Salination of the Deed

Rooted in the hidden core of Malatesta’s secular anarchism, an attempt to free the abstract common man from church and state, was the necessary binding to violence which typifies worldliness. While those plucky Romantic-idealists genuinely believed that they could storm the walls of those humble Italian towns, seize the crown of power, and then burn the authority that they carried in an act of iconoclastic rage, the truth was that these ideas were only held aloft by their particular moral orientation; their will to power, the unmediated desire to bring the world under one's power as the arky that determines the ontological truth of reality. Or, to indulge in the sin of the “Old Adam”.

When this will to power became frayed from the delicate moral life that held it in control, that steered the horses of power under the control of the delicate but determined reins in the hands of carriage driver, the secular anarchist movement descended into the aesthetic demand for power—and the complete collapse of the ability to hold oneself back. Eager to liberate by way of violence, violence plays its dreadful trick and moralising reaction of Ravanchol and Henry, it appears, became captured and enslaved to that very committment to and worship of violence that had driven them to that form-of-life: having turned anarchy from a vision of the sublime creeping into politics, like the beauty of the very divine unfurled in the dissolving flesh of the salted slug, to a call for total against all, their terrorism for terrorism’s sake was their own self-damnation. Analogous to the anxious militarism of the fascist and the insecurity of the Stirnerite, the anarchist became little more than an agent of power that sought to attain power of what he perceived to be his property—all of it. Against the ideal of the unity of means and ends, the only end justifiable was the aesthetic and the means could be any flavour that would satisfy the desire for desire once again. All flavours, of course, but salt.

The possession of property

For the Christian anarchist, as a corrective to these secular wayfarers standing in the shadows of the quiet men of faith in times gone past, the unity of ends and means remained as an important corrective. First, to the possible risk of temptation and its poisonous effect on the desire to become the kind of person that