The Universal Empire and Its Discontents

To render unto Caesar

I am a regular reader of

Arktos Journal

and of all Substacks they generate by far the largest number of subscriptions for me. I doubt they need me to say they do good work, and that the essays they publish are necessary reading for those in dissident right spaces. I am in particular a great fan of

Constantin von Hoffmeister

and esteem his work highly. Nonetheless, I must take exception to a recent essay published by Arktos written by the late Guillaume Faye, in which he writes:

Among the dogmas of Judeo-Christian universalism, which particularly threaten the identity of nations, is the dogma of the unity of mankind, understood as a metaphysical substance. This concept of a unique mankind (an aggregation of individuals and children of the same God the Father) that should reject abnormal and merely temporary affiliations originates from the biblical view of mankind — an evidently ethnocidal and totalitarian view. The biblical argument imposes a worldview in which the Absolute is decisive over particular notions, where the focus shifts from the general to the particular — without any interaction — resulting in the particular always being in a devalued position. This line of reasoning, utterly opposed to the worldview of European paganism, ‘derives what we can know about the particular from what we are supposed to know about the Absolute’¹ — yet it is now contradicted by the entire fields of biology, anthropology, and physics. Both this ethnocidal myth of the unity of mankind and the archetype of a universal man (a monogenetic being from the same stock) are rooted in Genesis and the teachings of the Church Fathers; this model leads to the devaluation of identities.

This- or some variation on this- is a common line of thought especially among European rightists, that Christianity is a foreign interpolation in “the worldview of European paganism” that “Judeo-Christian universalism” is corrosive to nationalism or ethnic identity, and that this pagan worldview supposes there are wholly different sorts of people that pagans would leave to their own folkways, but whom Christians are bent, pointlessly, on turning into clones of themselves in the service of some fanatical universalism that has somehow metamorphosed into globalism. This view is ahistorical and wrong.

It’s interesting that in the first place the argument conflates the “abnormal” and the “temporal,” seemingly saying that what is not permanent is not part of the right order of the universe in the “Judeo-Christian” understanding. Faye seems to acknowledge that nations are not fixed things, but still seems to wish to privilege them against any more or less universal frameworks. This seems an arbitrary place to settle. The French nation, for instance, was not wholly French-speaking until long after WWII, with successive governments making great efforts to stamp out regional identities. The thing he wishes to preserve was very much the conscious project of liberal reformers bent on centralizing power at the expense of organic cultures. And it was not done in the name of Christianity, but by its avowed enemies.

But since Faye restricts his critique to a comparison between the “worldview of European paganism” and “Judeo-Christian universalism,” it would be illustrative to look at the two great imperial projects of the Classical pagan world. If there were such a thing as a single “worldview” reflecting a European paganism, we would expect to find it there in its most intellectually, culturally, and politically sophisticated form. What do we see? In the first place, we have the Empire of Alexander and its successor states. Philip II Monopthalmos of Macedonia forcibly united the diverse city states of Greece into an regional power under his control before his son and heir Alexander invaded the Persian Empire, conquering much of the known world before his sudden death at the age of thirty-three. His generals and their descendants then fought among each other for the next few centuries, a period known as the Hellenistic Age. The two great projects shared by these diadochoi were that eponymous Hellenism, the conscious promotion of Greek culture, and syncretism, the blending of local religious traditions into ever more universal forms.

The effect of this was to alter every aspect of life for both colonizers and the colonized. Greek replaced local dialects from Macedon to the Punjab, while religious traditions particular to areas for centuries were uprooted, conflated with others, and spread in a hybrid form. Nothing was untouched because nothing could be left so. The Hellenistic rulers set no boundaries on their reach of their rule; they were god-kings who knew neither temporal or spiritual limits. Hellenism was a top-down project of imperial domination that privileged Greek culture in order to bind local elites into a system of control and subordination.

Harmonizing the religious beliefs of their subjects was also a necessary adjunct to legitimizing the foreign rule of the diadochoi. Thus it was that Zeus became Ammon, that Herakles came to guard the Buddha, and that Isis came to be the witch-queen of a thousand names. As Apuleius has her say to the protagonist of The Golden Ass:

Behold, Lucius, here I am, moved by your prayer, I, mother of all Nature and mistress of the elements, first-born of the ages and greatest of powers divine, queen of the dead, and queen of the immortals, all gods and goddesses in a single form; who with a gesture commands heaven’s glittering summit, the wholesome ocean breezes, the underworld’s mournful silence; whose sole divinity is worshipped in differing forms, with varying rites, under many names, by all the world. There, at Pessinus, the Phrygians, first-born of men, call me Cybele, Mother of the Gods; in Attica, a people sprung from their own soil name me Cecropian Minerva; in sea-girt Cyprus I am Paphian Venus; Dictynna-Diana to the Cretan archers; Stygian Proserpine to the three-tongued Sicilians; at Eleusis, ancient Ceres; Juno to some, to others Bellona, Hecate, Rhamnusia; while the races of both Ethiopias, first to be lit at dawn by the risen Sun’s divine rays, and the Egyptians too, deep in arcane lore, worship me with my own rites, and call me by my true name, royal Isis. 

