The Western Sickness

 

Many Traditionalists will link the decline of the West to the Enlightenment.  Some on the Far Right link it to the coming of Christianity itself.  The former view does not go far enough and the latter is in itself indicative of Western decline. 

The problem with the West might be said to go back to the incomplete conversion of the Barbarians, the ideas of power and pagan virtu infiltrating the Vatican and in a philosophical or theological sense a tension between authority and the freedom of the spiritual.

Tradition in the West has long been linked to power and authority.  With the claim to Papal Supremacy at the Great Schism and Anselm’s linking of redemption to the idea of a metaphysical Feudal Court, the paradigm from which we have not escaped has continued to define our beliefs and practices.  It explains the idiosyncratic view of Christ in the West, the rise of liberalism and the hardheartedness of reaction.

The dichotomy is a false one, but it has roots in the very beginning of a Western interpretation of Christianity:  one that led to a Pope who ran the Vatican as a political state and where Calvin could assert that many were damned from birth. 

It is also why Renaissance Humanism, with its rediscovery of pagan virtu appeared in the West.  This must be understood as an anti-Christian move prior to the Enlightenment.  After the Renaissance overturned iconography for worldly painting and Christian self-sacrifice for Machiavelli, the foundations were laid for the Enlightenment, which would pursue a reductive and secularising trajectory that led to Hume, Darwin, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell and finally even Richard Dawkins (who despite his populism should be taken seriously as a symptom).

For the purposes of this essay though, we will focus on a very specific and unique aspect to Western thought: the idea that the Law was not so much fulfilled in Christ as overturned and how that itself emerged from a use of the Church as a method of authority and power.  The Reformation was the culmination of the concerns resulting from this underlying tension and today’s liberal and humanist society, in perpetual revolution, is the result.

Because of an unnecessary and false dichotomy between Tradition as Power on the one hand and Revolution as Freedom on the other we see a destructive dialectic in Western culture that separates us more and more from Truth and harmony.  It is a simple yet seductive narrative, whereby all institutions and traditions are restrictions upon our true freedom.  In politics this narrative is accepted by both Left and Right. 

It stems from an interpretation of Christ as the revolutionary figure (remember those posters of Christ as Che Guavara? A strange icon indeed) overturning the legalism of the Pharisees.  Importantly in the Western mind legalism is linked to Tradition.  And in the West legalism and Tradition were linked, as was power of enforcement.  Roman Catholicism was based upon a punitive idea of God whose Vicar on earth, the Pope, acted with unilateral authority.  Thus the stage was set for a spirit of revolution in the name of Christ against the institution that claimed to enforce for Christ.

None of this was about Christ in reality and was far removed from Holy Tradition. So it was inevitable that this tension and conflict has now moved from religious to secular debates about politics and economics.  This is the root of the Western sickness.

That is of course not to say that revolutions have been unknown in the East and the Christian East is in particular a key example of Revolution.  That though was due to a heady mix of Eastern collectivism and Western Enlightenment ideas.  Marx was after all a creature of the Enlightenment and a warped offshoot of liberalism, with roots in Rousseau, that beguiling and demonic philosopher.  It might in part have also been due to Wall Street money, determined as many were that a traditionalist society should not be a rival to Western liberalism.

Despite this there is an alternative and the very moment one steps into an Orthodox Church one finds that Tradition and Freedom are not in conflict, but are one and the same thing.  Christ is the fulfilment not the rejection of the Law, making many of its requirements superfluous, but not wrong for the time prior to the Incarnation.  There is no battle between Church hierarchs and mystics.  The Church is not an institution, but a loving community of Christ’s Body.  The laity are as much a repository of Tradition and there is no claim to unilateral authority by the bishops.  There is therefore no tension between power and freedom manifesting as Tradition versus Revolution.  There is no root of theology in Anselm’s punitive account of God as a feudal overlord demanding payment.  The crucifixion is not so much our punishment by God taken for us,  but Christ living out the perfect love of the perfect human as God incarnate.  Thus, importantly, traditions are not imposed from above as an expression of power, but sustained by both clergy and laity.

This is not to sentimentalise the East.  It too has problems.  The point is rather that there was not the theological error at the inception, because the Church through all its struggles has remained Apostolic, kept to the traditions handed down and continuing to participate in a balanced understanding of the Trinity.

If we go farther East we find another tradition that is unforgiving, iconoclastic and legalistic.  It is not about East versus West.

