On Christianity | Rémy de Gourmont & Richard Aldington (trans.) | SA1335

On Christianity
An excerpt from Le chemin de velours; Nouvelles dissociations d'idées (The Velvet Path), 1911
Rémy de Gourmont
Translated by Richard Aldington
Published by Underworld Amusements for the Union of Egoists
Stand Alone SA1335
[8 pages, 4.25 × 5.5″, saddle-stitched. Limited to 66 copies.]

In 1911 Rémy de Gourmont surveyed a civilization that had trained itself to flinch, and pronounced it obscene. Not the cruelty — the flinch. "You cannot say that wolves generally eat lambs and that it is their duty as wolves," he complained, "without sending a shudder of horror through the crowd." On Christianity, lifted from his late and unrepentant Le chemin de velours, is the Symbolist master of "the dissociation of ideas" laying his scalpel against the one idea no one is permitted to touch: the universal, obligatory morality of pity that even Christianity's loudest enemies, he noticed, take pains to leave intact — would sooner make heavier than lighten.

His quarrel is not with faith but with sentimentality, with a "middling happiness" that sacrifices liberty first and calls the bargain salvation. ("The terrestrial ideal of humanity smells of the pigsty, as its celestial ideal smelt of the stable.") He has no patience for the patrician who kneels to the religion of slaves—"the apostates of their caste and their race"—and a cold admiration for the few who dare to say "My justice is my strength," and who prove it. Readers of this catalog will know the phrase. Aldington's faithful rendering of «ma justice, c'est ma force» is, idiomatically, nothing other than Might is Right—the motto Max Stirner armed and Arthur Desmond made notorious. Gourmont reaches the same precipice by the velvet path: not a manifesto, but an essayist's quiet, surgical dissociation of a thing his century had glued shut.

The translator is no accident. Richard Aldington—Imagist, early hand at The Egoist under Dora Marsden—moved in exactly the milieu of intellectual independence and cheerful heresy Gourmont's prose demands, and would go on to render the Frenchman for English readers at length. (Gourmont, returning the favor across the Channel, had introduced France to Benjamin DeCasseres—no stranger to this catalog.) This edition annotates Gourmont's idiosyncratic vocabulary—his pre-biological race, his aristocratic liberty, his juridical equity—restoring the precision the polemic runs on, and that a careless century has smeared. A companion to the Stand Alone series' other smuggled French heresies, from Jules de Gaultier's Bovarysm to Han Ryner's individualism, and to its anti-Christian fevers from Banner of the Antichrist to Against Christmas.

"Those who repeat 'Blessed are the meek' and who practise the gospel of pity are destined to become the slaves of those who dare to say 'My justice is my strength.'"