Screwtape’s Disciples | Thomas M. Doran | CWR blog
How can the many brave new worlders be defeated?
At first glance, the Jacobins, Marxists, Nazis, rapacious industrial and financial oligarchs, and modern jihadists have little in common. Weren’t the Jacobin revolutionaries democracy’s standard bearers? Weren’t they guided by reason and Enlightenment principles? Aren’t Marxists, past and present, social scientists opposed to oppression by the aristocracy and capitalist robber barons, striving to end class conflict? Weren’t the Nazis an inevitable product of oppressive WWI unconditional surrender terms? Aren’t industrial and financial oligarchs entrepreneurs and community builders? Aren’t modern jihadists seeking retributive justice for historically oppressed Muslims?
“An attractive end justifies messy means.”
This end? A brave new world, requiring destruction for re-construction, requiring the elimination of an ethos of self-donation, self-sacrifice, and self-identification with the Jesus of the Gospels, all so that man can progress.
J.R.R. Tolkien depicts angels who are fair-seeming, compelling in speech, and reasonable, so much so that many men are lured into their orbit, and eventually enslaved. Sauron and Saruman weren’t created to be the tyrants they later become. Nonetheless, angels they were and angels they remain, though fallen.
The Lord of The Rings is just a story isn’t it: adventure, fantasy, fiction, mythology? Actually, The Lord of The Rings, along with C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters describes how man is tempted, and sometimes corrupted, by fallen angels…devils.
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