tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33017654073153863722024-03-28T22:38:49.176+00:00A voice from the ShiresA theological and political blog from an Orthodox and High Tory perspective by Matthew GrovesUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger100125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-10878398231001511662024-03-28T22:06:00.011+00:002024-03-28T22:38:17.065+00:00Person-centred economics<p> The word economy is etymologically related to the word Oeconomia in the Orthodox Church. Oeconomia refers to the Church avoiding legalism out of love. It is an allowance without compromising dogma. Such an approach is very much in line with how Christ would school the Pharisees and Sadducees against their rigid legalism. It seems strange then that this word should be related to the "dismal science" of economics, as Carlyle described it, in the sense of theory about the wealth of nations.</p><p>What has happened to economics as a theory, all the way back to Adam Smith and Ricardo, was that it became about the generation of material wealth rather than the management of the household of the nation in which the person was placed at the centre. In England and the rest of Great Britain industrialisation, free trade, division of labour did indeed lead to increasing wealth, but a diminished existence for many human beings. While technology and wealth improved living standards in material terms, the spiritual life of the nation's families were much diminished. </p><p>Theoretically the Marxist revolutions in the Russian and Chinese Empires were a reaction against capitalist industrialisation, but these countries' economies were only beginning down that road as they remained largely agrarian. Marx's positivist dialectical materialism was proved false. Nonetheless the Communist regimes were just as much about industrialisation and economic growth as capitalism. </p><p>A crisis of capitalism occurred with the Wall Street crash in 1929 and the Great Depression of the thirties. An alternative economics emerged with the so-called "Third Way", led in political terms by former Marxist Mussolini. This was about freeing countries from the power of the banking sector and promoting the national interests rather than the interests of global capital. With the rise of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust this alternative was seriously tarnished. The Post-War Bretton Woods settlement saw the re-emergence of the power of the international banking sector, but tempered to allow a level of socialist mitigation of the full force of the market. This system itself led to government debt causing inflation that soon seemed unsustainable, A return to the economic orthodoxies of liberalism in the West re-emerged with President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher - paying off government debt, selling off state industries, free trade and de-regulated stock markets.</p><p>The neoliberal revolution led to a global economics, the strengthening of global corporations over sovereign nations, and open borders in terms of both trade and free movement of peoples. An alternative form of liberal capitalism, aiming to ensure its long term survival emerged with the Clintons, Blair and the global institutions of the post war years and a newly invigorated World Economic Forum with the concept of stakeholder capitalism. In domestic politics New Labour even adopted the name of the Fascists' economics - the Third Way,</p><p>Along with open borders, nudge manipulation, the political monitoring via ever-more sophisticated technology, a deep suspicion has emerged on the eclectic politics of the so-called Right, from libertarians to traditionalists. This led to the election of Trump in the States and the vote by the UK to leave the European Union. The vote from the people was for a more communitarian politics that protected national sovereignty, identity, culture and traditions. In Britain the neoliberal Right has seized control of the meaning of Brexit as the UK becoming a Singapore of the West, with open borders, no national identity. and uprooting of community - Britannia not a rescued maiden, but a whore open to all-comers.</p><p>In a sense we are no further on than we were with the Industrial Revolution and the end of the agrarian culture of our country. There is a very simple reason for this - it is that economics for centuries has been centred on ideas other than the human person. Economics has been about free trade, individualism, industrialisation, class conflict, economic growth; never has it considered the human person and his flourishing to be the key goal of economics. Instead the person must be sacrificed for the cause of economic growth, whether in the free economy or the command economy.</p><p>Today as a result, we find people are replaced by artificial intelligence, economic demands cause brain drains in poor countries and the dilution and loss of cultural identity in first world countries through mass economic migration. Everything follows the principle of economic growth, compound growth in fact. As a result the person gets lost.</p><p>The person is not the same as an individual. From the Latin for indivisible the individual is the unit of liberal economics and rational choice theory. The person is by contrast relational and embedded and spiritual. Compound growth and open borders take no account of the meaning of what it is to be a person. Industries disappear destabilising communities. And most of all the all-pervasive focus on filthy lucre kills spirituality and rooted community.</p><p> In 2016 both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, ironically capitalists through and through, seemed to touch on this. Trump recognised that jobs flowing abroad and migrants flowing in was destabilising the identity of the nation necessary for the embeddedness of the human person. Nigel Farage raised immigration frequently in the Brexit referendum because as he made clear identity is about more than economic growth.</p><p>Nonetheless, without the intellectual tradition you can only expect political leaders to go so far. Yes Steve Bannon read Evola and Guenon, but there is a deeper and more Christian "Third Way". It can be found in the writings of an economist like E F Schumacher, with his "Small is Beautiful" and " A Guide for the Perplexed" and even in the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII "Rerum Novarum" -1891. It can also be found in the writings of G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who worked out the implications of the Papal encyclical.</p><p>Distributism was the theory and it was based around the idea of private ownership of small property, of a large enough size to ensure self reliance and independence. Such an idea would terrify the banks and the capitalists of course, just as much as those socialists wanting to abolish private property and make everyone equal i.e. the same.