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.