The Empty Shell of Cultural Christianity

 Strident and polemical New Atheist and biological scientist Richard Dawkins has described himself as a cultural Christian, by which he means he has a subjective aesthetic appreciation of the art and culture of Christianity and feels more comfortable with the ethos and values upheld by a Christian past than the alternatives.  Furthermore his new enthusiasm for the Christian heritage he worked hard to undermine is in part due to his fear of Islam filling the void created by the decline of Christian belief in the West.

Other public figures such as Douglas Murray have also identified with the culture and ethos of Christian heritage while being atheist in terms of their personal beliefs.  There are several problems with this.  Three spring to mind.  First it overlooks that aesthetic and ethical values are as much about faith as intellectual assent to a creed.  Secondly, to claim the Christian ethos and aesthetic heritage is superior is a value claim that depends upon the transcendent.  Thirdly, to ignore the cause of the values and aesthetics you believe should be adhered to removes the justification for what you are trying to justify.

Dawkins famously referred to his love for the aesthetic of Anglican evensong.  He does not seem to realise that this appreciation of the beauty of Anglican evensong is a participation in the beautiful, moving towards worship.  His attack on religion has only ever been on the assent to the creed and the conceptual claims of that creed.  He seems not to realise that another aspect of religious faith is affective.

This is because he only thinks within an Enlightenment paradigm.  He has reduced religion to its components and separated them out.  Therefore the affective experience of worship is separated in his mind from the intellectual assent to the credal claims of the religion.  These two are the beauty and truth of religion, just as the Christian ethos is the goodness of the faith.  You cannot detach these three aspects as though they can be enjoyed in isolation.  The truth manifests in beauty and goodness.  The beauty of evensong and the goodness of the ethos it teaches are because the creed is true.

We encounter religion through all three aspects of this Platonic trinity.  The immersing in the beauty can, if we allow it, help us to participate in the truth that generates the beauty.  And, if we allow it, this participation in the truth through the beauty helps us to live according to the ethos of the faith.

To break this down further.  The Christian heritage is beautiful and good, as Dawkins seems to acknowledge, because it is true - which he refuses to acknowledge.  If we look at it the other way around then there is no religious art without the belief.  The evidence of the modern art of secular society is proof enough of this.  There is no ethic without the metaphysical justification - the metaphysical truth justifies the ethics he so appreciates.

Islam is more harsh and less loving because it does not recognise Christ is the Second Person of the Trinity Incarnate.   Otherwise Dawkins must answer where does the ethos come from and why does he wish to follow it over Shariah law?  Is it simply his own subjective taste or was England participating in something of transcendental value before it became secular?

One is reminded of Kant's transcendental argument.  Without the justification of the transcendent what you rely upon falls away.  Without the Triune God, the second Person of which became man, there is no ethos and art will degenerate (as it clearly has done in the West).

There is  a sleight of hand with this atheist endorsement of the faith without participating in the faith - they have already acknowledged a hierarchy of values by stating that the Christian ethos should be preferred to the Islamic.   

A more intellectually honest atheist, such as Friedrich Nietzsche understood the implications of atheism.  It meant the old table of values would be smashed.  The compassionate love for the weak could now be replaced with the Will to Power, that was to inspire the Nazi movement and indeed the relativism of postmodernism.  

In his famous passage about the madman in the marketplace Nietzsche spelt out the real implications of atheism not understood by types such as the complacent bourgeois Englishmen:

'Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: "I seek God! I seek God!" As there were many people standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why! Is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a sea voyage? Has he emigrated? The people cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub. The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. "Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? For even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console our selves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has so far possessed, has bled to death under our knife, who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history so far!" Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers ; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished.'

Of course the God that had been killed, as Christos Yannaras demonstrates, was not the God of the Church, but the intellectual concept of God developed through scholasticism not met through prayer - the God of the philosophers.  In slaying that God the revolution of the Enlightenment might have done the West a favour inadvertently, in clearing the way for a rediscovery of the God of the Church and the Bible - the living God, not a dry conceptual theory.  And the real God is indeed encountered through the beauty of ritual and self -emptying goodness. 

Nonetheless, there may be something in the English character that is too pragmatic and fails to see the implications of what atheism really means.  Religion is only understood in terms of its social efficacy.  The Englishman is in his heart a utilitarian and he rarely escapes this curse that blinds him to the depth of reality.  Nietzsche understood and finally fell into lunacy himself.

That English utilitarian spirit is alive in this empty shell of Cultural Christianity - the faith in the personal and triune God is reduced to social uses.  It has a utilitarian benefit, but the transcendental truth, indeed the necessity of that truth is ignored.  And what that means is, if we simply use Christian heritage for social purposes then we are never personally transformed through a relationship with God.  In that way this cultural Christianity could be very dangerous.  It might on the other hand be a stepping stone for many to faith.  Whether this island once known as the dowry of Mary, the Mother of God, will be re-enchanted again remains to be seen. We pray it will be, God willing.  