This represents the syncretistic project in its most mature form. The differences between the gods are illusions; all are one and the diversity of forms merely an accident of human consciousness. The differences are incidental; the universal is what is important. What Faye (not especially accurately) attributes to Christianity is far older and more pervasive than he allows.

The other great imperial project of pagan Europe was the Roman Empire, which like the Greek empires before it was a self-conscious system of subjugation in the name of higher civilization. Virgil’s vision of imperialism from the Aeneid would have been as recognizable to Alexander as it was to Augustus:

Others (I can well believe) will hammer out bronze that breathes

with more delicacy than us, draw out living features

from the marble: plead their causes better, trace with instruments

the movement of the skies, and tell the rising of the constellations:

remember, Roman, it is for you to rule the nations with your power,

(that will be your skill) to crown peace with law,

to spare the conquered, and subdue the proud.’

Nations were brought under the Roman yoke that they might be ruled by those sent by heaven for that purpose; it was destiny, and whatever destruction wrought in that cause was justified by the fact that it represented the clearing of a wilderness in order to plow a productive field. Rome was progress.

Faye seems to associate such chauvinism with Christianity.

To affirm the ‘right’ of all people to Christian baptism and subsequently to ‘civilisation’ (under the ideology of human rights) implies an acknowledgement that their own ethnic and cultural models are inferior. This suggests that they need to adopt the minority model presented by the Bible, followed by that of the Western world . . . Even if Blandine Barret-Kriegel rightly claimed that ‘the notion of man is biblical’, we must immediately add that this notion is racist and responsible for the genocides and ethnocide committed in its name and that this notion is not based on any fact. The species concept of ‘man’ is not human; it is zoological. In contrast, the entire pagan thought (confirmed here by ethology and anthropology) emphasises that peoples and humans, the main reality of human appearance, represent a biocultural and no longer zoological reality, that cultures and individuals build themselves by escaping the purely animal reality of a ‘mankind’.

Faye not only wholly ignores that the idea of a common humanity was not original to Christianity, but a key part of several pagan philosophical systems, including Stoicism, but makes what seem to this reader to be some major logical leaps in arriving at the idea that to believe that there is such a thing as ‘man’ is to be racist. He speaks of genocide and ethnocide as following from Christian ideas regarding humanity, but gives no examples of Christian doctrines inspiring any such thing, nor is it clear how they could. The notion that you and your potential convert share a common humanity is bound up with the possibility of conversion in the first place. He seems to claim at the same time that Christians wrongly believe everyone is the same and wrongly want to wipe out those who are different.

Some respite from this confusion might be found in a comparison of two episodes in history, ones which will make for an illustrative contrast on this point. To return once more to France, Gaius Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul was by any measure a genocide, and Rome’s subsequent occupation of that territory so thorough an ethnocide, so utterly destructive of the culture there, as to leave virtually no trace in the language or folkways of subsequent generations. Charlemagne, the Christian Roman Emperor, subjugated the Saxons by the sword, but the German volk lives on- there are children named Herman and Siegfried; Accos and Drutalos are no longer with us. Rome’s subjugation of the Gauls was total, and their incorporation into the empire meant that what was Celtic in the Gauls had to be stripped from them, both forcibly and with more subtle methods. As Tacitus notes concerning the destruction of a different Celtic people:

Step by step they were led to things which dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance, they called civilization, when it was but a part of their servitude.

The Germans, on the other hand, were largely left to their own devices once they agreed to accept Christian fellowship with the Franks, and stop their depredations on Charlemagne’s people. That this failed and they fell into war again and again speaks more to Charlemagne’s willingness to listen to the counsels of his bishops rather than exterminate them wholly as Caesar would have done.

Compare the supposedly diverse and tolerant Romans with their Christian successors in more general ways. Rome like the Hellenistic Empires, was a top-down project of cultural imposition that resulted in the destruction of every unique subordinate culture under its influence. Under Christendom, on the other hand, hundreds of unique polities and ethnicities flourished, speaking hundreds of different languages and dialects, reflecting a real and organic diversity. Christianity, supposedly the genocidal doctrine of conquest, inspired no offensive wars outside of its domains. Unlike Islam, which spread by the sword and brought with it a political, legal, social, and linguistic order, Christianity was carried to the far reaches of the Old World by unarmed monks, representatives of that Faustian spirit so admired by the ‘pagan’ right, men who boldly ventured into wild places and conquered hearts with words spoken in the tongues of the nations in which they preached.

