The Six: March 27, 2024
On Holy Week and the Heroic God-Man
Another Holy Week is upon us, and tomorrow begins the Sacred Triduum, the most sacred part of the Christian calendar since the ancient Church. It also provides a fitting time for us to reflect on the death and passion of our Hero, the incarnate God-Man, who alone has conquered death and granted life to those in the tombs. A blessed Holy Week to you all.
In this excellent piece, Matthew Rose begins by telling the story of French critic Dominique Venner’s grisly suicide in front of Notre Dame Cathedral’s main altar. In his suicide note, Venner wrote, “I sacrifice myself to break the lethargy that has overtaken us. I offer my life as a protest . . . While so many people are slaves of their lives, my gesture embodies an ethical will. I give death to myself in order to awaken slumbering consciences.”
Given his chosen venue (a Catholic altar) and descriptive words (“sacrifice”), you’d be forgiven for thinking that Venner was a hopelessly forlorn Catholic. As Rose points out, he was actually “a revolutionary and a pagan.” In fact, Venner was not only unsympathetic to the Christian vision but downright hostile to it. As Rose explains, “[Venner] traced the source of Western nihilism to Roman Catholicism in general, and a Dominican friar in particular.” To Venner, it was Aquinas who “disenchanted” the world through his abundant rationalism, paving the way for the obliteration of thirty thousand years of pre-Christian Western tradition.
This conviction of Venner’s is at least partially untrue and certainly unfair, but we’ll set aside most of that sweeping claim for our purposes here. Germane to our current analysis is Venner’s conviction that Christianity obliterated the concept of the hero, so important in archetypal mythic literature that he saw as the basis of Western civilization:
Venner did not regard violence as an intrinsic good. Rather, he held that Western humanity had forgotten that man must cultivate the strength to master himself and his environment, and that the highest excellences are attained only through suffering, risk, and a taste for adventure. Venner’s praise of human struggle drew from the writings of Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt . . . [he] similarly insisted on the cardinal importance of the martial virtues. Courage, loyalty, strength, and patriotism are the most important virtues because they make other virtues possible. Peace requires war. Friendship requires enemies. Loyalty requires exclusion. Love requires hate. Venner argued that a society that embraces the virtues of civility while denigrating the virtues of the warrior will become decadent and defenseless.
And herein Venner has made his fatal mistake. As others have observed, Venner held to essentially the same view as the neo-pagan Nietzsche: that Christianity was a slave religion representing the antithesis of the classical hero. Where heroes represented conquest and grit, Christianity’s founder instead died the death of a common criminal on a hill outside Jerusalem.
It should come as no surprise then that Nietzsche and Venner essentially agreed on the remedy: that from the self-inflicted wounds and scars of Western Christianity should arise an Übermensch, denying Christianity’s metaphysical claims and insisting on a total reevaluation of moral and ethical claims which will be judged not by the standards of God but by the self-referential standards of itself. It is through this lens that we should understand Venner’s suicide of “sacrifice,” through which he hoped to catalyze a return to the mythic days of yore.
In a 2019 essay, Thomas Beronneau described Venner’s convictions this way:
Whether it is Achilles or Odysseus, Arthur or Roland, Leif Eriksson or Charlemagne, the Western hero invariably bodies forth the ancestral forms. Those forms, those “lived values” of the European identity, carry within them the power, as Venner writes, to “put one on guard against nihilism.” What are the forms specifically? They have a Roman pedigree. They are “the dignitas of nobility, the virtus of the citizen, and the devotio of the leader who gives the gift of his person to his country.”
Where else have we heard this type of categorization? I’ll give you a hint: It’s a lot older than Venner.
Eusebius, the 3rd century Greek historian, described Jesus in a tripartite manner: Prophet, Priest, and King. Dignitas clearly maps onto Christ’s kingship, which we commemorate on Palm Sunday; Virtus is contained in Jesus’ identity as a Jew of the lineage of David, who came first to His own people of Israel (Matthew 15:24); Devotio is exemplified by his sacrificial priesthood, which we will commemorate on Holy Thursday: “This is my body, broken for you.”
Perhaps Venner gazed up at the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral and, in his final moments, recognized his error. Christianity is not the anti-myth, but rather the myth. All of the world’s other heroes—real and imagined—are mere shadows of our Hero.
Speaking of heroes: If you’re at all familiar with Twitter, you probably know something about Andrew Huberman. He’s a Neurologist and Ophthalmologist with a research post at Stanford, and he’s the host of Huberman Lab, a highly popular YouTube show and podcast that has garnered millions of followers. He’s especially loved by young men, who credit his “Huberman Protocols” with shaping their lives for the better. Huberman is a man’s man who frequently sports tight t-shirts while pontificating on the importance of testosterone (“T”) hygiene and fine-tuning the brain’s dopamine rewards system.
For these reasons, he’s held up as a hero by many young, impressionable males. Which is why it’s disappointing that he’s been serially unfaithful to women in his life, as this exposé makes clear. What’s also interesting is that the exposé was clearly written as an attempt to smear Huberman, but despite submitting his scientific work, his professional claims, and his faculty status to rigorous examination, the writer came up empty on those fronts. What was left is his violation of Judeo-Christian norms of marriage.
All of which is to say that I’m glad that New York Magazine is now on board with committed monogamy. (It was only two months ago that they published “A Practical Guide to Polyamory.”)
I may say more about this in a future installment, but you have to read at least the opening paragraph of this article, written by a Stanford sophomore, which is difficult to believe:
One of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”
This is one of my favorite clips I’ve seen over the past two weeks, and I’ve replayed it in my mind over and over again. Jensen Huang is the most powerful CEO you’ve never heard of; in 1993, he founded NVIDIA with the mission of bringing 3D graphics to computing. Over the past 31 years, he’s transformed it into one of the world’s most valuable companies, with a market capitalization of 2.3 trillion dollars (there’s a lot more to the story but I won’t go into it here). You know what it’s taken to get there? A lot of pain and suffering. Here Huang espouses a quasi-Catholic view of suffering: it is the means of our p
Princess Kate has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories this year since her absence since January after undergoing an unspecified (at the time) abdominal surgery. The speculations were unhelpfully fueled by the Royal Family’s PR team, which issued a disastrous altered photo and then tried to cover it up in early March. The BBC (and hundreds of others) chimed in on the “faux-toshop” (sorry), and some even more seamy outlets speculated about an affair.
It turns out that the Princess is waging a cancer battle at age 42. It’s a fight that my mother waged valiantly for three years before her death three years ago. It takes incredible courage and inflicts immense suffering, but with characteristic grace, the Princess appeared in a two minute video to explain her absence and to request her country’s goodwill. The British monarchy is a long and storied institution with a monumental legacy; pray for the Royal Family.
It was a pleasure to join my friends Andrew and Bobby on the podcast of their new initiative, The Spe Salvi Institute. I hope you enjoy the listen, and I encourage you to check out their work!
I have found the reflections as positive, helpful, insightful and with a view toward loving my neighbors,: fellow brothers and sisters here on Earth. Thanks