Black Legends And the Light of the World The War of Words with the Incarnate Word John C., Oxford Associate Professor of History St. John’s University 2 BLACK LEGENDS BLACK LEGENDS AND THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD: THE WAR OF WORDS WITH THE INCARNATE WORD © 2011 John C. Rao First Edition A paperback copy of this book may be purchased from Remnant Press P.O Box 1117 Forest Lake, MN 55025 Visit us online at www.com 3 INTRODUCTION “Christ said ‘I am the Truth’. He did not say, ‘I am custom’.
Gregory VII, citing Tertullian “There are times when an elevated spirit is a true infirmity. No one understands it. It even passes for a kind of mental limitation.” -Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe “Now battle had to be joined, and therefore men were needed to restore a new order, and new theologians as well, to whom the evil was manifest from its outward phenomena down to its most subtle roots; then the time would come for the first stroke of the consecrated sword, piercing the darkness like a lightning flash. For this reason individuals had the duty of living in alliance with others, gathering the treasure of a new rule of law.
But the alliance had to be stronger than before, and they more conscious of it.” -Ernst Jünger, Auf den Marmorklippen, XX 4 BLACK LEGENDS With many thanks to my father, mother, and sister, Mrs. Carol Palmieri, for their constant encouragement; to Linda and John Cuff for the initial inspiration for this work; to Christopher Ferrara and Michael Matt for intellectual support; to Richard Dunn and George Sanseverino for financial aid; to Jeanne Barrett for editorial assistance; to Pasticceria Rocco in New York City for a congenial working environment; and to all the friends of the Roman Forum, from New York to Gardone Riviera and Estonia, for their love of the Incarnate Word---the Light of the World---and their Catholic pilgrim spirit. 5 INTRODUCTION Table of Contents Introduction: On Weaponry and Terrain. Chapter One First Blood Chapter Two The Attack of the Word Chapter Three The Turbulent Battle for a Christian Imperial Order Chapter Four The New Ascent of Mount Tabor Chapter Five Counterattack and Resistance on the Cheap Chapter Six The War of All Against All or the Peace of the Reinvigorated Word Chapter Seven The Global Battle for Nature: Modern Naturalism and the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo 6 BLACK LEGENDS Chapter Eight The Naturalist Revolution, the Implosion of the GCSQ, and the Troubled Beginnings of the Ninth Crusade Chapter Nine The Ninth Crusade: Retrenchment and Renewed Assault Chapter Ten Firestorm in the Kingdom of the Word Chapter Eleven When the Salt Loses its Savor: Mindless Rout and Voluntary Enslavement to the Words Epilogue My End is My Beginning 7 INTRODUCTION Introduction: On Weaponry and Historical Terrain A.
A War Between “Words” and “the Word” The following pages offer a number of reflections on ecclesiastical history, based upon lectures given for the Roman Forum’s Summer Symposium at Lake Garda in Italy between 1993 and 2011. Although these meditations do, at times, focus upon rather specific events in the two millennia long life of the Church, they nevertheless do not represent an academic presentation of the Christian record and its theological underpinnings as such. Instead, their purpose is to provide the interested layman with a general, readable, thematic and bibliographic guide through a mass of otherwise daunting historical data. This guide is intended to inculcate the message that the essential issues, fundamental difficulties, and precise details of Catholic History can only properly be grasped with reference to the irrepressible, 8 BLACK LEGENDS unending, and ever more global war that the genesis, birth, and growth of the Catholic Faith have everywhere provoked.
What, exactly, is the nature of this war? Several giants of nineteenth century Catholic apologetics offered the clearest description of it. They argued that the struggle in question was a conflict waged over acceptance or rejection of the fullness of the Way, the Truth, and the Life brought into the world through the Incarnation of the Eternal Word: the only truly “new” and “different” event that has ever really taken place in the history of mankind. This clash, they added, was rendered inevitable, permanent, and monumental due to the existence of the Mystical Body of Christ—the Church—as the visible, organized, active continuation of the Incarnate Word and His teaching through the ages. And that struggle, they concluded, was intensified still further given that the Church more and more became a powerful, effective, rage-provoking “sign of contradiction” not simply to the opponents of Christian Truth, but to the enemies of each and every kind of Truth—rational, scientific, and aesthetic truth included.
Basic Church power and effectiveness come from the fact that fully awakened and practicing Catholics understand their need to struggle for individual salvation through her living, authoritative reality. But the actualization of the Church’s provocative potential in the natural realm has varied greatly over time in proportion to the seriousness of her commitment to two goals of the Incarnate Word possessing immediate, practical, historical and sociological importance. The first of these aims is the correction of sinful men and the flawed natural order in which social beings of flesh and blood must live and work out their salvation. Despite its supernatural foundations, such a project has precise contours 9 INTRODUCTION and can even be spelled out in transparent legal language.