</p><p>The point here is that, not being financed by big money, a good idea went to waste. Distributism might not be the total answer, but the point was that it proposed making the human person, made in the image of God the centre of the economy, rather than growth, capital or even the proletariat. </p><p>The idea did not fail because it was tried and failed, it was never tried, to misquote Chesterton himself. The powerful banking interests in the West did not want such an idea to develop and had it ever reached Soviet Russia it would have been squashed. That is because for all their superficial differences, Capitalism and Communism are creatures of the Enlightenment and they have forgotten that Man is made in the image of God and that Man not some other concept should be at the centre.</p><p>The Enlightenment itself was a project of vested interest. Its hatred of the ancien regime was largely because the wealth on which the new thinkers lived was stolen from the Church during the Reformation. There was a guilt that required them to destroy the ancien regime altogether and paint what had come before as benighted and savage. Hence the name Enlightenment of course.</p><p>The core intellectual goal of the Enlightenment was to break Man down and disconnect him from his God. Man became a unit for the liberal order that the Enlightenment led to. For all its talk of the sanctity of the individual, he was an atomised thing and was to become the very victim of anomie that Durkheim described. When we lost our sense of the person as the image of God, we lost a sense of Man as relational, embedded with roots and looking up to the heavenly realm. Without roots or telos men became mere workers, mere consumers, living under the enslavement not only of the boss or the bureaucrat, but his passions that the economic system fosters.</p><p>There is much talk of re-enchantment currently. Hand in hand with that, if it succeeds, must come a new understanding of the economy as a person-centred system, not waylaid by other targets that diminish the human being who is a person and is made in the image of God. </p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-46321341232233968052024-03-21T21:20:00.017+00:002024-03-21T22:10:47.088+00:00Diversity is our Decay<p> "Diversity is our strength" is a shibboleth parroted by our careerist and pusillanimous politicians and enforced by human resources departments throughout the West. A whole legal framework of human rights, not so much codifying inherited civic rights as enforcing an ideology of diversity has binding power throughout the West. Diversity and its corollary, inclusivity were cited as the justification for perpetuating the war in the Donbas (despite the key diverse idols of homosexuality and abortion being legal in the Russian Federation). </p><p>In terms of the Post-War paradigm being predicated on anti-authoritarianism and imposed unity, this obsession with diversity makes some sense. Of course, the contradiction is diversity of opinion is not permitted, because then the natural perspective embodied throughout the rest of the world and throughout the history of the whole world including the West, would contradict today's mantras of wokeism.</p><p>Indeed, the modern West's obsession with individualistic diversity is exceptional in the sense of being an aberration, with no historical equivalent. It is contingent upon our Christian culture, while being a perversion and twisting of that inheritance. For most of mankind's existence the question has not been how to enable and protect diversity, but how to return to holistic unity. From Plato to Eastern spirituality, we have understood diversity and idiosyncrasy to be a fracturing of a holy unity to which we strive to return as the telos of Mankind.</p><p>The Russian philosopher who finally became an Orthodox monk, Konstantin Leontiev, known as the Christian Nietzsche provided a powerful symbol of the body politick's progress towards individual diversity as being akin to the decay of a corpse that fragments and breaks up into individual pieces. This fragmentation can be contrasted with the ideal put forward by French Integralist Charles Maurras for whom a return to the Catholic Church and the Monarchy would re-integrate French society unifying it and overcoming the disintegration set in train by the Jacobin revolution.</p><p>Nonetheless, there is a connection between the disintegration into atomised individualism, where people celebrate their idiosyncratic enslavement to their passions and the Church. It is though a connection between Orthodoxy and a derivative heresy. Christian theology of the person and liberal individualism are linked in the same way as Orthodox teaching on the Word made flesh is to Arianism.</p><p>Diversity as an idea stems from liberal individualism, itself a heretical derivative from Man as the image of God, the Imago Dei. We must understand here that the Christian faith answered the dilemma of Greek philosophy - how to solve the problem of the One and the Many. For most schools of classical thought the break up from unity into diverse particulars was seen as a fall and a disintegration. The Church Fathers, in particular Saint Maximus the Confessor were able to provide the answer to this age-old dilemma and the answer lay in Christ.</p><p>In His Incarnation Christ joins the transcendent and the immanent, the universal and the particular, the One and the Many, God and Man. As Saint Athanasius and Saint Irenaeus put it - God became man that Men might become gods. This intertwining without loss of identity between Christ's two natures - divine and human - was further elucidated by Saint Gregory of Palamas's distinction between Divine Energies and Essence. The essence of the divine and the human are not confused, but distinct for we are being joined in energies not substance or essence. Thus identity is retained as in love and sexual union.</p><p>Furthermore, the Church revealed that God was not an impersonal One as the Neoplatonists held into which we would be absorbed and dissolved, losing out identity. God is rather Three Persons in One God, three hypostases and one substance. This then is the solution to the Greek problem of the One and the Many and it is found in personhood. We are not simply reabsorbed into a Platonic One, but retain our identities in relationship with the Triune God.</p><p>That personhood is expressed through relationship, just as the Trinity is three divine Persons in One. It is not the degraded atomisation into individualism. And that personhood in Man has a telos, to participate in the Divine, growing into the full stature of Christ.</p><p>The sanctity of personhood and freedom have been developed by contemporary Orthodox theologians such as Vladimir Lossky and Christos Yannaras. Our telos is Christ, but it is manifested in our irreplaceability and importantly this irreplaceability of our personhood is expressed through freedom from the passions.