Carlos Caso-Rosendi
One day, when we return to reason, the term “Postmodernism” is going to be abandoned. Some say that Postmodernism grew after World War II from a general disillusion with Modernism. Such disillusion was no surprise. The destruction initiated by Luther and completed by the Axis and the Allies, as they fought like hienas for the carcass of the Old Order was nothing to get dreamy about. Yet I think the term “Postmodernism” is a misnomer. Technically, the world we live in is the apotheosis of Modernism; the sum, pinnacle, and perfection of that destructive spirit initiated long ago on 33 A.D. “Why so early?” you may ask
You know the scene. In what was once Zion, the fortress of King David, stood the military Governor of Judea: Pontius Pilate. Before him there was a rather tall man, bloodied by the brutal lashes of the Roman flagellum, his head crowned by thorns. “Ecce homo!” here’s the man! shouted the Governor to the rabble crowded in the yard below. The response was immediate and visceral: “Crucify him!” The Governor knew about his man. One of his centurions swore that his daughter had been cured of a grievous infirmity by that man. The cure was effected by mere words: “Go home, you daughter is well.” And now the Roman centurion, a veteran of several campaigns, was a loyal follower of that tall Jew.
That morning, the Governor’s wife had told him to have nothing to do with the execution of that good man, who had made so many people whole, and whom even some Romans, Syrians, and Greeks were following now.
He looked at the crowd and asked again” “Do I crucify your King?” and the crowd roared in that language that the Governor had learned to hate: “We have no king but Caesar!” But the governor knew they were a bloodthirsty band of hypocrites that hated Caesar as much as they hated him and that good man Jesus who was meekly standing there.
The Governor made a last attempt to save the man. It was customary to liberate a prisoner on their spring festival, so he offered them to liberate Jesus. May be they would enjoy killing him themselves. But they asked for some rabble-rouser called Bar-Abbas. At that point, he gave his men the order to please the crowd and crucify the man. While they went to fetch Bar-Abbas, he ostensibly washed his hands before the crowd and told them: “I am clean from the blood of this man!” And the crowd roared again: “Let his blood fall upon us, and upon our children!”
The Governor did not notice that all involved were following liturgical instructions from Heaven. He did not notice that he was playing the rôle of a priest. That the sprinkling of the people with the blood of the sacrificial lamb had to take place more or less in that manner. If I remember correctly, the Syrian-Malabar Catholic Church believes the Governor later converted and died a Christian martyr.
In appearance, the whole ceremony was controlled by the Roman Governor. In reality, the Governor, the crowd, the centurions, were there to play their parts under the invisible direction of the very man they were condemning to death. Jesus was dividing the world with one powerful sword. The crowd below knew very well he was the Messiah. Spirits had identified him before entire crowds, he could expel demons, cure the sick, give eyesight to the blind, restore hearing to the deaf, and untie the tongues of those who had never spoken one word. Even the natural elements obeyed him and more than one time he had disappeared when they thought they had him cornered. Yes, he was the Messiah but not the Messiah they wanted.
They expected a Messiah that was more like Caesar. A warrior invincible, like Iskander Bai-Konur, Alexander the Great, the Ram, the Macedonian Greek whose very name and fame made kings surrender without a fight, whose army could obscure the sun with a cloud of flying arrows. They wanted the Lord that King David had seen conversing with God in a vision (See Psalm 110:1). That day the crowd decided that they themselves were going to be their own Messiah, they were going to conquer the world by any means necessary. Weren’t they the only surviving tribe of ancient Israel, after all? Weren’t they the lion cubs, the sons of Judah?
And so Christ went on to conquer the world with grace, mercy, and truth; reigning among his enemies and consolidating his Kingdom through the ages. The Jewish crowd went on to conquer the world through deceit, perversion, and usury—the exact opposite of the spiritual weapons of Christ—and the fight continues even in our age. Israel was changed that day. The true Israelites went to fulfill the original mission of the chosen people: to gather the nations to the House of God. They became the universal Israel, the Catholic Church. The ones rejecting the Messiah joined the original revolutionary, the devil.
That first anti-Christ, Bar-Abbas was the incarnation of the revolutionary spirit that had to be restrained by God to become manifest at the end times. When Luther nailed his thesis to the door of the church in Wittenberg, the spirit of Bar-Abbas was let loose in the world again. That spirit produced the false light of Illuminism and all the other maladies that infected Christendom after 1517, including Modernism. Finally in 1917, almost at the end of the Great War that had destroyed Christendom in the West, Communism took over the largest country in the world with the not-so-secret aid of the United States and other Western powers.
Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us—whether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter—asserting that the day of the Lord has already come. Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God. 2 Thessalonians 2:1-4
Modernism ruled almost unchallenged since those days. To believe in the concept of Postmodernism is to believe that a bull is a post-calf. Again, Modernism has got the world used to those euphemisms. I call the age we are living in the apotheosis of Modernism for good reason. The enemies of life and freedom have finally created a perfect culture of death. That culture has been advancing relentlessly through the 20th century, leaving a trail of death that makes the Roman Empire look almost like a beneficent institution. Count the dead: the fallen since the Napoleonic wars, the victims of abortion, those who were aborted by the contraceptive pill, by government-orchestrated famines, by the brutal economic forces unleashed by the financial powers of the world on “developing” countries” … that is the legacy of Modernism. We are living now in Modernism in its purest most perfect form.
Modernism infected the Church with Luther and the infestation is now manifest and almost complete. That abomination killed countless millions, flattened our culture, destroyed our education systems, perverted the government institutions, and cut the moral restraints of the masses. It is now about to conquer the last moral reference that was still standing: the Catholic Church. Paradoxically after so much success, we see its branches withering. Communism and other socialistic ideologies are in recession, followed only by mindless drones carefully created by professors in the indoctrination labs we euphemistically call “schools”.
