"By heaven, he who would make the state into a school of morals does not know how he sins! The fact that man has wished to erect the state as his heaven has always turned the state into hell. The state is the coarse husk round the kernel of life, and nothing further. But of what use is the wall round the garden, where the ground lies barren? In that case only rain from heaven can assist. O rain from heaven! O inspiration! Thou wilt bring us once more the springtime of the peoples. The state cannot impose its law on thee. Thou wilt come When will this be? At the time when the new church shall issue form out of these polluted forms."

Thus spake Johann Christoph Friedrich Holderlin's Hyperion, and Hyperion's friend Alabanda responded that the state in itself is an evil, that it is repressive. But on one thing both characters agreed: decadent people have no right to live. And it is with that in mind that we return to our discussion of the religious roots of neoconservatism.

Carl Schmitt's neoconservative jurisprudence, still popular today in the United States, particularly among right-wing authoritarians of the Bush administration, was used to legalize the Nazi party's extra-legal destruction of the liberal Weimar Republic, and to rationalize and justify the murderous establishment of Hitler's totalitarian state. Schmitt, as we recall, praised Hitler's June 1934 Blood Purge - the senseless massacre of over 400 persons on the pretext that they were part of an incipient "second" Nazi revolution emphasizing the Socialist aspect of National Socialism. The massacre served to terrorize the opposition and awe the masses. Schmitt's authoritarian rationalizations were deeply rooted in the most vulgar of Judeo-Christian religious prejudices and doctrines, hence were hardly novel but for the secular style of his presentation. His work still provides an effective model for the practice of neoconservative hypocrisy and prevarication.

Schmitt's black-or-white, friend-or-foe doctrine has had the most profound influence on those neoconservatives in the United States who take prodigious pride in the heritage of their "superior northern European culture", and who are anxious to have that culture adopted by all persons now, regardless of their respective races, cultures, and belief systems, so that they may be saved from terror, much of which is unwittingly provoked in the name of God and His Democracy by the neoconservatives themselves.

It is no wonder that so many people are anxious and confused given the troubling circumstances all around, the natural and social storms and stresses of the terrifying times, no doubt signifying, as it did for the Pan German societies, the end time, the disastrous time when the earth would be covered by flood and fire. Then the pure supermen of unmixed seed, who are descended from the northern gods born of the melting ice, would rule the earth.

John Calvin said, "We cannot be otherwise than constantly anxious and confused," given the terrors of Nature, particularly the storms and floods and the fact that enormous bodies hang in space over our heads. We must not be deceived, therefore, "when we can sun ourselves under a serene and peaceful sky, for every day their life is exposed to sudden storms."

John Calvin, like others who were bored with sophisticated humanist literature, admired the popular, violent rants of Martin Luther. Luther's rhetoric had such a phenomenal liberating effect on the peasants who flew the rainbow-covenant banner, Luther recommended they be stabbed to death for their sins. For Calvin, liberalism was virtually synonymous with sin, the very cause of the civil disorders of his day. That sin of course included Catholic doctrines, especially the doctrine of confessions, repentance, and works, doctrines he described as "filth" and "excrement" and "ordure."

Calvin, like Luther, apparently excluded the otherwise sinful rebellion of the Protestants against the Catholic authorities. Of course the Protestant's communist wing was heretical, and, as Luther suggested in his letter, tens of thousands of peasants armed with sticks, stones, and pitchforks were efficiently slaughtered by the professional armies of the princes. The Anabaptists were particularly dangerous to the state and Catholic and Protestant churches, for they preached not only re-baptism but the communal life of shared property. Notwithstanding the Protestant separation of church and state doctrine, the old doctrine of "Two Kingdoms", one spiritual and one civil, the civil authorities were more than glad to exile or execute spiritual communists. For instance, Servetus was burned at the stake with his book not because of Calvin's disagreement with its heresy over the Trinity, but rather because he wrote that people should be baptized when they grow up, because, as infants, they do not know what is going on. Wherefore the Geneva civil authorities associated him with the Anabaptists.

Some sexual libertines wanted to share mates as well as other goods, considering that private property in mates was a mortal sin. Calvin was dead set against the idea despite the biblical precedent for polygamy. And he wrote about certain "spirituels" or "libertins" who showed up to quibble with him - he identified them as Beghards. The Beghards and Beguines of two centuries past had actually led an exemplary life of lay monasticism, and were called "spirituals" because of their exaltation of spiritual love over doctrinal rationalizations, a devotion expressed by St. Francis, whom some spirituals believed was the Christ returned to institute the Age of Love, succeeding the Age of Faith of the Catholics and the Age of Law of the Jews. Of course Christianity had had its 'enthusiasts" or "god-possessed" adherents ever since the speaking-in-tongues controversy. The Messalians were one peculiar group; they like to spit and jump over fires; several of them were put to death as heretics by local Christian bishops. And at the outset of the Reformation, Protestant leaders expressed the antinomian or anti-law notion, that the Tables of Law had been set aside by their movement, but they soon had to back-track for political reasons more than moral compunctions, and claim that Jesus came to fulfill the Law and not abrogate it.

