1. The phalangist knows with a natural and absolute certitude that God exists, infinitely perfect, infinitely good, because the existence, order, beauty and goodness of the universe luminously prove it to be so. For him, this knowledge of God is not an a priori idea, a vague or inexpressible sentiment, a so-called moral certitude, a traditional belief or a human faith. It is the first and purest fruit of metaphysical wisdom. This satisfying knowledge of God, now that it has become the patrimony of civilised mankind, is accessible to any honest and open intelligence.
The principle and foundation, the beginning and end of all wisdom, this certitude is first given to us in a rich and confused manner through existential intuition: the immediate grasp of the being of beings, through the fact of the existence of all contingent beings, mentally freed from their natural limits and modes of being, infallibly leads the mind to the one, simple, infinite, perfect and necessary Being, the source of universal existence, who in the Bible calls Himself HWHJ, I AM.
The aesthetic intuition, the perception of that infinite beauty which shows through the sensible and spiritual world, reinforces this certitude, enriches this wisdom and leads to that rational knowledge of God which – from the knowledge of the essences of things, of their diversity, of their order and harmony, and through the spontaneous exercise of the first principles of identity, causality and finality – concludes in the existence of a God who is Creator and universal providence, and in His infinite perfections, analogous to those of beings and of their destiny.
Thus the thought of God’s sovereignty over the whole of creation is at the beginning of all wisdom and of all human morality, and already it allows the end to be glimpsed: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee!" (Saint Augustine)
2. As if by the same movement the phalangist believes in God, for the knowledge of His existence and of His infinite perfections invokes in him a supernatural act of full adherence and ardent love for this Lord in all that He is, that He says and that He wills, because of His holiness, wisdom, truth, beauty and manifest goodness.
3. This mysticism is the phalangist’s first sentiment and engenders within him adoration of his God, admiration for His visible and invisible works, the obscure contemplation of His impenetrable mystery, humility before His grandeur, compunction in the presence of His holiness, a filial love for this most good Father and the desire to proclaim the praise of His glory eternally.
In this faith in God, our Father in Heaven, he finds the source of his daily courage and his zeal for the phalangist work. And he propagates this faith with enthusiasm.
The phalangist recognises no truth, no aesthetic or ethical value, no right, be it natural or historical, in any organisation, power, or system, whether practical or theoretical, which denies God, opposes His truth, His law and His rights, and combats His Kingdom on earth. However great his respect for persons may be, he can never tolerate contempt for God.
The presence of I AM to men since the beginning, and to each individual from his birth until his end, is close and beneficent enough to constitute a sure and universal social truth, the principle of every authority’s public proclamation of His sovereign rights and of His law, which governs every power and every person, even those who contest and reject it.
1. The phalangist does not compromise with the irreligion of those who recognise the existence of God, but who state that they will not submit to His law and refuse to worship Him. When this attitude is displayed by Christians who have abandoned their faith, he regards their apostasy as criminal.
2. He does not accept atheism, be it individual, collective or state. He sees it as a monstrosity of depraved and rebellious intelligences and will openly oppose it, at the risk of his life if need be. He accepts no collaboration with atheists, other than purely external. He regards all submission to atheist masters, leaders or governments as an unjust and odious constraint. He fights all atheist organisations of whatever pretension, scientific, philosophical, moral, cultural or ecological. He knows that without God men can only build Towers of Babel doomed to destruction.
3. He challenges modern agnosticism and rejects the Kantian critique, which is its supposed theoretical justification. Though he may admit the agnostic’s incertitude as a weakness or infirmity of the individual intelligence, he contests the validity of positivist and idealist epistemologies which appear to be its foundation. Agnosticism is a spiritual regression, a moral evil, and today it has become a universal social plague.
On every occasion the phalangist will manifest his detestation of Kantian and Hegelian philosophy; he will demonstrate the falseness of these philosophical systems and the inane character of the morality they propound. He will combat the stupid infatuation of modern thinkers for this German system of thought, an empty dialectic of idealist or materialist pretensions, which has provoked the mental, moral, political and social ruin of the West. For the regeneration of the civilised world, he will oppose it with the Philosophia perennis of Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Its theory of knowledge, consisting of a realism and an intellectualism which are held in balance, is the only answer to the contradictory errors of nominalism, rationalism or exclusive empiricism. Its philosophy of natures, far removed from all materialist or pantheist monism, securely discerns the hierarchy of beings, from the lowly minerals to superior living beings and to pure spirits, thus situating man at the junction of two worlds. A codification of common sense, this philosophy is also the basis and the norm for the physical, biological and human sciences as well as for mathematics.
