Man and the Mythos

 What perspective brings together such an eclectic mix of writers as T. S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien and Aleksandr Dugin?  What ontology can find justification in the different perspectives of Plato and Heidegger?  At this time of year it is a perspective that we can and do encounter.  It is a recognition of the mystical encounter we often find at Christmas time.  The Virgin kneeling before the manger with the ox and ass nearby is a unity of the gritty realism of a hard birth without domestic shelter and the presence of the Divine Logos.  A thousand magical stars shoot from this one event forever relived in our various customs and traditions.  In our celebration of Christmas we rediscover the encounter with myth and meaning.

So writers as disparate as Tolkien and Chesterton on the one hand and Berdyaev and Dugin on the other recognise the truth of myth in contrast to the flattening out of the world that is the modern project - the Enlightenment deception.

As Orthodox icon carver, essayist and youtuber Jonathan Pageau has often explained - myth is where truth is to be found.  It is how we apply our attention to understand the meaning of seemingly random and material existence.  Not all truths are at the same level he argues, rather the higher level is at the level of myth.

There is another important aspect to the meaning of myth.  It is about participation in Truth.  Yes there is a flat and material meaning that can be found in the world of science, mechanical cause and effect and reduction to basic material explanations.  This though is how an alternative in Heidegger, the great anti-Platonist, and Plato himself can be found.

As Heidegger taught, meaning is found in the realm of encounter, rather than the alienated and dry picking apart of things by empirical science.  On the other hand Plato always points to material reality having a correspondence to the metaphysical Idea, in the realm of Being - where Truth is whole and not partial as in the world of becoming, always in a state of flux.  These very different perspectives can be united in the sense that our encounters can be mystical if we free ourselves from the Enlightenment paradigm.

Of course all our most important encounters and the stories by which we understand the world are far removed from the reduction to parts of empirical science.  The souls and personalities of our loved ones are at a higher level of reality and meaning, than reducing a human being to a talking ape determined by the mechanical laws of cause and effect.  And so while the Platonist attributes the reality we experience through personal encounter as revealing the higher meaning of the Forms, Heidegger might define this as the authentic encounter of beings prior to any abstract scientific theory.  The unity of the perspectives is a rejection of a reductive and abstracted approach as found in the Cartesian move towards subjects dissecting an objective and neutral reality.

Of course Heidegger and Plato have seemingly irreconcilable ontologies.  This is where Christmas provides the unity and the answer.  For Christmas is when the Word becomes flesh, when that outside the realm of beings enters our world of becoming.  By the miracle of Christmas, through a virgin birth, the universal and the particular, the immortal and the mortal, the world of becoming and the world of Being are joined and reconciled.

This also reveals further that as Saint Basil put it we like Moses have licence to plunder the Egyptians.  We can indeed take from and Christianise the pagan ideas and beliefs.  Paganism as a religion participated in a lower level of reality, worshipping angels and demons, rather than the Living God. 

Every level of meaning and belief participates to an extent in the Truth, insofar as it does it is good.  If it is taken as the complete Truth it becomes idolatry.  Everything is made new by the Incarnation.  pagan deities become the characters of fairy tale, the Wild Hunt of Woden is turned into the chivalric hunt of the Christian knight and the slaying of the dragon by Saint George.  All reality is transfigured by the Incarnation at Christmas and its fulfilment on Easter Day.  Death itself is revealed as an absence consequent upon the Fall.

And so, we look for completion not in a political, technological or economic progress to worldly utopia - for that will always lead to reductive ugliness, but instead we look to be transfigured by the Divine.  From Cromwell to Marx, the attempts to create heaven on earth have cut us off from Goodness, Truth and Beauty.

The whole Enlightenment project, with roots in the Reformation and earlier the nominalism of the Ockhamites, has alienated us and disenchanted the world.  Instead of finding in the beautiful a link to the Transcendent we have come to regard it with cynicism - the famous hermeneutics of suspicion, which kill our souls.  And it is these hermeneutics of suspicion that are the reason the powerful who dictate our narratives have taught us to abandon our myths, our stories and instead seek for utopia through political progress.  

While the Church has always understood the myths and customs of the world are imperfect and tarnished by sin, that is not the same as hiding an evil reality.  This though is the premise of the Enlightenment and has its roots in a Protestant rejection of Church ritual.  This pathological cynicism is the justification for Western progressivism that turns against its own myths that help us to access the mystical truth and instead forges a Faustian and Promethean world of hubristic ugliness.  It is also the reason why Christmas is so important in terms of re-enchanting the world and rediscovering the myths that help us to understand the deeper and higher realities of being human in a Fallen world that was created fundamentally as Good. 

Christmas - returning home

 For many Christmas is a quite literal returning home for the break, to return to all those aspects of life so important but neglected - recreation, relatives and religion.  Sir Roger Scruton once pointed out that in our ultra-modern, individualistic and secular England, Christmas is still the time everyone returns home to honour the old religion again. 

Even in the most hedonistic and materialistic excesses of consumerism in the fast time of Advent, there is a kitsch attempt to answer that longing for the old home, the old beliefs and the old world again.  The answers provided might be hideously consumerist, but deep down aren't those insatiable consumers filling our shopping malls (but it should be remembered often buying for others) really seeking a return home?

That return home is of course in the context of a technological, change-orientated, atomistic and hedonistic age.  We live in a culture and world far removed from everything that the Feast of Christ symbolises.  And yet there remains that yearning for that other higher world.

We pride ourselves on our rationalism, we scoff at what we dismiss as sentimentality, we wish to appear cynical and worldly.  Our families are falling apart, our history and identity is erased, magic is extirpated from the world in the name of science.  And yet, once a year this is all set aside for a feast that celebrates, remembers and takes part in the Incarnation.  

Many will say they merely enjoy childhood memories or love the old rituals, that it is a time for relaxation and family.  All these things though are transformed and affirmed by the Incarnation, by the Word made flesh.  We live in a world where life can be blessed and even made magical, not simply mundane and profane.

That magic of Christmas is something particular to Christmas.  It is the magic of receiving, not the magic of manipulating the world around us.  In the chaos of our post-modern culture people are more and more looking to magic as a means of controlling and manipulating the world around them,  This is trying to reform the world rather than receiving it as gift.  Indeed, this approach to magic is a form of techne closely related to science and technology.  It is no coincidence the early empirical scientists were occultists and alchemists.  That is the magic of manipulation, unlike Christmas.

At Christmas the magic is a gift that blesses us.  Even for the children Father Christmas visits as a surprise bearing surprises for their stockings.  Children do not resort to spells or incantations to conjure and command Father Christmas.  They learn the magic of the gift as a blessing out of our control or power.

The magic can only be found if stiff-necked pride is put to one side. Then we can discover the mystical magic down "in yon forest" where the Grail is hidden.  We must be ready like little children trustingly to receive with faith.  We all know this in our hearts and much of our cynicism and rationalism is mere bravado because we are too proud to show our inner child.

From Dickens and Chesterton to Lewis and Tolkien, modern writers have, like the prophets of old, pointed us back to the childlike magic of Christ's birth.  And the magic starts to change people, just like Scrooge.  Even hard-nosed Protestants for one season of the year honour Christ's Virgin Mother, meek and mild.  Religion begins to recover its old mystical magic again and the rigidity of rational doctrine is replaced with the mystical tradition of the Church at its beginning.  And the world is re-enchanted.

Forces are ranged against this rediscovery, this return to our homeland.  Commercialism, greed, consumption, family resentments, all come to the surface to challenge the gentle power of the event on that silent and holy night. Mad buying has replaced the fasting of Advent before the feast.  Christmas can become nothing more than drunken snoozing in front of the telly, sensual pleasure of the flesh hiding the spirit of Christmas.  

Even so, as the parish churches are full again for one day of the year, as families reunite and the Gradgrind world of capitalist work and career is forgotten in favour of the magic of the season, we all know we are returning to something more true, more beautiful, something that is good for us and brings us back to who we are in our spirit.

 

Progress and Anomie

Anomie as a word is of course linked to French sociologist Emile Durkheim.  Modernity or progress brought with it an idea of self-realisation unconnected with inherited tradition - an atomisation most prevalent in Protestant cultures where individualism was stronger.  Shared norms being lost a consequent ennui, purposelessness and despair would develop.  Durkheim observed suicide was more prevalent in Protestant countries.  Deviance resulting from a lack of shared and cohesive communal values led to increased crime and other forms of disconnection.  Perhaps in contemporary times the most extreme example of the dangers of anomie is the teenaged American gun murderer - the murderous incel.  An individualistic culture where institutions lose authority and values are no longer shared and a sense of being part of a community and tradition have been lost are factors that lead to anomie.  It is furthermore the result of division of labour and rapid social change.  In other words - progress.