In the West however, all is still seen through the prism of Tradition versus Revolution, power versus freedom.  We are therefore in a perpetual revolution against what are seen as traditional restrictions upon who we really want to be.  The revolutionaries prove to be just as punitive as the traditionalists.  Meaning is inevitably found outside the Church, written off as an institutional form of power through tradition.  Instead meaning is found in our passions, which of course are actually the real form of enslavement, wrongly understood as freedom achieved through social revolution. 

Types of Freedom

“Oh yes, we shall be in chains and there will be no freedom, but the time will come when, from the depths of our despair, we shall rise up once again in joy, without which man cannot survive and God cannot exist, for joy comes from God and is His greatest gift.”

Dmitry Karamazov, in Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

In Brothers Karamazov one of the key protagonists, Dmitry Karamazov, finds he is well prepared for his likely sentence to Siberia because of the internal freedom given to him by faith.  During the years of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe Orthodox priests in solitary confinement were amazingly able to transform solitary confinement into a spiritual journey.

In his recently published book The Cunning of Freedom:  Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols, Polish academic, political philosopher and politician, Ryszard Legutko wrote about the inner freedom of authenticity, the positive freedom of the virtues and the negative freedom of the liberal.  Inner freedom is the ancient and classical freedom of metaphysical man, homo metaphysicus:

“Metaphysical man is driven by the pervasive conviction that the goal of his existence transcends physical and societal limitation and though beyond his immediate grasp, it will determine his destiny.  Even the miseries that result from his finite nature, the failures, the fragility of life, the fear of death, point in this direction.”

Legutko therefore identifies three forms of freedom in European thought, first negative liberty – the dominant one of our contemporary era is the freedom from controls and restrictions.  Positive liberty is about the freedom to live consequent upon the virtuous life, so that a man is free insofar as he achieves his telos of virtue and is no longer enslaved to his passions.  Thirdly is the inner freedom of authenticity.  The last two freedoms are closely related, while the positive freedom achieved through virtuous living is in tension with the liberal idea of freedom, which in effect enslaves us to our passions.

If we were to live in a world different from our own, where the cultural idea of freedom were positive rather than negative, then the inner authenticity of the person would also be strengthened.  The liberal man, who is free to live his life as an individual following the drives of his passions is likely to be unable to withstand the situation where his appetites are unsatisfied and he must instead endure suffering.  Because his freedom has meant nothing more than following his passions or appetites, when the liberal is threatened with the totalitarian state he will discover he does not have the inner resources of the inner freedom that positive liberty, with its emphasis on freedom through the virtues nurtures.

Yet as with Dostoevsky’s Dmitry Karamazov, a character distinctly lacking in virtue, inner freedom is still attainable directly through faith and then comes virtue afterwards.  Instead of living virtuously authenticity of the inner life could just as easily be the result of a shock or a crisis.  Such a situation often occurs when one has lived according to one’s passions selfishly for too long and life takes a terrible turn in consequence.  To survive inwardly though still requires an underlying faith in something greater than oneself, even if one has avoided participating in that until the great shock or crisis comes.  The liberal does not believe in anything greater than himself or his own choices.

The strength of character and virtues resulting from the positive liberty of virtue ethics will always defend the person when his temporal benefits and distractions are removed, as Boethius discovered many centuries ago.  It is at that point, the point of arrest and the GULAG that one will know whether one’s freedom was merely of the negative type - that freedom of liberal ideology, mere individualism, or the true freedom of the metaphysical man.

When we reduce the situation to its extreme the concept of inner freedom based on a vertical spiritual participation versus the negative freedom of the liberal to follow his animalistic or even unnatural appetites is revealed.  The liberal will be far more vulnerable and have no inner depth, if he only lives for his passions.  The man whose freedom is about participation vertically in the higher realm will survive, as has been evidenced by the men who survived the prison camps of the Twentieth Century, such as Viktor Frankl.  Those who were not metaphysical men, such as Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn survived by becoming such during the shock of their imprisonment and from their encounters with imprisoned Orthodox Christians.

This reveals which freedom is true and which is actually a sham and no more than a form of enslavement to the things of the world.  It also has some worrying implications.  We celebrate liberal freedom in the West with our consumerist society that encourages all types of irresponsibility and sexual deviance as freedom.  And yet when deprived of our things, our fetishes, our appetites are we still really free?  The man living in Stalinist Russia, with few of our choices, survived through the strength of inner freedom.  It is a disconcerting thought that brutal oppression rather than the free society might create an inner freedom.  Is it any wonder that Christianity today flourishes in Russia and is in decline in the West full of things and opportunities to focus us on our passions?

