Light & Christ

When we consider again the mention of “Light” in the beginning of this passage (Isaiah 9:2-7)…

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light”

we are reminded that ‘Light,’ throughout the book of Isaiah as well as all of Scripture is a metaphor for God’s blessings, presence, and revelation (Is. 9:2, 30:26, 42:6, 16, 60:1-3), unto His people.

Isaiah 30:26
 
Moreover, the light of the moon will be as the light of the sun,
And the light of the sun will be sevenfold,
As the light of seven days,
In the day that the Lord binds up the bruise of His people
And heals the stroke of their wound.
 
Isaiah 42:6
6 “I, the Lord, have called You in righteousness,
And will hold Your hand;
I will keep You and give You as a covenant to the people,
As a light to the Gentiles,
 
Isaiah 42:16
16 I will bring the blind by a way they did not know;
I will lead them in paths they have not known.
I will make darkness light before them,
And crooked places straight.
These things I will do for them,
And not forsake them.
 
Isaiah 60:1-3
60 Arise, shine;
For your light has come!
And the glory of the Lord is risen upon you.
2 For behold, the darkness shall cover the earth,
And deep darkness the people;
But the Lord will arise over you,
And His glory will be seen upon you.
3 The Gentiles shall come to your light,
And kings to the brightness of your rising.

So, again, what is being promised here in Isaiah 9:2 is reversing travail and oppression due to the very presence of God.

We must not miss the idea of this Light because when the utter fulfillment of this promise comes to pass and when this child arrives what we read of His Light,

“9 And lo, the Angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone about them, and they were sore afraid.”

And John’s Gospel can speak this way of the Lord Christ … And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.

And our Lord Christ will even speak of Himself as being the “Light of the world.”

We capture something of this idea of the promised coming Light when we sing during this season our songs,

O Little down of Bethlehem
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light,
The hopes and fears of all the years,
Are met in thee tonight.
O Come All Ye Faithful
True God of true God, Light from Light Eternal,
Lo, he shuns not the Virgin’s womb;
Son of the Father, begotten, not created;

And again,

Thy cradle here shall glitter bright,
And darkness breathe a newer light,
Where endless faith shall shine serene,
And twilight never intervene.

Not only is Light in our Christmas Carols but it is played with as a metaphor for Christ by our poets;

HAIL holy light, ofspring of Heav’n first-born,
Or of th’ Eternal Coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam’d? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from Eternitie, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.
Or hear’st thou rather pure Ethereal stream,
Whose Fountain who shall tell? before the Sun,
Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God, as with a Mantle didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless infinite.
 
 John Milton 

Dr. Schlebusch Contra Social Contract Theory IV

5. Conclusion

Throughout the nineteenth-century, the leading representatives of the Counter Enlightenment opposed the social contract theory and its implications with a distinctly familialist conception of the nature and structure of society. This entailed the idea that the family, primarily the nuclear family, but secondarily also the extended family, and not the individual, is the most basic and foundational unit of human society. The consistent prevalence of this theme throughout the polemic writings of leading Counter-Enlightenment theorists from a wide variety of contexts in Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United States against the liberal social ontology of the Enlightenment is quite remarkable. The notion of familialism as propounded by these leading figures associated with the nineteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment furthermore firmly and distinctly stands in the Christian ontological tradition that had characterized pre-modern Western thought. This does not imply that the social ontology of the Counter-Enlightenment can be reduced to some romantic longing for a long-gone status quo ante, however. On the contrary, the familialist ideas embodied in the writings of prominent CounterEnlightenment thinkers such as Herder, De Bonald, Dabney, and Groen van Prinsterer were both very practically orientated towards their nineteenth-century historical contexts and also represented an unprecedented development in the history of ideas.