Prior to economic and political progress our aspirations were limited and manageable.  We belonged somewhere and had something like a predefined role.  Life was not an individualistic pursuit of my own subjective idea of happiness.  The world of guilds and family trades was replaced by economic and political progress through industrial revolution and division of labour.  As Durkheim put it:  " To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness."

Worse the idea of self realisation is therefore a myth.  Division of labour turned many into wage slaves and those who "make it" are in spiritual danger of a materialist and passion-driven existence.  

As religion became disorganised and splintered through the Reformation and a consequent sectarianism and spiritual individualism in belief so anomie grew.  Anomie is essentially a lack of social mores, standards or ethics.  These were provided by the Church, as Saint Vincent of Lerins put it:

" That faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all."

As a functionalist Durkheim himself had a reductionist leaning - religion was there for the purposes of social cohesion from his reductive and functionalist perspective.  We do not need to accept this to be able to recognise that social progress leads to disintegration and anomie.

The so-called "Christian Nietzsche", the Russian aristocrat and later monk, Konstanin Leontiev was scathing about the notion of progress.  For  him it could be represented by the metaphor of a body suffering a progressive disease that led to disintegration of the biological form.  In the same way social progress led to the disintegration of the commonwealth into individualism.

Progress can be understood as a social force that detaches us from what is around us - community, below us - our roots, and most significantly, what is above - the divine.  These all hold the body together in a hierarchical coherence that connects us to the higher.  Modernity and progress are on the other hand all about deconstruction and reduction.

The self realisation of the progressive West that we see today leads to misery and despair.  Contrast this with the human being who was part of a spiritual hierarchy of Being.  He understood that while existence was a mystery he had his place and purpose.  He had meaning.

One might contrast the glorification of self realisation of the individual that results from progressive ideas with a more Aristotlean understanding.  Self realisation is unconnected with Aristotle's thoughts on character, virtue or a preordained telos.  Rather as progress breaks apart social, spiritual and historical links, individuals pursue their own subjective idea of fulfilment as subjective happiness and self realisation.

For Aristotle man like any other being had a purpose.  Just as the lyre was made to be played to make music, so a man's preordained purpose was virtue.  Virtue was attained by practice and establishing habits that formed one's character.  This is a totally alien way of thinking for a progressive Westerner, who believes his current and flawed passsions of his character must be fulfilled to achieve self realisation - that is his purpose/he thinks, rather than forming his character by practising virtues that at first might seem unappealing and not suited to his flawed desires.

With Aristotle's virtue ethics we find a formidable and uncompromising answer to anomie.  There are social norms and values that are preordained.  The virtues are known and understood - but we have to work and reform our character to attain them.  One can see how compatible this pagan philosopher's ideas were with the Church emerging a few centuries later into Greece from the Holy Land.  Conforming to the likeness of Christ was the telos of every human made in the image of God and who was striving through the gate of the Incarnation to achieve likeness of God as Saint Irenaeus of Lyons explained.  Later in the Middle Ages Christian Western Europe, in schism with Greek Orthodoxy would rediscover Aristotle and his thought was to be a major influence upon the thinking of Thomas Aquinas.

While progressive seeds of thinking were latent in Scholastism in the West, nonetheless this pursuit of virtue and character was again understood in a Christian sense.  

To pursue character and virtue is a rejection of the very notion of progress.  The progress of Western reductive thinking means breaking up social and religious traditions for the liberation of individual identity with no predetermined telos; just as much as it breaks up longstanding communities for economic progress.

Virtue ethics are in many ways the antidote to anomie.  We should strive for character and thereby achieve the happiness of eudaimonia, rather than subjective self realisations as the existentialists such as atheist Sartre argued.  For this reason Western philosophers, in Britain for example, such as Alasdair Macintyre are rediscovering Aristotle's theories of virtue and character as a way to counteract the harmful and individualistic traits of the Enlightenment paradigm.

The virtues Aristotle believed it was the purpose of human life to attain included courage, generosity, justice, temperance and prudence - meaning a sort of practical wisdom.  The pagan philosopher cannot though have the last word, which would lead to a rather dry and restrictive purpose to living.  Orthodox Christian philosopher  Nicholas Berdyaev argued that to attain the likeness of our Divine Maker we were meant to attain freedom, freedom through our creativity.  This is not the Narcissistic self-realisation of the Western progressive, but a striving to participate in the divine through the freedom of being able to create as the imago dei.

Progress, the unquestioned good, has proved to lead to the breaking up of the community and the loss of tradition, virtue and purpose.  It has created a disintegrated world dominated by anomie and deviance.  If people do not simply fall into the trap of ennui, they are in danger of criminality and self-destructive tendencies.  That is the legacy of the Enlightenment.  Post modernism alone did not separate us from our telos, it is just the latest twist since the wrong turn of the Enlightenment and the new secular and individualist age.    

Progress and Power

A key characteristic of those who believe themselves to be progressives and to be on the right side of history is that they are sure they are good.  Progress as a notion though has done away with an idea of a Form of Goodness.  What is good is calculated and made sense of in a strictly temporal way.  Virtue has no real place and God is seen as a primitive idea. 

Progress as a concept is really based upon impoverished metaphysics.  The paradigm is predicated on meaning being reduced to power battles.  What is progress is really a debate as to how best to distribute, award or manage power.  There is no longer an understanding of Man's telos or purpose being participation in the Good through virtue and character, prayer and worship.

Of course some ideas of progress are somewhat unworldly with heterodox ideas of Heaven on Earth.  This in itself can lead to very dangerous places.  A large tendency in progressive thought though is essentially materialist with no focus on the transcendent or the life after death.  Indeed an orientation towards life after death can prove a distraction from the worldly and secular goals of the progressive.  The progressive is in reality a materialist, focused upon building a new Tower of Babel.  Man tries to be God without repentance, but with hubris.

With the English Medieval idea of nominalism we were consequently detached from the Good.  Instead of our telos being participation in The Good, with no universals all that was left was arbitrary power.

A key underlying theme of progressive thought is liberation from oppressive controls of authoritarian and "outdated" power structures.  This idea is revelatory of the underlying assumptions in progressive thought.    That is that history has a linear and benign direction ( a far greater leap of faith than that required by any of the world religions); thereby making anything old necessarily oppressive by definition.  Further, insofar as what came before was by definition benighted, so the freedom achieved is one of not being held back by tradition.  Self expression and self realisation are the inevitable liberation of breaking out of outdated power structures.  Power of course is the only way to make sense of any traditional structure, because higher meanings are discounted.    

We do live in a fallen world and that means that many of the traditions that held us together did fall short and were open to abuse.  The corollary of traditions being compromised by dint of existing in a fallen world is that revolution will also be subject to abuse and corruption, but without any participation in the transcendent that the earlier societies could depend upon to mitigate against abuses.

While Enlightenment thinking looked at inherited social forms to one degree or another as means of control, most powerfully expressed by Marx, but before by Rousseau's chains  - by overthrowing them all that was left was naked power.  

The only question now for Western Man, having cut himself off from the transcendent, was how to manage the raw power that was left.  The European intellectuals chose reductive power and cold abstract theories and rejected the opportunity of participation in the Good.  They rejected the gift of Easter - God becoming Man opening the way to us for men to become gods.  Instead, hubristically, with faith in their own powers of reason, the philosophers made themselves God through a revolutionary power grab, not repentance.  It was the old temptation of the serpent to become like God without God.

This liberation then has really meant negotiating mere and base power.  The only questions left were  who should dominate whom and how much I should be dominated by another?  Should the proletarian class seize power from its oppressor?  Should the strong man seize power?  Should I as an individual have full power over my own life through autonomy.

We think like this because we have cut ourselves off from the possibility of participation in The Good.  We no longer understand that true freedom lies in virtue and worship.  Freedom is to participate in the Good.

That means a kenotic self emptying that gives us access to love and community.  It means freedom from the passions that enslave our souls.

Instead progress has only offered us power over others or power over our own lives.