.

The Victory of Liberalism

 It is a common theme in internet memes to contrast the degenerate world of postmodernity with what the young men on the Normandy beaches believed they were giving their lives for.  From the end of ethnic homogeneity to sexual degeneracy, the "values" of the contemporary West seem in stark contrast to the shared values of the Christian West of the thirties and forties.  Many believed they were dying for Christian civilisation.  We have ended up emerging from the two world wars and the Cold War with a society far removed, whose shibboleth might be "sodomy and usury", whose symbol is the six-coloured flag of the LGBT movement and whose geopolitical and domestic political power is exercised through debt.  A far contrast from Christendom where both charging interest and homosexuality were forbidden.

The victory in the Second World War was achieved by the joint forces of liberal democracy and Stalinist Socialism.  The Cold War sorted out whether the future lay in Stalinist Socialism or Liberal Democracy.  The liberal democratic forces won bringing in a new world order of globalism expressed through social and economic liberalism.

National Socialism, with its pagan and occult leanings, its fetishisation of power and its brutal suppression  and mass murder of those considered degenerate was not a continuation of Christian civilisation.  But neither was the Weimar Republic it overthrew.  There has been some comment recently about the fact that the first books the Nazis burnt were promoting transgenderism.  Weimar was not a Christian state, it was a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.  The Nazis provided a pagan answer, mixed up with Darwinian science, to attack the indisputable degeneracy of Weimar.  That solution comes not from Christian inheritance; by contrast, based on power and violence it is another contradiction.  As Jewish convert to Catholicism Max Picard pointed out, Nazism was an avant garde and profoundly modern and post-Enlightenment phenomenon.  It does not follow either that liberalism is the alternative answer that should be chosen, or communism for that matter.

The victors of the Cold War were the liberals, who provided bureaucratic human rights, but killed the soul of Man.  Even Soviet atheism was unable to kill the soul in the way consumer capitalism and human rights have killed the soul of Man.

While it was the liberals who won the conflicts, hot and frozen, of the Twentieth Century, this was not simply an organic process.  Geopolitically the use of colour revolutions and NGOs as a tool of Western foreign policy worked to undermine the Soviet Empire.  No ally was unacceptable.  In the Cold War we saw the development of an unholy alliance between the capitalist and secular West and Islamic extremism, beginning in Afghanistan, much as Israel uses Islamists as an asset against Arab regimes in the Middle East.

Domestically it was also important to turn the West from a conservative and traditional Christian culture into a liberal, amoral and culturally permissive place.  This actually involved the Central Intelligence Agency in promoting a cultural revolution in the sixties, including the promotion of modern art figures such as Jackson Pollock, to contrast with the more conservative genre of Soviet Realism in art.

Combined with this promotion of popular culture, psychological theories were put into practice through therapy and mainstream education.  Ideas of sexual suppression leading to Fascism as argued by Adorno in his "Authoritarian Personality" gave a political reason to stop teaching virtues and instead to create a permissive society that made people slaves to their sexual passions as much as they were slaves to avarice and greed through the economic system.  Freud's earlier work also provided a framework for this.  Meanwhile the theories of Holocaust-survivor Viktor Frankl were ignored.

In politics the political class also ensured the permissiveness society was promoted through changes to the law on divorce, homosexuality and abortion.  It is no surprise we have now reached a place where we are even confused about gender.  But confusion, lack of order and permissiveness were always the goal.   

A veneer of propaganda that the West was still Christian in opposition to atheist Soviet Republics was also sustained to keep malleable and slow-witted conservatives on side.  Now many conservatives are worried about globalism, the WEF, no borders, the Great Reset - but this was always the goal.  The post-war West was run by an establishment that found its ideology in the liberal philosophers of the Open Society.  And as Karl Popper pointed out, the open society has enemies.  He singled out Plato and Platonic thinking for attack.  He was hostile to any idea of transcendent values, but in something of a contradiction the tolerance and open-mindedness of liberalism should be enforced, not tolerating the "platonic" mindset. This is where cancel culture stems from - certain ideas must be eliminated for the survival of the open society.  Popper's close student George Soros, uses the idea of enemies for undermining democracy, from Brexit to the Ukraine.

The problem is that liberals, whose ideology really developed in the Anglo Saxon countries such as Great Britain and the United States, have fooled conservatives in such countries to believe that liberalism is conservatism.  Whether it be laissez faire capitalism at home or support for Zionism abroad, conservatives have been fooled and are the useful idiots of globalist liberalism. 

There was an alternative to liberalism in Britain.  From Disraeli to Chesterton there was a case made for an organic conservatism that held the country together.  One Nation conservatism is a much debased term that now means "remainer" Conservative MPs who are usually socially liberal.  Rather like the word conservative, one nation once meant what it sounds like.  It meant holding the nation together through the values of shared heritage, land and ethnicity.  We are one nation, not to be divided by the class warriors of socialism or the atomising individualists of liberalism.