The familialism of these leading traditionalist-conservative thinkers
associated with the Counter-Enlightenment amounted to a reaction against what it identified as the socially disruptive social ontological impact of the individualizing tendencies inherent to the social contract theory as proposed by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. In countering what they saw as the atomizing of the individual, leaving him vulnerable to the rising power of the centralized state, they proposed a relationship-orientated ontological positioning of the individual as socially situated within the context of blood relationships. Their view of society and the role of the individual marked a distinctly theocentric reaction to the anthropocentric implications of Enlightenment social ontology. In terms of their understanding of the nature, structure and properties of human society, the Counter-Enlightenment advocated a relationship- and status-orientated social order rooted in the creational and providential ordinances of a God who is ultimately sovereign over human society. Their central argument is that by virtue of the Enlightenment’s rebellion against this social order, the organic order and structure of society is disrupted, with devastating consequences even for the very individual the Enlightenment claims to have elevated: by virtue of the atomization of the individual, he is isolated from those social relationships in which he is naturally imbedded by virtue of divine providence—relationships which provide the necessary protective social structures which are inescapable for the flourishing of humanity.

This principle that society as fundamentally shaped by divinely-ordained
social structures as opposed to being an aggregate of sovereign individuals
is principally based in the Counter-Revolutionaries’ Christian conviction
regarding the sovereignty of God with regard to providentially ordaining
the state and nature of all human existence—with the unit of the family
forming the most basic and vital divinely-ordained social structure. To the
philosophers of the Counter-Enlightenment, the family is the most essential and most basic unit providing structure and vitality to all of human society, with the recognition of its socially constitutive properties being absolutely key to any orthodox social ontology as reflection of divinely-ordained reality.

In this way the Counter-Enlightenment’s social ontology should certainly
be historically linked to the traditional ideas of the family as basic social
unit as advocated by the likes of Aquinas and Althusius prior to the age
of Enlightenment, yet at the same time their notion of familialism marks
a profound and distinctly modern development in terms of the history of
ontological ideas, in particular given their polemic strategies and rhetorical emphasis on the centrality of this concept in terms in countering the individualizing and atomizing tendencies of Enlightenment’s social ontology.

The nineteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment’s emphasis on familialism in its social ontology is therefore a particularly interesting and noteworthy phenomenon in the history of ideas, namely as a distinctly modern movement of theoretical resistance against the central ideas of the prevailing liberal social ontology which has historically shaped modern Western democracies.

Grapeshot Kinism

1.) If God doesn’t believe in “borders” then why is the New Jerusalem described as having walls and gates while describing the strangers, aliens, and wicked who are not allowed into the city staying outside the gates?

2.) According to Herodotus, when the Spartans and Athenians resolved to define who they were and what they were fighting for on the eve of the second Persian invasion in 480 BC they settled on 3 main points of “Hellenikon” (Greekness):

A. having the same blood and language
B. acknowledging the same temples and religion
C. observing the same customs

3.)  “Is it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration of the Mongol race? Are they to be immigrated out of house and home by Chinese? I should think not. It is not supposed that the people of California, in a broad and general sense, have any higher rights than the people of China; but they are in possession of the country of California, and if another people of a different race, of different religion, of different manners, or different traditions, different tastes and sympathies are to come there and the free right to locate there and settle among them, and they have an opportunity of pouring in such an immigration as in a short time will double or treble the population of California, I ask, are the people of California powerless to protect themselves? I do not know that the contingency will ever happen but it may be well to consider it while we are on this point.”

 
Sen Edgar Cowan
US Senator — Pennsylvania
Debate Civil-Rights Legislation — 1866

4.) Loss of love of place (the particular) is our besetting cultural sin. It is our besetting cultural sin because one can not love place without the ability to make distinctions between places. (Here I think of the places that include not only love of locale but love of the people and the gender as places in which we’ve been placed.)

 
 
I realize love of place can be likewise absolutized and so become an idol but I don’t think that is one of our besetting cultural sins right now.
 
 
All of this mitigates against Christian Alienism because Christian Alienism joins in the effort, by their principal agreement with the pagan alienists (a principal agreement which is perhaps only implicit and not intended) to destroy the idea of the particularity of place as well as particularity of people.

The Tyrant State’s Selfish Interest in Diversity

“Today, the greatest immediate danger to Middle America and the European-American civilization to which it is heir lies in the importation of a new underclass from the Third World through mass immigration. The danger is in part economic, in part political, and in part cultural, but it is also in part racial, pure and simple. The leaders of the alien underclass, as well as those of the older black underclass, invoke race in explicit terms, and they leave no doubt that their main enemy is the white man and his institutions and patterns of belief.”