This reduction of all to power battles has meant inevitably that liberalism too, the great victor of the battles of modernity, has become power hungry.  Liberal societies that prided themselves on their supposedly self emptying granting of freedom of choice, freedom of lifestyle and freedom of speech have also descended into authoritarianism, albeit soft and subtle.  

It is in liberal countries now that speech must be managed and core beliefs about what it means to be human in religious terms must be extirpated from the public square.  Secular liberalism softly, softly is using overweening power.  Unlike the Church when believers got it wrong or failed, this is not a human failing corrupting and tarnishing a transcendent truth.  This is because when you scratch the secular-liberal surface all there actually is in progressive thought is not the Good, the True or the Beautiful, but bare power.  And so liberalism, like its modern ideological cousins, Fascism and Communism, (that seem so different but are really all offspring of post Enlightenment modernity) really boils down to one more interpretation of life as power.  The individual does not participate in a telos of seeking The Good, he is simply an absolutist tyrant in his own life, living an arbitrary existence in a freedom that is really just slavery to the passions.  

 

Progress and Death

 When people bemoan our modern world the usual retort is an instruction not to romanticise the past and to consider the lifesaving utility of medical science.  The merit of medical science, in the hands of pharmaceutical oligarchs, is itself questionable.  Modernity from the dissolution of the monasteries to the categorisation of the wise woman of the village with herbal knowledge as a witch cut us off from inherited collective knowledge.  This indicates that today large corporations simply have to rediscover ancient knowledge never analysed and then they patent it.  That aside, progress in large part justifies itself as a successful flight from death.

Through the technological advances of progress we are cossetted from the severity of our mortality.  Death is made hygienic in a place of face masks and medication.  Coffins are not open at funerals, people generally die in a sterile environment amongst medical experts.

The argument here is not that the advances of medical science should be rejected.  The human being was endowed by his Creator with the talent to solve the problems presented by a hostile fallen Nature, outside of Eden.  Nonetheless this ability is ambiguous, it also leads to a subtle Luciferianism.  This is most strongly demonstrated in the idea of Singularity from the dark technical minds of Silicon Valley, in the idea an imitation of our personality recorded on technology is a means of immortality.

Most  human beings with any consciousness of their soul understand that this method of denying death is by no means immortality.  Nonetheless, we all seek to avoid death and prolong at least a healthy existence if not an unhealthy one.  The other side of this idea latent in progress that the future will be hygienically healthy cannot really tolerate to look at the physical decline of illness and old age.  Even though the technology progress itself produced can prolong people in a sort of nether region of half-life. this is not considered hygienic and as much as the body of the deceased must be concealed, the infirm are considered to have no dignity and we take upon ourselves the right to choose when we live and die or even when others should die (as soon as their scientifically prolonged existence tarnishes the bright and clean future).

Without wishing back a time of pestilence, plague and violence, we must also recognise in the hygienic world of progress a spiritual aspect of human nature has been somewhat curtailed.  We have not and will not conquer death, but we have hidden it.  It is no longer really considered necessary to find a spiritual answer to our mortality, instead our mortality is hidden, because science will solve that question before our turn comes.

A spiritual answer to death does not require some morbid and macabre focus, as though we need to dig up our relatives' decomposing cadavers to take part in a grotesque theatre of afternoon tea.  Somehow that seems reminiscent of the frozen corpses of Americans committed only to life in this temporal world.

Pestilence, famine and war asked us serious questions about the meaning of life that a life of medical care and shopping malls somehow conceals.  We should therefore along with serious thinkers such as Martin Heidegger or Aleksandr Dugin, continue to think seriously about death and how it actually imparts meaning upon our lives.  Without death there is certainly no sense of eternity.  Only with limitation can life choices be meaningful.  Only when we think of our frailty in the face of time can we gain a sense of the eternal.

Modern man might mock the apparent "superstitions" of his ancestors who faced death day in day out, but is that not only because he hides from the question of his mortality? And in hiding from his mortality he is also hiding from the eternal.  Consumption is the answer to ignore the pressing and creeping sense of limitation.  Phrases such as "you only live once" as a justification for existential curiosity that Heidegger saw as inauthentic, are really ways to evade death not to acknowledge it.  In hiding from our mortality, in living for our passions, we are also denying the demands of eternity upon us. 

There is a political question here.  It is with GDP, more consumer choice and liberalisation of laws to "free" us to engage our passions that a global political class can keep us passive.  It means no really difficult questions are asked about what is happening and why it is happening.  Arguably a citizen of Russia or Iran is far less politically-naive than those living in Western democracies where we can sate ourselves and hide from our mortality.

There is also, more obviously a religious question.  For the Westerner death can be regarded as some sort of Malthusian solution that does not necessarily touch me.  Pestilence and famine keep the numbers down and resist the Malthusian bogeyman of overpopulation.  In reality, if we truly recognise each person as more than a mere avatar of their passions, more than a consumer whose identity is defined by his career, by what football team he supports or what genre of popular music he enjoys, more even than which political party he supports, - if we actually see the human person as the imago dei, then his annihilation through physical decomposition is an affront to all that holds real value.

If we finally look at what death really means - the seeming annihilation of the personality, we can see it as the reductive and unnatural force that it really is and therefore reject its right over us.  That though is not in terms of some artificial download onto a computer.  It is instead a theological question, a cosmological question.  How can death exist in contrast to the human person?  It is only then we can recognise that for all our technological and medical progress, the real question is spiritual.  It is only then we can see the real answer is that this fallen world, following the laws of Darwin, is not natural.  It must be the consequence of sin, of a fundamental primary distortion of reality.  That means it cannot be solved by all the cunning techne of human ingenuity.  It is instead solved not by technological or political solutions, but by personal repentance.  We should not let technological, medical or political progress distract us from this. 

 

  

Progress and Alienation

 Hegel wrote of alienation from modernity and Marx wrote about it in terms of alienation from what we create through work.  Neither with Hegel should we agree to strive to  reconcile with modernity, nor with Marx should we simply diagnose alienation as a primarily economic problem linked to  a specific economic system - capitalism.  Marxist economics were equally alienating because it was a radical Enlightenment system.  Nietzsche saw through the shallowness of modernity and advocated the Ubermensch.  Traditionalists such as Evola and Guenon were important in diagnosing this spiritual alienation as a consequence of the whole project of modernity, the reign of Quantity.  Today Dugin advocates the Radical Subject as the way forward for the traditionalist and sacred spirit.

Modernity is a project beginning before the Enlightenment, back to the Renaissance, developing through Baconite science, Newtonian Physics and then of course the  Enlightenment itself.  Its ideology is in a very broad sense liberalism. Its economics are also revolutionary and disruptive of communal life, whether as revolutionary industrial Soviet Communism,  global capitalism or the Technocratic Fourth Industrial Revolution.  Heidegger in particular was able to present an alternative view of being open again to Being, rather than trying to capture it and as a consequence being enframed by our own metaphysics and technology, cut off from Being as the concealed.

The project of modernity, with its blind faith in Progress, what the man on the Clapham Omnibus might term "change for change's sake" (the ideology really is that crude and shallow), was intentional.  The interest in the Occult and magic of the early scientists, their receptivity to the demonic, "progressed" into the ideology of the secret societies, such as the Illuminati and the Free Masons.  Whether the Freemasons today adhere to this ideology no longer matters, but there was a time in history when the secret societes including freemasonry were committed to the revolution which ultimately meant pulling down the ancien regime - Crown and Altar.  (Even if monarchs could for a time serve as vessels of modernisation and religion could be recapitulated as deism or a proto theosophy).

What was the utopia with which they planned to replace the ordained structure of human society?  Well it encompassed liberation through atomisation, technological development and universalism.  Indeed those revolutionaries who paraded the Goddess of Reason through the streets of Paris coined the shibboleth that became the cry of all subsequent revolutions - liberty, equality, fraternity.  This was not the prescriptive liberty rooted in ancient rights under the King that Burke referred to when talking of the liberties of Americans and Englishmen under the English Common Law founded upon precedent.  No this was formed by the theories of  elite thinkers such as Rousseau, whose ideas led to the formation of secret societies amongst the elites.   The Enlightenment itself was fundamental to the shift in thinking, but the very Enlightenment itself was part of the revolutionary fervour of rejecting inherited wisdom, as can be seen in Immanuel Kant's famous essay "What is Enlightenment?"

