Edward Feser, one of my favorite American philosophers, asks:

Why the constant harping about the separation of church and state, but not, say, the separation of naturalistic metaphysics and the state, the separation of feminist theory and the state, or the separation of Rawlsian liberalism and the state?

My answer might disappoint Mr. Feser: Because the founders of this nation denied the very object of metaphysics (reality), hated women as much as today’s feminists hate themselves, and were just as ignorant and confused about justice as John Rawls.

And yet Feser’s question hovers over Moloch’s second term like a threatening cloud about to waterlog the ship of fools the White House has become. If the federal government can replace irrevocable definitions of moral philosophy, then why not those of mathematics, physics, or logic?

But why would our government presume to create new laws of nature? Answer: The handiwork of a ferociously anti-intellectual sect of Germanic pietists with only makeshift educations, America has always denigrated philosophy, the science of reality. With few exceptions (Thomas Sowell springs to mind), today’s “philosophers” are academic state hirelings, ideological apologists for any progressive government in power, hence irrelevant to the larger society such governments seek to crush.

With 376 years of institutionalized pseudo-philosophy behind them (counting from the publication of Descartes’s error-ridden Discourse on Method) and 496 years of rebellion against apostolic authority, revelation, and reason (starting from the posting of 95 blunders by a feces-eating alcoholic from Eisleben), today’s Puritan-liberal establishment has gone from fundamentally transforming America in 2008 to fundamentally transforming the laws of nature in 2013.

For just as one who attempts to redefine the circle as a four-sided polygon shows complete ignorance of geometry, one who attempts to redefine marriage as a union of two persons of the same sex shows ignorance of moral philosophy, which I believe is a true science just as rigorous, exact, and objective as mathematics. 

A people with 1,296 years of Christendom in their cultural makeup, the French have recently shown themselves capable of uniting around human nature’s laws. The million-person anti-gay “marriage” and adoption protests in Paris on January 13 included some of the most disparate elements. Leprous immoralists, socialist harpies, and liberal quadrupeds marched alongside Catholics, Jews, and Muslims.

These surprising coalitions were united by a common understanding of a foundational principle of moral philosophy, namely that human nature exists and follows laws in its very constitution.

Xavier Bongibault, president of the Plus Gay Sans Mariage association, came out in favor of this axiom and later helped organize the protest. In a Séronet interview last November, he displayed knowledge of moral cause and effect by declaring gay adoption “an opening to incest and polygamy.” For Bongibault, it is evidently one thing to degrade oneself through an unspeakable act against nature, another to institutionalize that degradation as “marriage.”

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The French anchored their protest against gay “marriage” and adoption philosophically, in the constitution and nature of the human person—something some France’s most macabre leftists publicly acknowledged by participating in the protest.

How were such inconceivable coalitions of opposing organizations possible, to the tune of one million protestors occupying Paris? Simply put, philosophers are still popular chez les Gaulois.

In a November 8, 2012 article published in Le Monde, a group of prominent French philosophers and intellectuals expressed their collective rejection of gay adoption in a brief joint statement. “In the name of what ‘modernity,’” they ask, “would one deprive a child of half of his identity construction?”

The first name to appear on the list of coauthors was that of Chantal Delsol, a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of the Institut de France. Delsol is an oxymoronic liberal philosopher whose fervent European federalism bends her to the level of knuckle-dragging Hillary and Hussein.

Delsol is far from alone in her insistence that gay “marriage” is socially destructive. Many French intellectuals on the left have drawn attention to the same realities of human nature. Sylviane Agacinski, for example, is a prominent philosopher whose visibility has been increased by her marriage to former French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, a howling communist.

Agacinski’s latest book, Women Between Sex and Gender, caused a sensation in academic circles because of its opposition to “queer theory,” a false “discipline” teaching that the sexual distinction between man and woman is a purely social construction. In the name of sexual differentiation, she also attacked gay “marriage” and adoption.

Agacinski militates in favor of children’s right “to know their personal history and the real conditions of their birth.” She explains that children can only develop when “inscribed in the order of sexuated generation.” She vehemently questions the idea of “anonymous gametes” since this creates the fatal illusion that children are merely “a commodity manufactured from anonymous biological material”—with all the potential human trafficking this implies.

In short, gay adoption is not adoption, because it cannot create a real filiation. “Filiation is universally bilateral (feminine and masculine) because it reproduces sexuated generation,” says Agacinski. “One is a father or mother in function of one’s sex, not one’s sexuality.”

The very term “matrimony” derives from the Latin “mater,” meaning “mother.” Clearly, a mother is not an anonymous gamete or the proud owner of a human pet. Society has an obligation to provide children with real parents and not just pleasure-seeking titleholders.

