Militia est vita hominis super terram
(The life of man upon earth is warfare)
— Job 7:1
The battle for gun rights is spiritual.
Modern man is used to outsourcing his security to organisations, systems, and other men: the police, surveillance technologies, the agencies.
This renouncing of personal responsibility weakens men physically and psychologically. When we do not teach our boys the skills and instincts to protect themselves, they can never fully transition into manhood.
A core part of the coming of age ritual for young men, which involves renouncing childlike innocence, is accepting the eventuality of death and responsibility for grave moral judgements.
In failing to give our boys the education and trust necessary to enact ordered violence, we are implicitly telling them that we consider them unworthy to exercise judgement in the most consequential and morally grave matters. It is infantilizing and disempowering.
This lies at the heart of the failure of modern man to be ready to wield true authority. Instead, he is condemned to a cowardly embrace of the managerial system, in which he can dissipate his authority into structures and launder retribution through vague networks and coalitions.
There is a further cost to outsourcing security: a spiritual one. The boy who is trained to depend on others for his physical security will do the same for spiritual security.
I believe that society should be ordered according to Christian morality. That being said, one observes self-professed Christians who complain about societal degeneracy in a pleading way that suggests that they are seeking to legislate away all their own temptations, removing their need to be strong.
Impossible! The life of man upon earth is warfare. It is good to argue against laws that harm the souls of others, but we must not use the existence of unjust laws to excuse our own weakness.
Attempting to outsource spiritual security is the ultimate expression of progressivism; the notion that systems and technology will not just solve physical want but metaphysical need too. In this sense, what appears on the surface to be an argument for Christianity is actually something closer to hyper-progressivism.
This is worse in a period in which an honest accounting of our society shows no sign that it is about to spiritually right itself. In such a time, by blaming society’s faults for one’s own, one is thus extending oneself infinite license to sin.
Remember that the early Christians flourished within the pagan Roman empire!
No: you cannot outsource your spiritual security. Re-sacralizing the world necessitates understanding it as a battlefield from which you cannot flee. You must fight.
There is a long tradition - scripturally supported - of understanding this life as a spiritual battlefield in which one must do spiritual violence to oneself and one’s demons.
In Catholic theology, for example, the Church is divided into three ‘states’: the Church Triumphant (those in heaven), the Church Penitent (those in purgatory), and the Church Militant: the soldiers of Christ currently on earth who wage war on “principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places” (Ephesians 6:12).
An excellent introduction to this vision of the world is provided in Fr. Lorenzo Scupoli’s 1589 classic The Spiritual Combat:
All you have to do is to fight valiantly, and never to throw down your arms, nor flee, however many wounds you may have sustained. Finally, to spur yourself on to fight courageously, you must bear in mind that from this conflict there is no escape; for not to fight is all one with being taken prisoner or slain. Besides, the fury and bitter hatred of our enemies are such, that there is no possibility of any truce or peace.
Fr. Lorenzo Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat
The twin assumptions of responsibility for physical and spiritual security are harmonious; by developing one’s capacities in either domain, one reinforces the other.
War, it is said, offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero who sleeps within him. War breaks the routine of comfortable life; by means of its severe ordeals, it offers a transfiguring knowledge of life, life according to death. The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero, even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence spent consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities.
— Julius Evola, The Metaphysics of War
It is worth noting that both the New and Old Testaments abound in metaphors of war. How, then, can we fully understand The Lord’s Word without understanding warfare?
Only in an openness to mortal danger can man appreciate the depths of his spiritual peril. We are never far from death, and we must accept and embrace this fact. In accepting combat, one accepts that one’s judgement may be nigh, and the need to live in a way pleasing to our Maker becomes all the more intense.
We live in an environment of layered support systems that attempt to keep us safe at all costs, allowing us to largely forget about the need to keep ourselves safe - spiritually and physically - and the possibility of death.
