DANIEL S. writes:

Majorie Jeffrey at Crisis Magazine has written what I believe to be one of the most balanced articles on the thought and suicide of the French historian and European nationalist Dominique Venner.

She doesn’t get bogged down in moral judgments of Venner’s suicides, she just states in a matter-of-fact manner that Catholic teachings clearly prohibit suicide, but that Venner was a pagan and so it is pointless to expect him to embody traditional Catholic moral teachings. At the same time she doesn’t use this divergence to dismiss Venner’s message:

The Christian mind has long rejected the possibility of suicide as a good, ever since Augustine’s prominent discussion of it in the first book of The City of God.  In Chapter 22 of that discussion, Augustine denies that men who commit suicide can ever be admired for their greatness of soul. Given that Augustine’s prime task was to write “against the pagans,” this line of argument is understandable; he wants to discourage any admiration of individual pagans. I would like to suggest that this restriction be revisited. A Christian may admire the heights of pagan virtue without condoning its sinful aspects. After all, Augustine’s firm condemnation of all things pagan cannot be entirely reconciled with the Thomistic embrace of pre-Christian Greek philosophy in the High Middle Ages. Admiring Venner’s cause is not the same as condoning his self-annihilation.

Just maybe, there is something we can learn from the spirit of his deed, if not from the deed itself. It certainly seems clear that Venner did not mean for men of the West to follow his example and commit mass suicide; he meant for it to shake them out of their malaise. It was a cri-du-cœur against the modern age.

And what is the spirit of Venner’s deed that Ms. Jeffrey thinks we should learn from and admire?

The final piece that he wrote on his personal blog, “The May 26 Protests and Heidegger,” gives a clearer explanation of his death than does his suicide letter. It contains a warning and a call to arms. He addresses this warning to the French anti-gay marriage protesters, who, in his opinion, have addressed their rightful indignation at the wrong thing. Venner himself expressed horror at the notion of “gay marriage,” but his objection to the culture of relativism goes deeper than that…

…Ultimately, the objections of the May 26th protesters will be moot. Gay marriage is a smaller symptom of the disease. In the end, the suicide of Europe will result in conquest by Islam. He continues, “The May 26 protestors cannot ignore this reality. Their struggle cannot be limited to the rejection of gay marriage. The ‘great replacement’ of the population of France and Europe, denounced by the writer Renaud Camus, is a far more catastrophic danger for the future.”

She further observes, “Dominique Venner’s suicide mirrors the suicide of the West, and is meant to shame us.”

In bringing our attention in shaking manner  to the demographic, moral, and spiritual rot of the West what did Venner want from his fellow French and other Westerners?

“Polite street protests,” as he puts it, are not enough. He calls for “real intellectual and moral reform,” which ought to begin as quickly as possible. And it is here that Dominique Venner tells us (what he hopes will be) the meaning of his death:

It certainly will require new, spectacular, and symbolic gestures to stir our somnolence, shake our anesthetized consciousness, and awaken the memory of our origins. We are entering a time when words must be authenticated by deeds.

The usual sort of political methods: protests, voting, etc. are increasingly irrelevant and Venner is correct that “new, spectacular, and symbolic gestures” are needed to confront the massive challenges of the West, though clearly I wouldn’t agree that ritual suicide be among these new gestures.

In closing Majorie Jeffrey offers the following:

His final published words were these:

We should also remember, as brilliantly formulated by Heidegger in Being and Time, that the essence of man is in his existence and not in “another world.” It is here and now that our destiny is played out until the last second. And this final second is as important as the rest of a lifetime. That is why you must be yourself until the last moment. It is by deciding, truly willing one’s destiny, that one conquers nothingness. And there is no escape from this requirement, because we only have this life, in which it is our duty to be fully ourselves—or to be nothing.

Of course, this is not what Christians believe. Our home is not this world. But that does not mean we can renounce our duty to care for the good, the true, and the beautiful in this world. Those of us who do not join monasteries are called to care for the political and the highest civilizational things. Dominique Venner, historian and former soldier, sought to found a new resistance to the collapse of European civilization. Whatever civilizational Christians think of his means, we ought to admire his end.

The few Catholic commentators who discussed Dominique Venner sought to disassociate from the man. They assured their readers that, contrary to erroneous media reports, Venner was not a practicing Catholic, but an atheist-pagan (and worse, a neo-fascist) with whom they had nothing in common. Furthermore, the totality of the man was to be dismissed simply for his final act of self-annihilation. I believe that Ms. Jeffrey shows us that we needn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Please follow and like us: