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Do not try to be a Christian and a Vitalist.

You can be a Christian that draws inspiration and energy from Vitalist authors in the pursuit of your own faith. You can be a Vitalist that respects the devotion and rigor of the Christian men who built the West.

But to equivocate, to pursue a contrived attempt at intellectual synthesis between two competing models of reality, will destroy your absolute belief - your true, transcendent faith - in both.

The two positions are fundamentally irreconcilable.

Contemporary Vitalism is infused with Nietzsche’s Positive Nihilism: the notion that in the absence of absolute Truth, we can generate our own metaphysics derived from Nature, our “proud animality”. His project starts with our worldly existence, and attempts to “justify life, eternalize it, divinize it” (from Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’). Christianity, conversely, asserts an absolute Truth, a transcendent Divine to Whom incarnated beings must submit.

To attempt to fuse the two position is just ‘soft’ Vitalism (attempting to alter metaphysical truth based on natural desires). This is cowardice and obscurantism, and an insult to the theologians and philosophers on whose paths we tread.

A contrived religion is an act of imagination, of fantasy, and you will not be able to trick yourself into believing in it. Nor will you be able to trick yourself into fanaticism for a faith that has been selected because it seems to present easy solutions to your personal issues or the political problems of the day. Facile solutions will fail, and if a faith is inauthentic, the consequences - which echo in eternity - are greater than contemporary politics. Choose wisely.

How, then, should we make that choice?

We must make an absolute commitment to the truth - wherever that takes us. This will involve deep meditation, study, an openness to challenging revelations, and a rejection of caricatures and cheap idols. We must be willing to cast aside social expectations and our own worst impulses, like an attraction to whatever provides easy comfort or childish excitement. We must be willing to question whether the apparent failings of our faiths force us to conclude that at some deeper level they are fundamentally false.

Here it is worth including an example of what it would mean to move beyond this; to illustrate just how complex, subtle, and multi-dimensional the interplay of philosophy and history can be, and therefore how nuanced we must be in the pursuit of truth.

I am a Christian, and I will use a Christian example; but there is also fantastic work being done by the best of the Vitalists, who are unafraid to contend with just how alien many aspects of the philosophies of antiquity were, and therefore how complex their revivification will be.

We must pierce through ideological caricatures, and dive deep into the rich thought of our forefathers to understand the fullness of their belief. With Christianity, reductive modern portrayals abound, including the notion that the sin of pride precludes Christians from pursuing excellence and magnificence, and that Christians are never permitted to hate.

Since REN mentions the philosophy of the Church Fathers as being at odds with the martial virtues of Vitalism - virtues that may become necessary again should war return to the West - this seems like a worthy subject of inquiry. Does authentic Christianity demand that we become weak and pacifistic?

There was a time when the scholarly consensus was that the Early Church Fathers were unanimous in their advocacy of pacifism. This ‘classic consensus’ was assumed by many of the great authors of our sphere, and appears in important texts like Spengler’s ‘Decline of the West’.

It is undeniable that the Early Fathers gave strong calls for nonviolence. Particularly influential on this issue were Tertullian and Origen, whom we shall return to. Their thought must be respected: they were giants of the faith and central to the flourishing of the church.

But over the last few decades the classic consensus that these men were ‘pacifists’ - at least as we would now understand the term - has broken, and rich debate has exploded. The primary catalyst for this was the publication of John Helgeland’s 1985 ‘Christians and the Military: The Early Experience’. Helgeland begins his work with the challenge:

All these assumptions are sometimes summed up in the statement: "The early Christians were nonviolent and pacifist, therefore, we must be too."

Unfortunately, history does not support such an absolutely stated premise.

Helgeland notes that context must be missing from the classic consensus, or it is not possible to integrate the Fathers’ positions into the broader history of the faith.

The Old Testament is rife with righteous violence. In the New Testament, although Christ makes a radical call for the love of neighbor, his words and actions also seem to support righteous violence (“And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple…” - John 2:15, “…he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.” — Luke 22:36).

A centurion is praised by Jesus as a paradigm of faith (Matthew 8:10), while another officer (“…Cornelius the centurion, a just man, and one that feareth God…”) is the first baptized Gentile (Acts 10). God-appointed rulers rightfully bear the sword (“But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God's minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil.” — Romans 13:4).

After the Early Church Fathers, Augustine lays the foundations of Just War Theory, and then come the Crusades, the Reconquista, and history continues. Popes have condoned violence; saints have justified it (see, for example, St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s ‘In Praise of the New Knighthood’). How then are we to understand the apparent anomaly of the Early Church?

A clue is to be found in the fact that the most significant Father on this subject, Tertullian, advances his position on soldiering within his writings on idolatry. In On Idolatry, a work entirely written within the context of the Roman Empire, military service is one of a number of professions that are to be avoided because they entail pagan sacrifices. Proscribed occupations include civil service and various private trades.

