Sam Vs. The Council of Trent

Samuel Finlay & James Discuss Violent Spectacle

From Samuel Finlay

James,
I came across something recently that I've been chewing on, and since you've read and written extensively on fighting it seemed like a good idea to seek your input. I realize this touches upon religion, and I would say at the beginning I mean no offense (the crack about Trent in the subject line notwithstanding); I'm trying to wrap my mind around something, and I'm sure y'all know a lot of things on this subject that I don't.

Over the past year or so, something has been changing in me for the better, and in trying to be as faithful to that as I can, I've found myself revisiting the older forms of the Church. A few months back, I came across a Catholic named Matt Fradd who's such a fan of St. Thomas Aquinas he has his own podcast he dubbed Pints with Aquinas, idea being every episode is kind of imagining of you at the bar having a beer with St. Thomas and asking him a question. Fradd and a guest then discuss what Aquinas might have said based on his writings. I'm not a Thomist, but it's interesting. On top of that, he's devoted a lot of work to trying to help address the toll that pornography can take on people, and encouraging them in cutting it out of their lives. Point being, he seems like a genuinely good dude whose heart is in the right place and is trying to get at the truth and help people.

On his Patreon feed he posted a video of himself and some friends discussing The Morality of UFC Something about that discussion troubled me. I'm not much of a devotee of sports in general, and I don't cotton the commercialization of violence (pro-wresting excluded; Stone Cold Steve Austin is a global icon and a national treasure and we must never forget what he did for us), particularly as the industry tries to get women to participate. This is to say nothing of that thing that happens to people; that look on someone's face when they delight in seeing gratuitous cruelty and humiliation visited upon someone. You can see it take hold of them and know you're looking at the stirrings of a monster ancient and primeval beyond understanding. I remember being on both sides of that as a kid and feeling disgusted afterward, so I think I grasp the reservations.

And yet, we are made for struggle. Not just in some metaphorical sense, but in a real, physical way. (I seem to recall some Pope celebrating the physical as the means by which the spiritual is made manifest, but don't quote me on that.); We grow fat and decadent without it. Little boys start play-fighting as soon as they can. It is at the base of our greatest stories. There was something you said to the boys at Myth of the 20th about how when y'all are training up someone, a venerable old technique is to get the most powerful fighter in the stable and put him across from the guy getting trained, and make it clear that the tough guy will only be blocking. This helps a fighter relax and get used to being across from a predator without panicking. I think of how terrifying that is to share space with someone who is so much bigger or stronger or more technically proficient; how much it takes to just be across from them. And yet, how glorious it is to survive and how much you learn.

To chase a rabbit for a bit; when I was a freshman at college I became friends with the "Dorm Dad" who had just gotten out of the Army after serving as a Ranger in the first Gulf War. He lived in the dorm with his family and he got us into fantasy books. After cracking the seal on Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, we started sparring with kendo shinai. People would be going to class and there we'd be, beating the hell out of each other on the lawn with bamboo practice swords. I loved it, but it scared me silly. Once a week we'd spar, and on those days a large part of me hoped he'd postpone and wondered what the hell I'd gotten myself into. We were friends, and I knew at most I'd leave with some cuts and bruises or a black eye, but it didn't matter. The fear threatened to unman me. At the end of it though, I felt like I'd earned something. To say we were just hurting each other or harming the dignity of each other as beings made in the image of God would be a grievous categorical error. In those sparring sessions, in confronting our fear and pain and rage and the specter of violence in another person (to say nothing of the thrill, and the triumph of landing a good hit!), we passed through a mystery together, and I wouldn't take for those days. I would be a poorer man without them.

A few hours later I was listening to another Catholic podcast, and though I really like the hosts, the guy mentioned dueling to make a point and said offhand, "but remember dueling is immoral." Immoral. I come from Southerners and Hill Folk; dueling, properly done, is an affair of honor. It doesn't get much more moral than that. I checked, and lo and behold the Council of Trent went so hard against dueling they practically called it Satanic and threatened Excommunication and the seizure of property. I was floored. Between stumbling upon almost an entire genre of Christian anti-agonistics and the dueling thing, it reminded me of that line falsely attributed to Thucydides, "The nation that makes a distinction between its thinkers and its warriors will wind up with its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools." Would the West have played out differently if some of the theologians at Trent had been shoved into wall lockers? I think there's a case to be made.