What today passes for a "right-wing" British conservative whether on the Right of the Conservative Party or a supporter of Reform will usually be an ardent supporter of liberal economics, a close alliance with the States and with Israel.  Contrary to the implications of liberal economics British conservatives do tend to oppose mass immigration and do oppose the woke culture that emanates from the USA they so love.  These contradictions are overlooked, because the British Right remains a useful tool for the liberals.

In the States where the evils are spreading from there is a resistance that is much more aware than the likes of GB News.  From Tucker Carlson to Candace Owens there are genuine conservative voices appearing in a country predicated on liberal secularism.  This is enabling some American conservatives to break free from the post-war paradigm that defines politics in the West and defines it favourably to the liberal agenda.

There is a genuine voice of opposition emerging.  It places emphasis on conservative social values, upon Christian faith and upon protecting our own people from the ravages of global capitalism.  In global politics it questions the support for Zionism and support for the Ukraine.  It has noticed the re-emergence of the Church in Russia and that our supposed allies of Israel and Ukraine persecute Christians.  A Trump victory will not only save us from escalation to a third world war, but will give space to genuine conservative voices to reassess our knee-jerk Cold War attitudes on Israel and the Russia-Ukraine question.

There is also a healthy scepticism these new conservatives have towards the Western establishment.  They are sniffing out the vested interests from Blackrock to AIPAC.  They are ready to ask questions that baby-boomer conservatives never did.  They recognise that while patriotism is a virtue, it can be used by scoundrels to further nefarious agendas, such as global liberalism. 

There seems to be a realisation from a generation less overshadowed by the Second World War and even the Cold War, that the shibboleths and stereotypes our parents fell for were really about pushing a liberal and globalist agenda.  There is not a binary choice between Left and Right.  There is another perspective, from voices of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, voices excluded from academia and political debate.  These voices put a Christian perspective forward that transcended liberalism, Communism, and Fascism.  There are signs that finally the Overton Window will be expanded.  Whether Donald Trump himself understands this movement, there are signs he does so intuitively if not intellectually, his victory will open up the space for new perspectives that can break free of the post- World-War, post- Cold-War perspectives that limit our vision from seeing the truth.            

 

       

 

Revolution and Control

 We are living under a revolutionary regime in the West.  It has been a somewhat incremental revolution.  The revolutionary movement has deep roots and it has at each step revolted against the earlier stages in the process.

What is the ideology of the revolution?  In practice it means a deep psychological level of control through manipulation, but it preaches freedom - that is the biggest lie.  Its idea of freedom is closely connected with its anthropology and biology.  It reveals a new "truth" that has been hidden from us, always it works on the basis that truth is hidden and what we see is deception.  This great truth is that man is not a spiritual being with spiritual freedom, this was a lie to enslave you.  The "freeing" truth is that you are a biological automaton, determined by your passions and that you have no soul, but you can be reduced to tiny atoms - that is all that you are.  This liberating message will supposedly usher in a new dawn of freedom, tolerance and equality.

That is the ideology, but it is based on lies, partly believed in by the revolutionaries and partly understood as a means to deceive the masses.  There is a spirt behind this revolution and it is Luciferian.  It rejects tradition, religion, even human love as mere superstitions.   Politically it manifests as forms of liberalism.  Its mantra is "freedom", its goal is control. Biological determinism is its shallow ontology.  It is the doctrine of those elites who through secret societies and occult and hermetic beliefs share a common goal.  It actually turns out to be strict control in the name of freedom.  It is closely connected to scientism, to eugenics, to atheism and materialism and to progressivism.  Its political views, its ideas about sex, its science are taught as unquestioned doctrine in our schools.

The revolution is best understood as having its roots in the Renaissance.  Tragically, after the fall of Constantinople, the West did not seek to rediscover the Orthodox faith of Byzantium, but instead was drawn to the esotericism, the alchemy and occultism that thrived on the fringe of Byzantine culture.  In turn hermeticism grew in the West and led to the development of the new science.  Newton was a key example of a scientist drawn to hermeticism.  From this new science developed the idea of throwing off Christian doctrine and so the Enlightenment would manifest and produced the philosophical ideology of the Revolution that manifested in Jacobin France and Revolutionary America, with its deist and Enlightenment theology behind its constitution.   The new revolutionary elite was essentially atheist and by the Twentieth Century it was attracted to eugenics, manipulation of the masses and so-called "sexual liberation".

This is a basic overview of the story that many will be familiar with, but there is an important role for the Church.  Because the Roman Catholic Church was already in a state of revolution against the rest of the Christian Church.  In 1054 the Pope, having been regarded as Primus inter Pares by the other Patriarchs, broke from the rest of the Church through an innovation in doctrine about the Trinity, put forward in a unilateral change to the shared Nicene Creed - he added the Filioque.  This had theological implications, in which the Monarchy of the Father in the Trinity was to be undermined and as Scholastic doctrine developed, rejecting the energies-essence distinction, was to turn God into an unknowable Monad.

