The Madness of Rationalism

Rationalism is a human quality distinguishing Man from the dumb beasts.  Man is the rational animal, as Aristotle put it.  Until the advent of post-modernism, rationalism had been seen since the Enlightenment and before as the unique and special quality of Man, at least in the West.  The Jacobins after the Revolution paraded an idol of Madam Reason through the streets, to supplant and usurp the Mother of God.

In the Lenten calendar, prior to the Laudation of the Mother of God, at the Akathist to the Mother of God a familiar Orthodox phrase is recited - 

"Rejoice fold of rational sheep!"

The Christian worshippers form a fold of rational sheep in the Church.  Why rational?  Well they are worshipping the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, the fount of the rational.  Importantly this is rationality not detached from the eternal Logos, but participating in worship of the divine Logos.  Through worship we become rational actors in life, working to the telos of our nature and participating in the energies of the Divine.  We overcome the irrational forces of chaos.

Indeed it seems something of a paradox, but the life of the Church, dismissed by the modern post-Enlightenment rationalist as obscurantist turns out to be the source of the rational life.  This is not the reductive rationalism of discursive reason, leading to the scepticism of Hume and the nihilism of Nietzsche and Sartre.  The contrasting rationalism of the Encyclopeadists is rooted in human hubris and from its very root was bound to deform into the subversiveness of atheism and finally the upside-down world of post-modernism.

It is through the mystics and ascetics of the Church that we learn how to live rational and ordered lives.  Right back to the days of  Saint Symeon the Stylites, the extreme ascetic of the Church did not condemn the world as evil, but acted as an arbitrator in worldly disputes when petitioned to pause his prayer on his pillar by parties to disputes.  Symeon of Stylites, imposing extreme asceticism upon himself was famous for his moderate and well-judged guidance to his fellow Syrian Christians.

Even more extreme we find the example of the fool for Christ who through his crazy breaches of social convention restores the city to a Christian life along the golden mean of moderation and away from extreme heresies.  Another Saint Symeon, Symeon the holy fool of Emesa, a fool for Christ, disrupted church services, caused general chaos in Emesa, even running through the ladies' communal baths naked, but all to restore the city to a Christian civic and personal life - whereby the extremes of hypocrisy, sin and heresy were moderated by his strange witness.

After the Laudation of the Mother of God comes the fifth Sunday of Lent and the commemoration of Saint Mary of Egypt.  An exemplar of asceticism, after a life of whoredom and promiscuity, Mary spent 47 years in the Jordanian desert living on roots in an extreme ascecis.  And yet this seemingly crazy life was a restoration of her soul to the fold of rational sheep, to such an exemplary degree that she walked on water.

The paradox is that those saints who live mystical and ascetic lives help us to live rationally and moderately.   This is true rationalism because it is rooted in humility.  By contrast what has passed for rational thinking in the West is instead rooted in a Babel-like spirit of Hubris.  The rationalism lauded today is from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge by prideful grasping, not awaiting the right moment.

Because of this and its denial of any hierarchy of beings or knowledge, it is by definition reductive.  The ratio becomes a zero.  It is not participation in higher meaning or being filled by the divine Logos.

In the reductive and discursive reasoning of deduction and induction, without any participation through the nous (that vital and neglected faculty) in the energies of the divine, there is only an ever-reducing circle to a point of zero or nil - nihilism results through a radical scepticism.

It is a type of knowledge and illumination of a Luciferian kind.  It is the enlightenment by Lucifer, but the refusal to enter into the divine darkness following Moses and Saint Gregory of Nyssa up Mount Sinai.  It leads to the continual prideful rebuilding of Babel - revolutionary France, Bolshevism, the New World Order and the Great Reset.  Such rationalism lies behind the approach to artificial intelligence and singularity of living for ever in a temporal and mortal existence.

For all its rationalism it is a type of madness.  G K Chesterton's description of the mad man comes to mind:

“If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

What can be drawn from this is that on the one hand we have the paradox of the mystical ascetic guiding us to rational moderation and on the other the reductive rationalist leads us to madness.  Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the story of the modern West.  Post-modern subversion is not the adversary, but the offspring of the Enlightenment.  Rationalism turned the philosophers mad by leading them into a radical scepticism, nihilism and finally the post-modernism of Derrida, Deleuze and the Frankfurt School.  And now the rest of the world looks on at the crazy chaos of modern Western culture that is destroying us for all our wealth, technological progress and indeed our rationalism.