Again, I get where they were coming from. When violence begins, The Abyss reaches out. Small matters spiral wildly out of control and things we love are lost beyond recall. (This lesson was graven into our family. My middle name is taken from my Paw-Paw's brother who was killed by a man with a knife after being falsely accused of rape.) What's more, when you think about the fact that we exist at all when it would've been far easier to simply be nothing is humbling, and such a realization should fill anyone with a sense of compassion and goodwill toward their fellow man. This is Big Medicine.

Sometimes though, a man just needs his ass whipped. Sometimes a man needs killing. There is a time for peace, but there's a time for war. (War; why must we always farm out the ability to name our enemy? Why must we only go en masse to kill strangers abroad at the behest of strangers nearer to us, rather than strike against those we know to be our adversaries?) Seems to me that under the sanction of dueling (whether armed or with fists) a man can choose his own battles, and leads to an understanding that all men bear a share in the upholding of their defense and health of the social norms that bind us. Knowing that if I do or say something irresponsible, someone could call me out and maybe kill me for being a fool, I will be a sight more careful. If I do get challenged and come to my senses, I can apologize and make reparations, and this gives the added benefit of providing another with an opportunity to show mercy and charity. (From what I understand, this was how most duels played out, but again, I'm rusty with this stuff.) Whereas now, the majority of people have been trained to bear insults and petty tyrannies at every turn, knowing that if they even so much as ask someone politely to turn down their music, they can expect an escalation, which, if answered, will result in jail. So while we may not be dying from dueling, we grind away in the shame of our present circumstances.

Martial depictions are clearly a feature under the writing of the Old Covenant, and there is the obvious admonition of Christ telling his followers to buy a sword, selling their cloak if they had to. (And as James knows well, one does not simply carry a sword into a violent encounter without running the risk of having it fed to them. Training is an implied task and one must be committed to imposing one's will on an opponent when the time comes.) He overturned the tables of the money changers and beat the hell out them with rope. Judas - one of The Twelve - came from a movement of men committed to the violent overthrow of Roman occupation. The Centurion who asked that his servant would be healed would've trained since his childhood or teens. The Epistles are rife with imagery of prize-fighters and athletes, and it seems to me, indicative of a culture where games of physical struggle would've been common. Many saints came from the martial class. Scenes of violence are a staple of iconography. St. Nicholas punched out Arius the heretic. On and on. Good Lord, I even remember seeing The Bells of St. Mary's years ago, and boxing was a sub-plot; drawing from the Irish-Catholic immigrants for whom boxing had been a part of their identity. Seems like there's an impulse to relegate it all to a romantic metaphor rather than something visceral and real. I dunno.

I'm sort of all over the place with this. I suppose I'm wondering what happened. More importantly, what's to be done. There's something missing. It seems part and parcel of this general trend toward de-masculinization. There's a guy named Podles who wrote a book called The Church Impotent. In it he argued that things like "Bridal Mysticism" and so forth that started this trend in the Medieval Era, and that the effeminacy associated with religion is largely a Western Christian phenomenon. (There's an interview with him here I found interesting that may be up your alley.

There's something Fradd says at the end about there's an eerie similarity in the way people watch porn and the way some people watch bloodsports. It reminded me of Roger Scruton's saying that "Sports are to war like porn is to sex." Got me thinking that if marriage is a rite or state created to ennoble and direct the sex drive, which is inextricably rooted in our physical being, in a way to help people flourish, could ritualized combat (whether as play, training, or sports/games) be an attempt to do something similar to the impulse for violence? I'd welcome your thoughts.

I hope the world's treating y'all well out there,
Sam

From Our Shameful Place

I have had over 200 duels with dull machetes, pipes and chains and I’m still here, having learned a lot from those encounters. I can tell you, men who can wipe you out with their hands or a stick, once you are both holding steel, there is a sorting mechanism brought on by the metal—for the sticks are really more dangerous—which causes a reshuffling of the hierarchy. You find out who has got the stones to do the real deadly deed. You also find out who has the cool, coactive wits to survive it. Hot heads get skewered.