The Catholic Church itself, as understood by Dostoevsky in his Grand Inquisitor narrative, became not so much the manifestation of Christ's body, but an institution of safety and security and control.  The spiritual freedom of the Church was replaced by an institutional framework of safety.  This was a revolution and in the same spirit as the freemasonic revolutions that would in a few hundred years turn against the Roman Catholic Church and the ancien regime It replaced spiritual freedom through Christ with control of that spiritual life.  The seed of revolution had already been sown by the Great Schism later to transform into the Enlightenment.

Furthermore, the Protestant Reformation itself, claiming to restore the freedom of Christ only progressed the revolution further.  For example, Calvinist predestination prefigured the Enlightenment idea of determinism by cause and effect and biology.

So through a combination of the Great Schism and the Reformation, the stage had already been set for a revolution by the elites.  And these elites in large part owed their wealth and therefore their position to the plundering of the Church during the Reformation.  So a matter of bad faith and guilt drove both Enlightenment philosophy and the political revolutions.  What came before had to be proved as evil and entirely rejected.

The revolution did not stop with regicides and empirical philosophy.  Nihilism soon took hold.  The elites working in their cabals designed schemes for Luciferin utopias.  And after the violence of the first centuries of political instability from 1789 to 1917, the idea of a Fabian approach took hold.  Ostensibly granting more freedoms, while retaining control, through democracy and education for all the revolutionary elites were able to achieve a legitimacy for their long term goals of dehumanisation and total power.

Why are the goals so evil?  Because this deal with power and this faith in their own intellectual superiority was a Faustian pact with Lucifer, the light of the rational mind.  The enslavement was dressed up as freedom.  When men could be convinced they were simply highly-developed monkeys then to become a slave to bestial passions was portrayed as freedom.  The 1960s sexual revolution was by design.  Evidence exists of CIA involvement for example.  And all the social changes from promotion of homosexuality to abortion were pushed by the elites, not as a result of popular demand.

It is openly declared in the published literature of the elites that the utopia is one of population control, eugenics and the elimination of religious faith.  Of course many useful idiots who promote these goals, in education, in churches, in politics are unwitting agents.  They have been convinced by the system that these goals are beneficial for mankind.

Who though are these shady elites?  They are the experts and the rich.  They are perhaps themselves somewhat unwitting in their evil.  They have fallen into the trap of their own pride and become themselves slaves of Lucifer who hates mankind.  They are those who control the global institutions such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.  Currently their political tools are wokeness, covid and environmentalism.  They see the resurgence of faith in Russia as a threat.  It is their propaganda in school sex education.    Their chief writers in recent times are the likes of H G Wells and Bertrand Russell.

What we must understand from this is that the establishment is working to separate us from true freedom that is to be found in the person of Christ.  They have managed to subvert most of the Western churches to their agenda. They have also promoted atheism as an ideology through the likes of Richard Dawkins and the rest.  They call much of what they do "freedom" when it is turning us into bestial slaves to the passions.  Technology is used to transfer us from the real world to a virtual world making us all the more malleable and easy to control.

If we wish for true freedom then we must take the intimidating step into placing our faith in Christ through trust and love.  We must free ourselves from the whole coherent, but dark narrative imposed at every level of education and reinforced in popular culture such as the messages promoted in Hollywood.  And this goes back to Dostoevsky's account of the Grand Inquisitor.  We can either place our trust in the security of the control by the revolutionary regime or become spiritually free through Christ.  

Person-centred economics

 The word economy is etymologically related to the word Oeconomia in the Orthodox Church.  Oeconomia refers to the Church avoiding legalism out of love.  It is an allowance without compromising dogma.  Such an approach is very much in line with how Christ would school the Pharisees and Sadducees against their rigid legalism.  It seems strange then that this word should be related to the "dismal science" of economics, as Carlyle described it,  in the sense of theory about the wealth of nations.

What has happened to economics as a theory, all the way back to Adam Smith and Ricardo, was that it became about the generation of material wealth rather than the management of the household of the nation in which the person was placed at the centre.  In England and the rest of Great Britain industrialisation, free trade, division of labour did indeed lead to increasing wealth, but a diminished existence for many human beings.  While technology and wealth improved living standards in material terms, the spiritual life of the nation's families were much diminished.  

Theoretically the Marxist revolutions in the Russian and Chinese Empires were a reaction against capitalist industrialisation, but these countries' economies were only beginning down that road as they remained largely agrarian.  Marx's positivist dialectical materialism was proved false.  Nonetheless the Communist regimes were just as much about industrialisation and economic growth as capitalism.  

