneful art of making infidelity fashionable among a capricious but amiable people. Every species of self-love was pressed into this insensate league. Religion was attacked with every kind of weapon, from the pamphlet to the folio, from the epigram to the sophism. No sooner did a religious book appear than the author was overwhelmed with ridicule, while works which Voltaire was the first to laugh at among his friends were extolled to the skies. Such was his superiority over his disciples, that sometimes he could not forbear diverting himself with their irreligious enthusiasm. Meanwhile the destructive system continued to spread throughout France. It was first adopted in those provincial academies, each of which was a focus of bad taste and faction. Women of fashion and grave philosophers alike read lectures on infidelity. It was at length concluded that Christianity was no better than a barbarous system, and that its fall could not happen too soon for the liberty of mankind, the promotion of knowledge, the improvement of the arts, and the general comfort of life.” (90)
Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand
Thus, Voltaire was one of the contrivers behind the French Revolution. From sophism, sadistic sarcasm, the ridicule of all things holy, the praise of infidelity, came a mountain of carnage and gore. Rousseau and Voltaire both were involved in the occult, being both Freemasons, and both believed in a form of evolutionism (Rousseau held that orangutans could be a lower species of man), and both — like Martin Luther — wanted to see the destruction of the Catholic Church.
THE PROTESTANTS BEHIND DARWINISM
Long before Darwin wrote his On the Origin of Species, a Protestant minister of the Anglican Church, Baden Powell, was teaching and promoting evolutionism. He, like Darwin and his predecessors, hated the Catholic Church. In an 1841 speech given at Oxford University, Powell said that the Catholic Church had made “corruptions of the simplicity and purity of the Christian faith,” that it had stemmed from “Successive ages of darkness and general barbarism” and that it was to the Church “that men’s minds were made to bow in abject submission.” Powell praised the cause of Luther and his fellow protestant leaders, saying that the “Reformation cleared away a vast mass of these corruptions.” Most notably, in this same speech, Powell said:
“Let not Protestants, then, forget their main ground of trust. Let them not perplex themselves, and waste their strength in vain disputes on lesser matters; but hold resolutely to the broad principle of the Bible, and every man’s right to search it and think for himself, on which alone the Reformation proceeded, or was, in fact, justifiable. Let them consider well, and remember that, in one word, Protestantism is Scripture.”
Baden Powell
Observe what he says here, that every man should read the Scriptures and “think for himself,” this is the creed of the “Enlightenment” and all of spiritual and political chaos. To equate the Scripture with Protestantism is to then force the Bible, and the interpretation thereof, to the capricious vicissitudes of mortals, of the ever changing and fleeting trends of people, for the protests of man do not cease, at that which is holy and never changing, man will never cease at trying to force it to submit to his will. Look at what Powell would say later in the same speech:
“The spirit of the Reformation is the spirit of enlightenment and free Scriptural enquiry.”
In other words, the interpretation of the Scripture is enslaved to man’s enquiry, that is, his deviant desire to conform the Bible to the contrivances that he wants to be popular or dominating. As soon as Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species, came out, Powell did not hesitate to continue the protest against orthodoxy, and force the Bible to conform to evolutionism, writing in 1860:
“that ‘creation’ is only another name for our ignorance of the mode of production… while a work has now appeared by a naturalist of the most acknowledged authority, Mr. Darwin’s masterly volume on The Origin of Species by the law of ‘natural selection’ — which now substantiates on undeniable grounds the very principle so long denounced by the first naturalists, — the origination of new species by natural causes: a work which must soon bring about an entire revolution of opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature.” (91)
Charles Darwin wrote a book, entitled An Historical Sketch of the Recent Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species, published in 1866, in which he documented numerous of the figures who taught evolutionism, or at least nascent forms of it, before he did. Darwin hailed the Protestant pastor Baden Powell, as one of his predecessors, crediting him as a thinker who had written on natural selection before he did. Darwin wrote:
“The ‘Philosophy of Creation’ has been treated in a masterly manner by the Rev. Baden Powell, in his ‘Essays on the Unity of Worlds.’ 1855. Nothing can be more striking than the manner in which he shows that the introduction of new species is ‘a regular, not a casual phenomenon,’ or, as Sir John Herschel expresses it, ‘a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process.’” (92)
Two of the most central figures in the spreading of evolutionism, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, were both not just influenced, but pulled into concluding evolutionism by a Protestant minister named Thomas Malthus. Utilizing his Protestantism, Malthus interconnected theology with eugenics, writing in his later 18th century work, An Essay on the Principle of Population,
“But the doctrine of life and Mortality which was brought to light by the gospel, the doctrine that the end of righteousness is everlasting life, but that the wages of sin are death, is in every respect just and merciful, and worthy of the great Creator. Nothing can appear more consonant to our reason than that those beings which come out of the creative process of the world in lovely and beautiful forms should be crowned with immortality, while those which come out misshapen, those whose minds are not suited to a purer and happier state of existence, should perish and be condemned to mix again with their original clay. Eternal condemnation of this kind may be considered as a species of eternal punishment, and it is not wonderful that it should be represented, sometimes, under images of suffering.”
Thomas Malthus
In the 6th edition, published 1826, of this same book, Malthus advocates for the State to enact certain policies that would guarantee that a large amount of people in the society die, such as making streets narrower to force people to be closer, in order to encourage the spread of disease; advocating for poorer people to forsake cleanliness, that way it would liken the chances of them getting sick; establish processes that would ensure that more and more babies die, and penalize doctors for striving to make medicine for diseases:
“It is an evident truth that, whatever may be the rate of increase in the means of subsistence, the increase of population must be limited by it, at least after the food has once been divided into the smallest shares that will support life. All the children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to this level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons. It has appeared indeed clearly in the course of this work, that in all old states the marriages and births depend principally upon the deaths, and that there is no encouragement to early unions so powerful as a great mortality. To act consistently therefore, we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.”
Before Darwin had his book, On the Origin of Species, published, there was a man who was close to him, who had conceived of the idea of evolutionism, his name was Alfred Russel Wallace, and not only was he an evolutionist, but an occultist as well. Being deeply entrenched in the idea of philosophical biology, Wallace was greatly pulled, while under strong delusion, to read Malthus’ essay on population. He was a diabolically possessed individual, suffering from hallucinations and other dark visions. In his chaotic hallucinations during his stay in the Malay Archipelago, he would begin to imagine that he was having a conversation with Charles Darwin, or times with the French naturalist, Jean-Baptist Lamarck, about evolution and natural selection. “All species have evolved,” Wallace would say in his delusional and shaking voice, with his face covered with sweat, “adapted and mutated. All living organisms have descended from earlier forms.”
While in his hut, Wallace recounted, “somehow my thoughts turned,” he wrote, to Malthus’ book on population, which he had read fourteen years earlier in Leicester. He continued to write in his recounting of this contemplation on Malthus, and how he inspired him in his acceptance of Social-Darwinism:
“it occurred to to ask the question, Why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted survive. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from enemies, the strongest, the swiftest, or the most cunning; from famine, the best hunters or those with the best digestion; and so on. Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain — that is, the fittest would survive. Then at once I seemed to see the whole effect of this. … The more I thought over it the more I became convinced that I had at length found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin of species.” (93)
Alfred Russel Wallace
Wallace was also an extreme heretic, following the teachings of David Friedrich Strauss, that the miracles of Christ were merely myths that grew from rumors that naturally were said about all great men of the past. (94) Other than being a heretic, he was a firm believer in occultism and partook in spiritism, necromancy and the ouija board. He put out a book in 1866 entitled, The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural. Wallace had one hundred copies of the book printed out, and reserved twenty five copies for his friends. These reserved copies, wrapped with paper, sat in the study of Wallace’s sister, Frances, who was supposed to distribute them to her brother’s friends. But she neglected them for several days, thinking that she would eventually give them away when she had the time. One day she left the study for a few minutes and when she returned she saw that the books were scattered about the room. Frances, frightened, called her friend, Agnes Nichol, who summoned a spirit through a ouija board to seek the answer as to why the volumes had been scattered about. “One for my sister Frances, I have marked it,” said the spirit. Frances picked up a copy and began flipping through the pages. She found red crayon marks on some of the pages and believed that they were made by the spirit. “If you could do this while the book was shut up,” said Frances to the spirit, “you could write my name in this book while it lays under my hands.” She closed the book, and after a few moments she reopened it and found her name, “Frances Wallace,” written on the top of the first page. (95)
David Friedrich Strauss
In this cursed book, Wallace taught that human evolution is a process that encompasses both biology and spirit; that man is evolving physically and spiritually into a higher being. “Survival of the fittest” was something that entailed both biological evolution and spiritual evolution. A man could not only be superior in his biological evolutionary state, but in his spiritual state as well. He wrote:
“The organic world has been carried on to a high state of development, and has been ever kept in harmony with the forces of external nature, by the grand law of “survival of the fittest” acting upon ever varying organisations. In the spiritual world, the law of the “progression of the fittest” takes its place, and carries on in unbroken continuity that development of the human mind which has been commenced here.” (96)
The “fittest” beings of the human species, to Wallace, progress to a higher, superior spiritual plane than inferior beings. Superiority is not only obtained biologically, but religiously. For Wallace and those like him, the “selected” beings — the “fittest” that is — progress in the evolutionary process into a form of ubermensch, an ideal superior human, high in the sphere of biological fitness, and lofty in his state of intellectual and spiritual disposition, the perfect human who has obtained the impeccable state of consciousness. Both Wallace and Darwin envisaged a utopia caused by the elimination of those deemed “inferior,” and the evolution of the “superior” towards superhumanity; they both lamented that this process was not being facilitated. In 1890, Wallace recounted:
“In one of my last conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeeded the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.” (97)
Darwin (left) and Alfred Russel Wallace. Two of the masterminds behind evolutionism, both influenced by the Protestant minister, Thomas Malthus
That Darwin observed that this progression towards a society of perfect humans was impossible without governmental facilitation, shows that the theory of evolution was not advocated on the basis of a sincere desire for truth. For if it was indeed truth, it would take place without humans forcing it. Evolutionism was promoted, not for the cause of truth, but for the seizing of power; for the creation of a dark, dismal, mechanical and despotic society, in which the pompous, filled with a perception of power, conduct genocide on the meek, the humble, the holders of the Faith, the holders of humanity against whom the father of lies is at war. It is not coincidental that evolutionism, within the period of its 19th century conception, was promoted as a religion, as a fortifier for the occult. For all false religion — following its first member, Cain — is about the pursuit of power. So occultism, being utterly bent on domination, coincided with evolutionism with all of its advocation for Darwinism and eugenics. Thus, Charles Johnson, one of the teachers for the occult Theosophical Society in the early twentieth society, said in a lecture in 1928:
“We are immensely indebted to the great teaching of evolution, which Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace put forward tentatively in 1859. We could hardly have hoped for the success of the Theosophical Movement had not the teaching of evolution preceded by sixteen years the founding of The Theosophical Society in 1875, because we teach — or, to put the matter in its true order, because we first learned, and then tried to convey, the teaching of spiritual evolution, with a far greater scope and larger potency than anything of which Darwin ever dreamed.” (98)
Clockwise from top left: Vera Johnston, Charles Johnston, Henry Olcott, Vera Zhelihovsky, and Helen Blavatsky, all of whom were leaders of the occult, Theosophical Society
Evolutionism simply strengthened occultism, and Protestantism merely led to evolutionism. Lets not forget, it was Thomas Malthus, a Protestant minister, who inspired Alfred Russel Wallace, and it was also this same minister who influenced Darwin on natural selection. As Darwin wrote in his autobiography:
“In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long- continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work”.