Yes, by the time of the late Renaissance new (old) ideas had crept back into to the thought-world of Christendom that inspired men to become new Caesars, but even then the wars were tempered by more restraint that the pagans of old would have shown. It took the liberales, after all, to dethrone the Nahautl language of the Aztecs, and liberals elsewhere commenced campaigns of national centralization that resulted in similar cultural destruction. The liberal project is one that involves replacing Christian ideas about man’s relationship with politics and ethnicity with newer, more progressive notions that serve the worldly interest of modern cultural imperialists and syncretists.

Faye’s basic concept of Christianity seems to derive from Enlightenment-era caricatures of it. He shows no familiarity with Christian doctrines or with the reception of Christianity in the Greco-Roman world. He relies almost wholly on contemporary social scientists with a potted understanding of theology (a “right” to baptism?) and his only quotes from any ancient sources are very misleadingly truncated references from Isaiah and Galatians. Faye is uninterested in how Christians understood these passages historically and one is thus confused by how they only seem to actualize as he predicts as western man rejects the faith in modern times.

Pace Faye, Christians in the past were not dismissive of nation or ethnicity as concepts. Consider that the Great Commission enjoins the Apostles to make disciples not of all men, but of all nations (πάντα τὰ ἔθνη). Or how when Paul in Acts 17 preaches to the Greeks at the Areopagus, he says that:

²⁶ From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. ²⁷ God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ²⁸ ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

Nations are part of God’s plan for humanity, not incidental or meaningless things, despite their inherent impermanence. Indeed, because God, not man, creates nations and marks out their “appointed times,” respect for them is part of one’s honoring the created order as a whole. Also worth noting, Paul’s allusions to universal brotherhood in the last couple of sentences come not from Jewish scripture, but two Greek philosophers. As for the Galatians verse beloved of both liberal open borders fanatics and their ostensible right wing post-Christian opponents, the part people tend to ignore is that the passage also notes that in Christ there is also neither “male and female.” As those differences are very much taken into account in both subsequent abstract Christian theology and basic praxis, the previous lines cannot mean that the other differences are meaningless either, especially given that Paul waxes elsewhere about the significance of his being a Jew.

As Faye’s grasp of the relevant history, theology, and philosophy is not especially nuanced, he is never able to venture a well-supported theory of how exactly it is that all the bad stuff Christianity is responsible for only seems to kick in as the faith is dispensed with. True, he does venture that

The first ethnocide, corresponding to the naturalisation of Christianity, was not completely destructive because the religious era of Christianity, especially Catholicism, was a syncretism of European and pagan values. Christian Europe remained, albeit restrictedly, Europe.

It’s unclear here (and elsewhere) what “European values” are, how they differ from “pagan” values, or how either is helpful conceptually when one means to privilege nation and ethnicity (what ethic group do “Europeans” and/or “pagans” belong to?) but in any case, everything Faye associates with the introduction of Christianity was already present in “pagan” Europe. He seems to imply in the subsequent passage that all the things he claims to view as anti-European (like the liberal social sciences he valorizes) are actually the next evolution of Christianity, but oddly, the people advocating these things always seem to view the faith as a hostile force. The people most committed to ending the influence of Christianity in France are the left and the would-be neo-pagan right of Guillaume Faye.

I could go on, but the plain facts of history are this. When the pews were full, Europe was a diverse patchwork of ethnic groups living under political and social arrangements that had developed organically over many centuries. The cultures were robust and bursting with creative force, and the West was suffused with art, science, literature, architecture, philosophy, laws, and works of faith that serve as monuments to a glorious heritage I’m honored to be a steward of. Christian Europe is the heir and custodian of a pagan past to which it has added the fuller and more glorious revelation of Christ’s redemptive sacrificial death and resurrection, and His injunction that men should love one another and treasure peace in hope of eternal life. The pagan legacy is greatness; the Christian crown is hope. This dual inheritance allows the men of the West to be at once particular and universal, possessed of a sense of ethnic identity not merely sanctioned but blessed by scripture as part of God’s creation, but also a universal identity as heirs to the Kingdom of Heaven alongside all those who embrace the faith. To reject this in favor of some constructed identity is neither authentic nor in any real sense right wing; it is simply liberalism, which posits that the past can be done away with and replaced with a contrivance. Men of the West, don’t sell your birthright for soup, and don’t trade the wisdom of the ages for this week’s latest sociology.