The so-called Enlightenment was a philosophical project working in tandem with the sciences to dislocate Western Man from his traditions, his history and his religion.  It was the zeitgeist of the Eighteenth Century, conceived in earlier centuries in Renaissance Humanism and the alchemy of the early occultist sciences.  It was a rising up against the Divine.  And universalism, which meant in reality complete atomisation and dislocation in effect, was its creed.

This is what has led to transgenderism and will in turn lead to transhumanism in this quest for supremacy over reality.

As technology, metaphysics and ideology have worked together, the human being has been reduced to homo economicus, a mere unit of production whether that was in the English Industrial Revolution, Soviet Russia or Capitalist-Fordist America.  This is the real alienation and it is not simply the Marxist account of losing the control of what one's own labour produces.  This is only one possible symptom of the shift to materialism that is fundamental to the idea of Progress.  A strange and irrational faith emerged that the Greeks would not have accepted - history is evolving progressively.  A new thought indeed!  Instead of a fallen post-Edenic, post Golden-Age world, we were to believe Man could again construct Babel.  The real effect was a deep spiritual alienation that manifested in destruction of home and hearth, disconnection from the home gods, the ancestors, the transcendent.

The irrational faith in Progress then, bolstered and supported by theories such as Darwin's evolution, was what really alienates us.  From ugly architecture to grotesque art in aesthetics, to dislocation and insecurity in employment and in economics we are always more and more alienated and torn away from our embeddedness.  Furthermore in a materialist paradigm we are unable to find the words to forge an argument against this pressure to move further and further, deeper and deeper into this mistake, this putting our own technological advances and liberation above the sacred and the human.

it is no accident that culture has decomposed and decayed.  In a world of alienation atomisation and ennui are the result.  This is expressed in our artwork.  It manifests in terrible and senseless crimes, in sexual promiscuity, in deviance.  There is no longer a Higher Authority, there is no longer a purpose, a telos, outside of and above this fallen world.  The only purpose is more liberation from authority and tradition.  Technology is intimately connected to cultural change and adds to our pride that we can create a new Luciferian world in defiance of cosmic law.   In the end they plan to defy death itself with their Singularity concept, bypassing the need for the Cross or so they think in their pride.

"And in those days men shall seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them."      

Of course technology in itself is not an evil.  It is to an extent of course a consequence of the Fall and linked to Cain.  Nonetheless, the Empire became Christian.  Art was created to glorify and venerate the Divine and the Saints.  Freedom is neither a moral evil.  The trouble is that by dislocating us from our cosmic position we have misunderstood freedom.  From the Greeks onwards,  Plato and Aristotle, through to the Stoics and culminating in the Church Fathers, freedom was understood as freedom from the passions and the potential to participate in the Divine.  The debased view of Man that emerged from the Enlightenment misunderstood freedom as a shallow lack of constraint by authority to be able to indulge the very passions that the ancients understood enslaved us.

The whole driving force of Progress is the passion of pride and it is pride that separates us from God and will as a consequence alienate us from our neighbour, our culture, our very purpose of existence.

Philosophers on the Right turn to the Ubermensch or the Radical Subject.  That though is still a modern response.  In "riding the tiger" of modernity the Traditionalist has already accepted the inevitability of Modernity.  There is no inevitability about it.  Man might build in pride, but Babel was destroyed.  This ideology of a universal system that now manifests in the dogmas of the WEF and the other globalist institutions, is nothing more than men of clay trying to replace God.  No paradigm is inescapable.  One simply has to look at the premise.  And the premise of modernity is Promethean.  It is an attempt to usurp the Divine.  It was the presumption that led to the downfall of Nebuchadnezzar.  However high we build we still have feet of clay.  And by attempting to usurp the Divine we have simply been degraded to slaves of the passion of Pride.  It is indeed Luciferian.  This is the dogma of Lucifer's revolution in the heavens replicated here in earth.  It is no accident that the supposedly secular advocates of Progress have always been fascinated by the occult and drawn to Lucifer as the progressive figure of Light.  It is why the Lucis Trust is so deeply entwined with the United Nations.

If we have faith though and have not given in to the materialist ideology of the Revolution then we know how this ends.  Indeed we know the victory is already won and this is simply the intermediate stage before the consummation of that victory and the building of the new Celestial City - not Babel, but the heavenly Jerusalem.

The Hideous Strength of Green Technocracy

 One way in which the Green lobby captures people's loyalty is by dressing itself up as conservationist.  We all love our natural environment and are distressed to hear of other distant environments being destroyed by Man's exploitative greed and destructive avarice.  Nonetheless, the actual specific proposals made by those using the Green agenda for their own purposes, such as the WEF, have produced a programme that really means the destruction of our actual local environment.  The technocrats have turned to intensive technology to resist the alleged dangers that so often over the years have not materialised.  From over-population to the disappearance of the ice caps, the dire prophecies never materialised at the time claimed and a new terror is then invoked. 

Ever since Climategate the alert and aware have been more sceptical about the claims of the climate fanatics.  It is notable that as global warming does not occur, the terminology has been subtly changed to "climate change", an untestable and unfalsifiable concept.

The measures imposed by global bodies and those being imposed by national governments in effect under the control of the WEF have the convenient consequence of the creation of a social credit system by stealth.  From fifteen minute cities to smart meters that can be switched off to planning to imprison those who cannot afford to turn their homes into ugly eco-compliant blocks, we are entering a level of control for which the Covid lockdowns set a precedent.  And at the very time the Globalists have caused a spike in cost of living with their proxy war against Russia in the breadbasket of Europe, the Ukraine, the high costs of Net Zero are being imposed over and above this upon ordinary people.

The most important aspect of this Globalist programme of Net Zero is though often overlooked.  It is not that wind turbines still need coal-powered energy or that electric cars are causing localised environmental and human catastrophes with lithium mining hidden from the view of the virtue-signalling Westerner.  No, it is rather that the whole programme of Net Zero is based upon a false premise and deeply misunderstands Nature.  With its pristine view of Mother Nature uncontaminated by Man there is a profound theological mistake - an outright heresy.  Ironically, in that heretical premise technology is turned to to eradicate Man from the Environment he shaped as co-creator with the Deity.  It was indeed Man's original Edenic vocation to be the gardener - the imago dei.

Yes, we understand that brutal exploitation of Nature, treating it in Heideggerian terms, as "standing reserve" is very harmful.  The environment though has its value and beauty in the way Man has worked with Nature.  Grazing livestock allow the wild flowers rather than scrubland and wilderness to flourish.  Even hunting led to the maintenance of hedgerows as fences for jumping, which are so much more beneficial for bird life and local ecology.  It is Man in community that makes the environment beautiful. That is not the same as dehumanised agri-business and developers building all over our green fields.

In their deep misanthropy and Gaia worship,  the environmentalists and the control-obsessed globalists are more than happy to eradicate Man from the environment.  Livestock farming that shaped our countryside must be destroyed in place of mono-crops for the new vegan diet.  This will be as bad, if not worse, than the much-hated large agri-businiesses rightly abhorred.  

To do away with coal fires in factories and indeed to destroy the family hearth, wind turbines will march across the green fields and rolling hills .  Dark Satanic mills again polluting our green and pleasant land.  In its hatred of the mining of coal this establishment-backed movement will turn our green and pleasant land into a horrific machine.  This technology though is alienated from Man.  Man is removed from Nature, but Nature is subjected to inhuman technology that silences the dawn chorus as migrating birds are decimated.

The home, the Englishman's castle, will be uglified by uPVC windows and doors and its heart torn out - the family hearth.  This worship of Gaia and hatred of anthropomorphic and patriarchal traditional religion has manifested in an attack on beauty and Nature in the name of Nature.

No longer can something be enjoyed for its beauty.  Now everything is standing reserve to be used for other sources of energy.  It is as though in the very pagan and heretical obsession with Gaia untouched by the stewards of Nature - Man - they are destroying Nature to eradicate that biological source of carbon, mankind.

Of course Providence ensured we would be protected from the risks of carbon.  Just as we produce carbon, so vegetation consumes carbon.  For this reason the planet is greenifying and demonstrating that written into Creation itself is the corrective for global warming.  

And the deep irony is that people are deceived  to destroy by this ideology because they do love their environment and what surrounds them.  That environment is not a wilderness.  Its beauty, what makes it sublime is Man in Nature.  That is not Man treating Nature as standing reserve, but from the chaos of the wilderness revealing, unconcealing the full beauty of Nature.