From Protestantism to evolutionism, from one form of anarchy to another. While Darwinism sprung from England, it greatly thrived in Germany, the heartland of Protestantism, and a link between Luther and Darwin was being hailed as the triumph of the Northern European over the Catholic Church of Southern Europe. This was being done by Darwin’s German colleague, Ernst Haeckel.
FIVE
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND EUGENICS
Protestantism would influence evolutionism, Ernst Haeckel (bottom left), a German evolutionist, was instrumental in influencing the Young Turks (bottom right) on Darwinism. The Young Turks, influenced by Darwinism, would carry out the Armenian Genocide
Ernst Haeckel was deeply influenced by the German religious teacher, Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher. In 1799 book, On Religion, Schleiermacher taught that true religion was forged deeply into the human heart, and that all rites and dogmas were merely poor expressions of this true religion. Influenced by Protestantism, Haeckel erected a bridge between Luther’s revolt against the Catholic Church, and Darwin’s revolt against the Christian teaching of Creation. In October of 1882, just months after Darwin’s death, Haeckel gave a speech in Eisenach in which he expressed his adulation for Darwin, paralleling him with Luther, who in his words, “with a mighty hand tore asunder the web of lies by the world-dominating Papacy, so in our day, Charles Darwin, with comparable over-powering might, has destroyed the ruling, error-doctrines of the mystical creation dogma and through his reform of development theory has elevated the whole sensibility, thought, and will of mankind onto a higher plane.”
Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher
Haeckel said that it was in Italy where he finally came to the realization of the distinct nature of the German and Northern European race, from the Southern European peoples. In an 1859 letter, writing from Messina, he explained how staying in Italy “stirred up and cultivated” more than anything a “heightened inner love for our incomparable German fatherland.” He wrote how anytime he visited Italy, no matter how beautiful its nature and scenery, he felt compelled to express his reverence for Germany. “It has to be heard over all of Italy and Sicily,” he wrote, “in the majestic environment of Naples, as well as on the glorious plains of Palermo, among the quarries of Syracuse, as well as on the peak of Aetna: Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles, uber alles in der Welt! — Ich bin ein Deutscher, will ein Deutscher sein! [Germany, Germany above all, above everything in the world! I am a German, I will be a German!]’ This superiority of Germany over Italy was really a continuation of what was advocated for by Luther in his mission to sever Germany from Catholic Christendom and the Roman universal Church.
Haeckel travelled through Italy with his friend, the German poet Hermann Allmers, who concluded that Darwin had fulfilled the promise of higher German thought, and that Darwinism was the expression of triumph over the Catholic Church. While the two were in Sorrento, they came across a Norwegian traveller. “The common bond,” Haeckel wrote, “of our German racial nature quickly allowed us to become acquainted with him and we were overjoyed to hear so well expressed… the noble and great ideas of the free German spirit.” He referred to other Germans that they met as “sons of the north” and of the “same great national race.” In another note he wrote: “This experience strengthened anew in me my belief that there exists in our common German nation a healthy embryo which is capable of evolution and it is only because of this that one may hope for a healthy surge in social relations.” (99)
Hermann Allmers
Haeckel esteemed Darwinism and evolutionism as the final stage of the German struggle — starting from Luther — against the Catholic Church. “What the Wartburg was for Martin Luther,” wrote Haeckel, “what Weimar was for the greatest heroes of German literature, Jena will remain in the future; a mighty fortress of free thought, free scholarship, free teaching — a mighty fortress of reason!” (100)
The beliefs of Haeckel would impact all of Western Europe, but it would also find significant influence in the souls of violently anti-Christian, Masonic, Islamic elites: the Young Turks. In 1908, the Turkish secret society, the Committee of Union and Progress, or the Young Turkey Party, commenced a revolution against the Sultan, Abdul Hamid II. The Sultan eventually abdicated his throne and gave it to his brother. But, by 1913, the Young Turks officially took over the empire.
Sultan Abdul Hamid II
Unlike the Sultan, the Young Turks held on to secularism, and believed that through modernization, the Ottoman Empire would be able to stop European expansion into Turkish territory. (101)
In 1871, Germany became an officially unified nation, and soon after its successful unification, Germany formed an alliance with the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman elites — statesmen, students, officers and bureaucrats — were the ones who had formed the alliance between Germany and the Ottoman Empire. They had lived in Germany where they studied medicine, military science and engineering, and took a strong interest in German philosophy and ideology. One aspect of German thought that the Ottomans dug into enthusiastically, especially after 1909, was the ideology of the racial nation, the “blood and soil” religion (102) that would be enacted in Nazi Germany.
The Ottomans learned this ideology through the teachings of both Haeckel and Herbert Spencer, the one who actually termed the phrase, “survival of the fittest.” Haeckel, alongside his fellow German Darwinists, Max Weber and Paul Von Lilienfeld, applied Social Darwinism to economics, praising the principle of economic competition as the force behind Social Darwinism. From this ideology, militarism and the extinction of those considered as “weaker, primitive races”, was justified in the Social Darwinist construct. This eugenist ideology seeped into Ottoman thought, and greatly inspired the annihilation of the Armenians, alongside the Greek and Assyrian Christians. (103)
Martin Luther (upper far left corner), influenced Ernst Haeckel (top middle), and alongside Herbert Spencer (top right), Max Weber (bottom far left) and Paul Von Lilienfeld (middle bottom), their work would influence the Young Turks who would go on to exterminate the Armenians
The Ottomans, just like the Identitarians of our day, looked to Japan as a prime example of a racially and religiously unified nation. The Ottomans were ashamed that their own empire was too religiously and ethnically diverse, being filled with Christians of Armenian, Greek and Assyrian descent. The Sultan, Abdulhamid II, himself lamented this, and coveted the nation of Japan. The Sultan wrote in 1917:
“I do not know how appropriate it is to compare Ottoman lands to Japan, to expect success from this Sultan similar to that of the Emperor! Japan is a country of islands, tucked away on one side of the Pacific Ocean; it is a great society, ethnically integrated, uni-religious, uni-national. If there is any region in the world that it does not resemble, it is our wretched country. How could I have reconciled the Kurd and the Armenian, the Greek and the Turk, the Arab and the Bulgar? … Never at any time did Mikado Hatsuhito [sic] come up against such obstacles and never did Japan confront such difficulties.” (104)
It was this desire for an ethnocentric, religiously unified and nationalist state, that resonated into the minds of the Young Turks. Though the Sultan believed in this, he did not completely enact it, but it was done by the Young Turks. When the Japanese defeated the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War, and when they conquered China, the Turks saw this as proof of the superiority of the Asian race over the European race. As one article written in 1904, and published on the Young Turk magazine, Sura-yi Ummet, expressed this view:
“Some Europeans and some Ottomans who imitate what they see without understanding, consider us a race in the lower part of the racial hierarchy. Let us say it in plain Turkish: they regard the Turks as second class human beings. Japanese people, being of the stock of the yellow race, are annihilating the slander against nature with the progress in their country and with their cannons and rifles in Manchuria.” (105)
The Japanese slaughter of the Russians and the Chinese, were viewed as a sign of racial superiority, by the Ottomans. The popular perspective of neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists is that Japan is a great example of a homogeneous society, one worthy of emulation. This perspective was as well adopted by the Young Turks. The Young Turk magazine, Turk, praised the “homogeneous” society and the fanatic nationalism of Japan:
“…in all [its] natural disposition and knowledge a homogeneous people that from end to end is touched by the same sentiments, pursues the same hopes. They love the homeland, with zeal fall victim for the sake of the homeland, in an instant they sacrifice lives for honor and dignity, lives that they sincerely loved and appreciated. They never fear death.” (106)
The fascination with Japan and its nationalism by the Ottoman Empire will be, I believe, continuing into the future, and will help motivate and facilitate an Ottoman Japanese alliance. The Young Turks revered the Japanese for their barbarism (giving them the title, with pride, of “barbarians”), their callousness while conducting massacres, and also for the love of patriotism. In the Sura-yi Ummet it reads a praise to the Japanese:
“Behold the work of these barbarians … they whose civilization, achieved in half a century, has become superior to European civilization which has fallen into decay; they who do not have to reproach massacres, who do not have to gag any mouths out of which a liberal word came, who do not have to exile or suppress patriots, who do not have to dynamite any human beings under the pretext that their skin was dark and that it constituted a happy pastime!” (107)
The Ottoman military officer, Pertev Bey, praised the Japanese soldiers, and wrote in awe of how they went “one by one, like a machine, emotionless, heartless, spiritless, voiceless” to defend Japan with “patriotic affection”. This talk of patriotism, alongside a reverence for Japan, went in hand in hand with the Ottoman belief in the superiority of the Turanian race. This glorification of the Japanese as a race, overlapped and interconnected with Ottoman universalist religion.
Armenian beheadings (left); mass beheadings done by Japanese soldiers in China. The brutality and cruelty of the Japanese was admired by the Ottomans.