  

   

  

The Tap Root of Western Civilisation

 Even new atheists now are beginning to recognise that the Christian ethos and tradition are what hold the West together and are also a bulwark against the forces of the barbarian and the alien.  It might be too late.  With the ongoing revolution in thought initiated by the Enlightenment, but with dark roots much further back, Western culture has become a vacuum into which forces such as Islamic belief are rushing.  Neither is the West any longer capable of protecting its physical borders.  

Some New Atheists want a cultural Christianity, whereby the transcendental truths of  the Church are mimicked and simulated while we pridefully maintain the claims of the Fall - Man actually neither believes or needs God.  A bit like marrying a person you do not love to have children, ending in divorce, faking religious faith does not work.  People will pick it up as phoney.  This perhaps has been the problem of the liberal Christianity of Western European churches.  And if you simply claim the ethos and the civilisational benefits, you have no justification for doing so, whereas Islam can point to its claimed transcendental justification.  Every culture and civilisation is based upon transcendental claims, albeit prior to the conversion of Rome these pagan metaphysical fundaments of cultures were parochial and culturally located.  With the conversion of the Empire the universal claims of the Church became the tap root of the world empire.

Therefore something changed with the Edict of Milan.  The very reason for persecuting the Church was its universal claim and rejection of local gods.  All of humanity is made in the image of the same God.  The particular and the universal, the problem of the One and the many is solved.  The solution is in the Incarnation.  Sin and death are defeated for all of humanity.  Each person has an eternal future and potential for theosis if they freely accept salvation.

This is the tap root of Western civilisation as well as being a true universal belief.  We can see political liberalism and philosophical humanism as being related to the Church teaching that man is free to choose (Mary's assent to the Incarnation and every free conversion and baptism since) and is made in the image of God and can be transformed into the likeness through Christ.  The problem with the West is that these beliefs rooted in the Church became detached from faith and led to the selfish individualism, the hubristic scientism and the secular vacuity of the modern and post-modern West.

The West has a tap root of the Church, but a cultural inclination to revolution.  Going back as far as the Schism, we see an assertion of rebellion and innovation in the seizure of power by the Papacy and the unliteral alteration of the Nicene Creed.  This seed of revolution would develop through nominalist rejection of universal truths, the fascination with magic and the occult, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and atheistic materialism, leading to the disconnection of Western thought from the transcendent spiralling into the madness of post modernism, deconstruction and existentialism - politically manifesting as wokeness and transgenderism and being further developed by the Silicon Valley demonic genii, trying to find everlasting mortal life in this world.

So we must understand the West as being disconnected from the tap root and this then growing into the deformed revolutionary spirit, promoted by secret societies and political ideologies from Jacobinism to Marxism and Fabianism,  so that the West now can neither defend its civilisation or really knows what its values are - equating them to the Jacobin revolutionary non-values of the revolutionary spirit. 

This tap root though did not only feed and nourish the West.  it nourished the Near East.  The Church emerged from the Middle East through the Greek world.  This is prophesied in John's Gospel, after the Jews reject Christ:

"The Pharisees therefore said among themselves, Perceive ye how ye prevail nothing?  behold, the world is gone after him.  And there were certain Greeks among them that came up to worship at the feast: The same came therefore to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and desired him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus.  Philip cometh and telleth Andrew:  and again Andrew and Philip tell Jesus.  And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified."

John 12: 19-23

Just as the Jews reject the Messiah so the Greeks accept him through the preaching of Paul. And the Church Fathers were Greek speakers and educated as Greeks.  Culturally the Church's conquest of Latin Rome through the blood of Christian martyrs was the deep Greek theology winning the Roman Empire.  

That tap root, that first sprouted in Judea, Syria then Greece and also Egypt won the West spiritually.  And yet from 1054 incrementally the West has broken its link to its tap root.  Even the emphasis on Judaeo-Christian culture is a tacit dismissing of the Hellenistic root of the Church, because the Jews rejected Christ and chose political revolution against Rome leading to the destruction of the Temple and the end of Temple Judaism.  Rabbinic Judaism would then emerge defining itself in opposition to the Church.

The result of this revolutionary and political choice to move away from the Church is the secularism and disintegration of the West, making it unable to resist the coming demographic and cultural conquest by Islam.  This is not only demographic.  The West cannot resist the demographic change, but more seriously it has no answer to Islam's transcendental claims.  In the bizarre and topsy turvy world of woke liberalism, where we cannot define a woman and are starting to offer suicide on demand as a service, more people of European origin will find answers in the clear message of Islam.  A religion that offers a political answer without the personal transformation of repentance and theosis.  In the crazy world of the West in freefall from any transcendent sense, Islam will be something people can grab a hold on to save them from the vicious spiral of Western degeneration.  Andrew Tate is a warning.