A crisis of capitalism occurred with the Wall Street crash in 1929  and the Great Depression of the thirties.  An alternative economics emerged with the so-called "Third Way", led in political terms by former Marxist Mussolini.  This was about freeing countries from the power of the banking sector and promoting the national interests rather than the interests of global capital.  With the rise of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust this alternative was seriously tarnished.  The Post-War Bretton Woods settlement saw the re-emergence of the power of the international banking sector, but tempered to allow a level of socialist mitigation of the full force of the market.  This system itself led to government debt causing inflation that soon seemed unsustainable,  A return to the economic orthodoxies of liberalism in the West re-emerged with President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher - paying off government debt, selling off state industries, free trade and de-regulated stock markets.

The neoliberal revolution led to a global economics, the strengthening of global corporations over sovereign nations, and open borders in terms of both trade and free movement of peoples.  An alternative form of liberal capitalism, aiming to ensure its long term survival emerged with the Clintons, Blair and the global institutions of the post war years and a newly invigorated World Economic Forum with the concept of stakeholder capitalism.  In domestic politics New Labour even adopted the name of the Fascists' economics - the Third Way,

Along with open borders, nudge manipulation, the political monitoring via ever-more sophisticated technology, a deep suspicion has emerged on the eclectic politics of the so-called Right, from libertarians to traditionalists.  This led to the election of Trump in the States and the vote by the UK to leave the European Union.  The vote from the people was for a more communitarian politics that protected national sovereignty, identity, culture and traditions.  In Britain the neoliberal Right has seized control of the meaning of Brexit as the UK becoming a Singapore of the West, with open borders, no national identity. and uprooting of community -  Britannia not a rescued maiden, but a whore open to all-comers.

In a sense we are no further on than we were with the Industrial Revolution and the end of the agrarian culture of our country.  There is a very simple reason for this - it is that economics for centuries has been centred on ideas other than the human person.  Economics has been about free trade, individualism, industrialisation, class conflict, economic growth; never has it considered the human person and his flourishing to be the key goal of economics.  Instead the person must be sacrificed for the cause of economic growth, whether in the free economy or the command economy.

Today as a result, we find people are replaced by artificial intelligence, economic demands cause brain drains in poor countries and the dilution and loss of cultural identity in first world countries through mass economic migration.  Everything follows the principle of economic growth, compound growth in fact.  As a result the person gets lost.

The person is not the same as an individual.  From the Latin for indivisible the individual is the unit of liberal economics and rational choice theory.  The person is by contrast relational and embedded and spiritual. Compound growth and open borders take no account of the meaning of what it is to be a person.  Industries disappear destabilising communities.  And most of all the all-pervasive focus on filthy lucre kills spirituality and rooted community.

 In 2016 both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, ironically capitalists through and through, seemed to touch on this.  Trump recognised that jobs flowing abroad and migrants flowing in was destabilising the identity of the nation necessary for the embeddedness of the human person.  Nigel Farage raised immigration frequently in the Brexit referendum because as he made clear identity is about more than economic growth.

Nonetheless, without the intellectual tradition you can only expect political leaders to go so far.  Yes Steve Bannon read Evola and Guenon, but there is a deeper and more Christian "Third Way".  It can be found in the writings of an economist like E F Schumacher, with his "Small is Beautiful" and " A Guide for the Perplexed" and even in the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII "Rerum Novarum" -1891.  It can also be found in the writings of G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who worked out the implications of the Papal encyclical.

Distributism was the theory and it was based around the idea of private ownership of small property, of a large enough size to ensure self reliance and independence.  Such an idea would terrify the banks and the capitalists of course, just as much as those socialists wanting to abolish private property and make everyone equal i.e. the same.

The point here is that, not being financed by big money, a good idea went to waste.  Distributism might not be the total answer, but the point was that it proposed making the human person, made in the image of God the centre of the economy, rather than growth, capital or even the proletariat.  

The idea did not fail because it was tried and failed, it was never tried, to misquote Chesterton himself.  The powerful banking interests in the West did not want such an idea to develop and had it ever reached Soviet Russia it would have been squashed.  That is because for all their superficial differences, Capitalism and Communism are creatures of the Enlightenment and they have forgotten that Man is made in the image of God and that Man not some other concept should be at the centre.

The Enlightenment itself was a project of vested interest.  Its hatred of the ancien regime was largely because the wealth on which the new thinkers lived was stolen from the Church during the Reformation.  There was a guilt that required them to destroy the ancien regime altogether and paint what had come before as benighted and savage.  Hence the name Enlightenment of course.

The core intellectual goal of the Enlightenment was to break Man down and disconnect him from his God.  Man became a unit for the liberal order that the Enlightenment led to.  For all its talk of the sanctity of the individual, he was an atomised thing and was to become the very victim of anomie that   Durkheim described.  When we lost our sense of the person as the image of God, we lost a sense of Man as relational, embedded with roots and looking up to the heavenly realm.  Without roots or telos men became mere workers, mere consumers, living under the enslavement not only of the boss or the bureaucrat, but his passions that the economic system fosters.