It would be helpful to remember the etymology of passion, linked as it is to the Greek word for passivity.  When we are driven by our passions something has control of us other than ourselves.  Through attainment of the virtues we are freed from our passions.  Passions being indulged are not evidence of freedom, as the liberal believes, but slavery.  Living the liberal life denies the possibility of transformation through transfiguration.  On the other hand not only the virtuous man, but the prodigal son recognises the higher freedom.

The free man is the one who has the inner strength through faith to look hard labour in Siberia steadfastly in the eye and still he will remain joyful. 

As Dmitry Karamazov exults the day before his trial in the novel:

“If they drive God off the face of the earth, we shall welcome Him down below!  It is impossible for a convict to be without God, even more impossible than for someone who is not a convict!  And then the time will come to pass when we, the underground people, will join in a solemn hymn to God, who is the source of joy!  Praise the Lord and His joy!  I love Him!”

Liberalism and Militant Islam – different forms of arbitrary power

 

I have often made the assertion that liberalism and militant Islam share certain philosophical premises, making them both different manifestations at opposite extremes of a dark theology.  Such an assertion is greeted with bemused looks, amusement and confusion.  Here is one more attempt to say what I mean.

Liberal reductionism

On the face of it, liberalism and militant Islam could not be more different.  The former represents individualistic freedom, the latter oppression of the individual by a patriarchal theocracy.  Nonetheless, the strange fact about these two ideologies is their common ontological root.  Both operate in an amoral universe, where in effect might is right.  The difference is not so much in their ontology as in where they place authority.

Of course militant Islam usually emerges in more tribal and traditionalist societies.  Nonetheless, as we saw in Timbuctoo or indeed with the Buddhist sculptures in Afghanistan, tradition and history are not safe in the hands of the radical Islamist.  He is a revolutionary and he is such because he has no sense of participation in a telos of  the Good, the True and the Beautiful.  There is not the emphasis in Islam and especially not in militant Islam on Man as being made in the image of God with the potential for participation in the Divine.  This of course has implications not only for iconography, but how we treat humans as the ultimate icons of the Divine.  It deprives us of the foresight to recognise that Man’s telos is to participate in the Divine.  Rather than a dynamic participation in divine love we find in both systems a legalistic framework – at each end of the spectrum, one focusing on rights, the other on restrictions: but legalism as the answer in both cases.

It must at the outset be acknowledged that while liberalism has a brutal and dark side with regard to abortion, euthanasia and suicide, most people in liberal societies are not living under a regime that will exercise power with such brutality as the Taliban or Islamic State.  The purpose here is not to relativise all perspectives, but point to some common roots that explain why liberalism is not enough in itself to resist militant Islam.  Enlightenment values will not do; it is a rediscovery of real Christian values that will protect the West.  Indeed in the liberal respect for the individual there is a hint of Christian sanctity of life, but the idea of the human being has been hideously distorted and reduced by the philosophical twists and turns of Western thought.

Despite a chasm in policy differences with Islam, fundamentally, liberalism, with its roots in English Puritanism, like militant Islam, has an amoral and reductive view of humanity.  Despots are the Hobbesian alternative to the sovereign individual.  Individuals are all potential despots who have no telos of participation in the divine; they are simply permitted to be despots or caliphs, so to speak, in the realm of their own private domain.  The ontology of power and sovereignty is addressed in a different way from Islam, but it still boils down to power and sovereignty.  Liberalism is a political way to manage a world that is just about will and power, with no higher purpose.  Militant Islam makes a religion of will and power.

This tendency in liberalism is in part likely due to the dim view that Puritans took of human nature, with an over-emphasis on original sin.  People had to be managed in a punitive way for a functioning society it was assumed.  The liberal perspective is also due to other broader religious influences, in particular that of the Franciscan theologians of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries in Britain – men such as Dun Scotus and William of Ockham.

 

The Franciscan School and Islamic Influence

The Scottish Dun Scotus is responsible for the theory of univocity of Being, failing as with all Roman Catholic theologians to distinguish between essence and energy.  For Dun Scotus God was not fundamentally different ontologically, but the ultimate form of Being.  This differs from Thomism with its analogy to the unknowable God and also Orthodoxy where God is knowable in His energies, not His essence.  As Anglican theologian John Milbank has pointed out, in this view, men in God’s image were able to become omnipotent rulers in their own domain, like the omnipotent Godhead.  Individuals free to dispose of their property and even their bodies as they wished. 

We cannot rely on Milbank very far, as being a Thomist he too fails to distinguish between energy and essence.  Instead he hides God away entirely as an unreachable and unknowable Being – the mistake that Saint Gregory of Palamas once pointed out would lead the West to atheism.