John Calvin's version of Two Kingdoms doctrine stated that spiritual authority "resides in the inner mind", while the secular authority "regulates outward behavior." Wherefore Calvin, like Augustine, had theoretically turned over the civil sword to the magistrates. The civil authorities were supreme in material matters, while the church could do little more than excommunicate unscrupulous people, no doubt liberals, whose sins distracted them from the natural dread of death - which Calvin called "the curse of God" - every day of their lives. He did not argue, by the way, as some did, that religion is the greatest distraction from death of all, hence perhaps also the greatest sin of all, and that its personal ego-god is the Vanity of vanities.

Of course Calvin had his humane and liberal side, but he was also an extremely anxious and conservative man, an obsessive-compulsive person who believed there was only one way to relief himself and everyone else to boot from the dread of death: the fundamental Christian way. Fundamental Christians are frustrated Jews, more or less, hence the mores of the Jews, or rather of the Hebrews and their tribal god, the Almighty Terrorist, must be adhered to. Despite the theoretical separation of church and state, the result in Geneva was the virtually total identification of church, state, and society; in effect, a totalitarian theocratic police state with one political party - we would call it the Christian right party.

Many years later, Carl Schmitt, reacting to the liberal threat, developed the secular concept of the Total or Totalitarianism. According to him, the liberals, always concerned with the political constitution of the state and the protection of individuals from its abuses, were to blame for separating society from state. As a result, the Weimar republic was weak and the society was decadent and depraved. Parliamentary procedures were divisive, a big waste of time, for people voted according to prejudices and party lines, and not on the issues themselves. Nation and race and party should be a unity in order to get the right things done. He proposed in 1933 that Germany needed a total state wherein no internal dissent of any kind would be tolerated. The merger of society and state would be accomplished by mass propaganda, and, if need be, by police force - hence Schmitt provided the Nazis with legal justification for their massacres precedent to their seizure of total power.

The totalitarian state Schmitt had in mind for Germany was not the "quantitative total" or materialistic mass-production state enjoyed by welfare states, which were inherently weak although total, but rather the "qualitative total" state, a ferocious authoritarian state, ruled of course by the elect warriors, particularly the charismatic hero, who has nothing but righteous contempt for peaceful, reasonable, meek and clerical people.

Incidentally, prior to 1934, German thinkers had thought of National Socialist Germany as a revived imperialism replete with a big army and bureaucracy, but now Hitler, a charismatic who possessed the "highest values", namely the mighty right above relative good and evil, was called to power by the folk. The Nazis eventually avoided the use of the term 'Total' because they preferred to refer to the racial folk-nation, not the abstract political state, as the basis of their movement. Nazis thereby avoid comparison with the totalitarian communist state so much despised by Hitler:

"The Jewish doctrine of Marxism repudiates the aristocratic principle of nature and substitutes for it and the eternal principle of force and energy numerical mass and its dead weight," said Hitler. "Thus it denies the individual worth of the human personality, impugns the teaching that nationhood and race have a primary significance, and by doing this takes away the very foundations of human existence and human civilization."

Of course the absolute anarch is just as absurd standing alone as the absolute archon. Once a leading man becomes a god, once a leading anarch becomes an archon, rational thought and constitutional forms, no matter how many their branches, will most likely be suspended in short order, usually to restore order with a series of wars. The ungodly or godly dictator appears to be the concrete universal, the embodiment of the one-in-many.

"Inside every anarchist a frustrated dictator is trying to get out," said Mussolini in good humor.


Again, Calvin's Protestant Geneva had, theoretically, Two Kingdoms. The civil authorities were to preside over outward affairs. To his liberal credit, Calvin, who was by upbringing an aristocratic republican, insisted that the magistrates provide not only police force but to provide for the welfare of the community as well, departing from Kant's conservative political dictum that, "The ruler has only rights against the subject, no duties."

Of course the civil authorities should heed counsel from the spiritual authorities. There should be, in addition to excommunication and the consequent inability to sit down with the community at the four annual feasts, exilations, humiliations, beheadings, burnings at the stake and so on. People must be spied upon and all the filthy things they do, to have fun and to forget God's curse of death, should be punished. Of course Calvinists should hold the highest civil offices, hence the question of separation of church and state is rather irrelevant. What difference does the formal separation of church and state make when the state is governed by bigots? Who cares if the commandments are posted or not if the magistrates follow them behind closed doors?