The Case against the Atheist Methodology to Knowledge - the Apophatic versus the Reductive, humility versus pride.

 

Just as most regard Eighteenth-century Hume as killing the Enlightenment project by his radical scepticism, so most thinkers would acknowledge Fourteenth- Century William of Ockham’s nominalism was harmful to Western thought.  Hume as a sceptic destroyed his own side so to speak by proving the impossibility of true empirical knowledge.  The Roman Catholic philosopher Ockham struck a terrible blow to metaphysics and the philosophical realism upon which religious faith is founded.

What have we lost as a result of Ockhamite nominalism?  It is understood that universals both in terms of secular classifications and the higher level universals of metaphysical realism are incompatible with the reductionism of nominalism.  When nothing really belongs to a class or species in the earthly realm and metaphysical universals such as love, beauty, goodness and truth are seen as speculative fantasy, access to meaning is cut off.  As humans no longer able to participate in identity (now just an arbitrary classification) or in the higher realm (now imaginary), we are ourselves reduced to mere atomistic individuals devoid of meaning and any telos.

For as long as we exist and think in such a paradigm fundamental beliefs that make full existence possible are inaccessible to us.  Instead religious belief and the spiritual life themselves become arbitrary and blind leaps of faith for each isolated individual.  In the consequent nihilist maelstrom, that must be seen as the final result of the nominalist cancer, meaning can only be achieved by an individual assertion of the will.  That is an underlying connection between arbitrary faith in Protestantism and the arbitrary assertion of purpose in Twentieth Century existentialism. 

Traditional religious faith stood in a different intellectual world, more intellectually rich, far less arbitrary and part of a collective human tradition of thought and spirituality.  It operated according to an ethos of humility.  This humility or recognising what one does not know goes back at least to Socrates and his assertion that true knowledge is that I know nothing.  It was followed through by the apophatic theology of the Church Fathers, in particular Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Saint Gregory of Nyssa.  Centuries later, Nicholas of Cusa would defend a doctrine of ignorance in the face of the hubristic claims of Renaissance Humanist thinkers. 

This humility or recognising our finite minds cannot fully comprehend divine Truth can also be seen at work in the Oecumenical Councils.  Dogma is a word much misused today.  When the Church met in Council it did so on the basis the faith and Christian Truth could not be reduced to a series of assertions.  Rather, all the Church could do was reject the heretical, that which undermined the Truth handed down from God via the Apostles.  So the Councils themselves followed the via negativa of apophatic theology.  For example, we cannot define the mystery of the Incarnation, but the Church was able to assert Arius had fallen into heresy because if Christ were not fully God as well as fully Man, Man could not be fully redeemed.

 What began to go wrong could really only take place after the Great Schism.  With the Pope’s supreme authority on doctrinal matters the Western Church moved towards a more declaratory and propositional theology.  It did not take long for a more propositional and reductive approach to theology to manifest.  Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the same century as the Great Schism, began to make syllogistic arguments for the existence of God.  Most significant was his reduction of the meaning of the crucifixion to satisfaction theology.  Christ died as a payment for our sins to God as a vengeful feudal overlord.  All the nuances and depth of Christian understanding of the crucifixion as part of the Tradition of the Church was lost as individual thinkers began to make theological assertions based on arguments thought up as individual thinkers with finite minds.  Of course the Pope himself would become the authority on dogma over and above the full Tradition.

In such a climate Ockham became possible.  It was his reductionism that we see at work in Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Western atheism.  Indeed atheism in the Western sense is only really possible where a culture has taken a wrong turn into a strange cultural aberration.   Being inside the paradigm we cannot see how pathological and dehumanising it is in reality.  

In the most prosaic and ordinary setting we find Ockham’s reductionism at work:  Ockham’s Razor!  This is the idea that the simplest explanation for the cause is the true explanation.  Of course this can be helpful, but it bears no relation to reality.  Often an effect results because of the coalescing of multiple causes.  Often a more complicated cause is the reason for something happening.  There is a certain logic in avoiding wild speculation, but Ockham’s Razor also prevents us from being able to recognise multi-faceted, higher and more complicated causes.

How has that manifested?  Roman Catholics claim the Pope is the sole authority on doctrine.  The Protestants rely on sola scriptura.  Holy Tradition, as continues in Orthodoxy, takes all into account, the Bible, the Church Fathers, the liturgy itself.  This reductionism has led to a trap for the Western mind, until we became so rationalist that we pulled down our inheritance.  In thought, Rene Descartes declared he would only accept what his finite mind could justify rationally, not recognising that there was a great accumulation of wisdom that his mind would never be able to produce, in politics this collective knowledge was termed the “wisdom of the ancestors” by Burke.   Descartes even attempted in an act of intellectual hubris to “prove” the existence of God through rational argument.  So much for the apophatic theology in the West.

In politics we saw revolution, regicide and sacrilege.  A spirit of prideful rebellion began to plague the West.  A Luciferian animus prevailed and was the ethos behind the secret societies that would foment revolution and atheism.

The reductionist Westerner thought he understood man by stretching his lifeless cadaver out and dismembering his body to see inside.  The most important aspect of the human that animated him, his soul manifested as the person was forgotten and Man was reduced to a machine – the simplest and sole explanation in true Occamite methodology.  Hence the possibility of Darwinism, reducing life to a base cause.

This hubris is fed by the technological power that the scientific method achieves.  This in itself though is Promethean.  It is about power, control and exploitation.  In the end as we see today with A.I. it becomes dehumanising.  Deep thinkers of the contemporary philosophical tradition from Martin Heidegger to Jacques Ellul have written powerfully on the ethical questionability of advancing technology as its takes on a life of its own, enframing us and reducing us.

The fallacy of this reductive spirit is to reduce everything to the lowest explanation so that the most important aspects of the world are invisible to us – the cosmos as a theophany, Man as the Imago Dei, the possibility of participation in the Divine.  We have lost the understanding that life and knowledge are part of a collective tradition within which we make sense of our particular lives.  The very opposite of the Cartesian obsession with individual verification.

In the end, as the Jesuits would say, it all ends in the absurdity as is emphatically demonstrated by the inverted world of today’s West.  Even gender is no longer clear.  The objectivist scientists do not understand they are the reason biological reality is being denied.  You cannot have biology with any meaning without the transcendental.  Gender has a metaphysical aspect.  A woman acts and moves in a feminine way because of her feminine spirit, not just because of the mechanical operation of her biology.

This is all down to a Luciferian rebellious pride.  An assertion of my individual understanding over long tradition.  It means we only understand the most base causes.  We are blind to higher meanings.

The clear absurdity that the scientifically minded who pride themselves on their objectivity are blind to is that they have argued for a random and arbitrary world.  They have an unquestioning faith in the laws of science such as physics, but they have no reality in a random world of chance.  The atheists believe the most simplest explanation of evolution and survival of the fittest can explain love, art, religion.  They do not realise that what their philosophy reduces to mere accidents in our evolutionary story are the highest aspect of life’s meaning and what it is all for – the telos.  Through the human personality, his energies, we can recognise that is the most important part about him and that therefore the most important and highest aspect of existence is the person, or rather Three Persons in harmonious and loving relationship.  Communion and love between persons is the highest point leading to participation in divine energies, not survival of the fittest.  Apply Ockham’s reductive razor though and you are left with the lowest and most trivial explanation.

Neither can the scientist ever overcome his contradictory faith in laws of physics that he can never prove, as David Hume so powerfully demonstrated.  The scientific method can never predict the same rules will apply tomorrow, because he rejects God.  Everything is random and arbitrary.  The ideological scientist is even forbidden by his dogma to posit an Aristotelian Prime Mover, let alone the Person of the Logos as that which holds together the laws of the cosmos, ensuring everything does not disintegrate into chaos.  In contrast the true scientist rather than the adherent to scientism, understands that like the Church Councils he can only say what is not true, he can never fully define what is true.  A spirit of humility applies to true science too.  Quantum physicists are ready to take Platonism seriously.