Through such argumentation, philosophers from all parts of the political spectrum provided the France-wide protest its conceptual foundation.

In intellectually defunct America, where homofascism has already extinguished the vitality of our social, political, and religious institutions—the usual sign that a civilization is ending—no such recourse to reality is possible.

Duchess of Cambridge

Like all English royals who ever lived, Kate Middleton is only as handsome as nature made her—no more, no less. The fact that she has wrinkles under her eyes, that her nose flattens crudely into her forehead, that her chin lacks refinement, that she can only produce a wry smile, and that she is decidedly less than “stunning” has nothing to do with the catastrophic failure of Paul Emsley’s official portrait of her.

In the hands of a competent painter, such attributes would have been exploited as elements of charm, something the Duchess of Cambridge possesses in abundance.

The portrait’s real problem stems from a false modernist concept of realism. Like most of today’s academic realists, Emsley has reduced portraiture to the dead mechanics of the photocopier, the artist’s brush to a toner cartridge. Today’s realist painters are soulless machines, capable of reproducing flesh and wrinkles and strands of hair, but utterly powerless to seize a subject’s essence.

Dead realism and abstraction both turn their backs on reality’s fullness.

Good taste retired from Albion’s shores at the marriage of Charles Windsor and Diana Spencer—some would say well before then, as far back as the 1950s when Elizabeth II transformed the monarchy into a TV reality show. The English ceased to cultivate the arts when Henry VIII delegitimized his throne by placing it above the one Jesus had given to Peter.

Consider that the black-garbed, grim-faced, and serially divorced Puritans are doctrinally iconoclastic. Art, especially good art, has always been their enemy—witness the desecration of statues at Utrecht during the Beeldenstorm of 1566, the work of hardcore Calvinists who would later spread their proto-communist rot to America’s eastern shores.

Whatever England had of culture after the Reformation has been either borrowed or purchased from the Continent. It is therefore impossible that a modernist such as Emsley should understand the charm of portraiture. For him, the English eighteenth century, with its glorious Gainsborough and affable Reynolds, is a stale museum, not a vibrant school full of useful lessons for portraitists of any age.

Art, the eternal mirror of the human soul, can only reflect modern life’s lack of charm. Emsley’s canvas is essentially empty: He even managed to remove the Kate from his Duchess of Cambridge.

The mere photographic copying of nature cannot make a portrait worth viewing. The best paintings playfully expose their own underlying illusion in a self-conscious manner, as if to say: “Look at me, I am art.” However accurate the brush may become in rendering things real, it must always retain a sense of the human hand that holds it, the personality and genius of the artist, his every gest enshrined in the strokes.

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Instead of a portrait, Emsley has produced an overblown mug shot. All mug shots are unflattering because they have nothing to do with the human soul’s depths. Kate Middleton is more than the sum of her facial attributes glacially rendered by an uninspired technician’s cold hand.

Art’s spirit must always have priority over vapid displays of forensic draftsmanship, however impressive these may be to our world of crass sensationalism.

Official portraitists should look to the Grand Siècle for inspiration because French painters of the time still believed in the human soul’s existence and immortality. Today’s atheist-materialists reduce human beings to a genetic compound, brute molecular matter and nothing more. Emsley’s portrait is just that: a brutality. In this sense, it mirrors our dismal age far more than it reflects his royal subject.

Compare Emsley’s disaster to Maurice Quentin de La Tour’s Portrait of Madame de Pompadour, completed in 1754 and currently in the Louvre. The subject is one of Louis XV’s favorites, a woman who greatly influenced Europe’s artistic and intellectual life. The medium is one of the most difficult: pastel on blue paper with gouache highlights. Once the pigment is placed, there is no turning back. On a table is a perfect still life signed by the Latin phrase Delatour, Pompadour sculpsit—an allusion to Pompadour’s love of engraving.

The Marquise carefully dictated to her official portraitist an entire literary, artistic, and intellectual program, a kind of visual proposal to her intimate friend Louis XV, who had little patience for pseudo-philosophers. The Marquise de Pompadour wanted the world to be as intellectually engaged in the cultivation of human arts and letters as she was. All the arts, from music to painting, are beautifully represented in La Tour’s singular masterpiece of unrivaled sumptuousness.

But even more than all these adroit signifiers of Madame de Pompadour’s essential nature, La Tour immortalized her personality through the breathtaking insouciance of the left foot crossed ever so casually over the right, almost revealing a forbidden ankle as the toes play with the idea of dropping the white slipper altogether.