The Young Turk magazine, Ictihad, praised the Emperor of Japan and even saw the rise of Japan as an awakener of both Muslims and Hindus as well:
“The land of the Rising Sun [Japan] is today neck and neck with foremost nations of the world, intellectually, technologically, scientifically, productively, commercially, agriculturally, politically, socially, militarily … yes, Japan’s rise made the awakening of the East a consequence. In the liberating motion of this [Japanese] ascension are awakened the dormant passions of the Muslim, the Hindu, the Brahmin, the Confucian. …The miraculous transformation Japan showed, from an oppressive feudalism into an elevated and rather progressive constitutional monarchy, is a development owing to His excellency the late Emperor.” (108)
In wanting to be like Japan, the Young Turks desired a homogeneous society, one free of Christians who refused to integrate to the Ottoman society and conform to the Ottomanist ideology. For the Young Turks, to be a Christian, one was likely to also be a Greek, Armenian, or Arab, in short, they were not Turks and thus were a threat to the utopian vision of a racially and religiously homogeneous society. The Young Turks even began replacing the Arab officials within the government, with Turks. This measure was done on ethnic lines. (109)
As the historian, Renee Worringer, points out, the Young Turks’ “affinity with Europe and their increasingly exclusive possession of Ottoman political power caused them to be profoundly attracted to racialized concepts of nationhood that would set them apart from others in the Ottoman Empire. This tendency was reflected in their particular view of a Japanese as a racially distinct and homogeneous nation, and their embrace of this attitude appeared frequently in the Ottoman Turkish literature of the period.” (110) In order to create a homogeneous society, the empire needed to be purged of Christians. Since the Christians either Armenians, Greeks or Semites, to be a Christian was to be deemed as being amongst the non-Turk and thus, inferior, races. The genocide of the Armenian Christians, and the Christians of Smyrna and other lands, was done under the fixation on a unified Ottoman Empire, without non-Ottomans, or those who would bring disunity to the empire. (111) This violent fixation on unity, on racial and religious lines, was inspired by the view of a “homogeneous” Japan. The Ottoman magazine, Volkan, headed by the Bektashi sufist, Kibrisli Hafiz Dervis Vahdeti, expressed this inspiration from Japan as such:
“Come heroes! Let us unite! Let us assume the strength of character of early Islam, let us be a noble people like the Japanese, who love their governments, their Mikados [emperors], who sacrifice their lives along the way. …Postponing even for a moment what I said will and does cause the homeland to break into pieces.” (112)
Kibrisli Hafiz Dervis Vahdeti
Christians were seen as causes of the homeland breaking “into pieces,” and so thus, were exterminated. This envisioning of a unified empire, was inspired by Islam — from the desire for Islamic unity, or the unity of the Umma —, Japanese nationalist ideology, and German nationalism. Yusuf Akcura, a major ideologue for the Young Turks, wrote that “the German interpretation of nationality — one that assumed ethnicity as the basis of nationality … is closer to reality,” and went so far as to put pan-Ottomanism as above pan-Islamism. (113)
Yusuf Akcura
The Armenian Genocide was influenced by Islam, and the ethnocentric ideologies of Germany and Japan. In summary, Protestant thought would influence Darwinism, and Darwinism would eventually influence the first holocaust of the 20th century, the Genocide done by the Ottoman Empire, and the later Holocaust done by the fatherland of Protestantism — Germany.
SIX
LUTHER AND GERMAN NATIONALISM
The anti-Jewish hatred of Nazi Germany was sown into the German soul by Martin Luther. Luther once expressed his violent fantasy against the Jews as such:
“Were I able, I would knock him [the Jew] down and stab him in my anger. It is lawful according to both the human and the divine law, to kill a robber; then it is even more permissible to slay a blasphemer” (114)
He also said, “We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them”, and he lamented:
“it is our own fault that we have not annihilated the Jews but placidly let them stay where they are in spite of all their murders, their curses, blasphemies, lies, violations, and that we even protect their schools, their dwellings, their persons and property.” (115)
What Luther wanted
Hundreds of years before the Nazis took power, Martin Luther introduced the idea of forcing all of the Jews into concentration camps and work camps. He pushed for this imposition in his anti-Jewish code:
“Pack them all under one roof or stable, like the gypsies, that they may know that they are not lords and masters in our land as they boast. …Deprive them of the right to move about the country. … Hand the strong young Jews of both sexes flail, axe, mattock, spade, distaff, and spindle; and make them work for their bread in the sweat of their brow, like all the children of Adam. Confiscate their property and drive them out of the country.” (116)
The German Nazis would follow the words of Luther, with their Darwinist ideology, in the Holocaust. German scholars, contemporary to Luther, were repulsed by Luther’s violent envisioning. For example, Heinrich Bullinger of Zurich wrote: “Everyone must be astonished at the hard and presumptuous spirit of the man (Luther). The opinion of posterity will be that Luther was not only a man, but a man ruled by criminal passions.” (117)
Heinrich Bullinger of Zurich
Martin Luther was the patriarch of German nationalism. He appointed himself as the mouth piece for the German race, saying:
“I am the prophet of the Germans, for such is the haughty title I must henceforth assume.” (118)
Luther moreover declared:
“As I am the prophet of the Germans, I will act as a faithful teacher and warn my staunch Germans of the danger in which they stand.”
Luther also said:
“I have been born for my beloved Germans, for them will I die!”
For Luther, the Germans were the Herrenvolk,, or “the best nation.” “The Germans are conspicuous for their nobility of character,” said Luther, “their constancy, an fidelity.” In another pompous and antichrist statement, Luther said:
“If God is concerned for the interests of His son, He will watch over me; my cause is the cause of Jesus Christ. If God careth not for the glory of Christ, He will endanger His own and will have to bear the shame.” (119)
If the Germans were so enthusiastic about a man like Luther, then it should have been no surprise that they accepted Adolf Hitler as their leader. Or in the words of Wiener:
“A nation which found it easy to accept a character like Luther as Christ, could not find it difficult to accept a man like Hitler as Messiah.” (120)
And that is exactly what happened. The Germans were looking for really the fulfillment of Luther’s envisioning of an absolutist leader — a fuehrer — for Germany. Luther once said:
“Germany is like a beautiful horse that has everything it needs. But it needs a horseman. In the same way as a good horse runs occasionally astray without a good horseman who governs it, so Germany has enough strength and people, but it lacks a good leader.”
Hitler was seen as the grand emulator of Luther. Karl Litzmann, a German general in the First World War who later joined the Nazi Party, definitely saw Hitler in this light. “Hitler,” he said in 1933, “is the greatest German, who can only be compared to Luther.” (121)
In this inquest on the connections between Darwinism, Protestantism and Islam, the First World War is of the utmost of significance. For in this conflict — amongst the most horrific ones experienced by mankind — Islam, Darwinism and Protestantism, converged together to war against the true faith of Christianity. When observing the problems of our present day, and how they presage the rise of another bloody conflict, one realizes somewhere along the road of inquiry, that the First World War parallels our own, and thus is a prerequisite for us to learn about it. In the words of historian George Kennan: “all the lines of inquiry, it seems to me, lead back to it.”
In the heart of Germany’s vision of supremacy, one will find Luther’s name engrained. Adolf Deissman, who was amongst Germany’s leading Protestant theologians during the First World War, unequivocally placed Luther as an inseparable pillar holding up German militarism. In 1914, Deissman wrote down the points of ideology which German Protestants had to follow. It was entitled: “The War and Religion” and in it he proclaimed the diabolical equation of Christianity with German supremacy. He wrote:
“The war has steeled our religion … We Germans can’t believe in anything else but a German God.” (122)
Adolf Deissman
Deissman also said:
“Our present religion is natural and German, and we preach a German God! A German, a national God!” (123)
By Making God German, what Lutheran ideology did was bring back the German people to its pre-Christian religion, when the Germans worshipped their own Germanic gods. By doing this under the guise of Christianity, it made it easier for people to return to paganism, without the trouble of appearing rebellious. Jesus Christ all of a sudden became a German, as we read in Deissman: “Only in a German cloak can the real Christ breath.” (124) This type of teaching went directly in line with the “back to roots” paganism that so grew in 20th century Germany. It also emanated from the Lutheran urge to form a German Christianity, in which lies the heresy of putting the race before the Faith. From nationalist religion, comes the idea that the race is above the Faith, and in this, do men put their own pride above mankind, and war against humanity itself. Hence why Protestant Germany had no problem in absorbing Social-Darwinism. Even in the words of the Protestant theologian, Deissman, do we find the Darwinist sentiment of “might makes right,” for he said:
“I am proud to preach the religion of might and what our enemies call barbarism.” (125)
Before the Protestant revolt, the German people were under the Universal Catholic Church, in which lied many nations, peoples and languages. There was a unified body called Christendom, under the Church, wherein Christian spirituality was the center of everything, culturally and politically. When the Pope declared a Crusade in the 11th century, French, Italians, Irish, Germans, and others, all gathered together to join the holy cause. There was spiritual unity, guided by the Church and not divided by the ideas of nations. What hindered the cause of Christendom was nationalism.
There was actually a natural factor behind the development of nationalism: the Black Death of the mid 14th century. Estimates put the death toll, for the era of 1346 to 1353, from 75 to 200 million deaths. But even after this, the Plague continued all the way on to the year 1671, and even continuing in other parts like Russia, to the late 18th century. Before the outbreak of the horrors of the Black Plague, the unity of Christendom, for the most part, was maintained by a common religion and Catholic civilization, and a large body of governors.
There was immense intermarriage between the people, there was free travel from kingdom to kingdom, people from different regions met one another through common zeal for holy causes — the Crusades and pilgrimages —, councils massed people from various areas of the continent together, and wars as well gathered them. People throughout England could speak French, with a man of Northumberland speaking not too differently from a man of Bordeaux. And even in other areas where they spoke different languages, like Spain and Italy, there was still a great amount of traveling and journeying being done by government officials, the upperclass, soldiers, clerics and scholars.
From the Black Death came the loss of tens of millions of people throughout Europe. The fear of infection kept people from traveling, and confided them to remain within their own lands. This serious decline of traveling naturally helped lead to the creation of national identities. Nationalism was something that was going to happen no matter what, but the Black Plague accelerated the process like yeast in water. Because of the Black Plague, within one lifetime the majority of people in England no longer spoke French, but English. In every place where the Black Plague had its effect, there was developed what has been called “particularism,” a rooting of the divisions between Christians peoples. By the year 1400, there were established differences developed between nations that greatly penetrated and altered the soul of Europe.
