At
Spearhead, a masculist webmag, a fella named Alcuin
positively reviews Aidan Nichols OP's attack on feminism's attack on God the Father. I checked out
Alcuin's blog. Boy, compared to him, I am a feminist running dog. The man is blunt. And smart. And about the huge feminist propaganda in so many movies (and commercials) , he is right on.
4 comments:
1. Civilization, culture etc have always been “effeminizing” -- drawing in some barbarian conquerors to constitute the ruling class that serves the domination needs of a particular military-industrial or military-agricultural or military-interpretive system. Consider the effeminizing effect of Islamic civilization upon Muslims, if one wishes for non-Western examples. Or Rousseau’s remarks on Confucian gentleman scholars and political decadence.
2. The Christian and post-Christian West, including socialism, has always been able to come up with authority figures, authoritarians, military commanders. This seems so easy, Christianity and its secularized aftermath are always coming up with crusades, 100-year wars, wars of the roses, 30-year-wars, and operation barbarossas in order to kill off the surplus value! … Very strange to propose valuationally summing up the history of Christianity not providing enough honour-driven fights!
3. Jesus’ Beatitudes are not rightly interpreted as “feminine.” To be sure, they aren’t a code of military honour (as Christendom had with the knights of the holy grail, and to some extent even in real-world Christian militaries), but their strict prohibition of involvement in the busyness of civil life, including ersatz cities such as the desert communities of the Essenes - do not resist evil - does not suggest anything feminine or soft. (Jesus’ only weakness may have been his inability to stay in the desert, his need to enter the villages and even eventually Jerusalem in order to advise culture of its worthlessness. And a culture aware of its worthlessness is Christendom -- the world where “worldly” is a term of opprobrium.)
4. Nichols’ complaint against Nietzsche seems beside the point. God the Father was well on his way to eternal rest underground, cf Wotan in Wagner’s Rinse Cycle. Rather than our seeing us as the projection of God, Feuerbach et al wanted us to fancy that God is the projection of us. Nietzsche interfered with this. Freud semi-remedy’d Nietzsche’s revelations by permitting God the Father to vanish underground not in a cloud of anti-semitic music but in a cloud of diagnoses (God is a collective obsessional neurosis, etc).
5. But then, admittedly, Freud rather encouraged paranoia in us vis-à-vis our own fathers: every pang of conscience should remind a son that his father wishes to castrate him. I guess, then, that Freud would see in the work ethic not as the son’s wish to santify the world for God the Father but as the sublimation-materialisation of the son’s phallos: the faithful son’s share of mammon is one’s penis in a condition that one’s father cannot easily destroy. That without the eyes of faith the sanctify’d Calvinist seculum seems a numinous desolation compared with the fleshpots of sacramental mystagogy that flatter Gaia (Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, pp. 228f) proves Calvin a righteous prodical son who will waste the half fakeness of the father’s essence or estate by taking it to the seculum, and not leaving everything a livelihood for the inner world. … In contrast, the Dominicans did not take the Summa theologiae to the world, and it seems Nichols who prefers to speak of divinization with the Eastern Orthodox rather than Aquinas continues this cowardly tradition -- while demanding more manliness! (“Divinization” “apotheosis” was accomplish’d by pagans. Couldn’t have been that difficult.)
6. Yet curiously by Freud’s account, shouldn’t we expect that girls and orphan boys have not mererly defective consciences but no conscience at all? Without a penis that might be cut off, girls should grow up to have only envy as a value system. Every boy without a castrating father in the home should grow up a total psychopath.
7. If Dominican Nichols wishes a culture without distrust of the Father, I am afraid he must abolish the New Testament and the Old Testament. (Your ex T. is much bolder on this point than the Dominican!)
8. Jesus rolls through the temptations from Satan without much difficulty, but the temptation in Gethsemane to let pass the cup presented to him by his father was evidently most difficult. This was not a temptation from Satan, or any other mediating force or creature on whom the blame can be dump’d by theodicy’s fanciful God-rescuers. This was direct I-thou between Jesus and the Father. As Anselm says, God the Father was in a jam because of the failure of his creature Man, and thus needed the Son to take the blame and destruction that Man deserved. (The Father receives the praise; the Prodigal Son accepts the blame but is deem'd likeable and a role model for faith and repentance; and the Elder Son rolls his eyes at the bad family dynamics.)