</p><p>Yes it rests on freedom, because we can only authentically grow into Christ if we choose that path - but it is not freedom to be enslaved to the passions. This is why Western churches have gone so awry - in their emphasis on inclusivity they say we accept you as you are, whatever passions have enslaved you. God wants the best for us and will not leave us trapped in our passions. True identity is unique and irreplaceable, but it is in the fulfilment of our telos to attain the likeness of the divine. We all start as the imago Dei but having lost the likeness, but our fallen state is put right by attaining likeness though theosis or sanctification. This is full freedom, not falling short through sin into enslavement to the passions, be that avarice and greed or promiscuity or homosexuality, so promoted by the Western elites. </p><p>The modern West by contrast misunderstands freedom as licence and acquisition of wealth. Avarice and sexual perversions that distort the image of God in us are celebrated as freedom. </p><p>The Western idea of freedom and rights is a distorted degradation of Christian freedom and personhood. Unlike the Church Fathers modern ideas are not derived from a high metaphysical principle such as the Trinity and the hypostases. Enlightenment philosophers simply exaggerated the idea beyond what was justified by metaphysics. Freedom and the sanctity of the person are indeed sacred principles, but there is no case for putting forward atomised individualism, enslavement to passions or diversity as principles. They are heretical claims based on nothing more than thin air. The Church made clear personhood was contingent on the Trinity and that personality could be retained in returning to our Creator as established through Christ's two natures. The only reason these ideas were developed further into a fragmentary individualism was because of the development of a profound nihilism that ignored the transcendent justification for what we hold dear about mankind. </p><p>And so we must rediscover that the true meaning of freedom is not in what is really the enslavement of "sodomy and usury" celebrated by our corrupt elites, but in the freedom to grow into the "full stature of Christ" through our unique irreplaceability when we are freed from the passions and sin. </p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-14856928542770119412024-02-29T17:42:00.020+00:002024-02-29T18:37:49.564+00:00Alchemy or Theosis - different paths to different illuminations<p> In the current time, despite the ever-increasing attractiveness of the New Age, the occult and the Eastern religions, we tend to have a materialist outlook. Even our dabbling in the occult or other religions are seen more as useful and about self-fufilment rather than worship. This is to be contrasted with true religion, founded on humility before the Divine. </p><p>It is somewhat counter-intuitive to link dry and objective science with anything mystical, but science originated in the esoteric worlds of alchemy and the occult. Newton was fascinated by occult ideas and early chemistry sprang from esoteric alchemy. Indeed, scratch the surface a little and we find the same underlying desire in both the occult and the scientific mindset - the grasping of power to manipulate the world. Nature is then, in Heideggerian terms, standing reserve and we impose our will on it to exploit it from a position of Machenschaft.</p><p>Today we see a re-emergence of pseudo religious ideas in the manifestation of singularity and the technicians' belief in immortality through technology - the creation of own own hands that seems to be controlling us and that we worship.</p><p>In today's world of objective and rationalist science we see the reappearance of old and esoteric beliefs that are premised on attaining power, immortality and deification through our own manipulative efforts. It might seem incongruous, but what manifests in both magic and science was there from the beginning, - the grasping at the fruit of knowledge, contrary to God's plan for his naive and immature creation, Man.</p><p>Such a spirit underpinned many of the pagan rites of initiation whether in the tradition of Mithras or Pythagoras. The Neoplatonists made use of theurgy, which was a formulaic way of achieving deification. By using certain incantations to invoke the divine, one is entering magical practice and thereby the manipulation of the divine or nature to achieve one's ends. And these same processes as used in magic and theurgy, whether neoplatonic or alchemist, are in fact a form of techne - the manipulation of the world for own own ends and the attainment of power over God or the cosmos.</p><p>From the perspective of faithful humility the praxis of magic, theurgy, alchemy, science and technology are forms of manipulation and domination, therefore being regarded to an extent as Luciferian. Despite false dichotomies presented today, from the perspective that matters, one of humility, these different forms of praxis are all linked to the Fall - they are all grasping attempts at manipulation.</p><p>Humility is then the key distinction from these manipulative forms of praxis. How we should have acted in the Garden was through a spirit of humility, not through pride attempting to seize power to achieve eternal life and knowledge disregarding our Creator.</p><p>There is a way to deification and it is not through the self realisation of alchemic or occult theurgies. It is in a spirit of humility and faithful trust expressed in prayer. Saint Seraphim of Sarov spoke of acquisition of the Holy Spirit as achieved by a life of Christian virtues. Primarily the grace of the Holy Spirit is attained through prayer. Prayer is the act of asking, not grasping and to ask is to act in the spirit of humility and trust.</p><p>To attain theosis the Fathers teach is to be deified. And the means is a life of Christian virtue and prayer, The possibility of acquiring the Holy Spirit is only possible because "God became Man that men might become gods" as both Saint Irenaeus of Lyons and Saint Athanasius, the great opponent of Arianism, said.</p><p>What this means is that any dichotomy between technology and the occult or chemistry and alchemy is false if the scientific work is in the spirit of pride, defiance and acquisitiveness. If we are grasping at power to be like gods, while bypassing God, be that through creating artificial intelligence, developing the atom bomb or engaging in New-Age meditation, we are replaying the story of the Fall from the Garden. Furthermore, we are mistaken if we attempt to separate the cold rationalism of science from the esoteric world of magic and the occult. These are different sides of the same coin when science becomes scientism and both have their origin in Luciferian pride, and are the ensnaring by Lucifer the beautiful evening star who distracts us from the Father of Lights and our salvation. </p><p> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-79880018335561051802024-02-23T20:27:00.018+00:002024-02-29T18:19:10.538+00:00The Mean Old Scrooge of Philosophy<p> Parsimony is not considered a virtue. We look upon those who exhibit this trait as mean, grasping, miserly and lacking in generosity or the milk of human kindness. And yet in the world of intellectual discourse we are encouraged to be mean and unrelenting. The intellectual rule in question is quite explicit as to the sentiment that motivates it - I mean the rule of ontological parsimony.