Sam, you might be a Christian, but if you find yourself packing a weapon to church in case the latest Deep State Shooter forgets he was supposed to hit the mosque or Synagogue down the street, know that you are upholding heathen heritage, albeit in service to the sissy members of your Christian church.

Sam, I was raised Catholic and sincerely hoped that the stained glass windows would melt when I stared at them with heathenish malice. I refused confirmation, mostly because of the way the Church treated our parents, embarrassing them when they were broke after my dad’s company went out of business by showing that we only donated $2.40 cents one week. That’s all they had. My dad didn’t eat anything that week. Also, the priest ate steaks every night for dinner, cooked for him by a live-in female assistant. The Catholic church in Washington, Pennsylvania [our parish was outside of town] had a good looking young priest who I suspected was gay and looking to date high school guys by the way he fawned over them. But what I told my confirmation teacher was that the last time I saw a guy make the sign of the cross it was a Roberto Duran KO victim and I wasn’t buying that worn-out mojo. My friends, for in Western Pennsylvania most people were protestants, assured me that Catholicism was devil worship and I briefly flirted with more modern prosperity Christianity until it became clear that it wasn’t going to get me a date with Marie Osmond. I’d still be going to church if I thought it would get me between the satin sheets with Marie.

Look, Christianity is one of the many enemies of heroism, in whatever form you give it. This speaks to the Judaic root, which had slight tolerance for heroes on the Aryan model like Samson, who was betrayed. From that root of Christianity the only place for the hero is as a champion of the theocracy. However, the New Testament has more Greek and Roman influence than Judaic, by a significant margin I’d say. The fact is, Christianity [if we accept that a person calling himself a Christian and believing that he is so, is a Christian] is a cluster of religions that resulted from the collision of four cultures: Jewish, Hellenistic, Egyptian [particularly the cult of Osiris] and Roman.

For a person disillusioned with the way the modern world has sunk into such corruption, returning to a pre-protestant form of Christianity: Coptic, Nestorian, Gnostic, Arrian, Orthodox or Catholic is appealing. After all, atheism, the current religion we live under, has only two founts: Judaism and Protestantism. So winding the metaphysical clock back is logical. Since Catholicism preserves many elements of traditional religions [Christianity and Islam are not traditional religions, but revealed faiths that profess to negate all traditional religions. Traditional religions do not deny one people’s notion of god and call it a devil and go to war over it, they syncretize.] Furthermore, no current protestant faith [that I know of, there might be some group that rejects Orthodoxy minting itself right now] has any immediate main root other than Catholicism. Orthodox churches also trace their origin to Catholicism. If not for Catholicism the world would have been pagan from 370 to the late 1500s when Martin Luther nailed his petition to the church door.

The above causes two problems for Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox alike:

Christianity, in the highly corrupted form of Catholicism, spread beyond the Roman Empire where it was the State Religion, through two methods:

-Military force, beginning with the Council of Nicea, this typically involved kings and princes and chieftains, from antiquity until the 1880s, letting their wives spend time with celibate men in the form of priests and monks, who did not challenge the king’s ball sack right to the queen at night; Catholicism permits the sissy priest to mesmerize the queen, or the chief’s wife, who is in charge of educating the children in the traditional religion. And when the bitch finally gets converted, she demands that the king convert too, or he loses her sexual favors. She also informs the king that Christian servants are more obedient than traditionally religious folk and that unlike the Old Gods, the New God can only be accessed through the priesthood, who is the steadfast ally of the king who is God’s henchman on earth. I understand this will upset some of my Protestant friends. But it is a fact that the greatest mass conversions in history were won by Catholicism and Islam with Orthodox churches in Eastern Europe running second place and the Jewish conversion of the Khazars third place. Protestantism is a hard sell and is in fact an impossible sell without the prosperity aspect of the Gospel. Indians used to laugh their asses off at preachers trying to talk them out of being men [warriors] and becoming what they understood as women, until the whiskey-sellers turned them into alcoholics and the preacher could then offer Christianity as a rehabilitation program.

