Takimag is a work in progress. Its namesake and funder has no agenda. He never goes online and, as he would be the first to say, cannot even handle the email program on his computer. He makes me and Chilton Williamson seem like technical whiz kids, and that is saying a great deal. Under its new editor, Takimag can be expected to take a new direction and give up this rather foolish Tendenz. I wish the project well, as I have always wished it well, if only for the name it bears.

In response to the gentle chiding of some readers that these sad young men--living in their mothers' basement, as one of you said--are not worth attention, I have replied more than once that they are merely the superficial emanations of a deeper phenomenon that includes the circle of the Medici, philosophers like Bacon and Descartes, occult movements like the Rosicrucians who did not exist and the freemasons who do, and much else that has polluted our spiritual and intellectual universe. Some attention, in an editorial fashion, might be paid to the several branches of this "movement," and I hope to take this on. I am also going to return to Herodotus.

And don't plan on it anytime soon. Taki.Mag has a totally different mission than Chronicles or so it would appear. I always assumed that Taki simply wanted to lay down some suppressive fire and provide a training ground for younger writers under the direction of older warriors who had already bled, while his friends over at Chronicles engaged in the the more disciplined and prolonged effort of re-establishing the foundations by offering schools, providing travel opportunities along what remains of the "old roman road" and an education that every college student had hoped for when he first headed off and away from his dear home --- But Never Received or Encountered!!

May the best beard win!

http://www.takimag.com/article/christian_heresies/

Yesterday evening I was reading Peter Brown's description of the historical country surrounding St. Augustine and he said the very same thing. I think it might be helpful to some of the younger lurkers of the blog, so I will quote a little of what he said.
"Moderns tend to be distressed about personal isues, such as sexual attraction, competitivness, popularity, and envy, so such people must make a strong effort to understand the impersonal passion for truth that runs through this Christian book."
Augustine remained to the end of his life an unreconstructed ancient philosopher. He believed that human beings should take their lives in hand, and that no trining of the self could hope to succeed if it were not grounded in reality --- that is, in as true a view as was possible for humans to attain of God, the universe, and of the human person. He put his life in order in the light of a higher reality,which the conventional wisdom of contemporaries had evaded or blurred."
In fact he goes on to suggest, it was the secret doctrines preached by Mani that were the other worldy fantasies so often attributed to"other worldly Christians". It is much like the secret doctines and interpretations of Vatican II offered today by such luminaries as George Wiegel, Father Neuhouse (rest in peace) and his friend Mr. Bottom who supposedly knows what Father or John Paul II and others would have said, if they were still here to say it.Yet, according Augustine and one of his better biographers, Peter Brown, the Christians or (catholics) interest should be in knowing God in spirit and in truth which alone can provide the eternal rest and peace we all so much desire. Such knowledge is, according to the Christian Tradition,is to be learned here, or nowhere at all.

Pax

I had hoped that Russell would cinch l his argument in the last chapter on Germanization post 678. Unfortunately, this chapter suffers from the same defects and limitations as its predecessors. In applying a “big theory” to secondary academic monographs and studies, without serious consideration of primary texts and sources, he is free to pick and choose what ideas or even quotations that fit his thesis but without ever really going deep enough into any event or situation to establish a solid basis for the argument. He spends, for example, a good deal of time on Gregory the Great’s approach to the Anglo-Saxon mission he sent out and its possible indications of a softening of Rome toward Germanic paganism. Gregory, however, gives conflicting advice. To an AS ruler, he advises toughness in putting down the relics of paganism, while to his missionary he advises a slower and more accommodating approach. Inevitably, Russell relies on R.A. Markus' Gregory the Great and His World, from which he derives evidence of a significant evolution in Pope Gregory’s thinking, from asperity to accommodation. But Russell pushes the argument well beyond anything Markus has suggested, and Markus, though a fine scholar, does not have to be right about everything, and he certainly is not. (I find him particularly weak, for example, on Gregory's moral theology.) We simply have too little evidence on which to judge this case. Gregory, one needs to remember, had been a major diplomat, and it is quite natural for him to advise discretion to a missionary while instructing a powerful converted ruler to crack down. To go from Gregory to Boniface is thus not entirely legitimate, especially given the spotty evidence, though Boniface certainly read Gregory's letters. It is simply a conjecture that Boniface, influenced by Gregory, decided to go easy on pagan practices. Thus one cannot go on to construct an account according to which the Church in Germany learned to accept important elements of Germanic paganism. It may well be true, but the historical case is shaky