Combined with the Scottish -Franciscan Duns Scotus’s idea of univocity of Being and haecceity of things (all being particular and individually complete) we have the English-Franciscan William of Ockham.  With his rejection of universals there was nothing at the metaphysical level to participate in.  He denied the reality of generals and universals, reducing them to mere names or constructs.  Thus Man in the image of God was denied his telos to be spiritually transformed.

It is no accident that this stripping Man of his reflecting the Divine glory and denying him the possibility of true theosis is similar to an Islamic view.   Undoubtedly Islam has strong neoplatonic tendencies, with the Monad, the geometrical art and yet the interactoin between West and East led to a loss of understanding of participation.  Thinkers such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham were heavily reliant upon the interpretation of Aristotle by Islamic theologian Averroes, who had rejected any neo-Platonic leanings of participation in Forms in Islamic teaching in favour instead of an entirely reductive and nominalist perspective.  Here then European Man in his denuded and materialistic form is very similar to the Islamic Man, who probably was not even made in the image of God and has no telos of theosis, because Allah is far beyond us.

Arbitrary Voluntarism

In effect this means that both Europeans and Moslems are living in an arbitrary world where their purpose is exercise of power – either on behalf of themselves or a despotic God.  The difference is where power lies.  For the Europeans it is found to reside in the individual and laws protect that individual unit.  For Muslims it lies with an arbitrary and unknowable divine power and Shariah law enforces that Divine Will.

There is another factor here common to both Islamic and secular Western thought – voluntarism, from the Latin for will.  It is the sovereign exercise of the will.  Now Islam and liberalism differ in who exercises the will – the individual or Allah, but still will is the source of Right.

The atomistic individual of the West and the Monad of Islam have a key characteristic in common: their non-relational aspect.  The God of Islam is an Ultimate Individual – self-contained, sovereign and arbitrary in his exercise of power.  He is the Monad. The Western individual has complete sovereignty over his acts and is not a part of an organic whole, like many, many monads.  Neither of them can relate to God in a transformative way, participating in the energy of God.  He is unknowable and beyond us.

The Christian Answer of Freedom in Love

Contrast this with Eastern Christian theology.  As theologian Christos Yannaras has pointed out, in a reflection of the Trinity as inter-relational hypostases, human beings are human through relating, through love.  We relate both to God and to our neighbours.  We are not atomistic individuals, but relational personalities.  This is where Orthodox Christianity differs fundamentally from both liberalism and Islam.  Man remains the relational image of God imbued with the possibility through love of transformation.  A latent telos though is not compatible with voluntarist sovereignty, whether that sovereignty simply be over oneself or over others.  To be one’s own master as with the liberal is to deny any higher purpose for which one exists.  Meanwhile, the Muslim is unable to participate in a God because of an ontological chasm between Himself and His creation.  Both the liberal and the Muslim live in a sort of random space, made secure through enforced laws.

Participation in the Good requires there to be more than mere will and power.  Liberalism’s alternative to the despotic God of Islam is to turn each of us into individual despots, within our own boundaries.  This is not a positive alternative to militant and political Islam.  It has already conceded the ontological field of Being to a random exercise of will through power.  Many in the West contrast our culture with Islamic extremism and the surface differences are very apparent.  Nonetheless, we will not be able to resist their powerful and militant aggression without a fundamentally positive assertion that human beings have a meaning and telos beyond subjugation.  Freedom used merely to exercise sovereignty over my own domain is no real freedom of possibilities.  To reassert a positive view of humanity requires rediscovery of a positive theology that regards the human being as a relational personality – a sacred icon of the Divine.  The icon has the potential and the possibility to reflect its Creator through Goodness and Love.  Neither liberalism nor Islam has this positive view of the human being.  Liberalism will not defeat militant Islam, because it is atomised negativity in the face of collective negativity.

Political Implications

The key difference between liberalism and militant Islam is how liberalism diffuses the exercise of power to the atom of society, the individual.  That same power is exercised at a collective level in the militant Islamic society, making it more effective in a clash of wills.  Individualism, with more spontaneity and innovation, produces more wealth and technology, but not the fanatical fighting spirit of the collective will.  Neither option gives human beings true freedom – the freedom to be a whole person through love rather than domination.

