Imitatio Christi - the key to exemplarity

 Exemplarity is an idea that can be found in Platonism, the Church Fathers, Franciscan saints such as Bonaventure and in Orthodox theology.  It is an idea that is based in philosophical realism and a metaphysical understanding of the transcendental - the Good, the True and the Beautiful.  Since corrosive ideas such as nominalism, which denies the reality of universals, we have lost touch with the necessity of participation in exemplarity.  The fullest manifestation of exemplarity is not abstract ideas, but the Person of Jesus Christ, the God Man.

With exemplarity we can see various threads of thought and culture coming together in a virtuous synthesis.  Stoic ideas of self restraint, Aristotlian ideas of the telos of virtue and Neo-Platonic ideas of participating in the transcendental realm all come together in the figure of the exemplar.  Only in the Church is the concept given its fullest and ultimate iteration.  In Neoplatonism participation is in abstract and airy transcendentals.  In Aristotle the telos is eudaimonia, rather than full self sacrifice. In the Stoics, the personal is lost in a pantheist theology.  Only in the Church is exemplarity incarnated in the God Man, in whose life we are to participate and Whom we are to imitate.

The concept of exemplarity requires a vertical and upwards-orientated understanding of reality.  Plato here is helpful in pinpointing reality as being in the realm of Forms, not in this material world of becoming.  The pagan philosopher though went too far in disembodying us from reality.  In the Church's teaching the second Person of the Trinity comes down into our world, incarnate.  Humbling Himself for us, through His kenosis.  The Truth is embodied.  The spiritual manifests in the physical.  The Word made flesh.   Without this we fall into Gnosticism.

If there are heights to which we aspire, if man as much as a lyre or an animal has an orientating purpose as in Aristotle, then it must be more than eudaimonia.  It must be deeper, it must then be love.  We then do not simply seek the happy life, the good life, but love in Christ.  This self-sacrificial love can account more for suffering than simply the virtue for the sake of the good life of eudaimonia.

 If life and virtue are about restraint and freedom from the passions, as with Seneca and the Stoics, then a pantheist cosmos is not enough.  Such  attainment of freedom must involve the personal, not a dissolution into the cosmos.  In the Church we participate in the Person of Christ, not becoming part of the universe.  The personal is the height of exemplarity.

The practical aspect of a chain of exemplarity is participation.  The purpose of our life is not hedonism or power, it is participation in the highest, which is about sacrifice and humility.  Exemplarity requires an orientation towards the highest.  The pagan philosophers could not find an ultimate exemplar.  This ultimate exemplar is Christ, because God as man is the perfect man.

With Christ as the ultimate exemplar, there are lower exemplars who to a greater or lesser extent manifest Christ and can be looked up to as examples and models to follow.  The Medieval notion of knighthood helps with the culture of exemplarity.  The code of chivalry was the warrior's form of participating in Christ.  We thus look up to the knight as an honourable model to follow, but as Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur reminds us, even knighthood as a worldly thing is imperfect and subject to temptation and hubris.

The saints are the greatest exemplars and that is why the churches are full of their icons.  They help us not only through their prayers, but because as flawed men and women they achieved the spiritual heights through Christ.  They can then inspire us in our participation as we follow the models of exemplarity.  The Mother of God, in particular, is to be understood as the ultimate fully-human exemplar of sanctity.

The knights, of course, had a particular veneration for the Mother of God, which was expressed in loyalty and love for their own lady.  The monks are the other zenith of human participation.  The Orthodox monks on the Holy Mountain of Athos dwell on an isthmus dedicated to Mary the Theotokos.  The Mother of God is the first Christian and the only human born in our sinful state to be personally without sin.

The figures of exemplarity are then in a chain of participation ultimately leading to Christ the God-Man.  Monks in particular exemplify this participation in the life of Christ.  As ascetics they sacrifice their life in this world for love of Christ.

Participation in the higher Good is challenging for us in the West.  With Ockham's denial of universals, with Protestantism's destruction of the saints' shrines and its hatred of the Mother of God, with empiricism turning our attention to the material and the particular and with utilitarianism's promotion of hedonism, these beliefs, linked genealogically, have separated us from the transcendental.  Popular culture celebrates revolutionary culture and individualistic self realisation.  We have become unhealthily obsessed with sexual identity.  Western Churches have reinterpreted Christ as an advocate for the secular values of liberalism.  We in the West are cut off from higher meaning.

This is why the statistics show a surge of interest in traditional religion from the young, so-called Gen Z.  Western ideals have been shown to be barren and empty, quite literally in the way our secular values have led to a demographic crisis.  Clearly aspiring to participate in the life of Christ through the Church is not ultimately about utilitarian social benefits, such as restoration of the trust society, solving the birth crisis or regaining our collective Christian identity - these are side benefits.  The true benefit is through Christ we have access to participate again in the Good, the True and the Beautiful and restore our telos, through self restraint and asceticism, in the eventual hope of eternal life with the Father through the Spirit. 