Illustration of the Black Plague
Within the 15th century, Jan Huss (inspired by John Wycliffe) led a revolt in Bohemia against the Catholic Church, calling Her the Harlot of Babylon and the Pope the Antichrist. He rejected the Eucharist and the priesthood, and his followers exhibited their destructiveness and cruelty when they smashed Catholic icons, which they believed to be idols, and beheaded and butchered Catholics. They revolted against the Holy Roman Emperor, Sigismund, and this led to the most brutal Hussite Wars, which lasted from 1419 to around 1434.
This revolt, and the wars that followed, were part of more so a nationalist movement than a theological one. The Hussites were separatists that wanted to make Bohemia into a Hussite state severed from the Holy Roman Empire. It is no wonder, then, that the father of German nationalism, Martin Luther, was inspired by the Hussite revolt, fervently writing: “my soul burns to see Bohemia and the religion so odious to the papal monster,” and “I do not fear the shame of the name ‘Bohemian,’ which is glorious in the sight of God.” (126) A similar observation of nationalism can be made in regards to the Wycliffite revolts in England, in which Lollards, led by Wat Tyler, caused an uprising against King Richard II, in which they decapitated the Catholic Bishop Simon of Sudbury. The goal was to sever England from the Universal Church and create an English Wycliffite church. (127)
The execution Wat Tyler, before King Richard II
These revolts, and the political effects of the Black Plague, presaged how Protestantism would break down Europe and act as a seminal mover in the development of nationalism. Hilaire Belloc spoke of this consequence of Protestantism, “that unity has been broken by a religious revolution in which the corporate economy of the craftsmen disappeared and the already long- decaying village system disappeared with it.” (128)
In England, the State established an English church — the Anglican Church — and when English revolted against the Protestant policy of William Cecil, 1st Baron of Burghley, hundreds of Catholics were rounded up and butchered and, in the words of Belloc, “there was not a village that had not its corpses swinging from trees.” (129) The inevitable result of Protestantism was the perception of the Catholic Church as an evil and foreign entity, and the push for the formation of national churches.
Luther and Zwingli may have hated each other, they may have disagreed on the sacraments, but they agreed on one thing: to attack the organization of Christians under the Universal Church. (130) Luther held that there needed to be a separation between the German kings and rulers, and the Catholic Church. In his Address to the Nobility of the German Nation (a title that unto itself denotes German pride), Luther praised the heretical, pro-Islamic German tyrant, Frederick II, speaking about how “those beloved princes the Emperors Frederick, the First and the Second, and many other German emperors were, in former times, so piteously spurned and oppressed by the popes, though they were feared by all the world.” It is interesting that he would pick Frederick II, he was not too different from Luther. Frederick was, as Belloc said, “one of the most intelligent and most dangerous men that ever ruled in Christendom”. (131) He preferred Islam over the Catholic Faith, saying to the ambassador of Sultan al-Kamil, Fakhr-ad-Din:
“That [the Islamic religion] is excellent, far superior to the arrangement of those fools, the Christians. They choose as their spiritual head any fellow they will, without the smallest relationship to the Messiah, and they make him the Messiah’s representative. That Pope there has not claim to such a position, whereas your Khalif is the descendent of Muhammad’s uncle.” (133)
Now, contrast these words with this statement of Luther:
“They say that there is no better temporal government than among the Turks, though they have no canon nor civil law, but only their Koran; we must at least own that there is no worse government than ours, with its canon and civil law, for no estate lives according to the Scriptures, or even according to natural reason.”
Hitler, like Luther and Fredrick before him, also preferred Islam over Catholic Christendom, saying:
“You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” (134)
(From left to right): Luther, King Frederick II, Adolf Hitler
Frederick II signed a treaty with the Muslims, giving the Christians control over Jerusalem for only ten years while giving the Muslims possession of Solomon’s Temple. He even told the Muslims one day, “God has now sent you to the pigs,” referring to the Christians. It was this same Frederick who, in 1240, brought an army of Muslims, alongside Europeans, into Central Italy. The Muslims did not hesitate to fight and kill the Pope’s troops. They ascended the walls of the church of San Damiano, saw a multitude of women and charged with the intention of ravishing them. A pious woman, St. Clare, was present, and before the heretics could seize their victims she cried out to God:
“Lord Jesus, do not permit these defenseless virgins to fall into the hands of these heathen. Protect them; for I, who have nourished them with Your love, can do nothing for them.”
All of a sudden the spirit of fear seized the barbarians; their boldness turned to panic, they clambered over the walls and fled with fright, (134A) and the heretics emulated the demons whom they worshipped, and fled from the ever glorious church.
That Luther would praise an emperor who praised Islam, hated the Catholic Church and brought in Muslim mercenaries to invade Catholic Italy, in a speech directed to the German elite. shows that he really wanted a German severed from Catholic Christendom, severed from the Roman Church, a separate nation and people; it shows a sign of nationalist fervor.
What Luther did was really sow the seeds for German nationalism. One can say that Luther’s revolt was the incipient stage of of German nationalism and identitarianism, as it emphasized the importance of a German Christianity, a German Bible, a German church, as opposed to a Catholic Universal Church. Once you remove the Universal nature of the church, then it becomes a national church, and from this, comes nationalist religion. “I thank God,” Luther would say, “that I can hear God now in my German tongue. Neither in Latin, nor Greek, nor Hebrew language would He be the same.” (135)
The reverence for Luther as the patriarch for German identitarianism was very vibrant and animate in 19th and 20th century Germany. Wilhelm Wundt, a pioneer behind the racialist “folk psychology” of the 19th and 20th centuries, wrote: “The work of Martin Luther made possible the rebirth of Christian faith through the German spirit.” (136) For philosophers like Hegel, the Catholic Faith did a heavy blow against the German people for having gotten rid of its native pagan religion, and replacing it with the Semitic religion of Israel and the Jews.
Wilhelm Wundt
The Reformation, on the other hand, was for Hegel the exemplary collective expression of German national identity. As he wrote:
“Christianity has emptied Valhalla, felled the sacred groves, extirpated the national imagery as a shameful superstition, as a devilish poison, and given us instead the imagery of a nation whose climate, laws, culture, and interests are strange to us and whose history has no connection whatever with our own. A David or a Solomon lives in our popular imagination, but our country’s own heroes slumber in learned history books, and, for the scholars who write them, Alexander or Caesar is as interesting as the story of Charlemagne or Frederick Barbarossa. Except perhaps for Luther in the eyes of Protestants, what heroes could we have had, we who were never a nation? Who could be our Theseus, who founded a state and was its legislator? Where are our Harmodius and Aristogiton to whom we could sing scolia as the liberators of our land? The wars which have engulfed millions of Germans were wars waged by princes out of ambition or for their own independence; the people were only tools, and even if they fought with rage and exasperation, they still could only ask at the end: ‘Why?’ or “What have we gained?’ The Reformation, and the bloody vindication of the right to make reforms in religion, is one of the few events in which a part of the nation took an interest, an interest which did not evaporate, like the interest in the Crusades, as the imagination cooled, but which was animated by a sense of an abiding right, the right in matters of religious opinion to follow one’s own self wrought or self-acquired conviction.” (137)
Luther’s hatred against the Jews became a central focus in German nationalism, and this is especially seen in anonymous 1881 German nationalist essay, entitled “Luther and the Jews”, in which the idea of being a Protestant Christian is synonymous with being German, interlinking race with religion:
“A Jew cannot be a German because a true German can only be someone who is a Christian. …How can we callow among us a people that slanders and derides every day our Lord and Savior? And because Christ stands in the center for our Dr. Martin Luther, he speaks with a true, holy wrath against the Jews.” (138)
Luther wanted to reduce the position of the Pope to just one of prayer and weeping, saying to the German nobility: “His office should be nothing else than to weep and pray constantly for Christendom and to be an example of all humility.” One can see the motivation of separating the German race from the universal Church of Rome, setting a difference between Germans and “the Romanists,” saying in one part of his address to the German nobility: “let us rouse ourselves, fellow-Germans, and fear God more than man, that we be not answerable for all the poor souls that are so miserably lost through the wicked, devilish government of the Romanists, and that the dominion of the devil should not grow day by day, if indeed this hellish government can grow any worse, which, for my part, I can neither conceive nor believe.”
Luther marked a line between the Italians the Germans: the Roman Church, in Luther’s eyes, had destroyed Italy and now wanted to come for Germany:
“Now that Italy is sucked dry, they come to Germany and begin very quietly; but if we look on quietly Germany will soon be brought into the same state as Italy.”
The historian, Thomas H. Dyer, in his History of Europe, astutely observed that Luther’s cause was for a German attack on Roman thought. “The Reformation,” he writes, “was a reaction of the Teutonic mind against the Roman.” (139)
In the words of Luther, German “Princes, nobles, and cities should promptly forbid their subjects to pay the annates to Rome and should even abolish them altogether.” Luther took whatever corruptions he saw in Rome as a pretense to foment division between Germans and the universal Church, saying that the German “Christian nobility should rise up against the Pope as a common enemy and destroyer of Christianity, for the sake of the salvation of the poor souls that such tyranny must ruin. …Thus those at Rome would learn that we Germans are not to remain drunken fools forever”. Luther demanded that German governments outlaw any German from going to Rome for pilgrimage, stating to the German nobility:
“Pilgrimages to Rome must be abolished, or at least no one must be allowed to go from his own wish or his own piety, unless his priest, his town magistrate, or his lord has found that there is sufficient reason for his pilgrimage. This I say, not because pilgrimages are bad in themselves, but because at the present time they lead to mischief; for at Rome a pilgrim sees no good examples, but only offence. They themselves have made a proverb, ‘The nearer to Rome, the farther from Christ,’ and accordingly men bring home contempt of God and of God’s commandments. … That this false, misleading belief on the part of simple Christians may be destroyed, and a true opinion of good works may again be introduced, all pilgrimages should be done away with. … If any one wishes to go on a pilgrimage or to make a vow for a pilgrimage, he should first inform his priest or the temporal authorities of the reason, and if it should turn out that he wishes to do it for the sake of good works, let this vow and work be just trampled upon by the priest or the temporal authority as an infernal delusion”
Luther, thus, wanted the German governments to prevent their subjects from going to Rome, and therefore, to further isolate the German Christians from the universal Church. This was amongst the steps towards German nationalism and the end of the unity of Christendom. Writing as a seminal influence towards nationalism, and with the desire to sever the German nation from Christendom, Luther once wrote: “the German princes have now learned — they who were formerly most worthy of trust, to submit to the Roman idol to do nothing better than break their word, to the perpetual ignominy of our nation.” (140) To Luther, for the German princes to remain loyal to Rome was a disgrace, not for orthodox Christianity, but for the German nation. Destroying the relationship between the German nobility and Rome was, thus, essential for Christianity, and ultimately, for the rise of the German’s peoples dignity. This envisage to fully sever Germany from Roman influence was held in Germany, even to the times of Hitler himself. “I do insist,” Hitler once said, “on the certainty that sooner or later — once we hold power — Christianity will be overcome and the German church established. Yes, the German church, without a Pope and without the Bible, and Luther, if he could be with us, would give us his blessing.” (141)
Luther also pushed the German nobility to control the building of Catholic monasteries: “Let no more mendicant monasteries be built! God help us! there are too many as it is.” In other words, Luther wanted the State to overpower the Church. The Catholic Church, to him, had become an entity that overlapped the national boundaries of German governments. By the late 16th century, 50 of Germany’s 65 imperial states had become Protestant. It was the Protestant religion that helped solidify the German identity and nation.