The answer for both the West and the East is indeed  the freedom to realise our telos, the participation in the Divine through the God-Man.  This cannot be forced upon people or sold to people like a product.  It has to be lived as the Body of Christ in community.  In terms of politics what does this mean?  It means an openness in political systems to that freedom.  This question asked of those political systems that suppress the possibility of theosis whether by political correctness and secularist institutions or violent oppression in a theocracy does not change the Church, which has often grown through the blood of martyrs or in the catacombs.  It is rather a question asked of Political Islam and Liberalism - whether they have yet participated in supporting such a freedom to be truly human, or instead striven, kicking against the pricks, to hinder and remove this freedom.  In effect this would mean treating every human being as an icon of God. There is the same onus upon liberal and Islamist to honour the real freedom, the freedom that matters.

Liberalism and Disintegration

 

What is meant by liberalism?  In every day language to be liberal means to be open minded and easy going.  In politics there is a link and that link is not necessarily positive.  As G K Chesterton pointed out, one’s mind, like one’s mouth, should on the whole be closed unless receiving something nutritious.  To be open to everything is in a sense to be willing to undergo disintegration.  It is to lose integrity.

The great proponent of open-ness, the French-Jewish philosopher Derrida referred to the Old Testament story of Rahab the whore who aided the Hebrew spies in the taking of Jericho with its supposedly impregnable walls (as pointed out by Jonathan Pageau).   Here we have two key symbols – the whore who loses her integrity of her body for money and the walls, which, when they fall end the integrity of the city.  Derrida promoted a radical open-ness, but for us we can see the fundamental attack upon integrity of  a radical open-ness.

The reactionary Russian thinker Konstantin Leontiev regarded Western liberalism as something like a progressive disease that destroyed the integrity of the body politick.  His use of “progressive” is interesting given its adoption by the most radical wing of liberalism.  If our concern and priority is integrity rather than open-ness, then progressivism does seem to lead to disintegration.

Liberalism’s roots can be found in the disintegration of metaphysics.  With the Franciscan thinkers Duns Scotus and William of Ockham we saw the development of two new ideas that caused a schism with the classical world of thought.  With Duns Scotus we find the development of the “thisness” of things or their haecceity.  What the essence of this new philosophical outlook entailed was that the classical idea of participation  in the metaphysical was lost.  It meant this because Duns Scotus believed that particular things are irreducible and individual (indivisible).  On the face of it that might suggest support for integrity, but the problem is that it works both ways.  In reducing everything to the particular, the integrity of universals is undermined.  By atomising everything it becomes impossible to participate meaningfully in general identities or the transcendental; or at least as the centuries unfolded such a problem was to be revealed.

When the Franciscan Duns Scotus is linked to the other revolutionary Franciscan thinker, William of Ockham, the momentum towards disintegration is further intensified.   With his nominalism Ockham denied the existence of universals.  Forms were merely names given to link disparate things (hence nominalism).

Such a philosophical paradigm can clearly be contrasted with Platonism, with its mystical and otherworldly intellectual forms; but it also breaches withAristotle with his empirically-derived forms and for our purposes, most importantly Aristotle’s telos or the goal towards which all things that exist are oriented (Man’s telos being virtue).

When this reductionist philosophy was applied to the world of Man it eventually became impossible to sustain the idea of the telos – that Man had an overarching purpose that he might fulfil or of which he might fall short.  We can see here the foundations of liberalism, which denies some overarching purpose such as virtue as oppressive and from which we are to be liberated.

Alasdair MacIntyre has identified this lack of telos as the key reason why liberalism cannot give an account of virtue and why liberal societies are falling apart.  It is not surprising that once Western theology and philosophy had taken such a reductionist turn, the philosophy of John Locke became intellectually possible.  The very hierarchy of the State no longer had any claim to universals over the particular.  The anointed Monarch no longer could rely on his participation in the transcendental, but must strike up a contract like a merchant to bring men out of the Lockean ahistorical fiction of a state of nature.

Combined with this disintegration is the influence of England’s religious internecine struggles.  The Protestants saw themselves as being liberated from Rome.  A narrative of liberation fed into popular consciousness and was very compatible with this new ontology of nominalism, where the hierarchies could no longer appeal to universals.

Here we find the moralistic tone of liberalism’s project of demolition.  To destroy general identity and any  chance of participation in higher meaning is narrated as “liberation”.  If we no longer participate in higher meaning or any collective identity then we are free to be the reduced and directionless atoms we really are, driven by our passions.  That in essence is the liberal project.

Contrast that with the more elevated vision of human nature – one that sees us as having a telos and belonging to more general categories.  We are not simply atoms, but are peoples, we participate in religious tradition, we are gendered. 

It is no accident, however uncomfortable classical liberals feel, that the activists at the extreme fringe of liberalism – wrongly termed cultural Marxists – are pushing to dissolve the most fundamental aspects of general human identity, including even gender.  This is simply the narrative of liberation from meaning and belonging being followed through to its nihilistic goal.