The second aim, on the other hand, is much more difficult to capture in limited human terms. It is centered round a spiritual reorientation of both man and nature to the exalted task of giving glory to the God who created them; to a renovation of the entirety of Creation; to a transformation of all things in Christ. Exactly what this means entails a complex learning process that has unfolded over time, and has only done so in union with individual and social progress in sanctification. Whenever the Church takes her examination of and commitment to the full significance of the Incarnation of the Word seriously, she more vigorously proclaims the fact that her Christ-centered Faith, which is undeniably focused primarily on the work of individual salvation, nevertheless must also inevitably toil to perfect the whole of the created universe.
The fully conscious Bride of Christ sees and exuberantly rejoices in the truth that Catholicism cannot help but mobilize all the diverse riches of the cosmos and place them at the service of distinct persons; that, in doing so, it enables human beings to obtain everything that life offers temporally, upon the earth, to the greatest degree that its mortal, dependent character permits; and that in transforming the incomplete and subordinate natural order, it actually sharpens the individual man’s yearning for God, thereby providing him with further tools to labor more vigorously for a complete and eternal life with the Trinity in Heaven. An increased celebration of the treasures of the Catholic path to perfection is necessarily accompanied by a much more firm repudiation of any determinedly anti- 10 BLACK LEGENDS incarnational, anti-Word message. That kind of teaching, represented most powerfully in modern times by the man- centered naturalism promoted by the Enlightenment and its various interpreters, is understood to cheat and diminish the individual. Naturalism is seen to do so through its acceptance of the earthly status quo, marred by sin, as though it provided a self-evident, common sense, and truly practical guide to life.
Such an outlook is recognized as actually putting men to sleep regarding the multiform character and full potential of the universe that God intended human persons to inhabit and enjoy. Closed to correction and transformation in Christ, naturalism—along with all the other anti-incarnational positions taught throughout the ages—is therefore condemnable not only for blocking men from that fruitful temporal use of Creation which acutely sharpens their desire for eternal life. It is also reproachable for encouraging the individual to embrace earthly “goods” which unfailingly turn out to be peripheral, ephemeral, or even utterly meaningless and repulsive shadows. A sleeping, inactive Church is already an irritant to the supporters of the natural status quo.
After all, even such a half-dead body still suggests the possibility of an alternative to the guidelines for human existence that they wish to remain totally unquestioned. On the other hand, a fully awakened, militant Church; a Church stirred by a proper ecclesiology to a complete consciousness of her character and mission, is a truly much more threatening phenomenon. Defenders of the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” must inevitably view her as launching an intolerable assault on the good life as they conceive it. It is therefore logical that they feel the call to meet an active Catholic challenge in one of two ways: either by unleashing a total war 11 INTRODUCTION to eradicate what is perceived to be an intrusive and unnatural monster, or, failing to break her back directly, to deconstruct, subvert, and radically dilute the Church’s depraved historical and sociological influence.
Hence, that perennial conflict carrying us from the time of Christ until the present; from the sophists of the later Roman Empire to the personalists, pluralists, neoconservatives, and libertarians of our own era, whose basically unchanging battle plan and weaponry must now be addressed. Word Games Mars has not been friendly to the Church and to Catholics in their struggles on behalf of the cause of the Word in recent centuries. All the strong points on the battlefields of this endless conflict seem to lie in the hands of their well-outfitted opponents. The enemy’s overwhelming strategic advantage can be explained with reference to two points: the character of the arms that he carries into the fray, and the unwillingness of believing Catholics both to open their eyes to the weaknesses in their own line of defense, as well as to employ the most powerful weapons at their disposal on the terrain most suitable to gaining them a victory.
The best of the arms shouldered by the anti-Word enemy are not always the ones that directly draw blood. For, potent as the swords and guns aimed against the Church throughout the ages have admittedly been, such weapons generally pale in long-term effectiveness next to the damage that has been inflicted through written and spoken words. I am referring here to the words eventually shaped by gifted enemy rhetoricians into two related types of myth: “black legends” 12 BLACK LEGENDS designed to ridicule the Mystical Body and Catholic efforts to correct and transform the world in Christ on the one hand, and alternative “good stories” mimicking the language of the Faith, while stripping it of all substantive Christian meaning, on the other. So important is the broad role of these black legends and substitute narratives in the imposing array of forces battling the Faith through the centuries that the entire clash of the opponents and supporters of Catholic Christianity can legitimately be discussed as this book treats it: as a war between “words” and “the Word”.
Let us briefly examine both types of myths in turn. Strictly speaking, the term “Black Legend” refers to the complex of yarns invented in sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch, English, and German circles to defame Catholicism in general, but the Spanish Habsburgs and King Philip II (1556-1598) in particular. However, I am employing it in a much wider sense here, to indicate the entire body of half-mythical tales that has been used throughout the ages to attack the Catholic Faith and Catholic believers. We shall see that this arsenal of rhetorically effective cannon balls already began to be assembled in pre-Christian times, in the midst of the battles of the sophists against the Socratics, when proponents of “nature as is” grasped the threat to the demands of “business as usual” emerging from the philosophical hunt for the deeper meaning—the logos—that lay behind immediate surface appearances.
It was augmented, bit-by-bit, even through the seemingly most Christian of centuries.