The West's tap root though presents a very different understanding.  God is triune and the second Person of the Trinity is incarnate.  He only became incarnate through the willingness of Mary to consent, the Mother of God.  Following from this salvation lies not in conquest but a personal assent. Death is defeated and Man has the potential to be transformed into the likeness of God through grace - deification is the gift.  Islam rejects this entirely and cuts us off from the salvation offered.  If the second Person of the Trinity does not become fully man, then man cannot be saved.  It must be full incarnation.  As Saint Gregory of Nazianzus put it: "For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved."

So if the West rejects its own degeneracy and begins to be transformed by Islam, thinking it has reached transcendental truth, it will be further cut off from salvation.   Liberalism, New Atheism, secularism might soon look more like a stage, clearing the ground for the final conquest of the West and the complete detachment from its tap root.  Through its revolutionary zeal the West will have brought about its end.  The Church remains, but Western civilisation, like the First Century Jews, has chosen political revolution over salvation. 

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.

Autocracy and Surrogate Imperators

With the recent death in prison of Alexey Navalny, the Russian politician opposed to President Putin, there has been much media attention given to what is happening; far more than that given to the late Gonzalo Lira, American citizen and critic of Zelensky, who died in similarly suspicious circumstances in a Ukrainian gaol a few weeks before.  Russia is being contrasted as an autocratic regime in opposition to the enlightened democracies of the West.  This promotion of the West, predicated on human rights and liberalism is still assumed to be the better system, despite protesting farmers, the yellow vests and in America a political divide too deep to be able to envision an American common weal.

These abstract human rights that the West sees as its foundation have become the only way to value human beings.  In contrast religious faith did not conceive of abstract rights to be able to live a certain way or do certain things, it thought rather that man's sanctity lay in being created in the image and likeness of God.  This view of human nature encompassed freedom, creativity and the sanctity of life, but remained categorically different from the abstract and individualistic idea of human rights.  It gave men a telos of virtue.  This perspective also honoured the Emperor, pagan as well as Christian, persecutor of the Church as well as the Christian Basileus.

In Dante's great work, Brutus as the betrayer of the emperor is in the very depths of Hell alongside Judas, the traitor to Christ.  The Emperor, as the Pauline epistles make clear, is to be honoured not for his individual virtues, but by dint of his role.  In the second epistle to the Thessalonians, Chapter Two, verse six, Saint Paul gives a clear explanation of the role of the Emperor.  And this was written centuries before the Edict of Milan:

"And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time."

The Church Fathers understood that the Emperor withholds the coming antichrist who will subvert all order and seemliness.  It is impossible that Saint Paul regarded the dissolute personality of Caesar Nero as good, but his role as Emperor has a function in Christian eschatology.  It is for this reason that Saint John of Shanghai understood that the regicide of the Tsar, Passion Bearer and New Martyr Nichols II meant there was no one to hold back the coming antichrist in these last days.

What are we to understand from this?  We see in the West much that is promoted in the name of freedom and rights that is very much in the sprit of Sodom and Gomorrah.  We see that in Western democracies today all is subverted in a post-modern celebration of degeneracy, particularly unseemly sexual degeneracy.  

Meanwhile citizens from those countries deemed an alliance of evil often have not lost touch with religious faith, high literature and art, philosophical thinking and something even more significant - they, the citizens have not lost a certain decorous innocence. Whatever the accusations of corruption and oppression we in the West throw at Iran or Russia (and these are two very different countries), their people on the whole retain a dignity that people in the West have lost.  They have not lost their intelligence or virtue on the whole.  While we in the West see scenes of degradation of the human person celebrated as freedom, in other parts of the world they would still blush.  We are somehow degraded by the celebration of the sexual passions in particular.  it goes further though, there is disrespect for elders, for figures of authority, we mock that which is sacred and celebrate that which is degrading of the human body.  Saint Peter in his second Epistle wrote of such a type of person:

 "But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government.  Presumptious are they, selfwilled, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignitaries"

Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans strongly affirms monarchical rule:

"For he is a minister of God to thee for good.  But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain:  for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil."

And the Church held to this throughout the persecution by the Empire, only resisting the Emperor on matters of religious faith.  Putting to one side the virtues and sins of emperors throughout history for the moment, it is clear that to be a rebel against ordained authority one is stepping into a path that also entails moral dissolution.  Note that those who oppose Putin, go by names such as "Pussy Riot" and many wave the flag of Western sexual liberation - the six coloured flag of LGBT.  The concept of human rights often seems a cover for living by the passions and rejecting virtue.