In fact, one of the reasons why Austria was not included in Germany’s 1871 unification was because it was traditionally Catholic. In 1906, the German Chancellor, Prince Bernard von Bulow, told his government’s representatives abroad in 1906, that if Austria were to be added into Germany, “We shall thereby receive an increase of about fifteen million Catholics so that the Protestants would become a minority … the proportion of strength between the Protestants and the Catholics would become similar to that which led to the Thirty Years War, i.e., a virtual dissolution of the German empire.” (142)
Protestantism is no rooted in the political essence of Germany, that till this day Luther is used for populist movements. For example, the rising Alternative for Germany party (AfD) presents posters with Luther’s portrait adjacent to his infamous words: Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise (Hier steje ich und kann nicht anders), alongside the slogan: “Courage to Truth” (Mut zur Wahrheit):
There is a video of a speech given by one of the AfD leaders, Bjorn Hocke, and it is prefaced by a Protestant hymn, Wach auf du deutsches Land (Wake up, you German land), written by Johann Walter, a Lutheran poet of the Reformation era. The first verses of the song sing:
Wake up, wake up, You German land!
You have slept enough,
bethink, what God has turn to You,
wherefore he has created You!
Bethink, what God has sent You
and entrust You his utmost pledge,
therefore You should arise!
In the video, social-Darwinistic influence and apocalyptic language is expressed. In one part of the video, Bjorn Hocke, with words reminiscent to the prefacing Protestant hymn, says:
“Perhaps it is the last chance for our people to once again awaken.”
Later on he speaks of mass violence in the streets of Germany, saying: “this country will quickly become a country of civil war.” He then goes on to express gratitude to Thilo Sarrazin, a German eugenist, social Darwinist and high ranking member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Bjorn says of the German eugenist: “I believe without Thilo Sarrazin we would not be sitting here today… he characterized Germany as self-abolishing, it is not simply a prophecy of doom, but a reality.” The influence and impact of Luther and apocalyptic Darwinism in current German politics, is seen in this video:
The Berlin pastor, Ernst Shaeffer, wrote in 1917 that Luther pursued the defense of “a German national Christian religion”. (143)
English eugenist, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, loved Germany so much that he became a German citizen, and was admired by both Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler. He too loved Luther and once said: “Unconditional patriotism and conditional theology made him [Luther] throw off his monastic habit.” (144) In other words, a limited theology with fanatic nationalism is what drove Luther to war against the Catholic Church. “Luther was more of a politician than a theologian,” said Chamberlain, he was “above all a political hero.” Chamberlain also wrote of Luther:
“It was Luther’s first thought to look in the Scripture for a political reformation. …Religious and social questions mingle together in the Reformation; it was in fact quite as much a social and political revolution as a religious movement. … Thus it was no accident that Luther was called on to take a leading part in the social and political struggles which followed on his theological controversies.” (145)
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, both as a young man and as an adult. Even at a young age, he looked sinister
It is not to our marvel that Protestant church historian, H. Hermelink, called Luther “one of the greatest politicians of Germany”. (146) German nationalist, Alfred Falb, wrote in a 1921 book, Luther and the Jews: Germany’s Leading Men and Judaism, that:
“At a time when the pagan-Jewish spirit in the Roman Church had conquered the West, when the Jewish loaning of money dominated Europe and slowly gave birth to capitalism… there arose in the most dire circumstances the liberator in Luther’s fighting heroism. Pure German in his blood and born in poverty, he carried the fate of Germany in his chest. But this fate is yet to be fulfilled! He foresaw what is happening now; posterity ignored his warnings. Only the future will complete what he already felt in his anxious soul. …A pointer in this book.” (147)
In the official publication for the German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewung), it said:
“His [Luther’s] literary attacks against Judaism are the fruit of an enduring struggle for the birth of an unlimited, European Christian way of thinking and feeling; they are a legacy of the eternal German spirit that shall never be forgotten.” (148)
In the 450th birthday of Luther in 1933, Julius Streicher, in his weekly journal, Der Sturmer (“the Assailant”), spoke of Luther as such:
“Luther stands before us as the warrior against the international power of the Jews. But his stance has been concealed from us. This is the great sin of omission of all responsible national educators. For enlightenment about the true nature of the Jews is neither an act of hate or envy but a duty for self-preservation patriotism. We hope that this is the time when Luther will be shown as a warrior to the people. We also want to see the full picture of Luther’s life in the church as the most proper place where truth must be honored.” (149)
Julius Streicher
For Alfred Falb, Luther had become the father of a “German religion.” He defended Luther’s rage against the Jews, speaking of them as such: “a hereditary, pernicious mental faculty in a people that, more than any other, inclines to be mentally ill, perverse, etc.” (150) In the 1930s the German Faith Movement hailed Luther as the presager of a world struggle for a new order of the earth dominated by en “eternal German spirit” and that Luther’s book, “The Jews and Their Lies” should be a “folk book” (Volksbuch) for the education of the German populace on the Jewish threat to civilization. (151)
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, LUTHER AND NAZISM
Martin Luther would influence Martin Heidegger, who would in turn be very influential on Nazi ideology
One of the most influential Nazi ideologues was Martin Heidegger, and amongst the biggest influences on his own philosophy, was Martin Luther. Although Heidegger was born Catholic, he eventually left the faith, writing to his priest, Engelbert Krebs, in 1918, that “the system of Catholicism” is “problematic and unacceptable.” He believed — as all heretics do — that the Catholic Faith was far away from the original state of Christianity, writing in 1919 that “the ancient Christian achievement was distorted and buried through the infiltration of classical science into Christianity. From time to time it reasserted itself in violent eruptions (as in Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard).”
Rejecting the Church, Heidegger turned, with strong fixation and focus, upon the works of Luther. From 1919 to 1923, Heidegger frequently referenced Luther in his lectures. In 1921, Heidegger possessed a full set of volumes of Luther’s writings. By 1922, Heidegger was seeking a teaching position at the University of Marburg. The German philosopher, Edmund Husserl, wrote a letter in support of him being a professor there, in which he mentions his desire to link Protestant theology with philosophy:
“There is one major theme of [Heidegger’s] studies, which are centered essentially upon the phenomenology of religion, that he, as a former ‘Catholic’ philosopher, understandably cannot treat here [at Freiburg] freely, namely, Luther. It would probably be of great importance for his development if he could go to Marburg. There he would be an important link between philosophy and Protestant theology (with which he is thoroughly acquainted in all of its forms and which he appreciates fully in its great unique values).”
According to American lawyer, John van Buren, “Heidegger saw himself . . . as a kind of philosophical Luther of western metaphysics.” According to Bultmann, “Heidegger himself never made a secret of the fact that he was influenced… most notably by Luther.” (152) Luther demanded a rejection of Catholic scholasticism and a return back to a “primal” Christianity. Heidegger, inspired by Luther’s aspiration, called for the “destruction of Christian philosophy and theology” and a return back to what he thought of as original Christianity.
Heidegger took Luther’s theology, secularized it and made it into a philosophy. As Edmund Schlink, a prominent scholar on Luther wrote, “Heidegger’s existential analytic of human Dasein [presence] is a radical secularization of Luther’s anthropology.” Heidegger’s teachings on Luther in the 1920s would have deep influence on well known Protestant theologians, such as Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Heinrich Ott. He saw metaphysics as “the way of salvation”. Heidegger wrote that “religious consciousness wins its new position with Luther.”
Heidegger took Luther’s fanatical emphasis on man’s enslavement to sin and interpreted it as being, that man is sin itself: “The being of man as such is sin. . . . Thus sin is not affixing moral attributes to man but rather his real core. In Luther, sin is a concept of existence.” St. John tells us, “He that committeth sin is of the devil: for the devil sinneth from the beginning.” (1 John 3:8) Since sin is of the devil, then to Luther, all of mankind’s existence itself is of the devil; and for Heidegger, humanity’s existence is enslaved to its fallenness, for as he writes: “Da-sein (human existence) has initially always already fallen away from itself and fallen prey to the ‘world.’” When writing this, he was doing so under the influence of Luther’s belief that man’s will was utterly controlled. In Heidegger, one find’s both Luther and his gnostic leanings.