Though she was a stunning international beauty, the Marquise did not especially care if La Tour emphasized her looks. The face is the least directed of the portrait’s elements. Women of true quality only care about the mind.

Not so with modernity’s carnal apostates. Paul Emsley can give us only photographic flesh, a surface with nothing behind it but modernism’s contempt and scorn for life.

St. James at the Battle of Clavijo by Tieopolo

Barack Obama, Islam’s crouching eunuch, serves a special function in the new Mideast, that of towel-bearer for jihadist dictators at their bloodbaths. After rubbing down their leprous bodies with the billion-dollar ointment of “humanitarian aid,” Obama dries them off with the soft cloth of impunity.

The dragging of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens’s body through Benghazi’s streets was just such a bloodbath.

Obama had drawn water for it in his 2009 speech in Cairo. He then poured in the powders by giving Egypt’s government $1.6 billion a year.

The flying of al-Qaeda’s flag over our Egyptian embassy on 9/11/2012, the assault on our embassy in Yemen, and the butchering of ambassador Stevens all have Obama as a proximate cause.

There is also a remote cause behind our government’s policy of appeasement toward international Islamo-fascism. 

Try a small band of neurotic social rejects establishing a creepy man-made “religion” at the Plymouth Colony in 1620. The Puritans had many things in common with Muhammad, the seventh century’s Martin Luther. We are now experiencing one of the most dramatic effects of the society they created: American accommodation of sharia law.

While Islam’s idol is created (as opposed to uncreated), the same can be said of the “internal” god of our predominantly Unitarian populace—use whatever names you please for America’s thousands of religious sects. 

If Islam has perverted marriage, so has Protestant America. If Islam is iconoclastic, so are America’s television-watching Baptists with their Lutheran abhorrence of Christian art. 

Just as Islam reduces women to objects of pleasure whose bodies are considered dispensable communal property, the same can be said of Sandra Fluke and her squalid followers. Feminism not only wages war on women, it denatures womanhood.

In her 2007 book The Jamestown Project, New York University history professor Karen Kupperman claims that Elizabeth I removed the metal from the roofs of Catholic buildings to provide Sultan Murad III with munitions for his Islamic campaign against Rome and the Holy League. From the despots’ mutually respectful correspondence we learn of the Sultan’s approval of the killer queen’s novel sect.

Doctrinal accommodation and military collaboration with Islam occurred in Protestant communities from the Reformation’s outset. Today, globalist immigration policies accomplish what used to be achieved through the scimitar: the Islamic occupation of Europe.

If our embassies are now aflame in Obama’s new Mideast, it is only because Islam is a pure reflection of what the West has become after 500 years of apostasy. Our relationship with Islam is now a race to the bottom.

In 2008, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams called for the introduction of sharia law in the United Kingdom. Pope Benedict XVI has made Muslim outreach a major theme of Vatican II’s ever-evolving religion, whose catechism (section 841) now teaches that Muslims worship the same god as Christians do—interesting news to both groups.

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Meanwhile, a forgotten incident in art history directly bears upon embassies, apostasy, and accommodation to Islam.

The year was 1750. 

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) was the greatest painter of the Venetian school. In 1749, at the height of his international renown, he was commissioned to produce the altarpiece for the chapel at the Spanish embassy in London.

Presented in the summer of 1750, Tieopolo’s St. James the Greater at the Battle of Clavijo portrays Spain’s patron in his role of Matamoros, the Moor-slayer. At Clavijo on May 23, 844 AD, the Christians were reputedly outnumbered by their Islamic foes. 

As the story goes, St. James miraculously appeared on the battlefield, routing the Moors and saving Western Europe from slavery 800 years after the apostle’s martyrdom by the sword in Jerusalem under Herod Agrippa.

Tiepolo has the ruddy figure of St. James astride a beautiful white horse. The martyr’s serene and resolute gaze looks upward to signify that his force is derived not from arms, but from heaven. 

In his right hand he bears a sword, the instrument of his own martyrdom. It serves as a mysterious channel of grace reaching downward to the defeated Moor, whose shoulder it lightly touches as if lifting him from the ground. The Moor’s attitude is that of the convert resigned to a higher love, a kneeling postulant for baptism to whom life is given, not removed.

It was by conversion, not war, that Spain became Christian, though she may have defended herself through might whenever necessary.

In the background of Tiepolo’s generous canvas, death is dealt to those attacking the children of God. In the foreground, the scimitar and Islamic flag lie upon the dusty ground, contrasting with the victorious banner of the Virgin Mary’s colors held high in the saint’s left hand.