!998 Samuel Francis

The more diversity a nation has the less likely voluntary associations are going to arise since people, in the context of diversity, tend to withdraw from Culture (see Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone.”) The more people refuse to build the voluntary associations that make for culture the more the State will centralize as it has no competition for authority from the social order matrix that is inclusive of the now reduced cultural infrastructure that once was built by voluntary associations that are no longer voluntarily associating (See Robert Nisbet’s “Twilight of Authority”). Hence it is in the interest of the Managerial State to foster as much diversity as it can.

Now combine this with the reality that diversity in religion, race, and culture ensures conflict between the competing religions, races, and cultures that are living cheek by jowl so that the only resolution of such conflict comes from the State and its enforcement apparatus and we see again the interest that the tyrant state as in embracing diversity.

Finally, the tyrant state also has an interest in continuing with the cheap labor that comes from the pursuit of ongoing diversity. Cheap labor favors the Mega-Corporation class and as the Mega-Corporation class is one and the same with the tyrant state (a revolving door existing as between them) the tyrant state pursues the interests of the tyrant Corporation class.

Dr. Schlebusch Contra Social Contract Theory III

4. Familialism and the Counter-Enlightenment’s social ontology

Edmund Burke, widely considered to be the father of modern conservatism, laid the foundations of the main principles of the Counter-Enlightenment’s social ontology in his most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Herein he counters the Enlightenment’s rationalist notion of a society based upon abstractions by means of an emphasis on the epistemic value of tradition, which ties individuals not only to their community but also their ancestors and progeny (Burke 1790:107). Utilizing this historic and traditionalist principle was key to the Counter Enlightenment view of the nature and structure of society, one of the earliest representatives of this traditionalist Counter-Enlightenment school, the German philosopher-historian Johan Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) wrote the following concerning the character of the family as foundational to human society:

The most natural state is, therefore, one nation, an extended family, with
one national character. This it retains for ages and develops most naturally
if the leaders come from the people … Nothing, therefore, is more manifestly contrary to the purposes of political government than the unnatural enlargement of states, the wild mixing of various races and nationalities under one scepter (Herder,1820:298).6

The family then, for Herder, was foundational to the nation, with the nation in the ethnic sense, that is, as an extension of the family and clan, being the unit around which the state is to be built. That states, therefore, should be considered as organic historically-developed extensions of the family as basic unit, as opposed to an aggregate of individuals, was particularly evident in the social ontology of the influential French Counter-Enlightenment philosopher Louis de Bonald (1754-1840). His work entitled Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société civile démontrée par le raisonnement et par l’histoire is primarily concerned with the relations between God, man and society by way of response to the ideas of the Enlightenment as embodied by Montesquieu and of Rousseau (Sarah, 2018:69). In it he writes, with reference to the social order that “Man only exists through society, and society shapes him for herself” (De Bonald, 1796:103).7

Per De Bonald’s traditionalism, therefore, the individual never exists in the
abstract but only as a member of society. The nuclear family is the logical and historical precedent for the larger family, i.e., the nation as political society. As a matter of fact, in the opinion of de Bonald, “any system which does not base the constitution of political society on the domestic society … is false and unnatural. This is the standard by which to measure all constitutions” (De Bonald, 1817:413).8

Having set the family, therefore, as the basic unit of society, de Bonald
(1830:441) applied its very constitution to political society as well: he argued that just as the nuclear family is constituted by a father, mother, and infant, so the state is constituted by the state’s power as the cause, the ministers as the means and the citizens as subjects. In other words, just as the father embodies the will of the family, the king embodies the will of the nation as political family.

Across the Atlantic, the Counter-Revolutionary Southern Presbyterian pastor and moral philosopher Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898) advocated a similar ontological social paradigm:

The theistic scheme, then traces civil government and the civic obligation to
the will and act of God, our sovereign, moral ruler and proprietor, in that He from the first made social principles a constitutive part of our souls, and placed us under social relations that are as original and natural as our own persons. These relations were: first, the family, then of the clan, and, as men multiplied, of the commonwealth. It follows thence that social government in some form is as natural as man (Dabney, 1892:305).