What is attacked by liberalism is the integrity of categories and the possibility of participating in higher meaning.  That is not to say any collective identity or means of achieving collective identity is right.  There is a Royal Path between liberalism and the worldly-focused totalitarian agendas (themselves bastard offspring of the Enlightenment).  A cultural and political environment that fosters participation in higher meaning and collective identities is that for which conservatives should strive.

The misleading rhetoric of liberalism suggests that it can provide such an environment, where all can pursue meaning in their own way.  The reality is that liberalism like all ideologies has its own totalising narrative.  The narrative of liberation means that all general and higher identities become categorised as oppressive and as a result must be abolished.  This means that in practice liberalism cannot stop at a compromise between conflicting higher identities, but must wage a campaign against them all.  This is exactly how the Western cultural journey of progressive decline is being played out.  First a collective telos of society, usually religious, is undermined.  In trade, barriers to influx of imports are torn down.  The integrity of the nation state ( once the liberal successor to the conservative empire) is undermined.  Even normative sexuality and then gender are overturned in the name of liberation.  As Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin has argued, the final stage of liberation will be from human nature itself and it is likely that such a “liberation” will be played out with technology, artificial intelligence and even, at the risk of sounding melodramatic (which is difficult in a culture where gender is no longer considered a real general category) – the cyborg.

Not Judging or the Upside Down Nature of Western Liberalism

 

One matter that ties up the modern Western Christian in knots is the fear of appearing judgemental, for did not Christ teach, judge not lest ye be judged?  Essentially the atheistic liberal, in bad faith, has a strong hand in being able to accuse the Christian of contradicting his Lord when he comments on matters associated with social liberalism.  Nonetheless the reason the modern Christian is tied up in knots is because his is too modern and not Christian enough.  His problem has everything to do with the liberal paradigm within which he thinks and very little to do with the eternal teachings of the Church.

It is not that we judge others, but that we repent of collective sin.  For the liberal, with his anthropology of atomistic individualism, collective sin is an impossibility.  And once you deny collective sin, to attempt to forgive and to work towards repentance seems to be judging others.

Modern Christianity has become tainted by the idea of individual virtue, rather than the acceptance of the collective fall and need for transformation.  Once we feel our virtue belongs to us, in a world premised upon meritocracy, then commenting on sin appears to be condemnation and judgement of others.

When the world was shaped by the Church and not philosophers and scientists, it would not have been understood that way.  Rather than atomistic individuals with self-control, self-command and autonomy, we were once all linked.  In that sense, no one’s sin was completely their own.

The monk spent a life of prayer and repentance for the sins of the collective human race of whom he was a part and the sin of which and the fallen nature of which he also partook.  There was no self-congratulatory judging of others, but an act of loving repentance for the human body of which he was a part.

The Enlightenment and its reductive creed of liberalism turned everything upside down.  Instead of partaking in repentance for our collective sin, it separated us out into atomised and disconnected individuals who owned and possessed our sins and virtues much like private property in the post-feudal era.

As a result to condemn the sins of others is to trespass on that other man’s property, as though disobeying Christ’s teaching not to judge.  Instead the Church saw everything the other way around.  Because we too partake in the sin and are all connected, we cannot judge others.  We are instead all collectively part of the fallen nature.  We lovingly repent for each other as well as our own sins, for which we do have a special responsibility.  So the Christian repentance is loving and not judgemental.  It is identifying alongside the sinner in his spiritual sickness, rather than condemning another from a position of moral superiority.  Only with individualism could that moral superiority exist.

That is not to say moral superiority is unique to the Enlightenment.  The claim to my own individual virtue was made by the Pharisees and was a continual problem in Byzantium.  This is the reason for the emergence of the fool for Christ, a figure the modern Western Christian cannot easily understand.

This unruly saint would deliberately simulate sin and disrupt the piousness of the hypocritical majority focused upon their own virtue. This type of saint is most powerfully portrayed in modern times by the actor Pyotr Mamonov in the 2006 Russian film Ostrov.[1]  Here the main character is unruly, disrupts the life of the monastery and generally offends the respectable monks.  One character in particular, Father Job,  seems to portray that striving for individual virtues; the struggle to attain them leading to the sin of pride.  Instead of priding ourselves on our religious knowledge and acquisitioin of virtues, we instead are called humbly to acknowledge our collective state of sin.  As Greek theologian Christos Yannaras put it:

“It is enough if someone humbly accepts his own sin and fall, without differentiating it from the sin and fall of the rest of mankind, trusting in the love of Christ which transfigures this acceptance into personal nearness and communion, into a life of incorruption and immortality.”[2]

The Enlightenment and its political expression in liberalism, breaks this communion.  It turns us into individuals, separated and estranged atoms, dislocated from the telos, for whom our virtue is our own and to speak of sin and guilt can only ever sound like judgementalism.  Only when we break out of the liberal paradigm of individualism will we be able to understand fully the nature of our call to repentance in love.