4. The phalangist will, however, recognise that progress is possible even in this most lofty sphere of transphysical speculation. Western thought has for too long remained the prisoner of Platonic idealism and Aristotelian substantialism, neglecting the value of concrete individuals and the importance of their particular destiny, as well as their universal history. This imbalance has had the baneful effect of proposing for the subject of moral science abstract man, the "human person", an autonomous and independent substance in relation to God, soon to become God’s rival and to offer worship to itself.
The phalangist will, on the contrary, find in every individual creature’s original relationship with I AM, who is his source, the first and last reason for his existence, his destiny and his worth. He will find every human person a subject for wonder, however wretched he may appear, since by virtue of his relationship to God and to mankind, who have conjointly called him into being, each person is rich in both his historical and immortal destiny, which constitute his grandeur in the world and before God.
5. In the network of his constituent and historical relationships to his parents, to his country and to the world, the phalangist will learn to discern the paternal intention of I AM, his Creator, who thus shows him his most personal vocation. In his loving fidelity to the ties that define him as well as in his free generosity, creative of new relationships and procreative of new lives, he will put forth all his energies, without offering himself any impious and anarchic worship, but serving the conviviality of creatures and their communion with God. For the phalangist, such is the true dignity and worth of each human person, and in this way he participates through the service of his neighbours in the grand design of the life and love of I AM.
As long as God remains unknown, unadored, unloved, unserved and unglorified in the world, mankind will wander miserably in search of its soul, its centre, and its essential.
1. Through the grace of faith the phalangist overcomes the philosophical obstacles and moral disquiet aroused in every lifetime by the reality of evil, be it limitation of being, privation, suffering, pain, disorder, moral failure, sickness or death. Leaving the philosophical problem in suspense, he refuses the temptation to set himself up as God’s judge and adversary and will not regard every disorder and suffering as unjust and intolerable, or every inequality as scandalous. Nor will he yield to those dizzy heights of pride that the rebellious Satan excites in man: "You shall be as gods!"
2. He knows that the only real evil is sin, whence all other evils flow. The first sin was the rebellion of Satan who brought the other rebel angels down in his fall and who then seduced our first parents. From that moment evil entered into the world and with it suffering and death. But God directs universal history and draws from evil a much greater good for His glory, for the salvation of the elect, and the manifestation of His bounty. It is by accepting trials permitted by God, by submitting to His holy will, by repelling temptation and fleeing from sin, and finally by helping his brethren in moral or physical misfortune, in spiritual or material wretchedness, that man responds to the love of his God.
Thus, the phalangist consents to God’s plan before even knowing it. He is satisfied with and thankful for his share of being and his destiny. He is resigned to unavoidable evil as to a mysterious trial; he intends to fight against all avoidable and reparable evil, knowing that it is man’s vocation on this earth to overcome it. He bends with compassion, as the Spirit of God inspires him, over the ills and sufferings of his brothers, in order to comfort them and help them bear the weight, practising at all times works of mercy towards his neighbour for the greater glory of God.
3. And so his supernatural faith leads the phalangist progressively to discover the meaning of his personal life and of human history: creation is in progress from the imperfect to the more perfect; the world has to be built as a holy city, a work of divine grace and human freedom, within the perspective of the eternal kingdom; each person’s life must be a conversion and a sanctification full of hope. Only at the end of this long gestation will the plan of our God’s mercy appear in all its brightness: "The whole of creation has been groaning in travail until now." (Rom. 8.22)
At last, freed from evil and the devil who infests it, creation will be holy and perfect in its order according to the plan of divine wisdom full of love. It will be in the image and likeness of the heavenly Father, whose work it is, to the praise of His glory for ever.