So the spread and formation of Catholicism is inherently corrupting of the masculine as it traditionally targeted the wives of men in power. Constantine was most likely not a Christian at heart. He just did the math and found that all of the rich atheists that had donated their fortunes to the new church in return for a soul had positioned the bishops to act as his civil service and he needed one, what with relying on barbarian mercenaries to crush his foes.

So method one of spreading Catholicism was a combination of feminine wiles and kingly dictates. Christianity, from its inception, was a religion of the moneyed elite that was pushed down, which resulted in about 1500 years of illiterate nature worshipers, herbalists, midwives, gnostics, cathars, bogomils, hussites, pagans, heathens and women who talked back, being slaughtered, hanged, tortured and burned at the stake in order to make it the religion of Europe, in order to form Christendom.

Now, even if you are King Christian, you can’t go all-stick-all-the-time, even with a mule as stupid as the medieval European. You needed to throw a carrot every once in a while and that is what the Catholics did, by permitting local deities and heroes and even major gods to have days named after them, to have feast days and to be inducted into the genius aspect of Catholicism, which is the cult of saints and the process of beatification, which has kept the faith alive for five times longer than any Protestant denomination, most of which don’t last more than a couple hundred years as real theological forces. Today, most thriving ministries are less than 100 years old. Merely a few hundred monks and priests trying to clean up and sort out the mess that the conquistadors made managed to convert a continent to Catholicism in two generations! And it is that brand of Catholicism, the Conquistador-Amerindian fusions, that is displacing the soft European Catholics like my family, who are now become atheist, agnostic or born again evangelists as the Catholic Church in Maryland turns away from English speakers and holds mass in Spanish instead.

There are many contradictions in the New Testament because it is the work of many minds over two hundred years, so there is endless fodder for theologians to argue about any aspect of the faith. As a heathen, I like the Psalms, Acts and Epistles and deeply distrust the gospels themselves. However, I would like to point out that every Protestant nation turns the other cheek when attacked or invaded by non-Christians and that only Catholic and Orthodox nations, historically and in our time, have fought back. Look, when the Marines went to Tripoli, that was under Jefferson who was a clear deist. Protestantism is the seedbed for Islam, plain and simple. Only nutty mystics seem to fight the Muslims on matters of faith. Hell, the Hindus with their thousands of hippie gods stopped the Muslims and Protestants can’t. The current forever war against Islam by the United States is a secular versus religious war, because the ZOG overlords know that Christianity has become impotent and the only faith-based block to atheistic overrule is Islam. Catholics and Protestant churches both feverishly import as many Muslims as possible to their home countries, turning their churches into refugee resettlement centers. I would say that in America, both sides of that divide are equally turning the other cheek.

But by fusing Medieval Christianity to Aztec, Mayan and Inca traditions, the Conquistadors built something that might not shine, might look mighty muddy from Whitetopia, but isn’t going to fall like a sissy domino before The House of Submission to God.

From my view as a heathen that has studied Christianity and is a sympathizer—all the best men I know being either Mormon, or Catholic or evangelical—I believe that the proper Christian reason for standing against combat sports and dueling are two, one Old Testament and one New Testament:

Padre Shekelgaol says: “Striking a man that is not an enemy of your faith is an affront to God! You may only fight to preserve God’s word and God’s chosen People [which would be whatever Christian sect you belong to] and should never fight for the money changers.”

Padre Dagowoopolis says: “Christ suffered and died on the cross for your sins. He made the sacrifice for all humanity. It is not for you to play at being some pagan savior of his clan out of the mists of godless antiquity, but to accept Jesus as your savior, not yourself.”

From an honest Christian perspective I don’t see how one justifies dueling. Christianity, like Islam, is a revealed faith intended to make most people docile, to toil for their betters as their betters toil for God. Any vestige of dueling in Christians cultures is a heathen hold over and needs to be purged. The ancient Roman idea of the Devotio, the final act of Hadding the Dane, the protection of the Paraguayan people by the Jesuits against vast odds, were all Christ-Like acts and for this reason the Jesuits were recalled so that Argentina and Brazil could rape Paraguay for slaves, because no Christian gets to upstage Jesus Christ in a Christian power structure.