He also intrinsically connects his familialist conception of the social order
with his opposition to the social contract theory proposed by Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, which per Dabney, stands in direct opposition to it (Ibid., p. 308-309):

The claim of a social contract is [a] theory [that] is atheistic and unchristian. Such were Hobbes and the Jacobins. It is true that Locke tried to hold it in a Christian sense, but it is none the less obstinately atheistic in that it wholly discards God, man’s relation to Him, his right to determine our condition and moral existence, and the great fact of moral philosophy, that God has formed and ordained us to live under civil government … [In terms of the social contract] civil society is herself a grand robber of my natural rights, which I only tolerate to save myself from other more numerous robbers. How then can any of the rules of government be an expression of essential morality? … Commonwealths have not historically begun in such an optional compact of lordly savages. Such absolute savages, could we find any considerable number of them, would not usually possess the good sense and the self-control which would be sufficient for any permanent good. The only real historical instances of such compacts have been the agreements of outlaws forming companies of banditti, or crews of pirate ships. Those combinations realize precisely the ideals pictured by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Did ever one of them result in the creation of a permanent and well-ordered commonwealth? The well-known answer to this question hopelessly refutes the scheme. Commonwealths have usually arisen, in fact, from the expansion of clans, which were at first but larger families.

Evident from both the likes of Dabney and De Bonald is their proposition that the family as foundational to society falsifies any individualistic notions of liberty which fundamentally underlies the social contract theory. With both these theorists society is fundamentally the organic and historical outgrowth of primarily the nuclear and secondarily the extended family as basic unit of the divinely ordained human social order. Dabney’s comment that the implications of the social contract theory is functionally atheistic in that it denies the reality of human relationship to God as sovereign Creator, is particularly telling in terms of how central the opposition to the Enlightenment’s social ontology in particular was in the thought of the leading representatives of the Counter-Enlightenment.

This also holds true for the most well-known Dutch representative of the
Counter-Enlightenment, Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801-1876). He
wrote concerning the Enlightenment’s political theory that “[t]he proponents of this sociable order ordained by the state, of this society not of clans and families, but companies and pelotons are, in terms of the implementation of their system, content with the peace and liberty of the government—with the liberty and omnipotence of those who take care for the discipline of society and are the heads of the herd who provide us with this new grazing. They have sadly convinced so many of the greatness and superiority of their ideas” (Groen van Prinsterer, 1847:67).9

For Groen van Prinsterer, the individualizing implications of the social
contract inevitably leads to government tyranny since a society made up of
individuals, isolated from their natural and familial blood relations, is an ideal subject for government despotism. In this way, Groen argued, the social ontology of the Enlightenment inevitably led to isolation from those natural familial relationships in which humans were designed to flourish as well as a consequent loss of true liberty (Groen van Prinsterer, 1867:1). In other words, by virtue of its attempt to liberate the individual from the natural bonds established by blood and birth, it takes away the divinely-ordained creational structure in which humanity was designed to prosper and thrive, thereby enslaving it to the only authoritative social structure that remains, the state.

6 “Die Natur erzieht Familien; der natürlichste Staat ist also auch ein Volk, mit einem Nationalcharakter. Jahrtausende lang erhält sich dieser in ihm und kann, wenn seinem mitgebor: nen Fürsten daran liegt, am Natürlichsten ausgebildet werden … Nichts scheint also dem Zweck der Regierungen so offenbar entgegen als die unnatürliche Vergrößerung
der Staaten , die wilde Vermischung der Menschengattungen und Nationen unter Einem Scepter.”

7 “L’homme n’existe que pour la societe et la societe ne le forme que pour elle.”

8 “Tout systeme de constitution pour la societe politique, qu’on ne peut pas appliquer a la societe domestique … est faux et contre nature. C’est la pierre de touche des constitutions.”

9 “De voorstanders van dit gezellig verkeer, van staatswege verordend, van deze samenleving, niet in huisgezinnen, niet in familiën meer, maar in compagniën en pelotons zijn, bij de ten uitvoer leggen van hun stelsel, te vrede met de vrijheid van den Staat, van het bewind, met de vrijheid of het alvermogen dergenen die zorg dragen voor de discipline, die aan het hoofd der kudde staan, die met deze nieuwe soort van vetweiderij belast zijn.
Velen hebben zij van de uitnemendheid hunner ontwerpen overreed.”