We can only speculate as to why so marvelous a work was rejected by its own commissioners. (It now hangs proudly in Budapest’s superlatively gorgeous Szépmüvészeti Múzeum.)

In 1750, Anglican visitors to London’s Spanish Embassy would likely have sympathized less with Catholicism than they would have with Islam.

In receiving news of the rejection, Tiepolo must have been surprised to learn that Anglo-Saxon civilization had finally extinguished itself…

…the fate of all societies whose art is powerless to vanquish hell because it no longer looks to heaven.

Nations are only as good as their art, their art only as good as their faith, and their faith only as good as the object of their faith.

Modernism is based on the idea that art is too good for us, that only a rarefied academic elite of gnostic initiates is sophisticated enough to reinterpret ugliness and dysfunction as desirable. This mentality pervaded the Romanian-Jewish-Bolshevik art movement known as Dada. 

At a Zurich exhibit in 1916, Dada’s uneducated phalanx triumphed. Anyone who did not fall down prostrate and worship Marcel Duchamp’s urinal as a piece of art was branded an uncomprehending hayseed to be crushed.

Ever since, modernism’s elitism and occult self-mythologizing have remained en vigueur.

The Third Reich’s proto-Obamist art scions differed little from their Jewish antecedents. Like the imperious cabalists of Dadaism, cubism, surrealism, and Fauvism, the Nazis continued modernism’s project of divorcing art from reality, but this time through realism because they could draw.

Hitler ingeniously applied the lessons of anti-art to advance his maniacal ends. His Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibit, featuring confiscated modernist paintings and sculpture, was not the only show in Munich in 1937. It accompanied the opening of Hitler’s Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art). The latter housed a collection mixing uninspired realism with a uniquely Völkisch pornography on a scale of poor taste matched only by Andrew Wyeth’s paintings of horn-wearing Valkyrie Helga Testorf.

Understanding modernism’s not-so-hidden agenda, the Nazis were better off than we are. They recognized modern art for the degenerate thing it is. Today’s art students are taught that 1916 was an annus mirabilis that freed art from the shackles of form, figure, lighting, drawing, perspective, composition, genius, beauty, truth, and the moral principle. 

Ironically, the Jewish-Bolshevik art most appreciated by today’s corn-fed self-sophisticates is what led to Hitler’s Deutschen Kunst. The ignorant Romanian Dadaist Tristan Tzara paved the way for Hubert Lanzinger’s portrait of Hitler, “The Standard-Bearer.” Nazis and Jews both transformed art to serve remarkably similar utopias. 

One generation of socialists empties art of its divine principles and another subsequently refills it with its own brand of emptiness. The operative Latin proverb is Abyssus abyssum invocat: “One hell summons another.”

The difference is that Nazi modernists were decent draftsmen—not great, but adequate. Unfortunately, good drawing is only a technique, its causality merely instrumental. It can never be art’s causa finalis. When technique becomes art’s ultimate purpose, art can only be good and dead. To be great and alive, something more is required.

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While we must reject modernism’s goal of reducing art to socialism’s ugly whore, we must also beware of reacting through a trite or mannerist realism, the other side of modernism’s wooden nickel.

Fred Ross is one of our nation’s most successful art collectors. His Art Renewal Center boasts an online collection of hundreds of important images and news of every realist studio that opens. Artists are drawing again thanks to Ross’s labors. 

Fred Ross distinguishes between art and anti-art. He understands that all art is abstract, from Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Cappella Sistina to William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s virtuosic canvases. He knows that the impressionists could not hold a candle to the French academic painters. 

Gallery owners here in Santa Fe have been dealing in Ross atelier artists for years now and even our local landscapists have put aside their facile neo-impressionism in favor of the new realism.

Ross exposed twentieth-century modernism as an outdated scam and has put the narcissistic Picasso and boring-as-dirt Matisse in their place. He says Picasso has become a religious idol to be venerated uncritically. Our adoring reaction to his jejune graffiti is thoughtless and reflexive, the result of Pavlovian conditioning imposed by state-funded academia rather than reason. Only decades of anti-humanist brainwashing can compel us to believe that ugliness, despair, angst, neurosis, disorder, and fragmentation are pretty.

But Ross seems unaware that modernism and American public education share a common framework of contempt and scorn for Western art’s Christian content.

Picasso’s support for communism during the Spanish Civil War was tacit and self-interested, although he voiced dislike of Franco, a hero who maintained Spain’s neutrality throughout World War II after sending Hitler packing. While communists were destroying priceless treasures of Spanish art, bombing some of the world’s most beautiful churches, exhuming dead nuns’ bodies to display on the streets, and murdering bishops and priests, Picasso remained silent.