</p><p>William of Ockham, that medieval thinker who struck a blow against philosophical realism, contrived a methodology that allowed little to no room to explain much of what the human being intuits and indeed little room for that which gives life and the cosmos meaning.</p><p>William of Ockham is famous colloquially for Ockham's razor, by which is of course meant cutting away all complicated reasons and looking to the simplest explanation as the most likely. As a rule of thumb through life it works fairly well in limiting overly speculative and unsupported claims about things we come across in life. It is simple to regard crop circles as a consequence of something manmade, be that farm equipment or a hoax, rather than assuming the patterns in the field are the consequence of extra-terrestrial activity.</p><p>Importantly, and what is sometimes forgotten is that Ockham's razor is only claiming that the simpler explanation is more likely, not that a more complicated explanation is proved as impossible. Ockham's razor is like a working solution until more is known and it cannot rule out conclusively a more complicated explanation.</p><p>The idea of ontological parsimony is closely related, but more specific to philosophy and theology. It is a rule of ontology that we are not justified in making speculative claims about ontology. From Ockham's point of view as an example, Platonic forms violate ontological parsimony. While Plato is logically coherent, he is for Ockham going too far ontologically in relying on forms outside space and time to account for the world of becoming and imperfection. Essentially what is meant by ontological parsimony is that ontological entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. Thus if the world can be explained materially, then it is not necessary to rely on immaterial explanations be that Platonic forms, God or anything from outside space and time. The more ontological claims you make the more likely you are to make a slip.</p><p>Now in modern Western thought, right down to the Man on the Clapham Omnibus, this is considered a holy and inviolable law. That though misses the point. The rule cannot prove that more ontological layers to a theory are bound to be false, only that you require more justifications for more ontological layers and this need can be avoided by not making any extra ontological claims beyond those absolutely necessary. A frugal and somewhat pusillanimous approach indeed that never actually proves or claims to prove new or speculative ontological claims are by necessity false; only that there is a greater need for justification.</p><p>As a result of the way this frugality of thought has seeped into our culture, atheism seems correct because it rules out all ontological claims. There may though be justifications for metaphysical and theistic claims bar the need to be an ontological necessity.</p><p>This parsimonious way of thinking means there is an inherent bias towards a simpler theory such as Darwin's idea of evolution because it does not need to rely on any greater ontological claims. But there may be very good reasons for giving credence to more ontological claims than those that are only strictly necessary.</p><p>This parsimony really is a frugal meanness of thought that impoverishes our intellectual realm in the West. If there is no ontological realism, by which is meant that certain universal or metaphysical concepts are considered real, we lose much that enriches life - the Good, the True the Beautiful.</p><p>Relying on a purely material explanation of reality gives us a very simple philosophy, but it is impoverished and means we must omit much that we intuit is real and not simply real on the periphery of reality, but central - be that ethics, the soul, the divine, love, even logic..</p><p>And so by adopting a philosophically frugal methodology we are bound also to adopt an impoverished Weltanschauung. We must rule out much of value, not because we have proved it as non-existent, but because we will only allow the most narrow of reasons to explain the world. But while this approach means less risk and less need for complicated ontology, it is equally possible that the cosmos is not at all simple, but baroque and beautifully ornate. The methodology is not proof in itself of a minimalist reality.</p><p>There are other reasons to think philosophical realism is justified. Indeed it is the opposite thinking to Ockhamite parsimony. A more generous way of thinking allows for us to give serious weight to immaterial but highly important ideas that we live by - love, God, beauty. </p><p>Evolution is often referred to as a beautiful theory, but that is because of its simplicity. There are other forms of beauty than minimalism and the human soul often craves a more intricate and ornate beauty. Minimalism is not necessarily superior to the Gothic or the Baroque.</p><p>If we look at the Church Councils and the Fathers they used a different methodology. For the Fathers it was what ensured theological concepts were coherent and non-contradictory that made up the methodology. Again there was a form of minimalism, in that it was not thought wise to over-dogmatise. Church Tradition was considered sufficient on the whole unless a heresy arose and only then would it be necessary to theologise on dogma. This thought is in the opposite sprit to the mean frugality of Ockham. Instead it gave liberal space to Tradition and personal spirituality unrestricted by dogma unless strictly necessary to avoid heresy. And so Patristics is generous not mean. </p><p>And Ockhamite parsimony really is mean spiritually. There is an ethical question about adopting a methodology that dismisses and derides the most precious aspects of being human, cutting us off like a crusty old miser, a Gradgrind, from the Good, the True, the Beautiful - the Transcendent.</p><p>Despite the way ontological parsimony and Ockham's razor permeate our way of thinking in the West at every level of society, making us a materialistic culture facing a meaning crisis, there are other methodologies that are more humane and generous that give credibility to all that the human soul intuits, giving a philosophical and theological structure through Scripture, testimonies, Councils and canons that protect this intuition from solipsism on the one hand and from a reductive ontology on the other.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-47575722806664801792024-02-19T21:41:00.018+00:002024-02-29T16:40:18.834+00:00Autocracy and Surrogate Imperators<p>With the recent death in prison of Alexey Navalny, the Russian politician opposed to President Putin, there has been much media attention given to what is happening; far more than that given to the late Gonzalo Lira, American citizen and critic of Zelensky, who died in similarly suspicious circumstances in a Ukrainian gaol a few weeks before. Russia is being contrasted as an autocratic regime in opposition to the enlightened democracies of the West. This promotion of the West, predicated on human rights and liberalism is still assumed to be the better system, despite protesting farmers, the yellow vests and in America a political divide too deep to be able to envision an American common weal.