Reading from pages 177-212 of Myth of the 20th Century, the 1982 Black Kite Edition

Meister Eckehart, an earlier Luther, a Catholic heretic preaching, specifically in 1327, a man of such stature that the Church dare not execute him, is Rosenberg’s hero above all others. Eckehart was a German mystic theologian, a Christian, who, along with the Albignasians and Waldensians of the previous century had preceded Luther, declared at the Dominican church at Cologne:

‘Without, in consequence, abandoning a single one of my principles, I will improve or withdraw…’

The eminent minister died before he was tried directly by the Pope, having such a superior character and logic that he stymied the Inquisitors.

Eckehart quotes Christ: ‘He has not wished to make us unto servants, but to call us friends. For a servant knows not what his master wishes.’

Rosenberg does a good job of demonstrating over and over again how northern Europeans tended to take up Gospel against Scripture and Southern European churches tended to take of Scripture against Gospel in their schismatic and hellishly bloody feuds over doctrine.

Eckhart views god as the illuminator, creator and perfector, not the destroyer and a champion of man’s works, not his enslaver.

As Rosenberg had earlier demonstrated the struggles of such as Arrian against the strict religious hierarchy of Dark Age, Rome, and closed Love and Honor with a strident declaration that Masons, with their humanitarian deism, and the disciples of Paulinism and Jesuitism, were waging war on the soul individually and collectively, he examines Eckehart’s sermons and teachings as at once an upwelling of Arуan spirit against the corruption and materialism of Rome, Africa [He means Egypt here] and the Middle East, in line with the great religious thinkers Thomas Aquinas and Emmanual Kant, only superior. He also offers an alternative to the descent into the ideals of mercantilism, Masonicism, Jesuitism, and the squalor of “Dostoyevskian man” which he saw as a logically fate befalling society wedded to the ‘abstract good of Sokrates.”

He describes Eckehart’s mission as a heroic doctrinal mysticism:

“In place of the static J!@#$^ Roman outlook, he asserts the dynamic of the Nordic soul; in place of the monistic violence he demands the recognition of the duality of life; in place of the doctrine of subjugation and blissful slavery, he preaches belief in freedom and will…”

I must state, that I have attended many Protestant Baptist sermons in the past year which agree wholeheartedly that Eckehart’s view is profoundly non-Christian, though he claimed a deeper Christianity that was not dependent on a violent hierarchy. I attended a sermon two weeks ago in which children were declared wicked at birth, and yesterday in which the same pastor preached the necessity of beating children. Rosenberg, like Eckehart 600 years before him, engaged in the hopeless task of separating the religion of peace from its hierarchies of violence, which include, in scripture and gospel hundreds of excuses for and justifications of slavery. And in the end, Rosenberg himself will preach that Marcus Aurelius was weak because he saw slavery as wrong and that the world should be divided into masters and slaves. His entire theory is riddled with such brilliant, heretical observations and witless contradictions. However, his journey into the Arуan mind along with his exposition of how man has continually fought to place himself between God and his fellows even as the edifices he builds in this babble of a quest creates systems that assume Godhood via instinct is very important in the unraveling of the mystery of the death of the West and the nature of our earlier forbearers.

The idea of the monstrous does not seem to penetrate his pie-in-the sky moonbeam, hippie-with-a-crew cut hope. He rather sees the sinister as preexisting against the preexisting good with no idea that man’s attempts to do good might generate evil and self-aware social systems. He can appreciate the evil resulting from the fourth Lateran council in 1215, but sees it as a sinister infiltration of an ancient alien consciousness. He does not suspect that economy of hierarchal scale makes of man’s efforts for good and ill numerous geo-political Grendels or Frankenstein monsters. I suspect both dynamics to be in play. But Rosenberg was looking for solutions, so had to choose a single cause and a single answer, in slavish devotion to the idea of salvation on earth. With this bearing in mind, let’s enjoy a flash of Rosenberg’s genius:

“In the last analysis, honour and freedom are not external qualities but spiritual essences independent of time and space forming the fortress from which the real will and reason undertake their sorties into the world.”

The human soul as besieged by the monstrous forces of corrupt society is such a brilliant view of the intact human mind, ironically at odds with the author’s contention elsewhere that we are biobots. I do not find this unfortunate, this contradiction, but informative of our plight as seeking souls seeking truth on a sea of lies.