One of Helgeland’s major breakthroughs was clarifying the scope and significance of pagan rituals that Christian soldiers would be expected to undertake in the service of Rome.

…in order to understand the fullness of the arguments of the earliest Christians against war and service in the legions of the empire we need to understand their socioreligious context, as well as the power narratives of their time. To do so, we have to begin at the beginning: to place the Church within the narratives of Rome, the omnipresence of the gods, the power of Caesar, the cultic structures that arranged the cosmos, the public religion that demanded obeisance and sacrifice.

— George Kalazantzis, Caesar and the Lamb: Early Christian Attitudes on War and Military Service

Within this context, participation in pagan rituals was necessary and ubiquitous.

A military campaign began with one of the most ancient and sacred public rites of the Romans, the suovetaurilia, the sacrifice of a sus (pig), an ovis (sheep) and a taurus (bull) offered in order to purify the army. At the end of the campaign season in late fall, all instruments of war, from soldiers to arms to the trumpets and the signa, everything had to be purified ritually again before settling in for the long winter. Before battle, commanders and emperors alike would consult with the haruspices, the diviners who looked for favorable omens from the gods in the entrails of animals; and after battle, the gods needed to be acknowledged again.

While Tertuallian believed that Christians should not bear the sword, he did believe that Christians should support their emperor and his armies to the greatest extent possible within religious law.

Without ceasing, for all our emperors we offer prayer. We pray for life prolonged; for security to the empire; for protection to the imperial house; for brave armies, a faithful senate, a virtuous people, the world at rest, whatever, as man or Caesar, an emperor would wish.

— Tertullian, Apology

Nevertheless, as the faith grew, so did the number of Christians that served in the legions. These soldiers were neither excommunicated nor denied the sacraments. Both Tertullian and Eusebius write approvingly of the miracle of the (predominantly Christian) Legio XII Fulminata - ‘the Thundering Legion’.

Marcus Aurelius Caesar was engaging in battle with the Germans and Sarmatians… he was in difficulties, because his army was oppressed by thirst; but the soldiers of the legion which is called after Melitene [in eastern Cappadocia], knelt on the ground according to our own custom of prayer, in the faith which has sustained them from that time to this in their contests with their enemies, and turned towards God with supplications. Now though this kind of spectacle seemed strange to the enemy, the story goes that another still more marvelous overcame them at once, for lightning drove the enemy to flight and destruction, and a shower falling on the army which had prayed to God, refreshed them all when they were on the point of destruction from thirst.

— Eusibius, Ecclesiastical History

Indeed, by the reign of Diocletian, there were a sufficient number of Christians in the legions that the emperor felt compelled to purge them. This brings us to the conclusion of my brief commentary on this topic - the glorious but little known Military Martyrs.

The Military Martyrs were Christians that served with distinction before going to their deaths after refusing to renounce the faith. These were great men, and the tales of their noble deaths are moving. Consider the final testimony of the centurion St. Julius the Veteran:

“In all the twenty-seven years in which I made the mistake, so it appears, to serve foolishly in the army, I was never brought before a magistrate either as a criminal or a trouble-maker. I went on seven military campaigns, and never hid behind anyone nor was I the inferior of any man in battle. My chief never found me at fault. And now do you suppose that I, who was always found to be faithful in the past, should now be unfaithful to higher orders?"

"What military service did you have?" asked Maximus the prefect.

"I was in the army," answered Julius, "and when I had served my term I reenlisted as a veteran. All of this time I worshipped in fear the God who made heaven and earth, and even to this day I show him my service."

— Quoted in Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs

It would be a grave error to conflate the nonviolence of the early Christians with weakness. In truth, the question of fully defining their authentic attitude to war and peace, violence and love, is an infinitely more complex task than what I have attempted here. This essay is merely intended to introduce how complex the pursuit of truth in these matters is. We must learn to value and love that pursuit if we are to persevere.

The nonviolent submission of the martyrs was a fanatical rejection of being tamed and incorporated into the normal functioning of the state and political machine. They were offered Christianity and the pagan empire in all its might, and they chose. They solved the apparent paradox of being commanded to honor their worldly rulers and rejecting idolatry by accepting their deaths when the emperor commanded it. They welcomed martyrdom, including in its most horrifying forms.

They were men of terrible strength. Their willingness to die for their faith was real and their strength outshone every one of us. We should be cautious of the arrogance to believe that we can prescribe a superior ideology that we manufactured on the internet.

Whatever we believe - it must be as authentic and deep as the faith possessed by these men. It must not merely sound exciting, but must be coupled at every stage with action, ritual, identity, numinous experiences, and a complete fanaticism for the Truth.

A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.

— James 1:8

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann

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