There is much talk of re-enchantment currently.  Hand in hand with that, if it succeeds, must come a new understanding of the economy as a person-centred system, not waylaid by other targets that diminish the human being who is a person and is made in the image of God.   

      

Diversity is our Decay

 "Diversity is our strength" is a shibboleth parroted by our careerist and pusillanimous politicians and enforced by human resources departments throughout the West.  A whole legal framework of human rights, not so much codifying inherited civic rights as enforcing an ideology of diversity has binding power throughout the West.   Diversity and its corollary, inclusivity were cited as the justification for perpetuating the war in the Donbas (despite the key diverse idols of homosexuality and abortion being legal in the Russian Federation).  

In terms of the Post-War paradigm being predicated on anti-authoritarianism and imposed unity, this obsession with diversity makes some sense.  Of course, the contradiction is diversity of opinion is not permitted, because then the natural perspective embodied throughout the rest of the world and throughout the history of the whole world including the West, would contradict today's mantras of wokeism.

Indeed, the modern West's obsession with individualistic diversity is exceptional in the sense of being an aberration, with no historical equivalent.  It is contingent upon our Christian culture, while being a perversion and twisting of that inheritance.  For most of mankind's existence the question has not been how to enable and protect diversity, but how to return to holistic unity.  From Plato to Eastern spirituality, we have understood diversity and idiosyncrasy to be a fracturing of a holy unity to which we strive to return as the telos of Mankind.

The Russian philosopher who finally became an Orthodox monk, Konstantin Leontiev, known as the Christian Nietzsche provided a powerful symbol of the body politick's progress towards individual diversity as being akin to the decay of a corpse that fragments and breaks up into individual pieces.  This fragmentation can be contrasted with the ideal put forward by French Integralist Charles Maurras for whom a return to the Catholic Church and the Monarchy would re-integrate French society unifying it and overcoming the disintegration set in train by the Jacobin revolution.

Nonetheless, there is a connection between the disintegration into atomised individualism, where people celebrate their idiosyncratic enslavement to their passions and the Church.  It is though a connection between Orthodoxy and a derivative heresy.  Christian theology of the person and liberal individualism are linked in the same way as Orthodox teaching on the Word made flesh is to Arianism.

Diversity as an idea stems from  liberal individualism, itself a heretical derivative from Man as the image of God, the Imago Dei.  We must understand here that the Christian faith answered the dilemma of Greek philosophy - how to solve the problem of the One and the Many.  For most schools of classical thought the break up from unity into diverse particulars was seen as a fall and a disintegration.  The Church Fathers, in particular Saint Maximus the Confessor were able to provide the answer to this age-old dilemma and the answer lay in Christ.

In His Incarnation Christ joins the transcendent and the immanent, the universal and the particular, the One and the Many, God and Man.  As Saint Athanasius and Saint Irenaeus put it - God became man that Men might become gods.  This intertwining without loss of identity between Christ's two natures - divine and human - was further elucidated by Saint Gregory of Palamas's distinction between Divine Energies and Essence.  The essence of the divine and the human are not confused, but distinct for we are being joined in energies not substance or essence.  Thus identity is retained as in love and sexual union.

Furthermore, the Church revealed that God was not an impersonal One as the Neoplatonists held into which we would be absorbed and dissolved, losing out identity.  God is rather Three Persons in One God, three hypostases and one substance.  This then is the solution to the Greek problem of the One and the Many and it is found in personhood.  We are not simply reabsorbed into a Platonic One, but retain our identities in relationship with the Triune God.

That personhood is expressed through relationship, just as the Trinity is three divine Persons in One.  It is not the degraded atomisation into individualism. And that personhood in Man has a telos, to participate in the Divine, growing into the full stature of Christ.

The sanctity of personhood and freedom have been developed by contemporary Orthodox theologians such as Vladimir Lossky and Christos Yannaras.  Our telos is Christ, but it is manifested in our irreplaceability and importantly this irreplaceability of our personhood is expressed through freedom from the passions.

Yes it rests on freedom, because we can only authentically grow into Christ if we choose that path - but it is not freedom to be enslaved to the passions.  This is why Western churches have gone so awry - in their emphasis on inclusivity they say we accept you as you are, whatever passions have enslaved you.  God wants the best for us and will not leave us trapped in our passions.  True identity is unique and irreplaceable, but it is in the fulfilment of our telos to attain the likeness of the divine.  We all start as the imago Dei but having lost the likeness, but our fallen state is put right by attaining likeness though theosis or sanctification.  This is full freedom, not falling short through sin into enslavement to the passions, be that avarice and greed or promiscuity or homosexuality, so promoted by the Western elites.  

The modern West by contrast misunderstands freedom as licence and acquisition of wealth.  Avarice and sexual perversions that distort the image of God in us are celebrated as freedom.   