The monochromatic mural Guernica celebrated the violence. Modernists, after all, are men of revolution—fundamental transformers and destroyers.

In Paris, Picasso surrounded himself with leaden atheists, soulless worshippers of dead matter spending most of their time, like him, in the local brothels. He joined the French Communist Party in 1944 and later accepted the 1950 Stalin Peace Prize, an odd honor seeing as it came from a mass murderer responsible for the deaths of up to 60 million. Picasso remained in the party until death, even during the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

For communists, freedom is only for artists and their masters.

But to read Ross, Picasso is evil because he was a cubist. Ross lacks the philosophical and historical background to comprehend modernism’s real purpose. While he recognizes that there is good and bad in art, he lacks the principles and definitions to help us with that.

Liberalism is a virus within all of us. The idea that the beautiful in art can be defined through objective criteria or that art is intrinsically moral will send some readers to the hospital for PTSD therapy—proof that 100 years of modernism have emulsified the human mind.

William Pitt the Younger, circa 1783 by George Romney

As summer ends, our haste in forgetting the abuse Mitt Romney spewed against conservatives during the GOP primaries is as unfortunate as it is convenient. Our feigned amnesia allows us to measure the Massachusetts moderate against Barack Obama’s subterranean standards, which could elevate even the lowest worm by comparison.

But this exaltation of mediocrity by mere contrast with human nature’s basest expressions is a built-in feature of the Manichaean political universe we have constructed. We see things through the deforming, dualistic lens of liberal versus conservative. Far worse, we erect this vision as our only truth. This vapid dualism is a diabolical ruse.

And so we face two problems. The first is the absence of standards against which to measure our presidential candidates. The second and graver problem is the gradual loss of definitions and principles, the intellectual means of measurement.

It was not always so. For millennia, the high-minded political virtues Aristotle meticulously described in the Nichomachean Ethics—and which St. Thomas Aquinas would later refine to the altitude of a divine model—often inspired the simplest men to greatness. If a philosopher’s words could not move, then artists furnished images.

George Romney (1734-1802), one of England’s defining portraitists and a direct ancestor of Mitt Romney’s, provided some of the finest images in the history of painting.

Romney was able to immortalize ideals without idealizing. I discovered this one frigid spring day when all of London smelled of the sea. A pungent downpour nudged me into the galleries of Tate Britain. Romney’s work seized me from a distance with its splendor.

Romney’s portrait of William Pitt the Younger is a masterpiece. It is almost stark in its economy. Its purity, psychological depth, and unimpeachable fidelity to its subject remain fresh and engaging.

Pitt became prime minister at 24. He argued passionately against Britain’s wasteful war on the American colonies. As the engineer of the Acts of Union 1800, he attempted to procure Catholic emancipation, establishing himself as one of history’s finest champions of religious toleration.

Mitt would do well to study Pitt, who was renowned for his administrative efficiency and his intolerance for radicals. Only during the war with France did Pitt raise taxes. He was appalled by the false doctrines of the French Revolution that continue in modern big-government politics.

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Pitt was handsome, so George Romney had no need to idealize. Yet his rendering of Pitt is the portrait of an ideal—that of political rectitude, intellectual sincerity, and incorruptibility. Can we find these things in Mitt, as Romney found them in Pitt? What a perfect mirror for comparison the humble ancestor has left for his famous descendent, if the latter only possessed the means of knowing it. If he did, he could stand before this portrait as I have and look with a special form of wonderment and therapeutic shame in all we have made of ourselves today.

Few these days will ever read a Thomistic treatise on moral virtues, or Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, or Lord Macaulay’s histories. But all can draw meaning from Romney’s portrait of William Pitt the Younger. It is a visual treatise on a leader’s human and political virtues. Since it is visual, it is perhaps more accessible to our intellectually fallen world, where sensation replaces thought.

In reading Romney’s biography by William Hayley, the reader is astounded by the leitmotif attending almost every page: George Romney was humble. It was “without education, without patronage, without money” that Romney “raised himself, by the mere force of talents and industry to intellectual eminence.”

Were politicians committed to truth, they would not need to purchase their “eminence” with hundreds of millions of dollars.

George Romney died in rural obscurity, only to be celebrated in verse as a beloved hero of England.

As pundits evaluate Mitt Romney, the art world is sure to reexamine his illustrious forebear. I find him more interesting. Neither Gainsborough nor Reynolds ever achieved Romney’s sober introspection, or his loving attention to all that is best and brightest in his subjects. His canvases frame a lost world, one that today’s listless candidates would do well to emulate—where beauty, refinement, and truth were upheld as genuine values venerated forever in art’s fathomless mirror.