The Reign of the Misfit

 We have recently again seen the extreme point reached of the culture of the misfit, with the evil attack on a church service for children at a Roman Catholic school in Minneapolis.  The murderer and suicide was a transgender misfit, with insane and dark political views.  He was an example of the extreme of what a misfit can become: the atomised weirdo who does not fit in and is full of bitterness, resentment and pride.

Our culture is dominated by and celebrates the misfit.  Clearly most misfits do not turn into gunmen attacking children.  The misfit is made in the image of God too, a created being.  It is a long downward journey to reach the point of nihilistic evil reached by the transgender gunman.  Nonetheless there is a spectrum here of the spiritual state of the isolated and atomised social outcast.

And the social outcast himself is a consequence of the diabolical disintegration of the community in Western civilisation.  Atomisation is the cultural trajectory of our dying civilisation, which has turned its back on collective and spiritual tradition.  Community is a relational society where humans are persons, not individuals, who live interrelated through church and family and community.  The powerful in our society, the liberal elite, has deliberately worked to dismantle this.  Since the Second World War the speed of this intentional disintegration gathered pace.  Now social and cultural disintegration was seen as the antidote to Fascism.  Homosexuality was legalised, as was abortion and popular culture was manipulated to develop a lack of tradition or hierarchy or respect - all seen as authoritarian traits.  In art the CIA promoted degenerate artists who created abstract and idiosyncratic masturbatory self expression.  Meanwhile architecture was redesigned to dehumanise and break down beauty, so the morale of the human being would be spiritually crushed as a result of ugliness in the environment.  This cultural degeneration groomed the misfit, alienated from family, religion and community.  These misfits, socially outcast, unable to feel true empathy exist in a Satanic hubris of resentment.  If not reaching the extreme of suicide or murder or both, they seethe in their resentment hating their family, investigating Satanism and in the school system being bullied and rejected.  He resents being outcast, but fails to understand why he is rejected.

In the West the latest stage in the cultural revolution was the idea of woke.  This was said to be an awareness and consciousness of the intersectionality of oppression.  It manifested as a weird alliance of racial minorities and social misfits, usually trapped in perverted sexual identities.  Movements such as BLM and the Pride promotion of LGBT are specific movements founded and promoted by woke ideology.  

This is in a way a subtle twisting of the Christian message.  Christ urges us to care for the outcast, but the deceptive move in the woke movement is to celebrate the fallen identity rather than the potential to be transfigured into the full stature of Christ.  Woke leaves people in their perversions and confusions and teaches that the fallen place is to be celebrated.  This is the ideology of affirmation of the misfit who seethes in his resentment and often in his sexual deviance.

Self-regarding compassion can be deeply misguided.  It is the equivalent of giving your son a snake when he asked for a fish.  The over-emphasis on individual self-realisation means we do not steer the misfit away from his poison, but tell him to keep drinking deeply.  It tells the misfit to live in a state of pride not humility and repentance.

The misfit is then the ultimate expression of individualism.  He is abused by the group,  but is so alienated can feel no empathy himself.  He is the victim of liberalism as it traps him in his passions, but he takes pride in his passions.  He resents the idea of any authority and worships none but himself.

We read in Dostoevsky’s Demons where the misfit finds himself.  Kirillov, thinking he has achieved the state of the man-god through self realisation is exploited by a ruthless revolutionary to commit suicide as cover for a revolutionary murder. He has got into this mess because he consciously rejected the humble acceptance of the God-Man Christ and instead wished himself to be the god-man through the self asserting act of suicide.  

And this is what the alienated misfit thinks.  He rejects the God-Man, Christ, for himself and his own self-realisation.  Perhaps, most likely, he was once vulnerable, but his inability to fit in with his fellow men turns him to resentment not humility.  He falls more and more deeply into self-obsessed loathing of the world.  He chooses to live how he wants in contravention of societal norms and in a campaign of revenge.  Here we can detect the spiritual zeitgeist of the times - Crowley’s “do what thou wilt”.  As a rejected person this reduced individual gains his only sense of self from his resentment and his assertion of his own will.

What then?  Most do not end up at the final point of shooting innocent children at prayer.  That though is the final nadir of the atomised individualism that our degenerated culture celebrates in its distortion of its founding Christian ethos.  Our society is run by the empowered misfit, be that the transgender man demanding to enter women’s toilets or the homosexual demanding they too should marry as if man and woman.  Normal people live in fear of being hateful, when to hope for something better for our fellow Man, our brothers and sisters is not hate at all.