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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz-vegualMg&t=1803s

[2] Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, New York :  1984,

WHY I AM NOT A PERENNIALIST

 

The writings and thoughts of the Perennialists of the last Century, in particular Rene Guenon, Julius Evola and Frithjof Schuon, seem accurately to diagnose much that is pathological in Modern and Post-Modern society.  We have an increasingly dispersed and disintegrated world, in which the profane science of the particular rather than the metaphysical universal is our focus, Perennialism identifies our progressive disengagement from metaphysical truth as the cause of our decline.  This seems convincing.  Furthermore Perennialism does much to challenge a simplistic positivism that assumes an inevitable Progress towards something unidentified but assumed to be better.

Only on its own materialistic and individualistic terms have we seen the positivist goal of Progress being achieved.  By any normal and more humane perspective this is surely a story of decomposition and disintegration.  Science has made leaps and bounds in its analysis of the world of becoming, thereby luring away human focus from the world of Being.  As a consequence men have become slaves of the technology that they created and evermore attentive to the transitory world of meaningless becoming, meaningless when without the metaphysical context of Being.  We are now on the cusp it seems of a dark era of trans-humanism.

The advances trumpeted by the Progressives, such as feminism, equality, the open borders causing mingling of peoples and nations, trans-rights, consumer choice – all are only advances from within the Progressive perspective, which gives no account of Being or Telos for Mankind.  On the other hand, the account given by Guenon and others of a progressive detachment from the metaphysical that had given meaning to the world of becoming is a very compelling alternative perspective.

In many ways we can learn from the school of Sophia Perennis, but nonetheless in important ways there are fundamental problems with their outlook.  Perhaps in the most profound sense there is something Manichean, an unspoken hostility to Creation, that is the major concern.  As much as we can understand the Perennialist Golden Age as a way of speaking about Eden, we must also realise that the narrative of continuous decline, while matching some understanding of Christ’s teaching that faith would not be found on the earth and that the AntiChrist would reign in the End Times, also omits the central and ultimate meaning of the Incarnation.  If the Edenic Golden-Age were better than the postlapsarian condition of Man, it is surpassed by the Incarnation, which reunited God and Man in a new way.  For the Perennialist the Incarnation is in the era of the Dark Age and that era continues towards the Kali Yuga notwithstanding.

Furthermore, just as God is willing to be comingled with the temporal world, so the world as God’s creation is, in a fundamental way, good.  And through the Incarnation the world of becoming is reunited with the world of Being, in a specific and new way.

In a schematic way, for the Perennialist, the Incarnation is one manifestation of a general trend found in all of the world religions.  For Christians the Logos, universal and divine, becomes specific in time and space, albeit not limited because divine, as the miracles demonstrate.  For the Perennialist, reliant on the mysteries of a universal religion (however respectful of tradition to avoid the shallowness of theosophy) the Incarnation is one specific example of many such manifestations.  In that sense the Perennialist doctrine inevitably falls into Gnosticism.  The outward and exoteric practices of each traditional world religion are contingent upon a hidden and esoteric mystery.  This is not acceptable from the perspective of the Church.  Christ was incarnate once and only once in First Century Judaea, He called simple fishermen, not the sophisticated and esoteric wise ones.  There were no hidden mysteries to be accessed.  The mysteries of the Church – the liturgy, baptism, marriage, ordination – are potentially open to all, not through gnostic and secret wisdom, but through faith and love.

We can understand the cyclical story of a decline to the end of the age, but the Trinity reigns from ages to ages.  Thus the Perennialist belief in cyclical time is not true.  Instead there is only one pattern that culminates in the ultimate event of the Second Coming. 

The problem with Perennialism is that it relativises Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity.  Indeed the personal nature of the Trinitarian Godhead is not accepted.  Buddhism, Islam and Paganism are equally manifestations of the same Truth in the Traditionalist’s eyes.  Beyond the personal manifestations is a divine that is impersonal – more like the Platonic “One”.  We thus see again that Perennialism is a continuation of pagan religion without any acknowledgement of the cosmic and ultimate event of the Incarnation.

