The 150 Points of the Phalange, Catholic, Royal, and Communitarian - Point 3

Point 3. Against the Irreligious, the Atheists and the Agnostics

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 relation 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 relation 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.