1. The phalangist founds his hope on the word of God, the revelation of the Covenant which God contracted with men from the earliest days, a Covenant lost and regained, ceaselessly broken by man’s sin and indefatigably renewed by the mercy of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ, the same God as that of the philosophers and wise men, now become close to men and the friend of their happiness.
2. The Bible is the revelation of the entire sacred history of God with men, from Genesis to the Apocalypse. It mysteriously unveils the meaning of existence for each and every one of us. For the phalangist, it is his only sacred book. He takes it as he has received it from Holy Mother Church, in its two Testaments, the Old and the New, the obsolete and the definitive, the former prefiguring and preparing for the latter, which is its never-failing fulfilment.
3. The Old Testament reveals God’s great plan of mercy for the human family, His fallen creature. Salvation is already promised to Adam and Eve in their descendants. God makes a covenant with Noah and his descendants for ever. And in Abraham will be blessed all the peoples of the earth. Before long the Covenant of Moses reveals and realises Israel’s election, its establishment in the promised Land, and its divine gifts of a faith, a law, a king, a holy City, a Temple, a formal worship of God and an inspired wisdom, as it awaits a New and Eternal Covenant. The latter will come with the promised Messiah, Jesus Christ, a Covenant open to all peoples at all times, and its worship will be in spirit and in truth, in preparation for the eternal life of Heaven, the consummation of God’s love for men.
4. The phalangist knows himself to be the legitimate heir to ancient Israel and a member of the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. Sure of God’s promises and of their complete future fulfilment, he meditates on the Bible in the light of tradition and the Church’s teaching, so that he may know God, the designs of His Wisdom and Mercy, and thus enter His Kingdom even now on earth and in Heaven.
The Bible remains the immortal form of the phalangist’s higher thoughts and mystical prayer.
For every enlightened man the Bible forms one whole, the two parts of which complement one another. They are inseparable. The one is the preparation, and the other the fulfilment, of that divine-human work to be pursued until the end of the world and extended to the ends of the earth.
1. The phalangist cannot, therefore, regard contemporary Judaism as a true religion, as a salvific covenant, or even as the heir of ancient Israel and the Covenant of Moses. The Synagogue has broken this covenant by refusing to recognise its fulfilment in Christ. It has lost the promises by crucifying its Messiah and Saviour, and has become a deicide race drawing malediction down upon itself. Contemporary Judaism is a perfidious distortion of the ancient religion, and is therefore devoid of truth, grace and authenticity. Moreover, it has set itself up as the enemy of God and His Church, the spiritual Israel, by elaborating the Mishnah and the Talmud, rabbinical writings inspired by passionate hostility to the Gospel of Christ.
2. The phalangist denounces the racism – religious and sometimes even atheist – and the carnal ambition of Judaism as the most fearful inversion of the ancient prophetic spirit. This proud racism and greedy imperialism is a constant danger to civilisation and the peace of the world. Christendom must defend itself against it.
3. For all that, the phalangist is not antisemitic, in that he does not reject the Old Testament, does not exclude the Jewish people from salvation, and does not refuse to pardon any of its members, for all men are called to one and the same brotherhood in Christ.
On the contrary, in harmony with the Church and in opposition to both ancient and modern antisemitism, the phalangist considers the Jewish people to be a people apart, marked with the seal of their original election, a people who exist scattered among the nations as the eternal witness of the Mosaic Covenant and the Messianic promises, the living memorial of the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus, and the prophetic sign, when they are finally converted, of the return at the end of time of all the peoples in the world to the Church of Christ, the New Jerusalem come down from God.
The application of critical methods to the "Sira", or traditional biography of Mohammed, has revealed its legendary character to the point where the very historical existence of the person is more than problematic. As to scientific exegesis of the Koran, it provides no positive support for his existence. On the contrary, it reveals the Jewish inspiration of what was doubtless, in its origins, a proselytising attempt on the part of the Synagogue in Arabia during the VIIth century. The phalangist, therefore, does not have much esteem for the Muslim religion.