</p><p>These abstract human rights that the West sees as its foundation have become the only way to value human beings. In contrast religious faith did not conceive of abstract rights to be able to live a certain way or do certain things, it thought rather that man's sanctity lay in being created in the image and likeness of God. This view of human nature encompassed freedom, creativity and the sanctity of life, but remained categorically different from the abstract and individualistic idea of human rights. It gave men a telos of virtue. This perspective also honoured the Emperor, pagan as well as Christian, persecutor of the Church as well as the Christian Basileus.</p><p>In Dante's great work, Brutus as the betrayer of the emperor is in the very depths of Hell alongside Judas, the traitor to Christ. The Emperor, as the Pauline epistles make clear, is to be honoured not for his individual virtues, but by dint of his role. In the second epistle to the Thessalonians, Chapter Two, verse six, Saint Paul gives a clear explanation of the role of the Emperor. And this was written centuries before the Edict of Milan:</p><p>"And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time."</p><p>The Church Fathers understood that the Emperor withholds the coming antichrist who will subvert all order and seemliness. It is impossible that Saint Paul regarded the dissolute personality of Caesar Nero as good, but his role as Emperor has a function in Christian eschatology. It is for this reason that Saint John of Shanghai understood that the regicide of the Tsar, Passion Bearer and New Martyr Nichols II meant there was no one to hold back the coming antichrist in these last days.</p><p>What are we to understand from this? We see in the West much that is promoted in the name of freedom and rights that is very much in the sprit of Sodom and Gomorrah. We see that in Western democracies today all is subverted in a post-modern celebration of degeneracy, particularly unseemly sexual degeneracy. </p><p>Meanwhile citizens from those countries deemed an alliance of evil often have not lost touch with religious faith, high literature and art, philosophical thinking and something even more significant - they, the citizens have not lost a certain decorous innocence. Whatever the accusations of corruption and oppression we in the West throw at Iran or Russia (and these are two very different countries), their people on the whole retain a dignity that people in the West have lost. They have not lost their intelligence or virtue on the whole. While we in the West see scenes of degradation of the human person celebrated as freedom, in other parts of the world they would still blush. We are somehow degraded by the celebration of the sexual passions in particular. it goes further though, there is disrespect for elders, for figures of authority, we mock that which is sacred and celebrate that which is degrading of the human body. Saint Peter in his second Epistle wrote of such a type of person:</p><p> "But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government. Presumptious are they, selfwilled, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignitaries"</p><p>Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans strongly affirms monarchical rule:</p><p>"For he is a minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil."</p><p>And the Church held to this throughout the persecution by the Empire, only resisting the Emperor on matters of religious faith. Putting to one side the virtues and sins of emperors throughout history for the moment, it is clear that to be a rebel against ordained authority one is stepping into a path that also entails moral dissolution. Note that those who oppose Putin, go by names such as "Pussy Riot" and many wave the flag of Western sexual liberation - the six coloured flag of LGBT. The concept of human rights often seems a cover for living by the passions and rejecting virtue.</p><p>Being an obedient and orderly subject is part of the virtuous life. In the West, since the top-down revolution of the elites and their secret societies, overturning the order of Christendom and expressing oneself sexually is seen as liberation. It is by such a subverted and revolutionary ethos that we now live. The Jacobins run our political structure.</p><p>Elsewhere, in more autocratic countries, fallible men have taken absolute power to themselves. In a 2009 Russian film by Pavel Lungin, entitled Tsar, this very problem is confronted. The autocrat has become not dissolute but cruel and mad. His close friend and companion and Metropolitan of Moscow, later to be canonised as Saint Philip of Moscow confronts and chastises this cruel Tsar, Ivan IV, known with the epithet Grozny or Terrible. As a Christian Philip cannot stop by and watch the wanton cruelty meted out upon Tsar Ivan's innocent subjects. In the end Philip himself is martyred, strangled to death by one of Ivan's henchmen. He though witnessed against the Emperor, the vicar of God. And mad as Tsar Ivan might have been, he began to build Moscow to be the Third Rome of Orthodox Christianity.</p><p>We therefore have a paradox - the Emperor there to safeguard the Christian world can himself become another Nero, And yet Paul wrote those words as Nero, who would put him to death reigned and terrorised Rome.</p><p>There is something deep here. If democracies subvert Tradition and order with their subversive human rights, the danger of arbitrary rule so despised by Anglo Saxon liberals still seems to hold as a criticism. Do Christians turn a blind eye to abuse of power?</p><p>Perhaps one way to understand it is that the Emperor fulfils his role insofar as he does not fall into sin himself. There is also a distinction between personal sin and being a public ruler, although usually private sins enter the public realm when an empire is ruled by a person rather than a constitution.</p><p>The Church though sees the bigger picture. With Saint Philip, in the tradition of Saint John the Forerunner, the Church challenges the ungodly exercise of power, but like Saints Paul and Peter the church recognises the sacred role of the Emperor and that for all the personal faults a personal ruler is superior to a constitutional republic - the system of deists and freemasons.</p><p>It is something to do with Monarchy that keeps countries from going down the road of abstract rights and maintaining personal relationships at the core of the polity. These personal relationships define the State as a family, rather than a constitutional system of rights and processes. With a monarch at the heart of the nation, the polity is not a codified document, but a family.