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Black Legends and the Light of the World:
The War of Words with the Incarnate Word
John C. Rao, D. Phil., Oxford
Associate Professor of History,
St. John’s University
Available from The Remnant Press
for just $30 (plus P&H).
Please send check or money
orders to:
The Remnant Press
P.O. Box 1117, Forest Lake,
Minnesota 55025.
Brief Synopsis, Introductory Quotations, and Table of Contents
Black Legends and the Light of the World is a thematic discussion of the whole of Church History, based upon the Roman Forum Summer Symposia at Gardone Riviera in Italy (1993-2011). This work has three purposes: first of all, to explain the successes of Catholic Christendom as the product of faithfulness to the fullness of the message of the Incarnate Word to the individual and society; secondly, to connect Christendom’s historical failures to a painful, recurring, clerical and lay Catholic willingness to believe rhetorical “word merchants” who either blacken that world-changing teaching, or reduce it to a harmless caricature of itself; and, finally, to demonstrate the essential unity of such misleading, rhetorical word merchandizing in its unending, disruptive, all-out war against the substantive natural and supernatural correction and transformation of man offered by the Word---from the age of the Sophists to that of Global Pluralism.
“Christ said ‘I am the Truth’. He did not say, ‘I am custom’.”
-Pope St. Gregory VII, citing Tertullian
“There are times when an elevated spirit is a true infirmity. No one understands it. It even passes for a kind of mental limitation.”
-Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe
“Now battle had to be joined, and therefore men were needed to restore a new order, and new theologians as well,
to whom the evil was manifest from its outward phenomena down to its most subtle roots;
then the time would come for the first stroke of the consecrated sword, piercing the darkness like a lightning flash.
For this reason individuals had the duty of living in alliance with others, gathering the treasure of a new rule of law.
But the alliance had to be stronger than before, and they more conscious of it.”
-Ernst Jünger, Auf den
Marmorklippen, XX
Table of Contents
Introduction:
On Weaponry and Terrain............................................................................1
Chapter One
First Blood....................................................................................................15
Chapter Two
The Attack of the Word................................................................................27
Chapter Three
The Turbulent Battle for a Christian Imperial Order..................................56
Chapter Four
The New Ascent of Mount Tabor...............................................................117
Chapter Five
Counterattack and Resistance on the Cheap...............................................171
Chapter Six
The War of All Against All or the Peace of the Reinvigorated Word.........247
Chapter Seven
The Global Battle for Nature: Modern Naturalism
and the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo................................................313
Chapter Eight
The Naturalist Revolution, the Implosion of the GCSQ,
and the Troubled Beginnings of the Ninth Crusade...................................375
Chapter Nine
The Ninth Crusade: Retrenchment and Renewed Assault.........................429
Chapter Ten
Firestorm in the Kingdom of the Word.......................................................496
Chapter Eleven
When the Salt Loses its Savor:
Mindless Rout and Voluntary Enslavement to the Words.........................573
Epilogue
My End is My Beginning...........................................................................631