1. By means of a crude literary device, the essentials of the Jewish Bible, the Covenant and the promises made to Abraham, are diverted from their historical beneficiary, Isaac, the son of the Promise, in favour of Ishmael, and thereby emptied of their Davidic messianism. For this reason, the racism of Islam, although less ambitious, is even more carnal than that of the religion from which it sprang, retaining only the latter's fanaticism and materialism. It too constitutes a formidable obstacle to the divine religion, to Christian morality, and to civilisation. Its monotheism is no less radically opposed to the Trinitarian faith than is that of synagogal Judaism. Its morality is as legalistic as was that of the ancient Pharisees. Its hope, void of all messianism and entirely ignorant of the redemption wrought by Jesus Christ, is as carnal as that of the Sadducees. It cannot be a religion of salvation, a true covenant of God with men, a holy theocracy.
2. Today, as the enemy brother of Judaism, of which it was originally a "prophetic" and "sapiential" attempt at reform, Islam has now come to exert unjustifiable violence against it. Nevertheless, it shares with Judaism the desire to exterminate the Christian peoples by means of a holy war or to dominate them by force and cunning. Thus it is that Islam is found to be in constant agreement with every revolutionary current hostile to our civilisation – currently with communism.
3. The phalangist recognises no significance, value or rights in this false religion; he will advocate no understanding or collaboration with it, but merely a circumstantial toleration for it within the limits of its strict subjection.
It is necessary, therefore, to denounce the error and the crime of those Western colonisers who recognised, supported and strengthened Islam with the weight of their authority, thereby making heavier the yoke of Muslim superstition and fanaticism over peoples whom they doomed to misery, thus causing the greatest harm to human civilisation and true religion. A silent tolerance, on the other hand, is the best way to manifest the superiority of the true, the beautiful and the good over these barbarous beliefs and customs, which are on the road to extinction – a tolerance that shows a certain esteem for the religious faith, the prayer and the submission of Muslims to a law and a social discipline, which maintains them in a mediocre state of civilisation, while we await their conversion to Our Saviour Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
The worship of the divine Word inscribed for ever in our holy books, the faith in the new and eternal Covenant, promised in the Old Testament and fulfilled in the New, the sight of miracles and mysteries of grace and glory wrought by God in the Church and still to be brought to completion, will turn the phalangist away from all idolatrous religions and eccentric philosophies, which were invented by men in times of ignorance and wretchedness.
1. He considers that no truth subsists in these religions that is not better taught by the Church, that there is no possibility of salvation that is not obscure, uncertain, and more surely given by Christ, and that no way is clearer and more glorious than that of the divine Covenant, now definitively Christian. He has, therefore, no interest in pagan mythologies and gnoses; he acknowledges them no rights and ascribes to them no future. Knowing nothing of the true God, these religions therefore know nothing about supernatural wisdom and the Covenant; and therefore nothing about the secret of universal history and Salvation; and therefore nothing about the path to eternal life.
2. At the breath of the preaching of the Gospel, every form of paganism must disappear and yield to the Kingdom of God. History shows that all pagan religions and forms of wisdom shatter when confronted with the two great powers of the Apocalypse, Christ and Antichrist, leaving only a barren folklore of no religious value.
3. The phalangist, however, strikes the balance between two attitudes which have always been current in the Church. The one attitude takes into consideration the truth, values, and goodness of pagan religions, even their sometimes very human and beautiful rites, and respects them as a preparation for the announcement of the Gospel, to which they necessarily lead and before which they must yield and be repudiated to give way to the one Church of Christ. The other attitude, insisting on their errors and the often appalling moral disorder of their various idolatries, sees them simply as inventions of Satan, who uses them to enslave peoples, and therefore as obstacles to be despised and overturned in order to open the way to the Gospel.
The one consequence of these two perspectives is that the phalangist will accord these pagan religions and philosophies a prudent de facto toleration, which in no way hinders but rather facilitates the preaching of divine truth and the openness of pagan peoples to Christian civilisation.
4. As for the ancient forms of pantheism – be it Western stoicism or Eastern forms of wisdom – which are resurfacing in the modern world through the medium of post-Christian gnoses and pseudo-sciences, claiming to appease the anxiety and satisfy the curiosity of the men of our time, the phalangist rejects them absolutely and fights them with all his strength as contrary to right reason and sane philosophy, but still more as an appearance of religion, nay a substitute for redemption, a return to the ignorance and slavery of Satan.