This is only one instance of many that can be cited. JCR’s more general thesis is not without merit, though it would require a good deal of nuancing and a thorough-going comparative study of the Church in Southern Italy and in the Byzantine East. The general idea is that the world-denying individualistic and otherworldly Christianity ran headlong into a magical, king-revering, collectivist German mentality that it was forced to accept. But, as I have pointed out in this discussion, this world-denying business has been rather overstated. Remember Christ at the wedding and all the homely parables of everyday life, His sense of humor, and His acceptance of publicans and sinners. There has always been an other-wordly mysticism in some important Christians and a tendency to contemn the authorities of this world, but St. Paul tells us that obedience to the powers-that-be is required of Christians; St. Justin writes with great respect to the Antonines; the Apology of Aristides and the Epistle to Diognetus both emphasize how normal Christianity was and is.

The idea that Germans made their rulers semi-divine would not seem terribly strange either to Constantine or to 1000 years of Byzantine Emperors. The Hellenistic kings had been divine or semi-divine, and in the East Augustus was worshipped even in his lifetime. Later emperors were less modest than Augustus. Even Constantine, after accepting Christianity, actually enhanced and magnified the religious reverence due to the emperor. The word sacred, for example, was more or less used in bureaucratic circles as term to denote what belonged to the emperor. Surely, these sacred majesties were not influenced by Germans. A similar point would have to be made about Christianity’s hostility toward German paganism’s sacred places. Exactly the same thing happened in the Greek and Slavic world, so whatever took place is not exclusively or even primarily Germanic. In the case of Northern Europe, where some sacred places were identified with human sacrifice, the missionaries were quite naturally suspicious.

What JCR does not seem to understand is Christianity’s complex relationship to this world. It is both word-denyint and world-accepting from the beginning. In the ancient Church, a distinction gradually developed between the strict expectations of the clergy, especially monastic clergy, and the requirements for ordinary men and women. Celibacy and communism turned out to be impractical, and, indeed, neither is actually taught by Christ Himself. On the magical elements in Christianity, we should remember that Christ worked miracles and passed on this power to his apostles. The veneration of relics goes to the beginning of our faith, to the woman who touched the hem of Christ’s garment, to Peter’s wrong-headed desire to build three tabernacles to commemorate the Transfiguration, to the pious Christians of Smyrna who gathered up the relics of their martyr Polycarp. Much like Plotinus, Christians are caught between two poles, between the recognition that God is greater than all his creations and the recognition that what God has created is good.

Stripped of its grand sociological theory and reinforced by a comparative study of Eastern Europe, JCR’s argument might be corrected to the point it could be accepted, but the what would it mean? That some harmless elements in paganism were Christened and adopted more or less permanently by Northern European Christians, just as Southern Europeans kept many Greco-Roman customs. That, at the other end of the scale, some bad medicine was also incorporated and this was only diminished after a long time—magical practices, fortune-telling, witch-craft, trial by ordeal, polygamy. A similar story, again, can be told in the Balkans and in Italy. Finally, some customs and attitudes, neither good nor bad in themselves, perhaps, but risky were accepted into Christian practice and have to be looked at from time to time. At what point does the Germanic sense of courage and honor turn into a justification for murder and mayhem?

The best that I can say of The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity is that it has a pretty good bibliography from which JCR is able to provide a broad overview of what major (and not so major) scholars have said on this subject. In the end, the verdict must be the Scottish verdict of “not proven,” though in this case, I should add, “not even close.” Even the title puts the reader on a false track. It is not Christianity that might have suffered from Germanization but Christendom, the way of life of the Christian West. Even his title, then, illustrates what he himself has called a “subjectivist” and “relativistic” definition of Christianity.

In conclusion, Neopagans who trot out The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity as proof that whatever manly elements there are in Medieval Christianity derive from Germanization are, first, misapplying Russell's book, because that is not his argument, and two, even if they were correctly interpreting the book, Germanization is not one of those magisterial books that closes and argument.

I'm not a geneticist but Sykes book on patrilinal/matrilineal markers seemed to make an awful lot of inferences.