I’ve been as polite as I can and would like to point out that Christianity only survived the 700s and the 1500s and 1600s because many Christian men—all claiming to be Catholic except for John Smith—and a few tiny Catholic nations fought off first the Arabs and the Turks in the way of heroes, that is to say, as pagan champions fighting for glory and honor, both of which concepts are squarely in opposition to Christianity, which, in antiquity, yesterday or today, makes the Christian Soldier a double hero, fighting for those who must condemn his every action, much like Samson.

I would like to study El Cd again in the future and try and fit him into this question.

Dueling and Civics

Sissydom is not the exclusive province of the Christian. Indeed, it is not until you indoctrinate the Christianity out of someone that you finally erase all of the traditional soul strings lingering from the religions from which that faith sprang, and my earlier citing of four sources was far too short. Christianity, as it formed around the missions of Paul and the other church fathers drew in many pagan elements that are poorly understood today. They were better understood in the 1500s, so men in Europe went to work scrubbing Christianity of all pagan influence in an attempt to define a pure Judaism that ignored the biological Jewish people as traitors to Jesus, a fallen people, and anointed the Christian who believed himself to be the ultimate metaphysical Jew as the New Israelites. I’m neck deep in Puritans with this Plantation America project and you must understand that America was settled as The New Israel, as a conscious act of theological colonization and faith-based population replacement. It is beyond my understanding why, but this attempt resulted in American Protestantism lasting only about 100 years before being replaced as a political force by deism, which is a belief in a creator force, a higher power, but not in a God that takes direct petty action, meddling in the lives of individual humans as depicted in virtually every traditional and revealed religion. Deism itself is a half-step from atheism and also comes close to the modern term agnostic in meaning. The Pilgrim Fathers were the New Israelites. A Hundred years later, their grandsons, the Founding Fathers were halfway to atheism. 100 years after that, between the War of Northern Aggression and the Great Caucasian Suicide of 1914, world leaders became entirely atheistic and actively worshipped industrial capacity!

Ironically, the last war on dueling was waged by the Great Powers against their own men in the late 1600s to early 1900s as pistol dueling in Russian and later Germany reached manic proportions. America had a gimmish of traditions from eye-gouging, boxing, bowie-knife fighting, sword dueling and pistol dueling, Britain eased from the sword to the pistol to the fist and the romance countries, that were, yes Catholic, continued the sword dueling tradition all the way up until Aldo Nadi dueled with sharps in the 1920s. The fatality rate by the early 1900s was around zero from sword dueling and it was becoming something of a farce.

There was, and remains, a strong German dueling tradition which values the cheek scar. See Christoph Amberger's The Secret History of the Sword.

Saber dueling and rapier dueling [much earlier] were very nasty and lethal. Amberger's book has a photo of a beheaded saber duelist circa 1890.

My former Paladin Press colleague, Paul Kirchner, gives you all the information you can stomach on dueling in his three books, The Deadliest Men, More of the Deadliest Men, and Dueling with the Sword and Pistol. 

My favorite duelists were the Scotsman who stood at a crossroad beating a drum and taking on challengers circa 1715, and the mixed-race Haitian-French officer circa 1809 in the Peninsula Campaign between Massena and Wellington, who stood against all ten of the Italian champions [this was over sleeping accommodations for the two allied divisions] without a scratch and also beat a man wielding a saber using only a practice foil.

Generally the Protestant men ended up going for pistol dueling and the Catholics stuck with the blade. In the book Dueling, The Cult of Honor in Fin-De-Seicle Germany by Kevin McAleer, we get to a type of eraser duel among German officers in which modern pistols were used at very close range.

It is interesting that Catholic areas stayed with the duel longer than Protestant areas, except in Germany where Christianity came last to Europe, and which remains mixed between Protestant and Catholic, as both fade before the Cult of Submission. The Prussians held out as pagan tribes for 200 years more than the Norse did.