Now it is of course true that Western Christianity has fallen and that Guenon is right in much of his specific criticism of Western Christianity.  Nonetheless the modernisation of Christianity in the West is a decline from the true form of Christianity, as Guenon himself asserts.  The trouble is that Guenon goes too far in asserting there is a truth beyond Christianity.  The conventionalisation of Western Christianity to the temporal values of the world does not mean that the Church itself is corrupted by the spirit of disintegration – for the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.  (In this context it is more helpful to speak of the Church as specifically embodying the true Tradition, in a vertical sense, rather than “Christianity” in all its various denominations).

Guenon was simply looking in the wrong place for the Church.  As  was his wont to look East, he should have looked more closely at the Eastern Church, which as he himself acknowledged was the truly Traditional Church.  Unfortunately Guenon went further in seeking some mysterious pagan truth beyond all traditional religion, while asserting only traditional religions manifested this deeper mystery.

In the West we saw the philosophy of nominalism that detached Western Christians from the universal and eternal.  This is indeed where the problem lay and Western Christianity can rightly be singled out as a culprit for the decline into what Traditionalists would consider the final stages of the Kali Yuga.  This nominalism was only another stage in a process of thought that went as far back as the addition of the Filioque to the Creed.     The Filioque being a step towards the idea of created grace, detaching the West from the transcendental.  William of Ockham’s theories were almost an inevitable development after the Filioque, moving us further and further away from participation in the transcendent and towards a focus on the temporal in its mechanical and broken-down state – the spirit of profane science as Guenon would see it.

Now it is true, as expressed famously by Schuon, that the Traditionalist School is not relativist and that is of course highly in its favour.  The problem is not relativism, because it holds to a higher mystery lying behind the authenticity of the traditional practices of the major faiths (which to its credit it defends from liberal relativisation).  The problem is that higher mystery is really something pagan.  It is placing something esoteric above the Trinitarian God of three Persons, hypostases that manifest the energy within which we may participate.  It treats the teaching of the Church in a schematic way as simply one manifestation of many.  Christ is one manifestation of the Word, not the ultimate manifestation of God in the flesh, so that flesh might be redeemed and transformed.

In this sense Traditionalism is akin to the old mystery cults, Neoplatonism, the ideas underpinning freemasonry – all of which are inimical to the Church.  Furthermore, its is akin to the Gnosticism of the non-canonical gospels, such as that of Thomas and Mary Magdalene.  These writings were Gnostic and not Christian.

There are of course advantages in engaging with Traditionalism.  It effectively refutes the Positivist and Materialist idea of inevitable Progress.  It points out the error of nominalism in the West by emphasising the metaphysical Transcendent.  In every case where it contributes something though, it goes too far.  It is an over-correction.  It ends up denying that the world of the New Testament is a fundamental improvement upon the Old Covenant.  It also places so much emphasis on the immaterial as to paint the material as somehow irrevocably fallen. 

The Incarnation is the answer to the Perennialist.  It is evidence that the universal and the particular meet, that the temporal has been pierced by the eternal, that the metaphysical and the physical become one, that matter, never originally evil, is redeemed, that the universal does not abolish the particular in some form of Nirvana. 

This is the heart of the matter: divine love is the solution.  This is not the sentimental statement of a belief that there is no sin or fallen-ness, no need for change in us.  It is instead the point made by Jonathan Pageau that love is where the universal does not dissolve the particular.  Where this happens is in the event of the Incarnation and behind the Incarnation the idea of the relationship of Three Persons in the Godhead, not an impersonal “One” as in Neoplatonism.  In reaction to nominalism, a corrosive heresy in the West, Traditionalism overcompensates for the first error.  It is therefore devoid of love in the fullest sense.  For that reason its advocates have been somewhat cold towards their fellow humans, as can be found particularly in the work of Evola, but it is also latent in the work of all the Traditionalists.  For the Traditionalists, like the Muslims, there is a greater emphasis on the power of God, rather than His love.  Like the Buddhists, there is no personal God, but something eternal that is of greater power than the personal.  This means that the dissolution of the personal is acceptable and not problematic. 

For Christians God is not an abstraction that can be manifested symbolically by various personal divinities.  He is three Persons in One and the second of those three divine Persons became incarnate once in a specific place and time.  The metaphysical Tradition is only manifested vertically into the one Church through the third Person of the Holy Spirit.  God is not so distant and abstract that he dissolves the irrelevant person in a higher level of transcendental existence.  On the contrary, through love He grants that very transcendental divine existence to us as persons, because we are infinitely precious in His eyes.  The human being is the icon of Triune God.  “God became Man that men might become gods”.