Being an obedient and orderly subject is part of the virtuous life.  In the West, since the top-down revolution of the elites and their secret societies, overturning the order of Christendom and expressing oneself sexually is seen as liberation.  It is by such a subverted and revolutionary ethos that we now live.  The Jacobins run our political structure.

Elsewhere, in more autocratic countries, fallible men have taken absolute power to themselves.  In a 2009 Russian film by Pavel Lungin, entitled Tsar, this very problem is confronted.  The autocrat has become not dissolute but cruel and mad.  His close friend and companion and Metropolitan of Moscow, later to be canonised as Saint Philip of Moscow confronts and chastises this cruel Tsar, Ivan IV, known with the epithet Grozny or Terrible.  As a Christian Philip cannot stop by and watch the wanton cruelty meted out upon Tsar Ivan's innocent subjects.  In the end Philip himself is martyred, strangled to death by one of Ivan's henchmen.  He though witnessed against the Emperor, the vicar of God.  And mad as Tsar Ivan might have been, he began to build Moscow to be the Third Rome of Orthodox Christianity.

We therefore have a paradox - the Emperor there to safeguard the Christian world can himself become another Nero,  And yet Paul wrote those words as Nero, who would put him to death reigned and terrorised Rome.

There is something deep here.  If democracies subvert Tradition and order with their subversive human rights, the danger of arbitrary rule so despised by Anglo Saxon liberals still seems to hold as a criticism.  Do Christians turn a blind eye to abuse of power?

Perhaps one way to understand it is that the Emperor fulfils his role insofar as he does not fall into sin himself.  There is also a distinction between personal sin and being a public ruler, although usually private sins enter the public realm when an empire is ruled by a person rather than a constitution.

The Church though sees the bigger picture.  With Saint Philip, in the tradition of Saint John the Forerunner, the Church challenges the ungodly exercise of power, but like Saints Paul and Peter the church recognises the sacred role of the Emperor and that for all the personal faults a personal ruler is superior to a constitutional republic - the system of deists and freemasons.

It is something to do with Monarchy that keeps countries from going down the road of abstract rights and maintaining personal relationships at the core of the polity.  These personal relationships define the State as a family, rather than a constitutional system of rights and processes.  With a monarch at the heart of the nation, the polity is not a codified document, but a family.

Today the post Soviet republics are not hereditary monarchies. They are ruled by presidents, but to a certain extent these presidents from Putin to Lukashenko are more like autocrats and whatever their personal faults and however much these faults creep into their public roles, they are withholding forces, restraining as Saint Paul would put it, the diabolical forces that so torment the West today.

What though is it that they protect?  Is it really more precious than the West's human rights?  It is a different culture, one of more restraint, innocence, decorum and intelligence.  Each undemocratic regime can be held to account for abuses of power, for special favours to the members of the inner circle and to downright cruelty towards political prisoners.  What though keeps support for a Putin or Lukashenko is the deep fear of a return to the times of chaos and foreign exploitation.  In that sense what the West sees as an opposition leader can look more like a traitor, especially when funded by the very country that had engaged in the asset stripping in the nineties.

That though is not the most precious thing that is protected.  In the West our culture has been so dumbed down that we are kept placated and stupid under the power of modern-day bread and circuses, be that football or reality television.  We are detached from our high culture and our history.  We have lost our identity.  We have been manipulated so as not to be able to discern the most precious aspects of life.  Swearing, promiscuity, sexual deviancy, disrespect for sacred things, blasphemy, disregard for the elderly, rejection of our culture have been normalised.  However brutal some foreign despots their people still have access to their religion, their culture and their identity.  This is not something to be lightly dismissed.  It is striking that a Russian or Iranian is likely to be more cultured than a Westerner.

That though is not to mistake the image for the real thing.  The undemocratic and anti- Western regimes all have their roots in revolution.  They are not emperors in the real sense, the traditional sense of the hierarchical religious societies of Tradition.  Instead they mimic their pre-revolutionary predecessors and there is a strange overlap between this return to Tradition and roots in the Marxist revolutions of recent history.  

Nonetheless, it can be seen that those in authority in Orthodox countries particularly are resisting the cultural subversion that is turning the West mad, which is even becoming confused over gender.  In that sense today's autocrats are restrainers of the worst excesses of the revolutionary West that has fallen prey first to Jacobins and rationalists and now to postmodernists and LGBT.  In the East meanwhile there is an example of trusting in God to bless the people with a good king.

