Last updated on February 17, 2013
Welcome to yet another Monday Update displaying my wide-ranging interests. Kidding! Theology and video games, maybe!
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance – As you may or may not know, on a previous podcast I intimated something to the effect that MGR:R simply wasn’t worth the price of admission. Well, at least at full price.
Well, here’s to impulse buys, because when it comes out tomorrow I will be playing it a whole lot. Silly name and all.
Why the change of heart, so to speak? Partly, I really need to play another Platinum Games style game. I picked up Anarchy Reigns on a whim and enjoyed it heavily for its emphasis on skill, learning, and mastering the game. Heck, the whole experience makes me want to pick Vanquish back up and try to defeat Hard and God Hard modes. Sometimes all those “experiential” games just do not satisfy me anymore; something needs to challenge you on both a mental and reflex level, and MGR:R looks poised to do that very well.
I’ll admit: Metal Gear Solid isn’t my forte (that would go to Mr. Joe Mazzaglia). I played MGS2 and enjoyed it quite a bit, but the whole of the series remains a notable hole in my backlog. The longwinded plots and convoluted “nanomachines fix everything” plots left me cold, in all honesty. When I heard Kojima Productions mixing it up with Platinum Games, though, even a person with little experience in the world of Konami’s making could jump right into a huge sword-swinging overkill extravanganza.
More thoughts on this as I play it, but going through the demo seven times gives you a pretty good indication of the quality, so there you go.
Survivals and New Arrivals – If you can figure out why I am reading books by obscure 20th century Englishmen, then please tell me! I certainly don’t know why these people are not seen in the public eye, except that culture moves fast and we cannot even take a breath before a once heralded (or hated) author disappears from the landscape.
I’ve talked before about Hilaire Belloc when I read The Servile State. Mr. Belloc see European Western civilization AS Christendom, only in disrepair within his time – thus, he appears to write a handy guide for understanding the current (1928) situation. Survivals and New Arrivals takes a theological tone, at times a diatribe against heresies and at others a description of the Christendom’s up and coming foes. He categorizes all heresies as breaking against the strong house of the Catholic Church and failing. Of course, Belloc’s work published in 1928, so one could cut him slack for his errors and praise him for his scarily accurate predictions. He was a hardcore belligerent Catholic, and it makes complete sense that he would see “Protestantism” die eventually. More negative modes of thought, such as fascism and capitalism, occur in such culture (hey, sounds like the United States, almost!) and he blames Calvinism (rightly, I think) for capitalism’s greater sins. Yet this book contains chock full of rigorous social analysis and intellectual debate of a specific period which I find fascinating.
Firstly, there are the “Survivals” – that is, intellectual movements, ideas, and forces that attempted to break the Church but found themselves insufficient or wanting. They survive, surely, but their exit will be swift and merciless. For example, Belloc believed that his age showed the insufficiency of the Biblical literalist – a person who takes the Bible utterly for its own Word and not that of the Church. When we mean “literalist”, Belloc does not mean exactly what you think he means. Take a look:
Mr. H. G. Wells has been at great pains to discuss the fall of man, in which considerable catastrophe he puts no faith. But when he discusses the fall of man he always has in mind the eating of an apple in a particular place at a particular time. When he hears that there is no Catholic doctrine defining the exact place or the exact time—not even the name of the apple, he shrewdly suspects that we are shirking the main issue. He thinks in terms of the Bible Christian—with whom he disagrees.
The main issue for European civilization in general is whether man fell or no. Whether man was created for beatitude, enjoyed a supernatural state, fell by rebellion from that state into the natural but unhappy condition in which he now stands, subject to death, clouded in intellect and rotted with pride, yet with a memory of greater things, an aspiration to recover them, and a power of so doing by right living in this world of his exile; or whether man is on a perpetual ascent from viler to nobler things, a biped worthy of his own respect in this life and sufficient to his own destiny.
On that great quarrel the future of our race depends. But the inventors of Bible Christianity, even when they have lost their original creeds, do not see it thus. They take the main point to be, whether it were an apple—who munched it—exactly where—and exactly when. They triumphantly discover that no fruit or date can be established, and they conclude that the Christian scheme is ruined and the Fall a myth.