</p><p>Today the post Soviet republics are not hereditary monarchies. They are ruled by presidents, but to a certain extent these presidents from Putin to Lukashenko are more like autocrats and whatever their personal faults and however much these faults creep into their public roles, they are withholding forces, restraining as Saint Paul would put it, the diabolical forces that so torment the West today.</p><p>What though is it that they protect? Is it really more precious than the West's human rights? It is a different culture, one of more restraint, innocence, decorum and intelligence. Each undemocratic regime can be held to account for abuses of power, for special favours to the members of the inner circle and to downright cruelty towards political prisoners. What though keeps support for a Putin or Lukashenko is the deep fear of a return to the times of chaos and foreign exploitation. In that sense what the West sees as an opposition leader can look more like a traitor, especially when funded by the very country that had engaged in the asset stripping in the nineties.</p><p>That though is not the most precious thing that is protected. In the West our culture has been so dumbed down that we are kept placated and stupid under the power of modern-day bread and circuses, be that football or reality television. We are detached from our high culture and our history. We have lost our identity. We have been manipulated so as not to be able to discern the most precious aspects of life. Swearing, promiscuity, sexual deviancy, disrespect for sacred things, blasphemy, disregard for the elderly, rejection of our culture have been normalised. However brutal some foreign despots their people still have access to their religion, their culture and their identity. This is not something to be lightly dismissed. It is striking that a Russian or Iranian is likely to be more cultured than a Westerner.</p><p>That though is not to mistake the image for the real thing. The undemocratic and anti- Western regimes all have their roots in revolution. They are not emperors in the real sense, the traditional sense of the hierarchical religious societies of Tradition. Instead they mimic their pre-revolutionary predecessors and there is a strange overlap between this return to Tradition and roots in the Marxist revolutions of recent history. </p><p>Nonetheless, it can be seen that those in authority in Orthodox countries particularly are resisting the cultural subversion that is turning the West mad, which is even becoming confused over gender. In that sense today's autocrats are restrainers of the worst excesses of the revolutionary West that has fallen prey first to Jacobins and rationalists and now to postmodernists and LGBT. In the East meanwhile there is an example of trusting in God to bless the people with a good king.</p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-66582123791093642412024-01-28T19:41:00.009+00:002024-01-28T23:02:53.087+00:00Singularity - Full Realisation of Man's Fall<p>The moment of singularity is when Artificial Intelligence will surpass human intelligence. To some this means the end or extinction of man, the Imago Dei, by his own idol. While Artificial Intelligence can only ever be complicated input and output and cannot possess consciousness in the of sense of Man as made with the divine spark of life, it can reach the ultimate stage of Gestell - humanity's enframement by the technology it created.</p><p>For a scientist such as Robert Kurzweil, captured by the work of his own mind and hands, this, like the Fruit in the Garden is the key to immortality. Such an attitude is rife in the tech world. It is no accident that Apple chose the symbol of a bitten fruit. From this perspective that human desire, rooted in pride, to know and achieve immortality through dominating Nature, subjecting the world to its will, can be traced from the temptation to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, through alchemy, occultism, Baconite science to splitting the atom, to Big Tech and now the push for singularity. </p><p>According to the reductive narrative of atheism, in its Promethean spirit, this is healthy rebellion against the arbitrary Patriarch God. We outwit the Divine decrees and achieve forbidden power, finally leading to immortality.</p><p>This is a misunderstanding of God and His love and benevolence. Adam was forbidden the fruit because in his undeveloped and naive state such knowledge in Eden would have brought about terror and disaster to mankind. Instead the Exile was to allow us to survive this disaster of our sin. The Exile leads to Christ and our redemption and immortality.</p><p>The pride of Satan was the cause of his rebellion and he appealed to our pride in our transgressions to achieve immortal life and power over Nature. We thereby in Heideggerian terms, treated Nature as standing reserve and became enframed by our technology - the work of our own artistry.</p><p>What is going wrong here in the vision of perpetual life in this realm of existence is what went wrong at the Fall,, whether you understand that story literally or symbolically. And it leads to death not life, enslavement to decay, not freedom. Our pride leads us to see Nature as something to manipulate whether by magic or science - the urge is the same to both practices. </p><p>And so, even if singularity means we can avoid death in this temporal realm, we will not be attaining the richness of eternal life with God. There is a fundamental and foundational mistake, indeed sin, in this attempt to seize the fruit of eternal life. We are going about it by grasping, not letting go.</p><p>From Christ's death on the Cross we see eternal life is achieved by relinquishng our control and smashing the idols we create, be they Moloch or Big Tech. That is not to say our creativity is wrong, for just as we are stewards of Creation, so we are made to be creative. It is rather the spirit in which we create. It is the Machenschaft Heidegger points to by falling into inauthenticity of Being and treating that over which we are stewards as standing reserve.</p><p>The spirit in which artificial intelligence is created is paradoxically both our own grasping at control and a surrender to the work of our own hands as a new god. Impatient for Moses to return from the mountain, we are building our golden calf.</p><p>Nonetheless, however far artificial intelligence develops as an input and output system, it remains only that. Only God breathes life into beings and only God creates consciousness. That is not to say that a level of sophistication and complexity that will exceed human rationality is impossible. Simply by dint of the complexity and the likely general nature of A.I.'s ability to process, in that level of intelligence it could exceed humanity and become more powerful in a technical sense. It could well be the Beast we must bear the mark of and bow down to worship. What A.I. will not have is the nous of which the Fathers speak, that enables us to participate in the Divine Energy of God and to be transformed from glory into glory as we participate in the divine - the Imago Dei recovering the likeness of God given at Creation and forfeited by Adam's attempt to force immortality by his own will and grasping. It is only by love and worship of the Divine source of love and goodness that eternal life is found. Eternal life is categorically and fundamentally different from the never-ending temporal existence the promoters of singularity lust after.