Singularity - Full Realisation of Man's Fall

The moment of singularity is when Artificial Intelligence will surpass human intelligence.  To some this means the end or extinction of man, the Imago Dei, by his own idol.  While Artificial Intelligence can only ever be complicated input and output and cannot possess consciousness in the of sense of Man as made with the divine spark of life, it can reach the ultimate stage of Gestell - humanity's enframement by the technology it created.

For a scientist such as Robert Kurzweil, captured by the work of his own mind and hands, this, like the Fruit in the Garden is the key to immortality.  Such an attitude is rife in the tech world.  It is no accident that Apple chose the symbol of a bitten fruit.  From this perspective that human desire, rooted in pride, to know and achieve immortality through dominating Nature, subjecting the world to its will, can be traced from the temptation to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, through alchemy, occultism, Baconite science to splitting the atom, to Big Tech and now the push for singularity.  

According to the reductive narrative of atheism, in its Promethean spirit, this is healthy rebellion against the arbitrary Patriarch God.  We outwit the Divine decrees and achieve forbidden power, finally leading to immortality.

This is a misunderstanding of God and His love and benevolence.  Adam was forbidden the fruit because in his undeveloped and naive state such knowledge in Eden would have brought about terror and disaster to mankind.  Instead the Exile was to allow us to survive this disaster of our sin.  The Exile leads to Christ and our redemption and immortality.

The pride of Satan was the cause of his rebellion and he appealed to our pride in our transgressions to achieve immortal life and power over Nature.  We thereby in Heideggerian terms, treated Nature as standing reserve and became enframed by our technology - the work of our own artistry.

What is going wrong here in the vision of perpetual life in this realm of existence is what went wrong at the Fall,, whether you understand that story literally or symbolically.  And it leads to death not life, enslavement to decay, not freedom.  Our pride leads us to see Nature as something to manipulate whether by magic or science - the urge is the same to both practices.  

And so, even if singularity means we can avoid death in this temporal realm, we will not be attaining the richness of eternal life with God.  There is a fundamental and foundational mistake, indeed sin, in this attempt to seize the fruit of eternal life.  We are going about it by grasping, not letting go.

From Christ's death on the Cross we see eternal life is achieved by relinquishng our control and smashing the idols we create, be they Moloch or Big Tech.  That is not to say our creativity is wrong, for just as we are stewards of Creation, so we are made to be creative.  It is rather the spirit in which we create.  It is the Machenschaft Heidegger points to by falling into inauthenticity of Being and treating that over which we are stewards as standing reserve.

The spirit in which artificial intelligence is created is paradoxically both our own grasping at control and a surrender to the work of our own hands as a new god.  Impatient for Moses to return from the mountain, we are building our golden calf.

Nonetheless, however far artificial intelligence develops as an input and output system, it remains only that.  Only God breathes life into beings and only God creates consciousness.  That is not to say that a level of sophistication and complexity that will exceed human rationality is impossible.  Simply by dint of the complexity and the likely general nature of A.I.'s ability to process, in that level of intelligence it could exceed humanity and become more powerful in a technical sense.  It could well be the Beast we must bear the mark of and bow down to worship.  What A.I. will not have is the nous of which the Fathers speak, that enables us to participate in the Divine Energy of God and to be transformed from glory into glory as we participate in the divine - the Imago Dei recovering the likeness of God given at Creation and forfeited by Adam's attempt to force immortality by his own will and grasping.  It is only by love and worship of the Divine source of love and goodness that eternal life is found.  Eternal life is categorically and fundamentally different from the never-ending temporal existence the promoters of singularity lust after.

We may find ourselves ruled over by a diabolical Beast that makes its own image for us to bow down and worship, but we can resist the Mark, like the first martyrs in Rome.  The never-ending life the singularists crave is that referred to in Revelation most likely:

"In those days men will seek death and will not find it."

If this sort of singularity is achieved by our mad scientists, it will be founded on something rotten that is the desire and lust to grasp at forbidden fruit and to usurp the natural order by defying God to achieve immortality.

Such an urge has been in us since the Fall.  It is not the defiance of some arbitrary rule that we are demonstrating.  There was nothing arbitrary about being forbidden to eat of the fruit.  Instead the only way to reach eternal life is as the monks say- by dying ourselves.  In that sense we must rather surrender our selfish and individualistic urge to self preservation and instead be moved by love - love of God and love of Man.

We are perhaps approaching another time of martyrdom where we will be called upon to give up on material life for God.  If we can be merged into some Frankenstein abomination through singularity, it will be the decision we must make to turn away from this fake eternal life, just as the martyrs had to choose the lions of the Coliseum rather than deny Christ for their self preservation of this temporal existence.  