Dueling is profoundly anti-Christian in that it takes place most often between men of the same faith and nation.

Now for the non-Christian concern.

Manpower

Once the nobility were crushed by the Enlightened Despots of Early Modern Europe after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, they were employed as officers. One study has determined that in the 1600s the French Crown lost 40,000 officers to duels! Somebody with a wig said, “Oh, this shit has got to stop!” in froggish.

In England, during the same time period, there was a dueling tradition that recognized 14 weapons including the fists and the gripes [wrestling.] The very sensible king took advantage of this and set up a boxing ring in London, encouraging officers to beat the piss out of each other rather than run one another through. Keep in mind that the tenor of naval and post combat upon which the British Empire was built was very dependent on hand-to-hand combat, so a monarch didn’t want to go full on to a sissy sport such as badminton for his officers.

The various churches and nation states of the medieval and modern world only put up with the purely heathen notion of the duel so long as it was necessary to maintain the ancient martial honor systems in place since before recorded history. Keep in mind that the Old Testament sneers at the duel when it tells that David fell Goliath with a sling stone. One might signal that out as the first blow against the venerable institution of honorable ritual combat, which is intended to limit casualties on both sides. The presence of the duel in a culture indicates that there is some sense that the warrior is more than a hunter, that being a warrior is more than predation of strong and fit over weak and soft, but a test of men’s character.

As much as Christianity tried to vanquish the heathen practice of dueling, they both died at about the same time. Ironically, what killed the notion of the duel was the extreme unlikelihood that officers of opposing armies would ever meet on the field of battle; they had done so only a few times in the American Civil War. For the late 19th Century, the Victorian Era, was roughly half century of military predation, from the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 to the Boxer Rebellion of 1901, in which small armies of Europeans equipped with firearms and artillery—and, yes, swords—slaughtered or were slaughtered by Stone Age and Iron Age tribes who were hunted like animals. With the sense of the honorable duel taken away from the individual it did not die, but rose through the ranks and saturated the giddy nations of the newly industrialized world, percolated upward to the heads of state and embodied entire national, industrial militaries, as each European nation, joined by the upstart Americans and Japanese, sought to outdo each other in conquering primitive territories. After two generations of this building of the nation as a seed farm and foundry for a war machine, the idea of the duel became national, with the shining weapon of the age the dreadnought, a massive warship that dwarfed the firepower of entire fleets from earlier eras. Eventually, the sissy heads of state, flexing their railroads and battleships and million man armies ended up showing the same lack of restraint that French officers had shown in the 1600s—only totally lacking in honor, as other men’s sons were sent into nationwide storms of steel by faggots sitting behind large desks—and wrecked their weapons and their race in a suicidal battle royale, an industrial scale duel from 1914-18.

Ages when men dueled did not see such slaughter. In fact the greatest pre-gunpowder military actions were precipitated by breaches of honor, the killing of Mongol ambassadors. The duel was first and foremost a means of regulating and limiting violence and at the same time maintaining a class of men capable of lethal violence against times of need. It was facet of the duel to be primarily an internal, same-culture affair, a holdover from some earlier time when rival tribes were set to coexist under a king, whether domestically or internationally. It could limit slaughter in battle as a possibly alternative and could limit the cycle of vendettas and back stabbing murders that plague clannish folk [such as Sam’s kin] in post-dueling times.

Think about this. Today’s action heroes, played by Matt Damon, Jason Statham, Robert Craig and Liam Neeson, what are they?

They are all understood to be CIA jackals if I recall correctly.

They are not champions, they are assassins.

When the duelist is ushered stage left the assassin becomes the hero in the dark.

The ancient heathens knew that two men dueling could save two tribes from annihilation and could save the same tribe from endless rounds of murder and retribution.

Something was lost, something more than politeness, when the duel was finally outlawed. Fortunately, Russia is bringing it back. There remains hope for humanity only so long as men are willing to duel. Without it, through many a wide and crooked byway, you get the obscenity of porn and the UFC, brought to you ultimately by the stifling religions of Universal Peace.

(c) 2019 James LaFond