When this blog was commenced, the name chosen for it was “ a voice from the shires”. This seemed most apposite given the focus of the blog was to promote a rural, royalist and sacramental, spiritual argument for English, even British, culture and tradition.
The mystical and Christian meaning of the Monarchy, the
spiritual aspect of tradition, the sacred value of English countryside in our
identity were of central importance and of concern to the blog in terms of arguing for their protection. There was an underlying Burkean perspective that set the
paradigm and perspective of the blog. This
was the more neoplatonic and mystical side of Burke combined with his practical
conservatism, as opposed to his more Whiggish elements. The Burke who won over Wordsworth to
conservatism, not the Burke who was himself won over by Adam Smith’s liberal
economics.
A key turning point in my thinking was expressed in a blog I
entitled A Orthodox Voice in a Western Wildnerness. https://avoicefromtheshires.blogspot.com/2014/01/an-orthodox-voice-in-western-wilderness.html
Having been an advocate of the West, concerned about the
encroachment of political Islam, arguing for the open society, as per the
content of many of my early blogs, I was becoming increasingly alienated from
the secularising and reductive spirit of Western liberalism very evident as
imposed on other countries via our foreign policy and direct violence. I began to notice that much of our foreign
policy was a manifestation of this reductive universalism that wants to flatten
out the world as a bleak wasteland of secularism and rational choice theory. People will be nothing more than individuals,
voters and consumers determined by their most petty passions.
In the particular blog mentioned above I applied Burke’s concept
of wisdom of the ancestors to Church dogma and the role of the Church
Fathers. This inevitably put me in the
camp of Orthodox theology, as contrasted against the individualism of Protestant
interpretation of Scripture and the Roman Catholic idea of unilateral Papal
infallibility unrestrained by Patristic Tradition. Of course there was still a long way for me
to go, especially in a spritiual rather than cerebral sense.
My interest in the mystical and spiritual aspect of our
Monarchist and Christian constitution inevitably led to the recognition of a
type of Byzantine idea of Symphonia that the British constitution strove for,
in opposition to all the Victorian liberal constitutionalists from Bagehot to
Dicey. The sacramental nature of the
mystery of the Coronation is of course rooted in Orthodox belief that is still there,
hidden in the mists of our Orthodox past.
Encounters with British Orthodoxy helped me to understand that a
rediscovery of our Orthodox past reconnects us with our mystical monarchy and
our mystical countryside – but this is long-forgotten, written out of the Whig
history. Now forgotten it was connected to our woods and sacred shrines long before 1066 and the
arrival of schismatic Roman Catholicism with the Norman conquerors.
It was Constantinople not Rome that the Anglo Saxon
aristocracy sort refuge.
With the Normans came Anselm’s theory of atonement that drastically distorted
Christian understanding of the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection,
further solidifying the Great Schism.
This bargaining for eternal life and appeasing a vengeful God sank deep
into the Western consciousness, combined unhealthily with Saint Augustine’s
emphasis on Original Sin.
The Normans, those rootless marauders, who in Southern
Europe would fight the Christian Empire in Sicily were content with a feudal
God and a rationalistic faith.
With our ancient Monarchy, preceding the Conquest, there has
been an ongoing sense that there is something deeply rooted in the English past
that is very different from the theologies and philosophies imposed by the
post-Conquest aristocracy. Not only did
Norman England give Anselm a platform for his heresies, but it was also the home
for the most damaging philosophy arguably in the West – the reductive nominalism
of William of Ockham. Somehow though the
sense has remained that England contains a deep spiritual mystery far removed
from Occamite nominalism, naïve empiricism, Hobbesian or Lockean liberalism and
reductive and dehumanising utilitarianism.
That mystery is symbolised in our Monarchy in a very Orthodox sense and
yet the Monarchy has also become a weapon of the veiled republic of the liberal
secularists and nominalists. This
conflict is reaching its height with the coming coronation of a personally spiritual
King linked to Orthodoxy, but also ideologically under the influence of the Globalist
WEF.
There is a deep contradiction in England and it is contended
here that it is because of the spiritual alienation from the Orthodox Church
after the Conquest. We have lived with a
continuous tension between a knowing and worldly “realism” that reduces all to
a worldly common-sense alienating us further from the spiritual life, tradition
in a mystical sense, and from holistic existence and on the other hand authentic Christian tradition. In accepting the Conquest perhaps the English
have adopted a certain fatalism to a materialistic existence where the paradigm
is essentially reductive. In accepting
their subjugation a deep cynicism has resulted.
But we know there was something more in our past, when we were still
part of the Orthodox communion.
The Sixteenth Century break with Rome might have seemed like
an attempt to rediscover the past – but the sacred objects of England were systematically
destroyed, the shrines desecrated and an even more barren and reductive
theology came to dominate, finally manifesting in regicide after a hundred
years. As the Pilgrimage of Grace showed,
the ordinary people still placed value on the old faith. While that faith came to be identified with Roman
Catholicism, this was a striving back towards something yet more ancient.
We see this authentic striving in our country misdirected
due to lack of knowledge. People seek
not Orthodoxy, but a pre-Christian paganism linked to our woods and
fields. Everyone knows there is
something amiss, but not what is missing and instead people fall into a shallow
and sentimental new -age paganism as an alternative to the continued propaganda
of the world now promoted by the likes of Richard Dawkins, a man rooted in the
world and establishment of the power of the Conquest.
It is in figures such as C S Lewis, in his Anglicanism, even Tolkien and Chesterton in their English Catholicism, Philip Sherrard, who perhaps like our new King flirted a little too much with Perennialism,
and of course Kallistos Ware, that Oxford convert, author and bishop who
embodies a certain familiar Englishness, and yet is valued and held in the
highest regard throughout the Orthodox world – so that at his funeral in
England, Moscow and Constantinople were united again despite the geopolitical crisis
over Ukraine.
We all have a sense that there is something in our English
past we have lost contact with. While
the Sophists, economists and calculators along with neocon warmongers and Atlanticists,
the economic and social neoliberals are the voice of the British State, we know
intuitively that the English spirit is something far contrary to this.
It was in part through applying Burke in a way he could not
have imagined that it was possible for me to understand the coherence and power
of the ancient faith, the apostolic faith from Christ’s disciples in an
unbroken line through the Fathers to the Church of today. There was much more to discover in a
spiritual rather than rationalist way. While
discovering the Orthodox faith has opened the doors of Russian and Greek
culture, it has also meant a deeper and fuller understanding of what it really
means to be English and to belong to “this sceptred isle”, this truly Christian
country underneath all the economic and social liberalism, the materialism, the
secularisation, the bureaucracy and the love of Mammon. The spirit of Orthodoxy is still here, if we
only look for it and that starts with a recognition that Englishness is not to
be found in the utilitarians, the free-marketeers, the liberals, the atheists,
the nominalists, those who have accommodated themselves to the catastrophe of
the Conquest and the consequent cynicism in high places that results from
authority being seized a thousand years ago with a Nietzschean will to power,
against the spirit of the Beatitudes and in alienation from the Church, the
authentic Church – the Orthodox Church.
The real counter-revolution is not in political activity, it is in
rediscovering our own ancient connection to the Orthodox Church. I have done so by joining the Orthodox Church
and specifically the Moscow Patriarchate, which has recently recognised the
ancient saints of this island before the Great Schism. It will seem strange to many, but I have
rediscovered the faith of my forefathers through Russia.