Good Authoritarianism

 What links the housing crisis in the UK to the Zionist bombing of civilians in Gaza?  One might say it is because Western governments are under the control of global interests with their own agenda.  Israel is an outpost of the global- liberal empire in the authoritarian and traditional Middle East.  House prices in the UK are out of control, because homes in London have been turned into assets for foreign money (global interests again), thereby pricing people out of the market across the whole country as Londoners are forced out.

That may well be the case,  but there is also an ideology that lies behind many of the crazy and inhumane policies implemented across what now seems a misnomer of the "free world".  That ideology is not simply liberalism, but it is rather anti-authoritarianism.  It is a belief that any measures that require the exercise of legitimate and moral authority or making judgments, is tantamount to Fascism.  And closely linked to this anti-authoritarianism is the never-again human reaction to the horror of concentration camps in Central and Eastern Europe.  This though seems to have been interpreted to give licence to Israel to enact slaughter on civilians in a horrifying way.  This seems to be learning the wrong lesson from the Holocaust.  What we can understand is that we are living in a post-war paradigm in which Israel, because of what happened under the Nazis, must always be protected and no policy domestically can be implemented that might uphold traditional values.  It is a reaction manifesting as a paradigm of thought resulting from the narrative of the Second World War and what it was about.

The situation in Israel and Palestine is not the main focus of the 'blog, but like the preoccupation with liberal progressivism, it is indicative of how we only understand political problems through the lens of the Second World War, while giving no real weight to any other part of European history.  It is of course understandable emotionally, given the proximity in time.  The lesson of the Holocaust though is surely that mass slaughter of civilians is wrong, not that Israel must act with impunity.  That though is another discussion.  Here the focus is the narrowness of the Overton Window in terms of only liberal and progressive perspectives being permissible, despite such political views clearly leading us to moral and social disintegration.  World War Two cannot explain the totality of politics or society.

Even the understanding of the Second World War is anachronistic and imposed retrospectively.  The United Kingdom, at least in the understanding of the man on the Clapham Omnibus was a battle for national sovereignty not global liberal values.  And the war was not so much a victory for the liberal democracies as it was a hard-won and bloody victory by the Stalinist  USSR.  The United Kingdom's sacrifice was real, but it turned us into a vassal of the United States, as the Suez Crisis was to demonstrate in our national humiliation.

We saw this post-war  triumph of anti-authoritarianism in other fields of life than geopolitics.  In the West's conservative movements, true conservatism and maintenance of traditional values and society were overthrown by the liberal ideology of the market and the atomistic individual.  In fields such as psychology, which gained greatly in importance, there has been a clear anti-authoritarian and anti-traditional agenda - from Adorno's the Authoritarian Personality to the dominance of Freud's sex-obsessed reductionism.   

Of great importance is the way that Adorno linked the traditional understanding of self restraint and virtues to Fascism.  Much of the destruction of the innocence of youth is a result of his poisonous idea that sexual restraint led to the Fascist ideology.  All of this was part of a pattern as the reaction against "third way" ideology, whether Fascism, Falange, or Nazi and its replacement with valueless and anti-tradition liberalism.  Hence the destructive sexual and social revolutions of the 1960s, the cancer of which has gradually worked its way through all levels of Western society and culture.  In art too we see the rejection of an authoritative standpoint of beauty to an abstracted modern art often simply trying to shock traditional attitudes long vanquished anyway.  Even in post-war architecture we saw this revolution.  People's living space was turned into the liberal onanism of destroying "authoritarian" values of architectural beauty and traditional civic space.

We must understand therefore that because of the Post-War paradigm, legitimate alternatives to the liberal degeneracy are always placed outside of the Overton Window, however legitimate the solutions presented might be.  It is also telling that after decades of Cold War, still in the West "Fascist" is the political insult of choice.

The argument here is that paradigms though can be flawed and be based upon distorted understandings.  For example, anyone who has read Max Picard's contemporary writings from the Third Reich can see that Nazism was not conservatism, but an avante garde movement, relying on practical methods of cutting edge technology to put forward a demotic and anti-traditional campaign.  The ideology had its roots in radical German thought, not conservatism. Atheist Nietzsche, vegetarian Wagner and artistic Futurism were important influences on the European Radical Right of the twenties and thirties.    Nazism was rejected by the revolutionary conservative movement, which also opposed the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic.   