If we are not used to risking our lives then we are not conditioned to value the next world over this one. By risking one’s life, one acknowledges that there are higher principles than earthly survival. Conversely, by failing to risk one’s life, one reinforces its primacy and seeming permanence. Evola states: “War makes one realise the relativity of human life and therefore also the law of a ‘more-than-life’, and thus war has always an anti-materialist value, a spiritual value.”
Repeatedly embraced, this way of seeing ‘beyond the world’ is written into our souls:
Therefore we have here a sort of amor fati, a mysterious way of intuiting, evoking and heroically resolving one’s own destiny in the intimate certainty that, when the ‘right intention’ is present, when all indolence and cowardice are vanquished, and the leap beyond the lives of oneself and others, beyond happiness and misfortune, is driven by a sense of spiritual destiny and a thirst for the absolute existence, then one has given birth to a force which will not be able to miss the supreme goal.
Our aspiration should be to approach the purity of the knights of faith at the height of Christendom. As St. Bernard said in his 1129 defence of the Knights Templar to Pope Innocent II:
Truly a fearless knight and secure on every side is he whose soul is protected by the armor of faith just as his body is protected by armor of steel. Doubly armed, surely, he need fear neither demons nor men. Not that he fears death - no, he desires it.
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux, In Praise of the New Knighthood
But we must never lose sight of the ultimate purpose of engaging in earthly combat. It is not war on our fellow man, it is war on ourselves, on our sins and fallen natures, on our demons and tempters (powers and principalities).
The ‘greater’ or ‘holy war’ is, contrarily, of the interior and intangible order – it is the war which is fought against the enemy, the ‘barbarian’, the ‘infidel’, whom everyone bears in himself, or whom everyone can see arising in himself on every occasion that he tries to subject his whole being to a spiritual law. Appearing in the forms of craving, partiality, passion, instinctuality, weakness and inward cowardice, the enemy within the natural man must be vanquished, its resistance broken, chained and subjected to the spiritual man, this being the condition of reaching inner liberation, the ‘triumphant peace’ which allows one to participate in what is beyond both life and death.
— Julius Evola, The Metaphysics of War
Only in accepting death can we find life; only in taking responsibility for our physical lives can we encounter and accept death. This is not a time of the great Holy Wars of the Crusades; nor can we manufacture a conflict through violent revolution against our rulers (see the fascinating discussion of Barabbas in Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth).
But we can and must take responsibility for ourselves and the threats against our families, and not further outsource this existential concern to the system. Train in self defence, and initiate your sons in wielding weapons. Make peace with the consequences of living a life of insecurity.
Whosoever shall seek to save his life, shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose it, shall preserve it.
— Luke 17:33
If you enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting this project by leaving a like or upgrading to paid.
Upgrading will also gain you access to exclusive posts for supporters. All revenue goes towards supporting my family, and is truly appreciated.
Sic transit imperium,
Johann
The emphasis on the spiritual aspect of armed culture has been lacking, neat post.
The flipside of the equation has also been under emphasized, what weapons restrictions teach us about how a regime understands its people.
Throughout history, if you were a "citizen" or enfranchised in any way, you were expected to have a weapon and know how to fight. This was a benefit to everyone, the regime and the person. If you were not a part of the system's governing structure, you weren't expected to uphold it. Such a person was either not allowed a weapon or not expected to fight. The example of knights vs peasants works well here, as well as what a citizens vs slaves of ancient Greece, (a list of specific examples would be great here, but a bit out of scope for a comment).
It should be disconcerting that in the United States, with a history of citizen soldiers, has been pulling away from encouraging "citizens" to own weapons. I do not think it bold to suggest removing armed culture from the idea of citizen, castrates the concept, rendering it a mockery of itself.
This was a fresh take on a tired old subject. You're right -- a state that doesn't trust its citizens to bear arms considers them little more than children.
"You can't solve your own problems. Only we can."
Any sort of independence or self-sufficiency must be discouraged.