</p><p>We may find ourselves ruled over by a diabolical Beast that makes its own image for us to bow down and worship, but we can resist the Mark, like the first martyrs in Rome. The never-ending life the singularists crave is that referred to in Revelation most likely:</p><p>"In those days men will seek death and will not find it."</p><p>If this sort of singularity is achieved by our mad scientists, it will be founded on something rotten that is the desire and lust to grasp at forbidden fruit and to usurp the natural order by defying God to achieve immortality.</p><p>Such an urge has been in us since the Fall. It is not the defiance of some arbitrary rule that we are demonstrating. There was nothing arbitrary about being forbidden to eat of the fruit. Instead the only way to reach eternal life is as the monks say- by dying ourselves. In that sense we must rather surrender our selfish and individualistic urge to self preservation and instead be moved by love - love of God and love of Man.</p><p>We are perhaps approaching another time of martyrdom where we will be called upon to give up on material life for God. If we can be merged into some Frankenstein abomination through singularity, it will be the decision we must make to turn away from this fake eternal life, just as the martyrs had to choose the lions of the Coliseum rather than deny Christ for their self preservation of this temporal existence. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-72323563301854095822024-01-20T14:36:00.012+00:002024-01-20T21:59:58.078+00:00Good Authoritarianism<p> What links the housing crisis in the UK to the Zionist bombing of civilians in Gaza? One might say it is because Western governments are under the control of global interests with their own agenda. Israel is an outpost of the global- liberal empire in the authoritarian and traditional Middle East. House prices in the UK are out of control, because homes in London have been turned into assets for foreign money (global interests again), thereby pricing people out of the market across the whole country as Londoners are forced out.</p><p>That may well be the case, but there is also an ideology that lies behind many of the crazy and inhumane policies implemented across what now seems a misnomer of the "free world". That ideology is not simply liberalism, but it is rather anti-authoritarianism. It is a belief that any measures that require the exercise of legitimate and moral authority or making judgments, is tantamount to Fascism. And closely linked to this anti-authoritarianism is the never-again human reaction to the horror of concentration camps in Central and Eastern Europe. This though seems to have been interpreted to give licence to Israel to enact slaughter on civilians in a horrifying way. This seems to be learning the wrong lesson from the Holocaust. What we can understand is that we are living in a post-war paradigm in which Israel, because of what happened under the Nazis, must always be protected and no policy domestically can be implemented that might uphold traditional values. It is a reaction manifesting as a paradigm of thought resulting from the narrative of the Second World War and what it was about.</p><p>The situation in Israel and Palestine is not the main focus of the 'blog, but like the preoccupation with liberal progressivism, it is indicative of how we only understand political problems through the lens of the Second World War, while giving no real weight to any other part of European history. It is of course understandable emotionally, given the proximity in time. The lesson of the Holocaust though is surely that mass slaughter of civilians is wrong, not that Israel must act with impunity. That though is another discussion. Here the focus is the narrowness of the Overton Window in terms of only liberal and progressive perspectives being permissible, despite such political views clearly leading us to moral and social disintegration. World War Two cannot explain the totality of politics or society.</p><p>Even the understanding of the Second World War is anachronistic and imposed retrospectively. The United Kingdom, at least in the understanding of the man on the Clapham Omnibus was a battle for national sovereignty not global liberal values. And the war was not so much a victory for the liberal democracies as it was a hard-won and bloody victory by the Stalinist USSR. The United Kingdom's sacrifice was real, but it turned us into a vassal of the United States, as the Suez Crisis was to demonstrate in our national humiliation.</p><p>We saw this post-war triumph of anti-authoritarianism in other fields of life than geopolitics. In the West's conservative movements, true conservatism and maintenance of traditional values and society were overthrown by the liberal ideology of the market and the atomistic individual. In fields such as psychology, which gained greatly in importance, there has been a clear anti-authoritarian and anti-traditional agenda - from Adorno's the Authoritarian Personality to the dominance of Freud's sex-obsessed reductionism. </p><p>Of great importance is the way that Adorno linked the traditional understanding of self restraint and virtues to Fascism. Much of the destruction of the innocence of youth is a result of his poisonous idea that sexual restraint led to the Fascist ideology. All of this was part of a pattern as the reaction against "third way" ideology, whether Fascism, Falange, or Nazi and its replacement with valueless and anti-tradition liberalism. Hence the destructive sexual and social revolutions of the 1960s, the cancer of which has gradually worked its way through all levels of Western society and culture. In art too we see the rejection of an authoritative standpoint of beauty to an abstracted modern art often simply trying to shock traditional attitudes long vanquished anyway. Even in post-war architecture we saw this revolution. People's living space was turned into the liberal onanism of destroying "authoritarian" values of architectural beauty and traditional civic space.</p><p>We must understand therefore that because of the Post-War paradigm, legitimate alternatives to the liberal degeneracy are always placed outside of the Overton Window, however legitimate the solutions presented might be. It is also telling that after decades of Cold War, still in the West "Fascist" is the political insult of choice.