9. And in the Old Testament, for the sake of God’s favour, Abraham undertakes to sacrifice his manifest son Isaac. God would indeed have been okay with the “death” of Isaac, but Jehovah intervenes and indicates a substitute. Reneg Girard would have it that true, real Christianity insists on the innocence of the scapegoat, contrary to the Torah where we read that communal guilt really is laid upon the scapegoat. More to the point, Christianity and Judaism indicate the guilt of the sacrificers, including no doubt the Girardian theoretician community, who indeed don’t rescue the victim but at least come along later with theories on how the victim was innocent, and maybe do critiques of social and economic injustices so that guilt will eventually not happen any more and the need for scapegoats as community-foundations will be abolish’d, any millenium now. … If the Father or God were “wholly other,” as Nichols apparently insists, He wouldn’t have spoken as He did at Matthew 3:17. The only community for whom God is wholly other is the community of revelation rejection (John 1:1-14).
10. Difficult to understand feminists in our psychodrama. By accusing the Father they keep him in view and prevent him from going under like Wotan (or prevent him from going up into a hot air balloon as the Wizard, American Prospero, surrounded by a cloud of incompetence claims that prevent attribution of blame).
11. »God the Father is at the present doing battle against the Baals and Ashuras of feminism« says the reviewer. Does this mean they keep him in view? Nichols refers to “the sacrificial Father.” Perhaps this means the Father wishes this sacrifice to proceed so that finally he can rest in peace below ground, and leave the world to Siegfried and Brunhilde. But what if the Ashuras and Baals wish to go under too?
12. Who is the feminist in our psycho-drama? The stepmother -- the real mother who does a desublimational end run around the traditional fuss and bother with a ‘good’ mother aspect? Despite the successes feminism has had with bourgeois reforms in economics, law and politics, the son somehow gets the message that he must be either a porno-immersed jerk who promotes rape culture, or a “puppy dog” (as in the complaint heard from young women in the early-ish feminist era “I want a man not a puppy dog.”) I guess the message received by the daughter is that she can be either a full-time activist protesting against the karma of the West, or a fail’d human person and defeated republican housewife. No message from the father comes through because — who knows? Go try to find a real Father and ask! Maybe he has no message because he is both the absent-father progenitor of the West (Osiris) and divorced mother’s new boyfriend critiquer of the West (Seth) who holds that the only good elements of the West are anti-Western resistance movements, protests, etc. … Robert Graves (The White Goddess, p. 110) hints that in order to deal with the conflict between good Father Osiris (progenitor of the positive, waxing year [= wicked witch of the east?) and his ‘wierd’, bad Seth (the spirit of the negative, waning year [=wicked witch of the west?]), Isis values the male infant Horus and tries to slamp the total karma of Osiris and Seth into him (though I surmise that Horus has a double too). Eve said, “With the help of Jehovah I have gotten a man child” Abel, but then his fratricidal brother Cain too was begotten and born.
»Then advented the pantomime ass —
Funny but not that helpful for revaluation.«
—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil ¶8
Or with the Wicked Witch of the West bringing fire to the Scarecrow, perhaps she is Ham, Niger, in the east (hamitic element of fire). For the over the rainbow world maybe is a mirror reflection -- thus west is east, and vice versa.
Dorothy, wearing the rub e red slippers, is perhaps the replacement non-charismatic nonlegitimate American version of the wicked witch of the east (reflection: west) over whom she drop'd her Kansas house. West: Japheth, Albinus -- element is water, and Dorothy douses the fire set into the Scarecrow with water. The wicked witch of the west (Reflection east) goes under because of the water, declaring "I'm me alting"?
Glinda, good witch of the north (left) must be Shem? Does the wand, rod -- tarot minor mystery clubs, suit of Japheth -- which she carries in her air (shemitic element) bubble belong to Dorothy, Japheth? ... Dorothy has given the witch's broom (the rod, wand, baton) to the Wizard, hasn't she? But now I recall that Glinda's wand has a star pentacle on it -- the suit of Shem.
... BTW, kind of astonishing that Over the Rainbow isn't used for 'feminist' critiques: the patriarch wizard (the planetary line of man, in Hermes, Mercury) is a fraud, his overwhelming mystagogy is empty techno showmanship, like that of a magician in a travelling show. The unfraudulent powers are goddesses witches. The psychodrama focuses on a girl, Dorothy. ... But instead we get agitprop that man's "capitalism" is so powerful as to socially construct ageist lookism, GWB as Hermestresmegistos can out-think all the smart people at Harvard and the Kennedy Skoo of Government and subvert their culture of peace in order to perpetrate war on the people of Iraq. ...
"Who rang that bell?!" (suit of canaan, also hearts). The wizard, Melchizedek, king of hearts, like Muhammad doesn't like the ringing of bells.
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