Today with economic crises, sexual libertinism and radical individualism we again seem to be in a Weimar situation.  Ideas of personal virtue and collective tradition are considered Fascist.  Meanwhile global finance seems to have captured the liberal democracies.  It looks more like we are ruled from Davos not our own parliaments.

Western intellectuals so wedded to the post-War paradigm will have to accept that unless politics is to enter a downward spiral, that some authoritarian values are not only right in principle, but necessary for a functioning and healthy society.  There are vested interests that would oppose a reassertion of traditional values.  We see this every time any form of genuine conservatism gains traction.  It has to be censored, proscribed and cancelled.

Nonetheless traditional values are vital and fundamental for a healthy commonwealth.  We cannot continue to function as a random collection of atomistic individuals driven by our evermore degenerate passions.  The consumer society only encourages people to be slaves to their appetites.  This suits global capital and the corruptors of our society, but it will eventually destroy us.

Only a reassertion of collective traditional values can save us.  Ideas of virtue-ethics, already being revived in philosophy, must enter the mainstream discourse.  According to the corrupted language of our liberal politics any such solution will be dismissed as "fascist".  The authority of parents, the Church, traditional and patriarchal figures are necessary to hold together our societies - but these are the very figures most attacked and maligned.  We need an idea of the transcendent Telos of Man again, particularly in terms of personal virtues, stoicism and traditional gender roles.  The paradigm within which currently we exist is not sustainable.  To some it feels that our atomistic, avaricious and democratic system has already run its course, its fractures and frailties clearly exposed.

For millennia, European culture understood a higher and transcendent purpose for mankind.  From Stoics to the early Christians civilisation was understood in terms of higher meaning.  To reduce and to caricature human civilisation to the Nazism of the Third Reich is both ignorant and anarchic.

Unless the purpose of human nature and society is rediscovered, in terms of living for something more than appetites, having a clear identity nationally, in terms of building a traditional family to give purpose, having roots and a transcendent telos, then darker solutions will beckon.  Just as the dissoluteness of the Weimar Republic was fertile ground for the dark paganism of Nazism, we too may be at risk unless we start to serve the interests of human beings rather than the interests of global finance that lead us to ever increased atomisation. 

There is then a lesson from World War Two after all.  It is not the one usually drawn and repeated almost like propaganda.  A lesson that can be drawn is that unless the moral degeneracy of today's Weimars and the impact on ordinary people of the global financial elites are not mitigated then we risk an extreme reaction.  Better to have a restoration of traditional authority before something more radical emerges in reaction unconstrained by our Christian heritage and ethos.

     

Consequences of Conquest

 All countries have their fault-lines, but there is perhaps something unique about the tensions in English society.  The higher society, the elite, has a contempt for its culture and heritage.  So much so that to prove one's high status it makes sense to treat one's national identity with contempt.  It is almost the test for belonging to the higher status class to demonstrate what would now be termed "woke" opinions.  Nonetheless, this is a longstanding trait in the English national character.  Nowhere was this unique aspect of our character more clearly illustrated in contemporary times than during and in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum.  A referendum on national sovereignty in large part split down lines of class.  The less-educated, the more poorly paid, those who often would have voted for the Left, backed national independence, demonstrating a belief in their country.  Meanwhile, as if to show their social status the upper middle-classes on the whole, in attempting to demonstrate their lack of attachment to national identity, voted against national sovereignty and looked with contempt upon the honest patriotism of those they saw as being of a lower social status.  Being unpatriotic and regarding one's compatriots with contempt was a way to indicate high social status.

The Brexit referendum merely highlighted in sharp relief a longstanding national tension.  And where did it originate?  So deep in the metaphorical DNA is this trait and tension that we must look far back.  Perhaps Sir Walter Scott, highlighting the deep division in his novel Ivanhoe, with the outside perspective of a Scot reached the heart of the matter - the divisions left by the Conquest.  He pointed to how words to describe livestock are English, while words describing the meat itself are French - demonstrating the way the conquered English serve the invading French.  

Has anything really changed?  Many of the most powerful families in the country tend to be from the Conquest and many of these elite have contempt for our national identity, focusing instead upon cosmopolitanism, open borders, and destructive liberal social reforms that are killing the country demographically.  Many of the powerful must have a deep sense of being from elsewhere and having an identity above the native identity of the serfs and peasants.  As middle class families go through universities they learn the best way to indicate their new social status is to hold their heritage in contempt and adopt so-called "woke" opinions.

Perhaps we might develop this point further to understand the different characteristics of Anglo Saxon and Norman.  The Anglo Saxons were focused upon the homestead, their faith and their farms.  There was no standing army.  Alfred the Great organised the translation of the Bible into English.  Monks, peaceful and spiritual were subject to the raids by the cousins of the Normans, the Vikings.