We must understand that this was always where our culture and society would end up, once we became secular.  Once our society began to aim at a reformed and progressive society rather than patiently waiting for all to be put right at the Eschaton the traits of Babel would appear, and even Sodom and Gomorrah.   Focused as we are on the here and now we became obsessed with secular notions of justice, unable to conceive of the transformative and life-fulfilling power of redemption.  So instead we focused on codified rights that emphasised the reduced individual.  Ideas of the telos of virtue or renouncing sin began to be seen as oppressive rules.  Instead we sought a revolutionary society of freedom.  What has resulted from this right to pursue our own happiness is a tragic alienation and anomie expressed throughout our society and at its most extreme point in the form of the transgender gunman killing children as the children acknowledge in humility and prayer the higher power of God.

Restoring the Paragon

 Our equalising and resentful culture despises the paragon.  While for two thousand years the West has understood we are flawed and fallen, we now live in an age where virtue itself is pilloried.  We are taught heroism and sanctity are fake, unattainable and are just a cloak for hypocrisy.  As a result exemplarity and virtue are turned om their head.  And we instead condone personal vice, immorality and loss of innocence, while demanding adherence to superficial and schematic ideological programmes as though that is where virtue lay.

Our ruling class is deeply afraid of the concept of virtue as much as it is of beauty.  Just as our streets are filled with ugly modern architecture so our stories and entertainment celebrate so-called liberation through moral degeneracy and confusion.  To question this is to be at best prudish but more likely it is seen to be judgemental, intolerant and hateful.  We once were taught to hate sin and hate evil.  Today hate itself is the only sin, by which our ruling class often means opposing the lifestyles of those it wishes us to celebrate.  People though were once wiser.  They were able to distinguish between sin and sinner.  As Saint John of Kronstadt put it:  "Never confuse the person, formed in the image of God, with the evil that is within him."

Today though we most certainly live in confusion about Man as the Imago Dei.  Man defiled, lost and fallen is celebrated.  He is no longer recognised as the imago Dei who has something precious that can be marred by sin.  Loss of innocence is regarded as gaining important life experience.  In a culture of hedonism trying the forbidden fruit is to be commended as a sort of personal development.  And this error rests in the first error of losing the sense of Man as the imago Dei and this proceeds from the campaign that those who run our society have worked on with an extraordinary assiduousness to the point of fanaticism to convince us God does not exist and religion is an oppressive force of the past.  And our masters have been aided in their agenda by liberal clergy who sadly never take a stand but instead give a Christian tone to the secular shibboleths that secular Man is so obsessed with as a compensation for his renunciation of personal virtue in favour of political correctness.

Such a framework cannot allow paragons.  If anyone overcomes their passions they are a threat to a society based on hedonism and self indulgence.  The woman who chooses to struggle bringing up a child alone strikes fear in the hearts of those who promote killing the child in the womb - such a woman must be discredited as a slave of the patriarchy.  The man who seeks a girl who has maintained her innocence is ridiculed and attacked as a shameless and controlling misogynist.

Paragons, male and female, are a serious threat to the system, a system that rests on control by enslaving us to our appetites and passions.  This is why sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, female hyper-sexualisation, no-fault divorce and same- sex marriage are promoted - to attack Christian virtue and to enslave us to our weaknesses and appetites.  By contrast, to inspire people to be better, to follow an ascetic spirit is dismissed in popular culture with zeal and rigorous enthusiasm, because such a spirit must never be permitted to revive.  

Men enslaved to their appetites are easy to suppress.  It is why Israel beamed pornography onto television stations in Rafah.  It is why Hollywood promotes God-less ways of life as though about freedom, not enslavement.  When a man loses his integrity and his sense of his own virtue he loses his own self respect and cannot resist the emasculating oppression by our corrupted political class.

We can see that this way of thinking goes back to the Frankfurt School and Theodor Adorno's description of the authoritarian personality.  He feared the strength of the man who could exercise sexual restraint as a dangerous political force nigh impossible to control.  Such thinking has fed into the way popular culture manipulates us to become morally loose and unable to master ourselves with integrity.  

And this is why the landscape of the Western city is a multicultural and atomised place with Pride parades taking place on streets of dystopian and anti-human architecture.  The alternative is a restoration of traditional values in traditional and rural communities.  Yes we are fallen, but through prayerful connection with God men can again become virtuous, even holy.  For such men women will keep themselves pure.  For such men gangs of people hostile to our culture will no longer have the temerity and the contempt for us to attack us.  A culture of virulence and virtue would not have turned a blind eye on the grooming gangs.

