Essays in Idleness

We are (the present writer included) creatures of our place and time. Verily, it is our divine task to overcome this “temporality,” to escape our condition as animals, mere earthlings.

One thinks of the prisoners in camps during the war. (Any war will do.) They are creatures of the camp, yet each has a duty — not a dream, but a duty — to escape, if he can. He is not a common convict, who deserves his sentence, and has a duty to serve it out. Rather, he is the ward of an enemy who must eventually be defeated. And while he may be polite and “understanding” of his guards through the day — they might be conscripted soldiers, like him, who never chose to be camp guards; they could be “only following orders” — he will be looking for the hole in their fences and defences. I think of incidents in memoirs of captive soldiers. One must escape not only the camp, but from behind enemy lines; and with as many of one’s companions as will come.

But I am speaking by analogy of a spiritual task. Our camp accommodations may be quite pleasant; or at least more pleasant than the prospect of trekking across Siberia. We might be lazy. “There is a lion in my way,” as the sluggard says, in the Book of Proverbs. The task may seem impossible. We would need extraordinary help to spring out. In the Christian religion, Christ is that helper.

“Fear not,” He says, not only in his own Person, but throughout the Bible. Moreover it is Fear that has usually imprisoned us; at some level, perhaps, it is always fear. To be free begins (and perhaps ends) with the conquest of this terror. Not the “management” of it, but the defeat of it.

By this, I could not possibly mean that gentle reader should become a psycho, which he might do via hashish or other drugs, that suppress fear artificially. Rather we must overcome the intimidations of the world, while, in effect, plotting against it; wise as the owl of Athena.

Because we are moderns, it is hard for us to understand the simplest classical phrases. We take Christ for a kind of psychological counsellor. “Fear not” becomes the equivalent of, “don’t worry be happy.” It is part of some mundane scheme for self-improvement, like diets. But as ever with Our Saviour, the meaning is more profound.

He calls us to Freedom — to dangerous Freedom — from the temptations and exclusions of our little enclosed lives. He says, “follow me,” to Freedom, from the world.

From “the world,” I do not exclude politics. The parties of pagan “progress” are desirous of slaves. Their policies are consistently those of the plantation. Their schools are (according to me, as ever) designed to idiotize the general public,  to keep them “low information,” and thus malleable. They manipulate fear — even unreasoning fear of the Batflu — to keep the people in muzzles and chains. They seek to “guide us” in the most petty ways; and they are habitual liars. That is because “the end justifies the means,” for those without faith.

For they, too, are imprisoned by fear. And their worst fear, is that we will be unafraid.