In contrary to these evil writers, St. John says: “He that doth justice is just, even as he is just.” (1 John 3:7) Man, then, can be free from this enslavement from doing justice, or as Gregory Palamas wrote: “those who have elevated their minds to God and exalted their souls with divine longing, their flesh also is being transformed and elevated, participating together with the soul in the divine communion, and becoming itself a dwelling and possession of God;” (153) God, then, when man elevates his mind towards Him and strives to do good, transforms man into an instrument for His justice. While the gnostic worldview makes God into a hater of the physical body, St. Maximus the Confessor writes that “because God cares for what is lower, that is the body, and has given the command to love one’s neighbor, the soul prudently makes use of the body. By practicing the virtues the body gains familiarity with God and becomes a fellow servant with the soul.” (154) Such a beautiful teaching was conveyed by St. Bernard of Clairvaux in his letter to Pope Eugene III:
“If the heart be cleansed, free from vice, and relieved of the burden of its sins, it may hereby be easily relieved of the burden of its sins, it may hereby be easily raised to things above; the admiring soul may sometimes also for brief intervals be even kept entranced with wonder and amazement.” (155)
St. Maximus the Confessor (top left), St. John the Apostle (top right), St. Bernard of Clairvaux (bottom left) and St. Gregory Palamas, all men who fought gnosticism
At the heart of Heidegger is the aim at destroying tradition. His mission was to obliterate the tradition of Aristotelian scholasticism and go back to the pagan philosophers before Aristotle and Socrates, and he looked up to Luther’s mission of destroying Catholic tradition and replacing it with “primal” Christianity as his inspiration. As scholar Ken Hiltner notes:
“What Luther and Heidegger each envisioned was a deconstruction which could reclaim Christianity’s original revolutionary spirit from the Greek philosophical thinking co-opting it. The irony here is that the Greek tradition threatening Christianity was, in part, the very tradition that these thinkers argued Christianity itself was designed to deconstruct. As the young Heidegger progressively put it in lecture notes that have recently come to light, “the great revolution [of Christianity] against ancient science, against Aristotle above all,” not only failed, but turned on itself as he became “the Philosopher of official Christianity—in such a manner that the inner experiences and new attitude of [Christian] life were pressed into the forms of expression in ancient science.” (156)
In 1929, Heidegger had written to Viktor Schwoerer with regard to appointments at the university:
“Either we restore genuine forces with educators emanating from the native soil to our German spiritual life, or we abandon it definitively to the growing Jewification.”
According to historian Yvonne Sherrat: “The term Heidegger used was Verjudung, an anti-Semitic term used in Mein Kamp.” Emmanuel Faye also confirms this in his book:
“As for the word Verjudung, it is the most egregious example of anti-Semitism. It shadows precisely the discourse of Hitler, who, in the first part of Mein Kampf, speaks of the ‘Jewified universities’ (verjudeten Uniiversitaten).’” (157)
Adam Kirsch, the director of the MA program in Jewish Studies at Columbia University, once wrote on the connection bettwen Heidegger’s Nazi beliefs and his own philosophy:
“’The question of the role of World Jewry is not racial; it is, rather, the metaphysical question of the nature of a type of humanity, the absolutely unbound, that can assume the world-historical ‘task’ of uprooting all beings from Being,’ runs one of Heidegger’s dozen or so remarks about Jews.
But this is hardly exculpatory. On the contrary, it is especially damning because it brings anti-Semitism into the central precincts of his thought. For Heidegger, the ‘uprooting of beings from Being’ was the metaphysical curse of the modern world, the source of the nihilism that afflicted humanity.”
Joshua Rothman of the New Yorker writes that notes of Heidegger show that, even as Heidegger held the most banal and ignorant anti-Semitic beliefs (he wrote about a worldwide conspiracy of “calculating” Jews “unfurl[ing] its influence”), he also tried to formulate a special, philosophical, and even Heideggerian kind of anti-Semitism. (Jews, he writes, are “uprooted from Being-in-the World”—that is, incapable of authentically caring and knowing.)
According to Thomas Assheuer, writing in Die Zeit, “The Jew-hatred in ‘Black Notebooks’ is no afterthought; it forms the foundation of the philosophical diagnosis.” In other words, these newly published writings show that, for Heidegger, anti-Semitism was more than just a personal prejudice. In the Guardian, Philip Oltermann offers some choice passages:
“World Judaism,” Heidegger writes in the notebooks, “is ungraspable everywhere and doesn’t need to get involved in military action while continuing to unfurl its influence, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people.”
Photographs, impossible to unsee, show him wearing a Hitler moustache; that year, Heidegger told his students, “Let not theories and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your being. The Führer himself and he alone is German reality and its law, today and for the future.” In 1935, he spoke about “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism.
In ways large and small, he happily furthered the Nazi program—he applied the regime’s “cleansing” laws to the student body, for example, denying financial aid to “non-Aryan” students.
Heidegger never truly apologized for being a Nazi; even worse, he never directly and publicly addressed the reality of the Holocaust before he died, in 1976. (Thomas Sheehan’s essay “Heidegger and the Nazis” is an excellent, and dispiriting, overview of the philosopher’s Nazi years.)
Michael Wyschogrod (Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Houston) wrote in 1982:
“Not once did he utter a word of sorrow for what Germany had done to its victims. Instead, he tried to portray himself as an anti-Nazi who had joined the party only to protect the University of Freiburg. Even if this is true-personally, I do not believe it–the absence of a public condemnation of Nazi crimes makes Heidegger, in my view, a moral accomplice of those crimes. Once he had made his choice, Heidegger did not want to join what he considered the post-war cowards who reneged on their original loyalty. He was not going to besmirch a holy cause of his life. In that way, he remains fixed in history as a Nazi.”
Emmanuel Faye did a very in depth study on Heidegger and concluded:
“We now know that the attempt at self-justification of 1945 is nothing but a string of falsehoods. Heidegger claims that from 1934 on he no longer had a hand in the affairs of the university. In fact, at the request of Secretary of State Wilhelm Struckart, a high dignitary of the party close to Hitler and Himmler and the first president of the German Association for Racial Hygiene, he agreed to participate in the constitution of a new school of professors of the Reich.”
CONCLUSION
In the First World War one will find Protestantism, Islam and Darwinism to be the ideologies of great influence, for the Germans were Protestants and Darwinists, and while it is true that the Austrians were traditionally Catholic, atheism and Darwinism had greatly corrupted their society. Moreover, Islam was very much involved in the Great War, since the Ottomans were a great ally to the Germans, but even with them there was be a mixed ideology of both Sufism and Social-Darwinism, with the Ottomans seeing themselves as a superior people. The Young Turks utilized a mixture of Islam and Darwinian ideology to justify their genocide upon Greek, Assyrian and Armenian Christians.
In the Second World War, there was still this joining between Darwinism, Protestantism and Islam, with the Germans, fanatically upholding Luther and eugenics, and conspiring to butcher Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews, with Muslim auxiliaries. The Second World War was really a continuation of the First. Hence, in 1924, Thomas Mann wrote of “the Great War, in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely yet left off beginning.” And while our own times are referred to as a “post-Cold War” era, the reality is, in the words of Sean M. Lynn-Jones, “in many ways our age is better defined as the post-World War I” epoch. Therefore, if we are really living in the aftermath of the First World War, and since history is repeating itself, then we should look to the First World to have an idea as to what state the world will soon be in.
In that era leading to the First World War, that is, the nineteenth century, Social Darwinism had become extremely influential and popular. It is not as though Darwin’s theory just suddenly appeared and then took time to be grasped by the people. Darwin was merely feeding bread to ducks whose mouths were already open. On the very day it came out, on November of 1859, all of the 1,250 copies of his first book on evolution, On The Origin of Species, sold out. His publisher, John Murray, at that point was already about to publish three thousand copies of the second edition. “We shall soon be a good body of working men,” wrote Darwin to his colleague, Joseph Hooker, “& shall have, I am convinced, all young & rising naturalists on our side.” (159)
Nietzsche one year before his death
Indeed, these naturalists would eventually set the stage for a Darwinist society, wherein war, destruction and Darwinian struggle would be the new creed. If Protestantism paved the road towards a society vacuous of the Catholic Faith, Darwinism would now build on this, making not only a secular Europe, but one that made war on humanity itself. If Protestantism abolished free will for slavery under our sin nature, Darwinism as well abolished free will, but this time under “natural selection,” in which there is not the Creator of Order, but an embracing of utter chaos.
Luther saw his doctrine of rejecting free will as worthy of bringing the world to ruins for, and the Darwinists — or the “young & rising naturalists” — of the 19th and 20th centuries, saw Darwinism as worthy of bringing utter destruction and disarray to the earth for. If Luther said, “No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day”, then the violent idealists of the twentieth century would see violence and carnage as a means to their own ascendency and redemption.
An authority of this worship of chaos was Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in the words of Fromkin, was the “prophet of the age” in the twentieth century, in which it was “widely believed that only destruction could bring regeneration.” (160) The favoring of the destruction and annihilation of human life, based on the ideology of Darwinism, was taught and promulgated by Nietzsche. In 1880, Nietzsche wrote:
“The tendency must be towards the rendering extinct of the wretched, the deformed, the degenerate.”
The right to reproduce, said Nietzsche, must be neutralized, so that “race as a whole [no longer] suffers.” He also wrote:
“The extinction of many types of people is just as desirable as any form of reproduction.” (161)
The manifestation of this dream of redemptive chaos was the French Revolution, and it led other revolutions that did not fulfill the utopian visions of the fantasizers. This led to a mass popularity of the religion of destruction and the hatred for order. But, one cannot simply point to Nietzsche as though he was the originator of this way of thinking. Ideological and religious rebellions do not appear randomly on their own, they can only thrive in environments that have the right conditions for them to grow and spread. Think of heresy as bacteria. If the temperature is too cold, bacteria has difficulty thriving; but if you have a warm climate, moisture and some sustenance for the microorganisms, then bacteria will thrive. The same goes for heresy. Nietzsche did not gain popularity out of nowhere. He was a product of his time. The society in which he lived was already godless enough to accept whatever evils he taught. As Fromkin notes: “Hysteria and frenzy seemed to be the order of the day.” (162)
At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a glorification of violence and chaos, and there arose a belief that violence was natural in the cause of one’s race, nation and class. Nationalism and the eugenist belief in racial domination, were intertwined as principles innate to each other. Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, chief of staff for the Austro-Hungarian armed forces, said that war was “the basic principle behind all events on this earth.”
Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf
In 1897, Theodore Roosevelt, who was a eugenist and avid Nietzsche reader (163), reflected his Nietzschean and Darwinist beliefs when he said:
“All the great masterful races have been fighting races; and the minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues, then… it has lost its proud right to stand as the equal of the best.”