“So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel—let the reader understand— then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one on the housetop go down to take anything out of the house. Let no one in the field go back to get their cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again. Matthew 24:15-21
Plato would say that it should not surprise us to find the reason for the debacle of Modernism: it is in the nature of a culture of death to die. Modernism has reached its peak. They can call it Postmodernism or they can call it George for all I care. The abomination has conquered the world and now the time to pay the price has come. It will pay with its soul.
“What then, will anyone gain by winning the whole world while forfeiting his soul?” Matthew 16:26
The one who will truly conquered the world forever, the true Messiah poured his soul on the Cross so we can live with him as our King forever and ever.
Carlos Caso-Rosendi 
Interesting post today. You may have missed the post-modern money-quote from 33 A.D. when Pilate turned to Jesus and said “What is truth?” He was not asking for an answer, he was asking a rhetorical question that posed an answer, “Truth is ephemeral, a momentary glint off of a moving wave, shifting crazily with the breeze.” He said this while speaking directly to Truth!
There is a sense to the term “post-modern” of the failure of the modern project which can be said to have begun with the Enlightenment. The doctors of the Enlightenment believed that the our experience in this world could be known in such detail, using scientific instruments to amplify our senses, that we could bend all reality to our will using logical reasoning. In my view, the apotheosis of this modern world view was the age of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Engels and their followers. Shortly after they had seized world-wide attention with their promises based on reductionist scientism, three new ways of understanding reality were discovered. The Big Bang, quantum physics and the programmatic structure of DNA. The Big Bang blew out the concept of an eternal, steady state universe. It could be shown to have had a beginning. Suddenly, with a bang, there wasn’t enough time for a leisurely paced series of mutation accidents to have accrued randomly to make all that could be seen in nature. Quantum physics and relativity took down the possibility of knowing (in a mechanistic sense) what went on at the smallest and in the largest observable fields. What was discovered was a fundamental uncertainty that in theory could not be overcome. Enlightenment certainty had to be replaced with odd probabilities. Finally, the discovery of the structure of DNA showed that intelligence of some kind was in the universe and had to be accounted for. Classic Enlightenment/natural selection understanding was reductionist. It described all of life in terms of scientific “laws” of energy, force, mass, and blind interactions. DNA showed that information had to be added to the mix and that information could be transmitted through time.
The smartest of the professional thinkers realized that the modern jig was up. We could get to the moon using energy, force and mass, but we could not get to human consciousness using such blunt instruments. Many of those individuals, realizing that new knowledge had burst the old reductionist wine skin coined the term “post-modern” in their despair. Like Pilate, they began to grump, “what is truth?” While the Enlightenment had sought power using reason and empirical data, the post moderns now seek power using the formula that there is no solid standard for truth. Truth is what the speaker says it is or what the listener thinks it is. It is another way of saying that there is no such thing as a lie if someone believes it. Individuals actually are heard to say, “That’s your truth (reality) but not mine,” And they are not howled down with derision.
The enlightenment died taking the modern movement with it. It is obvious to anyone with any insight at all, that scientific materialism is not only a failure, but has been rendered incoherent by the very science it viewed as a messiah. That’s OK though because we are all post-moderns now. Your truth might be different than my truth and so who am I to judge? Unless, of course you make metaphysical claims to Truth in which case you are a very, very bad individual and must be punished.
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From asserting their own alternative truth to resorting to the very denial of truth. Anything but accept Truth.
To your list of discoveries which have cut the ground from under deterministic materialism, I would only add Kurt Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem.
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The consequences of Goedel’s Proof should have cut the legs of the whole Progressive proposition but perfect as it is, it is not easy to translate to a mass of fools. I regard all those discoveries as precursors of the Great Illumination of Conscience that is coming, the Signum Magnum that will wake them up and make them recover their common sense.
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Yours is an excellent comment, OnePeterOne. I cut short the dialogue with Pontius Pilate because I wanted to highlight the split between the Church, going with Christ after the resurrection, and that other previous false “resurrection” of Bar-Abbas. The misguided enemies of Christ were exchanging kingship and eternal life for Bar-Abbas and that insurrectionist spirit that was going to survive through the ages and be quashed every time; from the rebellions against the Romans in the first century (there were several) to the Marxist insurrection, all the way to Antifa there is always a Jewish instigator, thinker or financier behind it. Bar Kochba, Marx, Soros … etc.
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The Jews were the Chosen People. They are very special and gifted. This makes their rebellion all the more deadly. It enables them to make an impact on History out of all proportion to their numbers. Let us pray for their conversion.
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The ways of God are mysterious indeed. I believe God is completely in control of the situation — the drama unfolding in the world is allowed to happen for our instruction. The Jews will convert in the end but they will be called “lesser” in the Kingdom of God. Like Esau, they forfeited their glorious inheritance for mere material gain. That should make them perhaps the thickest-brained people of all ages while their brothers that accepted Christ will be the sharpest! Some of them will join the Iscariot: the man who “would have been better if he was never born.”
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Carlos, I don’t believe Modernism has reached its peak. The total eradication of the acceptance of the reality of human nature has not yet reached fulfillment, although it is impossible to do but it is clearly incrementally gaining favor as man continues to believe he is his own god. What is transgenderism but a complete denial of human nature or the desire to create animal/human or robotic/human hybrids? No, Modernism has much further to go to reach its peak, if God allows it.
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I am afraid you are right. Those who believe Modernism is over are wrong. I believe we are at a specially high point, a sort of apotheosis but that certainly does not mean that they can climb to new heights of degeneracy. I’t a long way to Hell and that is more likely to be reached during the reign of the Antichrist.
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