Daniel Schwindt - Holocaust of the Childlike: The Progress of a Spiritual War

It is said that disease and famine once threatened man at every turn. I doubt this was ever true, but for our purposes here we will pretend that it was. It is then said that people banded together, formed a society, advanced in knowledge, conquered nature, and became modern. The result, it seems, is that now man only threatens himselfdefeating himself at the moment of his own apparent victory. Consider, for example, that suicide is a problem specific to developed countries. This alone should be enough to give us pause.

But the mystery of our Age does not end at this strange tendency toward self-destructionthat is only its initiation. What shall we say when men begin to go even further? What happens when suicide is no longer enough ?

On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School. I dont need to say any more. Everyone knows the details. For this man, suicide was not enough. If he had stopped there, at the abdication of his own throne of consciousness, I wouldnt be writing this book. But he went further. Again, suicide was not enough. In one violent act we saw the absolute rejection not just of life by a man, but also the rejection of motherhood, and, most violently of all, the rejection of childhood; which is to say, not only of life but of innocence, wonder, zest, play, and joy.

For a civilization which has been taught to see only material causes behind material effects, this was a terrible exception, but nothing more than an exception. For those who can only consider events significant when they are also statistically significant, what happened that day was a tragedy, but also an anomaly. It cannot be shown to represent a mathematical trend. In short, the act must remain ultimately dark and meaningless, leaving us with nothing to do but mourn and move on.

But traditional wisdom tells us something different. The early Christian fathers believed that an event could have a four-fold significance. They applied this method primarily to scripture, but it was relevant also to all human experience. These four categories of meaning were called the literal , the allegorical , the moral , and the anagogical . The literal meaning is the most obvious, most simplistic, and also the most irrelevant. It is nothing more than the facts as they pertain to time and place. The allegorical is a means of meaningfully connecting a past event to a present one. Third, the moral sense roots the lesson in the here and now, representing what we would call the moral of the story. Finally, there is the anagogical sense, which identifies the highest truth of the event, transcending both history and morality, and entering into the significance of eternity. It is the spiritual truth that lies behind every aspect of life and creation.

The anagogical is therefore the highest, most subtle, and most valuable meaning of the four categories. Unfortunately, as all subtlety has been progressively rejected in favor of everything that is most superficial, material, and obvious, the only meanings which the modern world acknowledges are the literal. Only the plain facts are taken into consideration, as if they were somehow capable of explaining themselves, or of guiding men in their actions. The belief that facts can explain themselves is one of the devils greatest victories.

Thus, when people discuss what happened in Newtown in terms of a single mans developmental psychology, going back to his formative years or his social environment to look for causes, their findings present us with some literal evidence behind the event. Such evidence is often valid, but in the end it is nothing more than bare data, devoid of any meaning in itself. In order to approach a real understanding, one must be willing to go further, and to delve into the subtle and the invisible, which is to say, into the spiritual. This requires the use of anagoge , entering not only into one mans childhood, but into Mankinds childhood in Paradise, and then journeying from there all the way to the Apocalypse. We have to be willing to dig to the subterranean depths of the psyche, but also willing climb to the celestial heights of the soul.

If we are willing to make such an effort, then we will no longer see a heartbreaking but meaningless sociological anomaly. We will instead see the face of an infernal enemy. We will also see the shape of his cosmic war that has been raging since Adam and Eve, and which will continue to rage until the Antichrist. Man has tried to bury it, and has largely succeeded in hiding it from his consciousness; but occasionally it ruptures through the thin surface film of his awareness, making itself known in the most horrific of ways. The more he hides from it, the more casualties it will claim. It is a war above all against innocence; and, having begun in the Garden of mans spiritual childhood, it is a war against mans childlikeness. That being the case, it should be no surprise that mans childrenwho are themselves the living symbols of that state of innocence and purityare the most frequent casualties.

In other words, it has always been the goal of the infernal enemy to bring to about the universal holocaust of the childlike . It is therefore the goal of this book to outline the progress of his attack, enabling each man to better survive the battlefield onto which he is born. There are two parts to our investigation, which follow precisely the two possible definitions of the word holocaust :

holocaust

1: a sacrifice consumed by fire

2: a thorough destruction involving extensive loss of life especially through fire

1. a sacrifice consumed by fire : The first part of this book (chapters 1-11) traces the slow but accelerating tendency of man to sacrifice his own innocence upon the altar of the world. Here I seek to identify the virtues of spiritual childlikeness, and to point out the most significant spiritually degenerative tendencies through which it is being destroyed.
2. a thorough destruction involving extensive loss of life especially through fire : The second part (chapters 12-16) explains the necessary result of the first part. As man progressively surrenders his own childlikeness, the world becomes increasingly hostile to the actual physical child. Children and childlikeness are not the same things, of course, but the child reflects and symbolizes childlikeness, so he will always and everywhere stand next to the childlike on the sacrificial altar.

The only just war is the holy war ; the only righteous conflict is a crusade . The fact that the holy war no longer exists for the modern world should serve as a kind of spiritual barometer indicating how little it concerns itself with those notions like holiness and justice. Unlike the modern secular state, all traditional civilizations pivoted around a spiritual center, and so it was natural that all armed conflicts represented only the most obvious and outward expression of a more subtle and universal conflict of the spirit. This is the true meaning behind the Crusades, and it is why the great knightly Orders which arose from the conflict were always Holy Orders, made not of mercenaries but of monks; not of soldiers but ascetics.