Roosevelt’s speech was reprinted in full and distributed throughout the United States, and its collective approval indicated the desire for war and chaos in the American populace. (164) As A.J.P. Taylor writes of that era:
“Men wanted violence for its own sake; they welcomed war as a relief from materialism. European civilization was, in fact, breaking down even before war destroyed it.” (165)
The degeneracy of this society was a result of centuries of anti-Catholicism, and the embracing of a god who dies. What do we mean by this? There is a continuity within German thought, from Luther, to Hegel, to Nietzsche, for all three believed in a god that dies. Luther taught an incipient form of this doctrine, Hegel elaborated on it, and Nietzsche simply declared that “God is dead.” Luther taught, contrary to Catholic doctrine, that the divinity of Christ died. In his 1540 Disputation on the Divinity and Humanity and Christ, Luther wrote:
“When therefore it is said that “the divinity died,” then it is implied that the Father too and the Holy Spirit have died. But this is not true, for only one person of the divinity, the Son, is born, dies, and suffers, etc. Therefore the divine nature, when it is take for a person, was born, suffered, died, etc., and this is true.” (166)
According to Lutheran scholar, Steven D. Paulson, Luther actually referred to Christ as a “pants-shitter God,” and that this actually inspired the Lutheran hymn writer, Johan von Rist to compose a hymn in 1628, entitled “O darkest woe,” in which it was said:
“O great dread
God himself is dead!
He died upon the cross…” (167)
Johan von Rist
Hegel elaborated on this theology, and he concluded that because God — the Truth and the Absolute — died, albeit temporarily, it showed that truth unto itself is not absolute, and that subjectivism was made manifest in the death of the divinity. “God has died,” wrote Hegel, “God is dead — this is the most frightful of all thoughts that everything eternal and true is not, that negation itself is found in God. The deepest anguish, the feeling of complete irretrievability, the annulling of everything that is elevated, are bound up with this thought.” (168)
For Hegel, Christ is merely a representation of the unity between the human self and God. The death of this representation, says Hegel, “is the painful feeling of the unhappy consciousness that God himself has died.” (169)
Luther declared that the Divinity had died, and so successive generations declared the death of God, and from such posterity, did the world behold the rise of German — with souls possessed by chaos — making war upon God Himself, wishing to make their fantasy, a reality. This was witnessed in the First World War, and especially in the Second World War.
A connection between Protestantism and the First World War was made by Alfred Rosenberg, the head ideologue for the National Socialists. Luther was praised by Rosenberg as the one who commenced the battle between German and the Catholic world. He wrote that the Germans, for a long time, were fighting like slaves for Rome, and not for the Teutonic race. It was not until Luther, Rosenberg writes, that the Germans began to finally defy the Catholic powers with their mixed — and not pure — races. In his own words:
“Seen in its broad outlines, the history of Europe is the history of the struggle between this new human type and the forces of Roman racial chaos, which, numbering in the millions, stretched from the Danube to the Rhine. This dark tide carried some glittering values on its surface and catered to some nerve tingling lusts; its waves spoke of a past of once mighty world dominion and of a religion which answered all questions. A considerable number of the Nordics succumbed to the seductive enticements with careless, even childlike, abandon. Thus they became themselves the servants of a kind of dream of ancient Roman grandeur. Too often they fought throughout the world in the cause of a fantasy, and so became, instead of the progenitors they had been, merely the inheritors. Until Martin Luther appeared on the scene, such was the form taken by the struggle between the Teuton and the forces of racial chaos. …Today, those supporters of national rights who yet preach the ideal of a united mankind and laud a single, organised, visible, ecumenical church which is to determine and embrace all public life, all science, all art, all ethics, on the basis of a single dogma, display the end result of those ideas, born of racial chaos, which have poisoned our true nature through the centuries. This is exemplified by the kind of commentator who says: What Austria is striving for, the whole world must attain on a vaster scale. This is racial pollution and spiritual murder elevated to a world political program. Emperor and pope once fought for this universalist and antinational idea; opposed to it were the German kings. Martin Luther created a national political idea as against the papal world monarchy.”
Alfred Rosenberg
Rosenberg affirmed that the new leader of Germany must be a mix of both Martin Luther — the one who rebelled against the Catholic Church — and Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, the mastermind behind pushing Germany to make war against France and Russia. (170) Rosenburg wrote:
“It is beyond question that it is the Moltke type, during the first period of a future Germany, which will form our league of men—let us call it the German Order. This group must step strongly into the foreground in order to save us in the present chaotic confusion. There is also a need for preachers with Lutherlike natures who hypnotise, and for writers who consciously demagnetise hearts. The Lutherlike leader in the coming Reich must, however, be clear about the fact that he must unconditionally abandon the system of Bismarck after victory. He must transfer the principles of Moltke to politics if he wishes not only to realise himself, but, also, beyond his death, to create a permanent Reich sworn to a highest value. Whatever shape things may take, whether eruptive, or powers creative of form, both must only be of the essence of the Nordic soul.” (171)
The linking between Moltke and the Third Reich sheds light on the conclusion that many hold: that the First and Second World Wars were actually just one single conflict, with a mere armistice taking place between the two parts of the one event. When one studies the times prior to the eruption of the First World War, one will find that it was not too different from our own times. In the times of the 1890s and 1900s, there was a tremendous amount of globalization, conferences on “disarmament,” international congresses, and talks about forming a league of nations. It really was just like now, human nature does not change, the ways of evil do not alter, the only thing that changes is our perspective on the rise of evil; to the masses, past tyrannies have fallen and will not rise up, but to the prudent, as long as evil exists, despotisms will always return.
The First World War, with its horrors and devastations, its innumerable loss of life, and all of the sinister philosophies and heresies that possessed the souls of those involved, was like a dark cloud that flooded the whole earth, becoming to a great degree the most destructive war that humanity had ever experienced. It was fought between the Triple Entente — that is, Great Britain, France and Russia — and the Triple Alliance — Germany and Austria-Hungary. The two alliances clashed, and an ocean of blood filled the earth. Twenty million soldiers perished on the fields of battle, another twenty-one million were wounded, and tens of millions more died of disease. On August 8th, 1914, just four days after Great Britain entered the war, the London publication, the Economist, called the war “perhaps the greatest tragedy of human history.”
The American historian and diplomat, George Kennan, described the war as “the grand seminal catastrophe of this century.” Fritz Stern, one of the leading intellectuals on German affairs and on the rise of the German volkisch movement, referred to the First World War as “the first calamity of the twentieth century, the Great War, from which all other calamities sprang.”
The destruction that the First World War caused went beyond the physical, its consequences were also spiritual. For after the war there was, in the words of Fromkin, “a wide-ranging freedom from restraint,” with deviancy, infidelity and anti-Christianity increased more so than what it was before.
The biggest misconception about the First World War is that it commenced because A Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip murdered the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and his wife, Sophie. The idea that that all of this violence, with tens of millions losing their lives in the most bloody and chaotic battlefields, all because of this one incident, is an unrealistic affirmation. Behind the outside outcry over the assassination, was years of German ideological animosity towards it neighbors; calculative plans to invade France and Russia, and Darwinian apocalyptic ideas of war between Teutons and Slavs. The murder of the Archduke and his wife did not cause the war, it provided the justification for a most wanted war on the part of the Germans.
I believe that this thirst for world domination, militarism and despotism, still lives on in Germany, only waiting for that very justification to occur, so that it can reawaken once again. Germany now is peaceful, but this is only a result of restraint and deception. This German maruna (to use the Arabic term for Islamic deception) was reflected by the words of Gustav Stresemann, who served as German Chancellor in 1923:
“It is the tragedy of our policy, that the Prussian and German army no longer exists. The policy of might (machtpolitik) will in the end always be the decisive factor. But while we have no might, we have to fight with the idea. We have a right for a powerful in Germany.” (172)
This was said in the 1920s, after the First World War, when Germany was brought to submission. If the Germans were, at that time, using deception as a distraction to make time for a militarist plan, then what makes us believe that they are not doing the same today?
The great World War will be caused, not by realists, but by fantasizers; with chimerical envisioning, they will drown the whole earth in blood to make their fantasy a reality. But the fantasies of the lovers of destruction never become reality, the only reality that is revealed is that all those who hate God, love death.
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REFERENCES
(1) Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, prologue, p. 6
(2) Kinloch 2005, pp. 113-135
(3) Kinloch 2005, pp. 113-135
(4) See Tooze, The Deluge, ch. 7, pp. 147-148
(5) See Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 39, p. 240
(6) See Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 36, p. 226
(7) See Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 41, p. 247
(8) Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 45, pp. 264-264; ch. 46, p. 274; ch. 39, p. 242
(9) See Kohn, WW4, part ii, scenario i, p. 12
(10) See Cohn, WW4, part ii, scenario i, p. 11
(11) See Kohn, WW4, part ii, scenario i, p. 12
(12) Kohn, WW4, part ii, scenario i, p. 20
(13) Kohn, WW4, part ii, scenario i, p. 20
(14) See Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 4, p. 32
(15) See Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 46, p. 273
(16) See Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 7, pp. 49-50
(17) W15, 27, in Weiner, Martin Luther: Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, ch. 2, p. 26
(18) E61, 422, quoted in Weiner, Martin Luther: Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, p. ch. 2, p. 25
(19) McGrath, In the Beginning, ch. 1, p. 7
(20) Ambrose, On the Mysteries, 9.53
(21) Letter to the Smyrnaeans, Ch 6
(22) See Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, notes for ch. 1, n. 10
(23) Moreri, A New and General Biographical Dictionary, Lollard
(24) La Moreri, Dictionnaire historique ou melange curieux de l’histoire sacree et profane, vol. 5 (1740), p. 213, quoted by Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch. 1, p. 14
(25) Encyclopedie des sciences religieuses, publ. sous la direction de F. Lichtenberger, vol. 8 (Paris: 1880, p. 347, in Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch. 1, p. 15
(26) Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, intro, p. 8
(27) Euthymii Zigabeni, Panoplia Dogmatica 40, Patrologia Graecia, quoted in Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch. 1, p. 17
(28) Synodicon of Boril, (Sofia: 1928), p. 92, in Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch. ch. 4, p. 62
(29) *In Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch. 4, p. 63*
(30)De compositione hominis, pp. 3-4 (London, 1884), in Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch. 4, p. 63
(31) The Inquisitorial Register of Jacques Fournier, Invocation of the devil: testimony of Arnaud Laufre, in Edward Peters, Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe, ch. ix, p. 264
(32) Johannes Janssen, History of the German People at the Close of the Middle Ages, vol. 1, part 2, ch. 2, pp. 212-213
(33) Quoted by Weiner, Martin Luther: Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestors, ch. 2, p. 22
(34) Table Talk, No. 963, W1, 487, in Weiner, Martin Luther: Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, ch. 2, p. 27
(35) Wiener, Martin Luther: Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, ch. 2, p. 26
(36) In Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch. 1, p. 22, taken from the Depositions of Johannes Reve of Becle.