And that is where we also can find the root of the Norman character - Vikings settled in the North of France after raiding and piracy succeeded.  Just as in Sicily, where the Catholic Normans plagued the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, in the North of Europe too on the stormy waters of the North Sea, in their own world, the Normans were pirates.

It is not in the insularity and conservatism of our Anglo Saxon forebears and fathers that we find the character enthused by so-called Anglo Saxon economics that uproots communities and focuses on international trade.  The Normans brought to this island the spirit of piracy.  Even on the side of Brexit there are the Normans, wanting to turn this ancient homeland into a Singapore of the West, rootless and cosmopolitan, preoccupied with treasure and lucre.  Whereas the Anglo Saxon yeomanry of England voted leave to secure their borders out of concern for loss of identity through out of control immigration.

Perhaps in the enthusiasm amongst our political class for foreign wars we see again that pirate Norman spirit.  And it is our Norman blood that leads us to try to destroy Russia, with our addiction to the geopolitical Great Game.  Here we inevitably think of a Russian thinker so critical of Anglo Saxon geopolitics, Aleksandr Dugin.  He has resurrected interest in British geographer Mackinder, who saw geopolitics as a clash between liberal, free-trading sea powers and the heartland of Eurasia, focused on tradition and roots - the large empire based on God and Monarchy, not filthy lucre and trade.

Surely our island is in itself a microcosm of this geographical division.  There is real conservatism in England and a rootedness to the land and our heritage.  Contrast this with the enthusiasm of our elite for liberalism both socially and economically.  The elite pushed the sexual revolution.  The elite pushed the economic revolution.  Sharks and bullies from lower status exploited the opportunities in making money and the working class has been destroyed by social liberalism and the sexual revolution.  These revolutions were led by the elite with its Norman blood, with no real sense of rootedness or the ethics of the ethnos.

Another tragic trait of being conquered is a sort of obsequiousness of the subjugated as elites send our young men to die, exploiting our lionhearted bravery, or send their jobs abroad.  Patriotic as we are, our trust in the elite has meant we have allowed agendas that destroy our identity and past to be pursued, from mass immigration and multiculturalism to sending jobs abroad.   We are forced to abandon our history, our traditions, our faith to accommodate the multicultural society that suits the powerful.

That surrender to our current masters goes back to a pacific Anglo Saxon attitude post-1066 to accept the new masters.  Nonetheless, the picture is nuanced.  The Norman Royals ensured they married into the Anglo Saxon House of Wessex.  The monarchy is the institution supported by the ordinary people even today and mocked by the shallow elites, who being alienated from the beginning have no affection for our history.

Not all the Anglo Saxons accepted the Conquest.  Men of deep Christian faith they sought refuge, not in Papal Rome with the Great Schism still echoing through Europe, but in Orthodox Constantinople, joining the Orthodox Emperor's Varangian Guard and taking the fight to the Normans in Sicily, only to be slaughtered by their old enemy.  It is said though that many Anglo Saxons were settled by the Emperor by the Black Sea as a "new" England.

The matter of the Great Schism is also of import here.  Today's Russian Church recognises pre-Conquest Anglo Saxon saints as Orthodox.  As an island England was untouched by many of the Papal innovations.  From the point of view of the Orthodox the Anglo Saxons remained Orthodox.  The schism only occurred a dozen years before the Norman Conquest.  It seems, given their choice of refuge the Anglo Saxons also saw themselves as Orthodox at the time, not Roman Catholic.

In England post Conquest, the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, was to redefine the understanding of salvation as satisfaction by Christ's death to God, pictured as some feudal Lord.  Anselm was canonised by Rome, but this theological innovation separated Roman Catholicism further from the Orthodox Church.  

And what does this tell us about how we as the English should live today?  The Anglo Saxons were a peaceful and deeply Christian people, an Orthodox people it seems.  We can either metaphorically look to Constantinople or accept the settlement of the Norman Conquest.  This does not mean political schemes, but rather a spiritual change - rediscovering our lost spiritual heritage.  To some extent that would put us in the tradition of the English reformers such as Tyndale who reverted to the Greek rather than the Latin to try to rediscover a less legalistic faith.  Of course that English reformation was seized control of by the elites and became instead an orgy of iconoclasm, very contrary to the spirit of Orthodoxy.

We need to rediscover the Grail of the faith.  We need to return to English Christian spirituality prior to the Conquest and no longer accept the co-option into the Papal institution by our Norman conquerors.  We must return to the faith of our fathers.