And so in contrast to the hubristic claims of the humanists, the empiricists, the rationalists we can only return to a full and meaningful life if we adopt an approach of knowing ignorance in humility.  Only if we recognise our limitations and that the full Truth is infinitely larger and higher than we can comprehend will we come anywhere near to Truth. That does not mean we know nothing.  We have the accumulated spiritual experiences that feed into Holy Tradition.  We also have our own personal spiritual encounters that we are able to make sense of within the wisdom of Holy Tradition.  We cannot claim to know it all or assert that what the Church has understood by revelation, by Scripture, by the lives of its saints, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is irrelevant because my finite mind cannot comprehend it.  Instead in a spirit of humility, recognising our ignorance, we must come home to the Church and its Tradition through personal encounter, which is centred on love.

The Final Stage of the Revolution - technocrats, occultists, elites and sexual rights.

 

 

Western Churches in their rather ineffectual and half-hearted attempt to resist the sexualisation of our society (sometimes turning into their full abject surrender to the agenda) are often accused of being obsessed by sex.  Of course the real problem for the churches is they are trying to survive and perhaps even rescue the sinners in an age dominated by sexualisation.  It is becoming all the more apparent that in the 1960s there was not so much a social and sexual revolution as a major project in social engineering directed by elites in power.

The CIA now acknowledges its own involvement in the cultural revolution of the 1960s with the MK Ultra project encouraging drug usage and in other manipulation with the promotion of abstract art against traditional forms, by supporting artists such as Jackson Pollock, or in promoting radical politics such as backing Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse.  In terms of drug usage, sexualisation of society and feminism it seems highly likely the CIA was generally involved. Ostensibly this was to present a Western society as “free” and avante garde in contrast to the Soviet Union’s oppressive restrictions and its Soviet realism in art.  While the early USSR had been extreme in its social progressivism after the Revolution, this changed during the Great Patriotic War.  Stalin, party to the original social liberalisation, recognised to win the War and defeat the Nazi threat he needed to give people access to their churches again, bring a halt to abortions and homosexuality and restore some level of traditional values again.  For pragmatic reasons, the Soviet Union had dispensed with the path to moral degeneracy; in a couple of decades time, the West fully embarked upon moral degeneracy during the 1960s.

There was perhaps more to it than merely a good propaganda opportunity to present the United States as the land of the free.  On both sides of the Atlantic, elite intellectuals shared certain progressive ideals often meant to be achieved by sinister methods.  Eliminating religious faith, sexual liberation, feminism, eugenics and an all-powerful State were the ideals of the Transatlantic elites.  Important families -  the Rockafellas, the Rothschilds, the Huxleys, the Darwins were part of an elite linked to progressivism.  The Fabian idea of a slow technocratic revolution promoted by the Webbs, H G Wells’ vision of a new world, Betrand Russell’s dry atheism, all were complementary to each other in an overarching elite and anti-Christian idea of progress.  Valiant opponents spoke out such as G K Chesterton, C S Lewis via his novels, even George Orwell from a non-traditional perspective.  What is sometimes overlooked is the fascination with the occult sitting alongside commitment to atheism and a religious scientism amongst these elites.  Secret societies were popular.  There was undoubtedly an elite agenda following in the tradition of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, secret societies and the French and American Revolutions.

It is important to understand that atomisation and Socialist Revolution go hand in hand.  The real technocratic Socialism of Wells, Mr and Mrs Webb or Russell, rather than the small s socialism of a Schumacher.  And we should not be too distracted by Socialism, an ideology that has probably served its purposes – one of which was to violently destroy Holy Rus and another to achieve a type of Benthamite panoptican.  An obsession with free love, population control and elite power were the Babel preoccupations of the Western elites at the beginning of the last Century.  A brave new one- world government would be achieved by the elites managing the talking monkeys (a degraded view of Man and rejection of Man as the imago dei).

Combined with this were to come structural economic changes that created an opportunity to implement the final revolution.  As capitalism moved from its Fordist stage which had been aided by social engineering to replace the extended family by the nuclear family, the capitalists in the late Twentieth Century now needed dislocated individuals, they needed women in the workplace and a certain cosmopolitan rootlessness as capitalism in the West became global, factories moved abroad, migrants were brought in as labour.   In the Post War era manufacturing’s time in the West was limited.  It was not only militant unions that destroyed industry.

Throughout the sixties Governments still obviously dominated by liberal elites passed laws that “liberated” or atomised us.  Instead of living a life in a context of traditional values and responsibilities we were encouraged by legal changes and engineered popular culture to think what was good was what was pleasurable and aided my passions and appetites.  Homosexuality and abortion were legalised.  Divorce was made easy.  In America elite liberals had pushed for the creation of an effective contraceptive to break people from the responsibilities of child bearing (an early transhumanist move). This further facilitated the shifting of women out of the family home and into the workplace, usually into lowly jobs trying to find money for childcare.  Racial hatred laws were introduced for what would be the inevitable future multiculturalism of an increasingly global capitalism based on shifting cheap labour from poorer countries into richer countries.  They would be a means to prevent discontent boiling over in the face of mass migration.  Whatever the merits of such laws, they were drafted with an eye on the plans for the future.   

Most central to everything was the sexual relationship.  If the most personal and sacred encounter between two people, the act at once most intimately physical and spiritually unifying could be extracted from the sacramental union of marriage and taken out of the family home and was no longer between two spouses, but rather made casual, then alienation and atomisation would be achieved.  The powerful elites, with their occultist interests and their Darwinian reduction of men to mere intelligent apes saw the power of sexual desire.  If taken off the yoke of social taboos unrestrained sexual desire would create a new race who could never really connect, who were driven by their passions, which they felt it was their right to sate.  Harm between persons and distrust would turn us into the isolated individuals subject to anomie and self-loathing, but preoccupied with our rights, and the technocrats knew they would be able to control people thus demoralised.  We would become exactly the sort of alienated and isolated individuals that would be passive in the face of an ever encroaching progressive system.  Furthermore if deviant relationships could be promoted, the family would be undermined, the greatest bulwark as Chesterton pointed out against the oppressive State.

Another development was in the elite’s favour – the invention of television.  The visual image is far more powerful than the spoken word of radio (already a propaganda tool).  Serials with popular characters were written pulling at the heart strings to make radical changes in what was socially acceptable achievable.  The social revolutionary themes of freemason Mozart’s operas entered popular culture with narratives of oppressive patriarchs being ridiculed.  The propaganda would develop to actively promote what was once seen as taboo in sitting rooms across the country, via that glowing, talking box.  With the removal of the Lord Chamberlain’s role television could be used to push boundaries of taboos until unwittingly a conservative society would become liberal.  In America former propagandist Edward Bernays had already utilised the social-engineering potential of advertising.

And so the elites who long planned this seem to have achieved their goal.  The bread and circuses of entertainment, sexual promiscuity, LGBT, and the impact of feminism have all helped towards Malthusian goals of population reduction.  People are unable to think as they focus on consumption.  Churches are in decline.  Marriage is in decline.  These are the very aims of those Occultist progressives at the start of the Century.    What is more they cannot tolerate the survival of any foreign government not fully on board with the revolution of “liberation”.  International tensions are therefore escalated to pressurise countries to abandon not only economic freedom from debt to globalist institutions, but also their traditional values.  Western NGOs are often focused not only on protecting human beings from oppressive regimes, but more on promoting the new subverted values of the revolutionary West.  So much so that the six-coloured banner of LGBTQ+ has come to be seen as a flag of globalist imperialism in many non-Western countries.

The “rights” of sexual freedom, from heterosexual promiscuity to LGBT are now being used to increase the reach of the Panoptican, so that speech is suppressed if it makes a case for a return to traditional values.  The surveillance system via the State and Big Tech is the other side of the revolutionary coin to the “rights” rhetoric.  And so in the name of freedom not only have we been enslaved to our passions and appetites, isolated and atomised, but we have lost the freedom to speak out and question the agenda imposed by long-established families and secret societies that are in their deepest beliefs hostile to God, the Church and Tradition.

FAITH AND PLUNDER

 

It is difficult not to call to mind the Fourth Crusade when hearing that the holy relics in the Kiev Caves Monastery are being seized and distributed to Western countries and the Vatican.  After expelling the monks from one of the holiest sites in Orthodoxy, the Government in Kiev has now seized the relics and is working with UNESCO, a globalist organisation rooted in the Lucis (Lucifer) Trust, to distribute Orthodoxy’s sacred relics to the Latins.

The Government in Kiev is run by oligarchs and politicians whose support comes from the Uniate parts of Ukraine and who are deeply hostile to canonical Orthodoxy.  The Western media, very quick to report on arrests in Russia is silent about the persecution of Orthodox Christians in the Ukraine.