The Western idea of freedom and rights is a distorted degradation of Christian freedom and personhood.  Unlike the Church Fathers modern ideas are not derived from a high metaphysical principle such as the Trinity and the hypostases.  Enlightenment philosophers simply exaggerated the idea beyond what was justified by metaphysics.  Freedom and the sanctity of the person are indeed sacred principles, but there is no case for putting forward atomised individualism, enslavement to passions or diversity as principles.  They are heretical claims based on nothing more than thin air.  The Church made clear personhood was contingent on the Trinity and that personality could be retained in returning to our Creator as established through Christ's two natures.  The only reason these ideas were developed further into a fragmentary individualism was because of the development of a profound nihilism that ignored the transcendent justification for what we hold dear about mankind.    

And so we must rediscover that the true meaning of freedom is not in what is really the enslavement of "sodomy and usury" celebrated by our corrupt elites, but in the freedom to grow into the "full stature of Christ" through our unique irreplaceability when we are freed from the passions and sin.       

Alchemy or Theosis - different paths to different illuminations

 In the current time, despite the ever-increasing attractiveness of the New Age, the occult and the Eastern religions, we tend to have a materialist outlook.  Even our dabbling in the occult or other religions are seen  more as useful and about self-fufilment rather than worship.  This is to be contrasted with true religion, founded on humility before the Divine.  

It is somewhat counter-intuitive to link dry and objective science with anything mystical, but science originated in the esoteric worlds of alchemy and the occult.  Newton was fascinated by occult ideas and early chemistry sprang from esoteric alchemy.  Indeed, scratch the surface a little and we find the same underlying desire in both the occult and the scientific mindset - the grasping of power to manipulate the world.  Nature is then, in Heideggerian terms, standing reserve and we impose our will on it to exploit it from a position of Machenschaft.

Today we see a re-emergence of pseudo religious ideas in the manifestation of singularity and the technicians' belief in immortality through technology - the creation of own own hands that seems to be controlling us and that we worship.

In today's world of objective and rationalist science we see the reappearance of old and esoteric beliefs that are premised on attaining power, immortality and deification through our own manipulative efforts.  It might seem incongruous, but what manifests in both magic and science was there from the beginning, - the grasping at the fruit of knowledge, contrary to God's plan for his naive and immature creation, Man.

Such a spirit underpinned many of the pagan rites of initiation whether in the tradition of Mithras or Pythagoras.  The Neoplatonists made use of theurgy, which was a formulaic way of achieving deification.  By using certain incantations to invoke the divine, one is entering magical practice and thereby the manipulation of the divine or nature to achieve one's ends.  And these same processes as used in magic and theurgy, whether neoplatonic or alchemist, are in fact a form of techne - the manipulation of the world for own own ends and the attainment of power over God or the cosmos.

From the perspective of faithful humility the praxis of magic, theurgy, alchemy, science and technology are forms of  manipulation and domination, therefore being regarded to an extent as Luciferian.  Despite false dichotomies presented today, from the perspective that matters, one of humility, these different forms of praxis are all linked to the Fall - they are all grasping attempts at manipulation.

Humility is then the key distinction from these manipulative forms of praxis.  How we should have acted in the Garden was through a spirit of humility, not through pride attempting to seize power to achieve eternal life and knowledge disregarding our Creator.

There is a way to deification and it is not through the self realisation of alchemic or occult theurgies.  It is in a spirit of humility and faithful trust expressed in prayer.  Saint Seraphim of Sarov spoke of acquisition of the Holy Spirit as achieved by a life of Christian virtues.  Primarily the grace of the Holy Spirit is attained through prayer.  Prayer is the act of asking, not grasping and to ask is to act in the spirit of humility and trust.

To attain theosis the Fathers teach is to be deified.  And the means is a life of Christian virtue and prayer,  The possibility of acquiring the Holy Spirit is only possible because "God became Man that men might become gods" as both Saint Irenaeus of Lyons and Saint Athanasius, the great opponent of Arianism, said.

What this means is that any dichotomy between technology and the occult or chemistry and alchemy is false if the scientific work is in the spirit of pride, defiance and acquisitiveness.  If we are grasping at power to be like gods, while bypassing God, be that through creating artificial intelligence, developing the atom bomb or engaging in New-Age meditation, we are replaying the story of the Fall from the Garden.  Furthermore, we are mistaken if we attempt to separate the cold rationalism of science from the esoteric world of magic and the occult.  These are different sides of the same coin when science becomes scientism and both have their origin in Luciferian pride, and are the ensnaring by Lucifer the beautiful evening star who distracts us from the Father of Lights and our salvation. 

   

The Mean Old Scrooge of Philosophy

 Parsimony is not considered a virtue.  We look upon those who exhibit this trait as mean, grasping, miserly and lacking in generosity or the milk of human kindness.  And yet in the world of intellectual discourse we are encouraged to be mean and unrelenting.  The intellectual rule in question is quite explicit as to the sentiment that motivates it - I mean the rule of ontological parsimony.