A culture that has a sprit of asceticism will not be made up of people easy to manipulate either in terms of their behaviour or their political thoughts.  Far more important than the temporal political benefits though would be the preservation of our humanity, that gift from God and furthermore the transfiguration from our fallen state into a redeemed existence.  And this is where one realises the stakes are even higher.  Our eternity is under threat.  If politicians and multinational capitalists have selfish and cowardly interests in degrading us, there is a far more serious matter in question.  

Baudelaire once said that the Devil's greatest trick was convincing men that he did not exist.  As we arrogantly live impure lives, manipulated not only by Hollywood and liberal politicians, we are also manipulated by Satan himself.  He has his own game - to steal from us our eternal future he has shut himself off from due to his incorrigible pride.  Enviously he wants to degrade the image of God in each one of us.  He wants us to sleep around, become addicted to drugs and alcohol, to be lured into more deviant sexual practices, to live for money, to work for a usurious system.  The politicians and film makers and media class and global capitalists are in this sense just his tools.  They only seek to emasculate and enslave us in this world.  But there is a far more serious threat and it is the prize of our souls and their eternal future.

For this reason virtue and asceticism must be rediscovered.  We must again strive to be paragons and no longer live for hedonism.  We must realise we were made in His image and that by Christ there is a way back to the restoration and transfiguration of our state.  We must therefore look to paragons of virtue and ourselves strive against our fallen nature, to be saints.  In so doing we will also find we are rebuilding the traditional society. 

Resisting Progress

 It is an article of faith and a hidden presumption of the secular West that progress is real and that it is an unqualified good.  Modernisation is a necessity it is taught and must be imposed.  Resistance is reactionary and morally suspect.  It was modernity though that produced totalitarianism, environmental exploitation, loss of the sacred, nihilism and anomie.  Progress then makes a totalitarian demand that is imposed on us, regardless of what of value is sacrificed to facilitate this.  Value is the main loss, quality is neglected for the sake of quantity.

From Heidegger to Guenon, Leontiev to Weaver, very different thinkers have challenged the unquestioning faith in progress as a force for good.  We have seen the secularisation of belief and the enframement by technology.  As much as we recognise benefits such as ease and efficiency, the eradication of disease and the increase in comfort we must realise we have in a sense become disconnected from authentic existence.

A key factor is quantification, whereby everything is measured and reduced to data.  This mathematical process is reductive, it always leaves a remainder - that remainder is quality, which cannot be accounted for by the modern mind.  Quality is therefore dismissed as merely subjective.  The Platonic triad of the Good, the True and the Beautiful once having transcendental authority and meaning is now reduced to mere preference and idiosyncratic tastes of the atomised individual.

This shift to quantification of existence leads to atomisation be that via Marxist Socialism or free-market capitalism.  Value has to be measured and therefore all that counts is a materialist assessment.  This is reductive and anti-spiritual.  It also means that whatever we attempt to measure we cannot take into account the true spiritual value of the quality.

So the real process is one of disintegration whereby hierarchies and organic connections are dissolved into individual atomised and dislocated units.  This degeneration is justified both in terms of a positivist scientific process and a political achievement of liberation and equality.  Liberation though means dislocation and equality means the destruction of uniqueness found in the traditional and organic hierarchies of human society.  In economics all that is measured is the data of productivity, so purpose and activity occur on the basis of consumerism, not principles.  Hedonism becomes the only purpose, replacing asceticism and sacrifice.  This is the totalising event of modernity.  It turns us all into identical units driven by passions and appetites.  The only value is material quantity.

A key turning point was the development of nominalism by William of Ockham, whereby universals were rejected and only the particular was regarded as valid.  The connection with the realist tradition back to Plato was broken and the march of modernity through meaning and telos was initiated.  With the Renaissance and the release of occult and kabbalistic theories from fallen Constantinople, a further turn brought complementary ideas of manipulation and magic as power over reality.  Modernity developed further in hubris and the infatuation with technological progress and political revolution grew more.

Modernity, the dream of the Enlightenment and the revolution is the reduction of human existence, the loss of the spiritual level and the separation from our ancestors.  Modernity then kills the value of human civilisation. 

The resistance to progressive disintegration must be a focus on a return to the sacred, the hierarchical, the meaningful, the telos and at an overarching level the transcendental Logos.  This return to the Logos is not to be misinterpreted as reductive rationalism, but in a rediscovery of transcendental meaning and overall a structured and purposeful cosmos. This is then in reality a reinvigoration of our civilisation and culture by a reassertion of what Saint Vincent of Lerins described as Quod Ubique, Semper, et Ab Omnibus. Progress, by contrast, has meant disintegration and reduction and the atomisation of the human being whether as a self-interested rational actor or an egalitarian member of international sameness, disconnected from tradition, heritage and culture.  We cannot continue on this path of quantification and disintegration.