Strangely the idea of religious freedom and protection of sacred sites does not seem to apply in the Globalist system if the target is the Orthodox Church.  This though is nothing new and is a deeper reflection of our spiritual problems in the West.

Back to the Fourth Crusade (1204 A.D), when the West claimed to be protecting Byzantine Orthodoxy from Islam, but instead sacked and plundered Constantinople committing sacrilege, the theme is a longstanding one.  True there had been tensions and conflicts between the Greeks and the Latins with a terrible attack on Latin merchants – that though must be understood as the resentment of ordinary people towards the monied foreigner rather than a sacrilegious attack.  In the case of the Fourth Crusade, it was the knights of Christendom who sacked the Second Rome and plundered it of its holy relics of the saints and martyrs, while committing acts of sacrilege.  The holy relics made their way back to Western Christendom and flooded the market of indulgences.

Given the transactional theology of satisfaction via the crucifixion in the West these holy relics quickly acquired a market value.  Buy your way out of Purgatory by purchasing the relics.  So egregious was the situation that a certain German monk used the unedifying situation to nail 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg Church.  Thus were unleashed the powerful forces of the Reformation, destroying Western Christendom and splintering further the schismatic Patriarchate of the West.  And we then can see the journey of the West into fragmentation, ideology and spiritual decline.

It is from such a fragmented culture that there is something grander than a mere geopolitical strategy emerging.  Whatever one thinks of the regime in the Kremlin, it is clear that there is a religious conservatism able to flourish there just as the West is on the point of stamping out any reference to higher power, devolving all to the fragmentary culture of unitary individualism  - not the person but the mere consumer for whom even gender and sexual preference are a purchasable choice.

There is an End of History narrative in this Western liberalism, not only to be found in Fukuyama, but in a more sinister way in the secret planning of Fabians and secret societies for the ultimate Panoptican where pleasure replaces joy and is used as a tool to control society.  Most obviously articulated in Klaus Schwab’s language of the Great Reset a new Tower of Babel is planned governed or rather controlled by a soft totalitarianism of surveillance and pleasure.  From H G Wells to Aldous Huxley this plan is laid out plainly before our eyes so that the secrets are disclosed to us through literature just as today via Hollywood films.

The reason this connects to the scandal of the Fourth Crusade is that the seeds of this Nominalist and utilitarian ideology were fertilised and multiplied by the shame of the consequences of the sacking of Constantinople and the reaction, which through Protestantism led to a subjective individualism.  A genetic journey can be traced to liberalism and utilitarianism. 

Today as we stand on the cusp of a type of inauthentic and materialist existence, in Russia itself there is a Christian cultural resurgence.  This is not to deny the geopolitical interests, the Wolfowitz doctrine, the Neocon strategy of regime change in those countries that refuse to take on interest debt to globalist institutions. 

There is though a higher level aspect to this.  Russian culture, for all its post-Soviet troubles, presents a spiritual threat to the nearly-triumphant ideology of fragmentation that will lead to a new form of control.  Nothing is a greater threat to the Globalist elites than the Church, just as Constantinople by its very existence threatened the legitimacy of the Holy Roman Empire and Papal Supremacy.  That is the real Russian World that the secular and liberal West fears.

And so it is not a mere coincidence that as the Slavic Christian lands are ravaged by war an opportunity for plunder is taken.  This is not just any plunder, it is sacrilegious plunder like the crimes of the Franks and Venetians.  It is the seizing of the relics of Orthodox saints to be taken by the Vatican and other Western countries, all administered by UNESCO, with its deeply anti-Christian origins.  The sacrilege of the Fourth Crusade in the end burnt Christendom with the maelstrom of Reformation fragmentation; so now there may be long term spiritual consequences for the West, whatever the outcome of the geopolitical struggle.

The Perennialist Prince – Gobalism and the New King

 

King Charles III has long attracted criticism for holding beliefs in what amounts to the veiled republic of the United Kingdom.  Because Monarchy still has meaning for the people, the liberal cabal that dominates British politics tolerates its continued existence, not yet exercising its de facto power against the institution from which their own legal authority derives.

The late Queen commanded respect in  a way it would be difficult for any successor to inherit.  Her late Majesty represented a better Britain of morals, manners, duty and faith.  However much the British declined in terms of their character throughout the Queen’s reign, people still found that they were somehow moved to respect their monarch.  Now since the passing of the Queen, the new King has found himself subjected to disgraceful acts of disrespect such as eggs being thrown as missiles.

It might be said that by entering the fray of public debate the King lost the mystique of his mother, the Queen.  On the other hand HM’s human failings and weaknesses with regard to his marriage might have led to this new world where the unthinkable showing of disrespect to the Sovereign has become a reality.  More likely though, while they knew they could not disrespect Queen, the liberal Jacobin elites instead undermined her heir, playing as ever they do, the long game.  It therefore became acceptable to show disrespect to our new King.

Indeed with His Majesty’s advocacy of tradition in terms of architecture and farming he greatly angered those who run our society in accordance with their anti-human ideology of dissolution and fragmentation.  This is perhaps a reason they singled His Majesty out for attack when he was Prince of Wales.

It was not simply about the fact the Queen lived a life of duty and service, as much as that counted; Her Majesty represented a different ethos from another generation of respect and we all raised our standards with regard to Her Majesty.  Just as Prince Charles has become King though, it seems the liberal cabal has uses for him.  This is why they pulled His Majesty into opening the WEF meeting, playing on his genuine concern for the environment.  Now they find the Monarchy useful to their ends.

His Majesty must of course be careful in these febrile political times.  Too many associations with the globalist international elites will alienate the very part of his realm traditionally most loyal.  Meanwhile as soon as they find the institution of Monarchy no longer useful, and an ancient and traditional institution will always be perceived as a potential threat, the liberal elites will move against the Monarchy.

Nonetheless, it is too simplistic to link Charles III to the globalist and liberal Left just because he too places an emphasis on multiculturalism and the environment.  There are good traditionalist reasons for placing emphasis on such matters, indeed His Majesty’s reasons are Traditionalist with a capital T.  As demonstrated by this lecture https://youtu.be/qZ1sDmIQuAM King Charles is a reader of Rene Guenon, who placed an emphasis on the hierarchies of Tradition and also the destructiveness of the individualism and industrialisation of modernity upon our environment.  Contrasting the qualitative world of Tradition with the grasping greed of an individualistic and utilitarian mercantile culture that alienates men from the world with technology, Guenon himself advocated a harmonious relationship with the environment.

Furthermore, His Majesty’s respect for Islam and other faiths that are growing minorities in this country is not relativism, but again a Traditionalist perspective, seeing value in traditional faith in contrast to secularism and new cults.  His Majesty is being consistent with Guenon in respecting the traditions of each faith with longevity about them as manifestations of the perennial wisdom, the Sophia.  This is different from relativism, syncretism and theosophy on the one hand, but also different from the absolutist exclusivity of the Church, historically.  Personally the King seems particularly attracted to his late father’s faith of Orthodoxy.  His Majesty has visited Mount Athos in a personal capacity on more than one occasion.  One might draw an unlikely link with another Geunon reader, which the King would want to eschew – the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who argues that each religious tradition has its own validity in contrast to the universal claims of global liberalism.  The One Truth of Sophia manifests in the many ancient world faiths of traditional roots.

Nonetheless, there is a danger that the clever and manipulative elites will mislead the King into supporting the agenda of the WEF, which is an antithesis of genuine Tradition.  The King needs advisors who point out that the globalists through their organisations such as the UN, the WHO and the WEF are no friends to his subjects and wish to crush them under a new progressive technocracy through net zero policies, artificial intelligence and a hi-tech surveillance apparatus.  Look into their roots and they are a global network of Jacobins, no friends to Monarchy.  Sadly many of our own politicians are signed up to the agenda of the WEF.  His Majesty will not receive good advice on this.

Herein though does lie the danger of Perennialism itself, even in its more Traditionalist manifestation in Guenon’s writings.  There is even in Guenon a certain level of relativism and material for a globalist cabal to use, which cannot be found in the true tradition of the Church.  Much as Guenon rejected the theosophists and syncretists, his work can be used by the globalists too, as Orthodox icon carver and youtuber Jonathan Pageau has warned.  The technocratic globalists such as Huxley, were also Perennialists after all. 