Calvin's "revolution of 1555" or seizure of total power was made possible by immigration into Geneva of fleeing French Protestants, some of whom had the wherewithal to buy the right to vote. Calvin's party gained control over Geneva's councils, which were previously controlled by the liberal, Perrinist party of Amy Perrin. The Perrinists were insultingly alluded to as the party of 'Libertins', apparently after the Synagog of Libertines or Freedmen who conspired against St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr. But in the biblical 'Libertines' were probably Jewish 'Libyans', who, along with other African and Asian Jews, had been freed by Rome and were in fact political and religious conservatives, not liberals.

But let us be careful of what we say here, lest we be striken by lightning; or perchance a comet might plow into our our planet and the Earth be purified of our filth by flood if not by a Black Death or a series of nuclear explosions. Mind you that, bbesides the natural apocalypses - the revelations of the wrath of the Almighty Terrorist dangling from above - we are encircled by terrorists here on earth, thugs who would liberate us from our lives and property, particularly our fertile real estate and females. Thus would women and everything else be liberated from their almighty rightful owners and promiscuously shared: everything including the racial seeds would then get mixed up.

Men, for example, might start acting like hysterical women, complaining all the time, might subject each other to abominations such as sodomy, perhaps even in the temple itself. Neoconservatives to this very day, obsessed as they are with sexual power, lose a great deal of sleep over the wrongful distribution and utilization of genitalia. Calvin in his day worried himself about cross-dressing. Women were dressing like soldiers! Those kind of women, said Calvin, are "monsters so scandalous that one ought not only to spit at meeting one but pick up some piece of filth to throw at them for so audaciously perverting the order of nature!"

Indeed, we still note a marked intolerance for ambiguity in the "either good or evil" psychology still present in the current neoconservative order. Calvin would certainly sympathize with today's neoconservatives: he loathed "mixing" things up. The very word 'mixing' connotes "adultery" and "promiscuity." He wanted a clearly defined order, represented on earth by monogamous marriage and surveyed plots of real estate owned by landlords; and, in mental space, he demanded clearly defined ideas presided over by the spiritual entity and his elect representatives.

Of course the order desired is the totally good order, while the disorder of any other order, namely the liberal order, is associated with evil, disorder, chaos. If any contradictions are noted in the lucid rationalizations about their heavenly order, the questioner should be referred to "God's mysteries." If he persists with his pestering questions, so much the worse for him in terms of God's wrath, for such mysteries should not be questioned, debated, or seriously discussed as decadent liberal sophists are wont to do - they should be beheaded, or burned at the stake if not in hell.

After all, if the liberal sophists persist with their discussions, the world will be overrun by libertines, who are notorious for all those sins that amount to escapes from the constant, terrifying consciousness of impending doom; sins including but not limited to drinking, dancing, gambling, fornicating, birth control, sodomy, cross-dressing, spitting, joking, vanity, adultery, perjury, blasphemy, pantheism, atheism, communism and the like, not to mention too much thinking for one's own good. If only the obsessive-compulsive, liberal neoconservative could put everything in total order, extirpating all heresy, the Kingdom of God would be be realized on earth:

"We throw heaven and earth into confusion by our sins," brooded Calvin, who worried much about the terrors unleashed by his own anxious movement.... "If we were rightly disposed to obey God," tentatively concluded Calvin, "all the elements would certainly serve us, and we would discern an almost angelic harmony in the world."

On the other hand, lest Terror vanish from the earth and men run amuk, freely doing whatever they will in order to save themselves and each other, Calvin argues that works, no matter how good they might be, are not good enough to satisfy God's sublime law. Even angels and saints cannot fully abide by that inscrutable divine law, for creatures are forever tainted by the very fact of their existence. For instance, the Church doctrine of confession and repentance is not only excremental, it is a "butcher's" doctrine which adds to the tortured existence of human beings, who are corrupted by original sin just for being, and who face death upon death even after eternal death - at which point Calvin ran out of superlatives for the ultimate Terror.

To be fair to Carl Schmitt's religious prejudices and their influence on contemporary neoconservatism, we should take up Neoconservative Catholicism and consider the ideas of the Catholic thinker from whom Schmitt borrowed some of his main ideas. As for the most prominent Reformers, we have not devoted much time to Luther's decided influence as a frustrated Catholic protestor on neoconservatism; we should mention here in passing Luther's ironic hatred for the Reason of the Enlightenment and his reliance on "God's mysteries" to explain away all contradictions in his arguments.