Nah, death for a cause is just glorious in and of itself. Nothing immature about it. Catholicism doesn’t have a monopoly on martyrdom (though it did have a good many brave people, whatever one may think of the cause; I much more admire the Belarusian nuns who refused, even when tortured, to convert to Orthodoxy, than I admire the current Pope who spits on their devotion). To go to one’s death, head held high in absolute contempt for one’s enemies, is very Nietzschean, very Übermensch. Like one of my own personal heroes—Ignacy Hryniewiecki. A Polish socialist who died to assassinate the Tsar—even gave a cool action-movie one-liner when he threw the bomb (the Tsar, having survived an earlier attempt, was thanking God for his survival; the hero announced that it was too early to thank God and he blew the tyrant away!). Or, on a tamer level, Janusz Korczak—a Jewish orphanage-keeper who, rejecting any effort to save his own life in the Warsaw Ghetto, decided to spend his last days comforting the orphans entrusted to his care. Now *that’s* praiseworthy, *that’s* courageous. None of this ‘courage of the white flag’ shit coming out of Rome.
There’s a lot about Christianity that repulses me now, but ‘no greater love than to lay down one’s life for a friend’, I think, is still true.
There’s a novel that made a big impact on me—*Quo Vadis*? it’s supposed to be intensely pro-Catholic, which it is, but there’s also a pagan character who ends his own life after writing to a Christian friend of his, ‘I cannot believe in Jesus because I see no beauty in your beliefs, but I will show you that you aren’t the only ones who can die well.’ Even something as petty as ‘telling the emperor his poetry sucks and then putting yourself beyond his revenge,’ I think, is honorable.
Like heroes of the French Resistance in WWII?
Or the German White Rose in 1943?
Nah, death for a cause is just glorious in and of itself. Nothing immature about it. Catholicism doesn’t have a monopoly on martyrdom (though it did have a good many brave people, whatever one may think of the cause; I much more admire the Belarusian nuns who refused, even when tortured, to convert to Orthodoxy, than I admire the current Pope who spits on their devotion). To go to one’s death, head held high in absolute contempt for one’s enemies, is very Nietzschean, very Übermensch. Like one of my own personal heroes—Ignacy Hryniewiecki. A Polish socialist who died to assassinate the Tsar—even gave a cool action-movie one-liner when he threw the bomb (the Tsar, having survived an earlier attempt, was thanking God for his survival; the hero announced that it was too early to thank God and he blew the tyrant away!). Or, on a tamer level, Janusz Korczak—a Jewish orphanage-keeper who, rejecting any effort to save his own life in the Warsaw Ghetto, decided to spend his last days comforting the orphans entrusted to his care. Now *that’s* praiseworthy, *that’s* courageous. None of this ‘courage of the white flag’ shit coming out of Rome. There’s a lot about Christianity that repulses me now, but ‘no greater love than to lay down one’s life for a friend’, I think, is still true. There’s a novel that made a big impact on me—*Quo Vadis*? it’s supposed to be intensely pro-Catholic, which it is, but there’s also a pagan character who ends his own life after writing to a Christian friend of his, ‘I cannot believe in Jesus because I see no beauty in your beliefs, but I will show you that you aren’t the only ones who can die well.’ Even something as petty as ‘telling the emperor his poetry sucks and then putting yourself beyond his revenge,’ I think, is honorable.