It is for that reason we should all like Father Seraphim Rose, that American Orthodox monk who did so much for Russian Christians with his samizdat, take what is good from Rene Guenon and the Traditionalist school whilst recognising its limitations.  We should as Saint Basil the Great put it “plunder the Egyptians” of pagan wisdom.

            The King then as a Traditionalist will make a serious commitment to one faith and that will be Christian.  No doubt as it was for his mother, His Majesty will be profoundly affected by the sacramental mystery of the anointing at the Coronation.  From a Christian rather than a Perennialist Traditionalist faith, we should welcome the King’s philosophical seriousness about faith and commitment to one particular tradition.  We like the King must also not fall into the trap of the Globalists and turn against Monarchy, because for a period they might be able to manipulate his well-meaning intentions.

            I began this blog with an article about the importance of the coronation and its link to our Christian faith some years ago.  The anointing is of central importance.  When that takes place we can pray that God will work His grace upon His Majesty and protect him from the malign influence of the Globalists.  Whatever our concerns about the tentacles of the WEF - for how many of our friends and family have fallen under the spell of their ideology? -we should celebrate with love and joy this coronation.  Together as His Majesty’s Loyal Subjects, we should cry :  God save the King!

An Orthodox Englishman

 When this blog was commenced, the name chosen for it was “ a voice from the shires”.  This seemed most apposite given the focus of the blog was to promote a rural, royalist and sacramental, spiritual argument for English, even British, culture and tradition.

The mystical and Christian meaning of the Monarchy, the spiritual aspect of tradition, the sacred value of English countryside in our identity were of central importance and of concern to the blog in terms of arguing for their protection. There was an underlying Burkean perspective that set the paradigm and perspective of the blog.  This was the more neoplatonic and mystical side of Burke combined with his practical conservatism, as opposed to his more Whiggish elements.  The Burke who won over Wordsworth to conservatism, not the Burke who was himself won over by Adam Smith’s liberal economics.

A key turning point in my thinking was expressed in a blog I entitled A Orthodox Voice in a Western Wildnerness.  https://avoicefromtheshires.blogspot.com/2014/01/an-orthodox-voice-in-western-wilderness.html

Having been an advocate of the West, concerned about the encroachment of political Islam, arguing for the open society, as per the content of many of my early blogs, I was becoming increasingly alienated from the secularising and reductive spirit of Western liberalism very evident as imposed on other countries via our foreign policy and direct violence.  I began to notice that much of our foreign policy was a manifestation of this reductive universalism that wants to flatten out the world as a bleak wasteland of secularism and rational choice theory.  People will be nothing more than individuals, voters and consumers determined by their most petty passions.

In the particular blog mentioned above I applied Burke’s concept of wisdom of the ancestors to Church dogma and the role of the Church Fathers.  This inevitably put me in the camp of Orthodox theology, as contrasted against the individualism of Protestant interpretation of Scripture and the Roman Catholic idea of unilateral Papal infallibility unrestrained by Patristic Tradition.  Of course there was still a long way for me to go, especially in a spritiual rather than cerebral sense.

My interest in the mystical and spiritual aspect of our Monarchist and Christian constitution inevitably led to the recognition of a type of Byzantine idea of Symphonia that the British constitution strove for, in opposition to all the Victorian liberal constitutionalists from Bagehot to Dicey.  The sacramental nature of the mystery of the Coronation is of course rooted in Orthodox belief that is still there, hidden in the mists of our Orthodox past.  Encounters with British Orthodoxy helped me to understand that a rediscovery of our Orthodox past reconnects us with our mystical monarchy and our mystical countryside – but this is long-forgotten, written out of the Whig history.  Now forgotten it was  connected to our woods and sacred shrines long before 1066 and the arrival of schismatic Roman Catholicism with the Norman conquerors.

It was Constantinople not Rome that the Anglo Saxon aristocracy sort refuge.

With the Normans came  Anselm’s  theory of atonement that drastically distorted Christian understanding of the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection, further solidifying the Great Schism.  This bargaining for eternal life and appeasing a vengeful God sank deep into the Western consciousness, combined unhealthily with Saint Augustine’s emphasis on Original Sin.

The Normans, those rootless marauders, who in Southern Europe would fight the Christian Empire in Sicily were content with a feudal God and a rationalistic faith.   

With our ancient Monarchy, preceding the Conquest, there has been an ongoing sense that there is something deeply rooted in the English past that is very different from the theologies and philosophies imposed by the post-Conquest aristocracy.  Not only did Norman England give Anselm a platform for his heresies, but it was also the home for the most damaging philosophy arguably in the West – the reductive nominalism of William of Ockham.  Somehow though the sense has remained that England contains a deep spiritual mystery far removed from Occamite nominalism, naïve empiricism, Hobbesian or Lockean liberalism and reductive and dehumanising utilitarianism.  That mystery is symbolised in our Monarchy in a very Orthodox sense and yet the Monarchy has also become a weapon of the veiled republic of the liberal secularists and nominalists.  This conflict is reaching its height with the coming coronation of a personally spiritual King linked to Orthodoxy, but also ideologically under the influence of the Globalist WEF.

There is a deep contradiction in England and it is contended here that it is because of the spiritual alienation from the Orthodox Church after the Conquest.  We have lived with a continuous tension between a knowing and worldly “realism” that reduces all to a worldly common-sense alienating us further from the spiritual life, tradition in a mystical sense, and from holistic existence and on the other hand authentic Christian tradition.  In accepting the Conquest perhaps the English have adopted a certain fatalism to a materialistic existence where the paradigm is essentially reductive.  In accepting their subjugation a deep cynicism has resulted.  But we know there was something more in our past, when we were still part of the Orthodox communion.

The Sixteenth Century break with Rome might have seemed like an attempt to rediscover the past – but the sacred objects of England were systematically destroyed, the shrines desecrated and an even more barren and reductive theology came to dominate, finally manifesting in regicide after a hundred years.  As the Pilgrimage of Grace showed, the ordinary people still placed value on the old faith.  While that faith came to be identified with Roman Catholicism, this was a striving back towards something yet more ancient.

We see this authentic striving in our country misdirected due to lack of knowledge.  People seek not Orthodoxy, but a pre-Christian paganism linked to our woods and fields.  Everyone knows there is something amiss, but not what is missing and instead people fall into a shallow and sentimental new -age paganism as an alternative to the continued propaganda of the world now promoted by the likes of Richard Dawkins, a man rooted in the world and establishment of the power of the Conquest.

It is in figures such as C S Lewis, in his Anglicanism, even Tolkien and Chesterton in their English Catholicism, Philip Sherrard, who perhaps like our new King flirted a little too much with Perennialism, and of course Kallistos Ware, that Oxford convert, author and bishop who embodies a certain familiar Englishness, and yet is valued and held in the highest regard throughout the Orthodox world – so that at his funeral in England, Moscow and Constantinople were united again despite the geopolitical crisis over Ukraine.

We all have a sense that there is something in our English past we have lost contact with.  While the Sophists, economists and calculators along with neocon warmongers and Atlanticists, the economic and social neoliberals are the voice of the British State, we know intuitively that the English spirit is something far contrary to this. 

It was in part through applying Burke in a way he could not have imagined that it was possible for me to understand the coherence and power of the ancient faith, the apostolic faith from Christ’s disciples in an unbroken line through the Fathers to the Church of today.  There was much more to discover in a spiritual rather than rationalist way.  While discovering the Orthodox faith has opened the doors of Russian and Greek culture, it has also meant a deeper and fuller understanding of what it really means to be English and to belong to “this sceptred isle”, this truly Christian country underneath all the economic and social liberalism, the materialism, the secularisation, the bureaucracy and the love of Mammon.  The spirit of Orthodoxy is still here, if we only look for it and that starts with a recognition that Englishness is not to be found in the utilitarians, the free-marketeers, the liberals, the atheists, the nominalists, those who have accommodated themselves to the catastrophe of the Conquest and the consequent cynicism in high places that results from authority being seized a thousand years ago with a Nietzschean will to power, against the spirit of the Beatitudes and in alienation from the Church, the authentic Church – the Orthodox Church.  The real counter-revolution is not in political activity, it is in rediscovering our own ancient connection to the Orthodox Church.  I have done so by joining the Orthodox Church and specifically the Moscow Patriarchate, which has recently recognised the ancient saints of this island before the Great Schism.  It will seem strange to many, but I have rediscovered the faith of my forefathers through Russia.