William of Ockham, that medieval thinker who struck a blow against philosophical realism, contrived a methodology that allowed little to no room to explain much of what the human being intuits and indeed little room for that which gives life and the cosmos meaning.

William of Ockham is famous colloquially for Ockham's razor, by which is of course meant cutting away all complicated reasons and looking to the simplest explanation as the most likely.  As a rule of thumb through life it works fairly well in limiting overly speculative and unsupported claims about things we come across in life.  It is simple to regard crop circles as a consequence of something manmade, be that farm equipment or a hoax, rather than assuming the patterns in the field are the consequence of extra-terrestrial activity.

Importantly, and what is sometimes forgotten is that Ockham's razor is only claiming that the simpler explanation is more likely, not that a more complicated explanation is proved as impossible.  Ockham's razor is like a working solution until more is known and it cannot rule out conclusively a more complicated explanation.

The idea of ontological parsimony is closely related, but more specific to philosophy and theology.  It is a rule of  ontology that we are not justified in making speculative claims about ontology.  From Ockham's point of view as an example, Platonic forms violate ontological parsimony.  While Plato is logically coherent, he is for Ockham going too far ontologically in relying on forms outside space and time to account for the world of becoming and imperfection.  Essentially what is meant by ontological parsimony is that ontological entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.  Thus if the world can be explained materially, then it is not necessary to rely on immaterial explanations be that Platonic forms, God or anything from outside space and time.  The more ontological claims you make the more likely you are to make a slip.

Now in modern Western thought, right down to the Man on the Clapham Omnibus, this is considered a holy and inviolable law.  That though misses the point.  The rule cannot prove that more ontological layers to a theory are bound to be false, only that you require more justifications for more ontological layers and this need can be avoided by not making any extra ontological claims beyond those absolutely necessary.  A frugal and somewhat pusillanimous approach indeed that never actually proves or claims to prove new or speculative ontological claims are by necessity false; only that there is a greater need for justification.

As a result of the way this frugality of thought has seeped into our culture, atheism seems correct because it rules out all ontological claims.  There may though be justifications for metaphysical and theistic claims bar the need to be an ontological necessity.

This parsimonious way of thinking means there is an inherent bias towards a simpler theory such as Darwin's idea of evolution because it does not need to rely on any greater ontological claims.  But there may be very good reasons for giving credence to more ontological claims than those that are only strictly necessary.

This parsimony really is a frugal meanness of thought that impoverishes our intellectual realm in the West.  If there is no ontological realism, by which is meant that certain universal or metaphysical concepts are considered real, we lose much that enriches life - the Good, the True the Beautiful.

Relying on a purely material explanation of reality gives us a very simple philosophy, but it is impoverished and means we must omit much that we intuit is real and not simply real on the periphery of reality, but central - be that ethics, the soul, the divine, love, even logic..

And so by adopting a philosophically frugal methodology we are bound also to adopt an impoverished Weltanschauung.  We must rule out much of value, not because we have proved it as non-existent, but because we will only allow the most narrow of reasons to explain the world.  But while this approach means less risk and less need for complicated ontology, it is equally possible that the cosmos is not at all simple, but baroque and beautifully ornate.  The methodology is not proof in itself of a minimalist reality.

There are other reasons to think philosophical realism is justified.  Indeed it is the opposite thinking to Ockhamite parsimony.  A more generous way of thinking allows for us to give serious weight to immaterial but highly important ideas that we live by - love, God, beauty.  

Evolution is often referred to as a beautiful theory, but that is because of its simplicity.  There are other forms of beauty than minimalism and the human soul often craves a more intricate and ornate beauty.  Minimalism is not necessarily superior to the Gothic or the Baroque.

If we look at the Church Councils and the Fathers they used a different methodology.  For the Fathers it was what ensured theological concepts were coherent and non-contradictory that made up the methodology.  Again there was a form of minimalism, in that it was not thought wise to over-dogmatise.  Church Tradition was considered sufficient on the whole unless a heresy arose and only then would it be necessary to theologise on dogma.  This thought is in the opposite sprit to the mean frugality of Ockham.  Instead it gave liberal space to Tradition and personal spirituality unrestricted by dogma unless strictly necessary to avoid heresy.  And so Patristics is generous not mean.  

And Ockhamite parsimony really is mean spiritually.  There is an ethical question about adopting a methodology that dismisses and derides the most precious aspects of being human, cutting us off like a crusty old miser, a Gradgrind, from the Good, the True, the Beautiful - the Transcendent.

Despite the way ontological parsimony and Ockham's razor permeate our way of thinking in the West at every level of society, making us a materialistic culture facing a meaning crisis, there are other methodologies that are more humane and generous that give credibility to all that the human soul intuits, giving a philosophical and theological structure through Scripture, testimonies, Councils and canons that protect this intuition from solipsism on the one hand and from a reductive ontology on the other.