(37) In Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch. 1, p. 25
(38) Acta inquisitonis Carcassonensis contra Albigensis a. 1308 et 1309,” Dollinger, vol. ii, p. 18, in Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformatoon, ch. 4, p. 64
(39) Gui, Manuel de l’inquisiteur, p. 26, in Vasilev, Heresy and the Protestant Reformation, ch. 5, pp. 90-91
(40) XXIV Conslusiones Wycclyf damnatae Londoniis in synodo, Fasculi Zizianorum, p. 278, in Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch. 4, p. 65
(41) Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises, p. 379, in Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch. 5, p. 90
(42) See Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch. 5, p. 90
(43) *Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch. 5, p. 91*
(44) N. Tanner, ed., Kent Heresy Proceedings 1511-12 (Kent Archeological Society: 1997), p. 2, in Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch. 5, p. 87
(45) Tyndale, Obedience, p. 111, in Vasilev, Heresy and the Protestant Reformation, ch. 5, p. 87
(46) W. Tyndale, Practice of Prelates, p. 284, in Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch. 5, p. 89
(47) Thomson, The Later Lollards, p. 253, in Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, ch.1, p. 30
(48) *Quoted by K.A. Hagen, A Theology of Testament in the Young Luther, p. 92*
(49) Belloc, The Great Heresies, p. 72
(50) John of Damascus, Orthodox Faith, book 3, ch. 2
(51) WA 45.239, 32-40, quoted in the Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology, P. 280
(52) St. John of Damascus, Orthodox Faith, 3.24
(53) St. John of Damascus, Orthodox Faith, 3.27
(54) Trishreden, Weimer Edition, Vol. 2, Pg. 107
(55) O’Hare, The Facts about Luther, p. 271
(56) De Servo Arbitrio, in op. lat. 7, 113 seq, ellipses mine, in O’Hare, Facts about Luther, p. 272
(57) The sermon of Cosmas the Priest against Bogomilism, in Edward Peters, Heresy and Authority, ch. iii, p. 113
(58) Pope Leo, Exsurge Domine, 1520
(59) City of God X.12, 13, 24
(60) Galton, Hereditary Genius
(61) St. John of Damascus, Orthodox Faith, 2.26
(62) E29, 196, in Wiener, Martin Luther: Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, ch. 2, p. 28
(63) De Caussade, The Sacrament of the Present Moment, ch. 5, p. 30
(64) See Merold Westphal, Hegel, Freedom, and Modernity, ch. 9, p. 152
(65) Hegel, The Philosophy of History, section iii, ch. 1, p. 415
(66) Philosophy of History, pp. 260, 41, as quoted by Weiner, Luther, p.87
(67) Quoted in John Witte, Law and Protestantism, ch. 4 p. 137
(68) Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twenty First Century, brackets mine
(69) See The Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich, p. 286
(70) Wittenb., ad. 5, 1573, sighted by O’Hare, The Facts about Luther
(71) Comment. in. Gal., sighted by O’Hare, The Facts About Luther
(72) Temple of Nature, canto i, III. 122n
(73) Zoonomia, sect. xxxix, 4.8
(74) Temple of Nature, Canto i, V. 295-302
(75) Temple of Nature, Canto i, V. 309-314
(76) See Charles Darwin, The Life of Erasmus Darwin, p. 36
(77) Stott, Darwin’s Ghosts, p. 176
(78) See Stanley L. Jaki’s introduction to A. Barruel’s History of Jacobinism
(79) McGrath, The Making of Modern German Christology, p. 19
(80) Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox, p. 121
(81) Adam, Protestantism and Modernisation in German Children’s Literature of the Late 18th Century.
(82) Mathesius, “Tischreden,” p. 171, sighted by Grisar, Luther, vol. 6, p. 247
(83) Quotes can be found in Grisar, Luther
(84) On May 29, 1545. Janssen, ibid., p. 286 f. , in Grisar, Luther
(85) Ibid
(86) K. Hagen, Deutsche Geschichte, etc. pp. 183-184, sighted by O’Hare, the Facts About Luther
(87) Canon William Barry, Four Centuries of Luther, The Tablet, p. 552, 1917
(88) Thomas Paine, Letter to Camille Jordan
(89) Voltaire Les Lettres d’Amabed (1769), Septième Lettre d’Amabed
(90) Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity, intro., pp. 46-47
(91) See J. Offer, Herbert Spencer and Social Theory, p. 74
(92) See the Appendix in Stott’s Darwin’s Ghosts, p. 299
(93) See Stott, Darwin’s Ghosts, ch. 12, p. 263
(94) Stott, Darwin’s Ghosts, ch. 12, pp. 268-269
(95) See Ross A. Slotten, The Heretic in Darwin’s Court, p. 245
(96) Wallace, The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural, pp. 49-50
(97) See Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, ch. v, p. 70
(98) From Theosophy, lecture 9, Theosophical Quarterly, July, 1928
(99) See Daniel Gasman, Scientific Origins of National Socialism, p. 3
(100) See Daniel Gasman, Scientific Origins of National Socialism, p. 17
(101) See Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 10, pp. 68-69
(102) See Worringer, Ottomans Imagining Japan, ch. 3, p. 50
(103) See Worringer, Ottomans Imagining Japan, ch. 3, pp. 50-51
(104) See Worringer, Ottomans Imagining Japan, ch. 5, p. 126
(105) Quoted by Worringer, Ottomans Imagining Japan, ch. 5, p. 136
(106) Worringer, Ottomans Imagining Japan, ch. 5, p. 139
(107) Quoted by Worringer, ch. 5, p. 142
(108) See Worringer, Ottomans Imagining Japan, ch. 6, p. 167, brackets mine
(109) See Worringer, Ottomans Imagining Japan, ch. 6, pp. 178-179
(110) Worringer, Ottomans Imagining Japan, ch. 7, p. 185
(111) See Worringer, Ottomans Imagining Japan, ch. 7, p. 196
(112) See Worringer, Ottomans Imagining Japan, ch. 7, p. 175, brackets mine
(113) See Worringer, Ottomans Imagining Japan, ch. 7, p. 189
(114) Detailed references given in Grisar, Luther, vol. v, p. 413, in Weiner, Luther, p. 73
(115) In Weiner, Luther, p. 74
(116) W53, 525 abridged, in Weiner, Luther, p. 75
(117) See Weiner, Luther, p. 76
(118) Weiner, Martin Luther: Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, ch. 2, p. 26
(119) Quoted in Wiener, Martin Luther: Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, ch. 2, p. 26
(120) *Wiener, Martin Luther: Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, ch. 2, p. 27*
(121) See Weiner, Luther, p. 88
(122) Quoted by Weiner, Luther, p. 90
(123) Quoted by Weiner, Luther, p. 90
(124) As quoted by Weiner, Luther, p. 100
(125) *As quoted by Weiner, Luther, p. 100*
(126) See Donnelly’s translation of St. Thomas More’s Responsio Ad Lutherum, Preface to Luther’s Work, Written to a Certain Bohemian Noble, p. 102
(127) See Belloc, How the Reformation Happened, Introductory, pp. 46-48
(128) Belloc, The Crusades, ch. 3, pp. 22-23
(129) Belloc, How the Reformation Happened, ch. v, pp. 190-191
(130) See Belloc, How the Reformation Happened, ch, iii, p. 137
(132) Belloc, The Great Heresies, What was the Reformation, p. 87
(133) See Carroll, A History of Christendom, vol. iii, ch. vi, p. 214
(134) Speer, Albert (1971). Inside the Third Reich. Trans. Richard Winston, Clara Winston, Eugene Davidson. New York: Macmillan, p. 143; Reprinted in 1997. Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs. New York: Simon and Schuster. p. 96
(134A) Englebert, St. Francis of Assisi, ch. viii, p. 119
(135) See Weiner, Luther, p. 81
(136) Quoted by Eric W. Gritsch, Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitism, p. 112
(137) Hegel, Early Theological Writings, p. 146, trans. T.M. Knox
(138) Quoted by Eric W. Gritsch, Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitism, p. 111
(139) Quoted in Weiner, Martin Luther: Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, ch. 1, p. 15
(140) See Donnelly’s translation of St. Thomas More’s Responsio Ad Lutherum, Preface to Luther’s Work, Written to a Certain Bohemian Noble, p. 101
(141) Hitler’s Speeches, edited by N.H. Baynes, Oxford, 1942, p. 369, quoted by Frank R. Zindler, in his foreword for Wiener’s Martin Luther, Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, p. ix
(142) See Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 9, p. 55
(143) Quoted by Eric W. Gritsch, Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitism, p. 112
(144) Quoted by Eric W. Gritsch, Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitism, pp. 112-113
(145) Quoted by Wiener, Martin Luther: Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, ch. 1, p. 17
(146) H. Hermelink in Zeitschrift fur Kirchengeschichte, vol. 29, 1908, p. 478
(147) Quoted by Eric W. Gritsch, Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitism, p. 114
(148) Quoted by Eric W. Gritsch, Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitism, p. 115
(149) Quoted by Eric W. Gritsch, Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitism, p. 115
(150) Quoted by Eric W. Gritsch, Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitism, pp. 114
(151) Eric W. Gritsch, Martin Luther’s Anti-Semitism, pp. 114-115
(152) Van Buren, The Young Young Heidegger, p. 150
(153) Palamas, The Triads, C. II. ii. 5
(154) Maximus the Confessor, On the Cosmic Mystery of Christ, Ambiguum 7, iv, p. 66, trans. Blowers & Wilkins
(155) St. Bernard, On Consideration, 5.32
(156) Hiltner 2003: 78, quoted by Vishwa Adluri, Heidegger, Luther, and Aristotle
(157) Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger, the Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, p. 34
(158) Faye, Heidegger, p. 83
(159) See Stott, Darwin’s Ghosts, ch. 1, p. 4
(160) Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 5, p. 39
(161) Quoted by Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, ch. 7, pp. 266-247
(162) Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 5, p. 40
(163) See Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, ch. 3, p. 94
(164) Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 6, p. 41
(165) See Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 6, p. 40
(166) Luther, Disputation on the Divinity and Humanity and Christ, trans. Christopher B. Brown
(167) See Paulson, Lutheran Theology, p. 100
(168) Quoted by Paulson, Lutheran Theology, p. 100
(169) See Paolo Diego Bubbio, Hegel: Death of God and Recognition of the Self
(170) See Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, ch. 49, p. 287
(171) Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century
(172) Quoted by Weiner, Luther, p. 91