This impulse to corroborate the facts of the Bible and make them the pinnacle of faith remains a phenomena; one only needs to look at Answers in Genesis and its ilk to see that a massive crowd still makes their faith rely on fact to its own detriment. I may be Protestant, but I know faith does not rely on fact for its backbone; it sustains itself. In this me and Mr. Belloc come into agreement almost wholeheartedly. Of course, this “Survival” came to prominence once again in the United States, but its influence continues to plummet.
On the other hand, the “New Arrivals” consists of those enemies of the Church which may not even exist yet, but will rise into prominence. Frankly, I found his claims here fascinating for one reason: he predicts Islam will rise again as the greatest enemy of Western civilization and Christendom. As Mr. Belloc says:
Many another heresiarch has done this, throwing overboard such and such too profound doctrines, and appealing to the less intelligent by getting rid of mysteries through a crude denial of them. But Mahomet simplified much more than did, say, Pelagius or even Arius. He turned Our Lord into a mere prophet, though the greatest of the prophets; Our Lady (whom he greatly revered, and whom his followers still revere), he turned into no more than the mother of so great a prophet; he cut out the Eucharist altogether, and what was most difficult to follow in the matter of the Resurrection. He abolished all idea of priesthood: most important of all, he declared for social equality among all those who should be “true believers” after his fashion
With the energy of his personality behind that highly simplified, burning enthusiasm, he first inflamed his own few desert folk, and they in turn proceeded to impose their new enthusiasm very rapidly over vast areas of what had been until then a Catholic civilization; and their chief allies in this sweeping revolution were politically the doctrine of equality, and spiritually the doctrine of simplicity. Everybody troubled by the mysteries of Catholicism tended to join them; so did every slave or debtor who was oppressed by the complexity of a higher civilization.
The combination of passion and simplicity made Islam a force, both acceptable to the common man and powerful for those who led them. Thus, we saw the explosion of Islam from its founding in 632 AD to its gigantic Empire held barely in check by European civilization. That it began to crumble in the 1800s and definitively after World War I did not seem to blind Belloc’s eyes to a rising threat. His culture’s ignorance of this threat would prove a grave mistake:
…We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the near future. Perhaps if we lose our Faith it will rise. For after this subjugation of the Islamic culture by the nominally Christian had already been achieved, the political conquerors of that culture began to notice two disquieting features about it. The first was that its spiritual foundation proved immovable; the second that its area of occupation did not recede, but on the contrary slowly expanded.
Islam would not look at any Christian missionary effort. The so-called Christian Governments, in contact with it, it spiritually despised. The ardent and sincere Christian missionaries were received usually with courtesy, sometimes with fierce attack, but were never allowed to affect Islam. I think it true to say that Islam is the only spiritual force on earth which Catholicism has found an impregnable fortress. Its votaries are the one religious body conversions from which are insignificant.
This granite permanence is a most striking thing, and worthy of serious consideration by all those who meditate upon the spiritual, and, consequently, the social, future of the world.
And what is true of the spiritual side of Islam is true of the geographical. Mahommedan rulers have had to give up Christian provinces formerly under their control: especially in the Balkans. But the area of Mahommedan practice has not shrunk. All that wide belt from the islands of the Pacific to Morocco, and from Central Asia to the Sahara desert—and south of it—not only remains intact but slightly expands. Islam is appreciably spreading its influence further and further into tropical Africa.
Now that state of affairs creates a very important subject of study for those who interest themselves in the future of religious influence upon mankind. The political control of Islam by Europe cannot continue indefinitely: it is already shaken. Meanwhile the spiritual independence of Islam (upon which everything depends) is as strong as, or stronger than, ever.
I think history proves Mr. Belloc quite right, and affairs in the Middle East (especially Afghanistan and Iraq’s “Westernizing”) confirm this assumption: Islam will not be displaced by a mere idealistic effort. It remains a threat to all Western culture; how we will deal with it, you wonder? Force hasn’t worked.
If this seems interesting in any way, given the copious quoting done here, please read it here or buy it for a dollar on Amazon.
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That’s Monday Update: Hilaire Belloc Edition. More MGR:R coverage to come this week!