</p><p>The argument here is that paradigms though can be flawed and be based upon distorted understandings. For example, anyone who has read Max Picard's contemporary writings from the Third Reich can see that Nazism was not conservatism, but an avante garde movement, relying on practical methods of cutting edge technology to put forward a demotic and anti-traditional campaign. The ideology had its roots in radical German thought, not conservatism. Atheist Nietzsche, vegetarian Wagner and artistic Futurism were important influences on the European Radical Right of the twenties and thirties. Nazism was rejected by the revolutionary conservative movement, which also opposed the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic. </p><p>Today with economic crises, sexual libertinism and radical individualism we again seem to be in a Weimar situation. Ideas of personal virtue and collective tradition are considered Fascist. Meanwhile global finance seems to have captured the liberal democracies. It looks more like we are ruled from Davos not our own parliaments.</p><p>Western intellectuals so wedded to the post-War paradigm will have to accept that unless politics is to enter a downward spiral, that some authoritarian values are not only right in principle, but necessary for a functioning and healthy society. There are vested interests that would oppose a reassertion of traditional values. We see this every time any form of genuine conservatism gains traction. It has to be censored, proscribed and cancelled.</p><p>Nonetheless traditional values are vital and fundamental for a healthy commonwealth. We cannot continue to function as a random collection of atomistic individuals driven by our evermore degenerate passions. The consumer society only encourages people to be slaves to their appetites. This suits global capital and the corruptors of our society, but it will eventually destroy us.</p><p>Only a reassertion of collective traditional values can save us. Ideas of virtue-ethics, already being revived in philosophy, must enter the mainstream discourse. According to the corrupted language of our liberal politics any such solution will be dismissed as "fascist". The authority of parents, the Church, traditional and patriarchal figures are necessary to hold together our societies - but these are the very figures most attacked and maligned. We need an idea of the transcendent Telos of Man again, particularly in terms of personal virtues, stoicism and traditional gender roles. The paradigm within which currently we exist is not sustainable. To some it feels that our atomistic, avaricious and democratic system has already run its course, its fractures and frailties clearly exposed.</p><p>For millennia, European culture understood a higher and transcendent purpose for mankind. From Stoics to the early Christians civilisation was understood in terms of higher meaning. To reduce and to caricature human civilisation to the Nazism of the Third Reich is both ignorant and anarchic.</p><p>Unless the purpose of human nature and society is rediscovered, in terms of living for something more than appetites, having a clear identity nationally, in terms of building a traditional family to give purpose, having roots and a transcendent telos, then darker solutions will beckon. Just as the dissoluteness of the Weimar Republic was fertile ground for the dark paganism of Nazism, we too may be at risk unless we start to serve the interests of human beings rather than the interests of global finance that lead us to ever increased atomisation. </p><p>There is then a lesson from World War Two after all. It is not the one usually drawn and repeated almost like propaganda. A lesson that can be drawn is that unless the moral degeneracy of today's Weimars and the impact on ordinary people of the global financial elites are not mitigated then we risk an extreme reaction. Better to have a restoration of traditional authority before something more radical emerges in reaction unconstrained by our Christian heritage and ethos.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-23449117809624384342024-01-08T20:08:00.016+00:002024-01-08T20:25:42.206+00:00Consequences of Conquest<p> All countries have their fault-lines, but there is perhaps something unique about the tensions in English society. The higher society, the elite, has a contempt for its culture and heritage. So much so that to prove one's high status it makes sense to treat one's national identity with contempt. It is almost the test for belonging to the higher status class to demonstrate what would now be termed "woke" opinions. Nonetheless, this is a longstanding trait in the English national character. Nowhere was this unique aspect of our character more clearly illustrated in contemporary times than during and in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum. A referendum on national sovereignty in large part split down lines of class. The less-educated, the more poorly paid, those who often would have voted for the Left, backed national independence, demonstrating a belief in their country. Meanwhile, as if to show their social status the upper middle-classes on the whole, in attempting to demonstrate their lack of attachment to national identity, voted against national sovereignty and looked with contempt upon the honest patriotism of those they saw as being of a lower social status. Being unpatriotic and regarding one's compatriots with contempt was a way to indicate high social status.</p><p>The Brexit referendum merely highlighted in sharp relief a longstanding national tension. And where did it originate? So deep in the metaphorical DNA is this trait and tension that we must look far back. Perhaps Sir Walter Scott, highlighting the deep division in his novel Ivanhoe, with the outside perspective of a Scot reached the heart of the matter - the divisions left by the Conquest. He pointed to how words to describe livestock are English, while words describing the meat itself are French - demonstrating the way the conquered English serve the invading French. </p><p>Has anything really changed? Many of the most powerful families in the country tend to be from the Conquest and many of these elite have contempt for our national identity, focusing instead upon cosmopolitanism, open borders, and destructive liberal social reforms that are killing the country demographically. Many of the powerful must have a deep sense of being from elsewhere and having an identity above the native identity of the serfs and peasants. As middle class families go through universities they learn the best way to indicate their new social status is to hold their heritage in contempt and adopt so-called "woke" opinions.</p><p>Perhaps we might develop this point further to understand the different characteristics of Anglo Saxon and Norman. The Anglo Saxons were focused upon the homestead, their faith and their farms. There was no standing army. Alfred the Great organised the translation of the Bible into English. Monks, peaceful and spiritual were subject to the raids by the cousins of the Normans, the Vikings.</p><p>And that is where we also can find the root of the Norman character - Vikings settled in the North of France after raiding and piracy succeeded. Just as in Sicily, where the Catholic Normans plagued the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, in the North of Europe too on the stormy waters of the North Sea, in their own world, the Normans were pirates.</p><p>It is not in the insularity and conservatism of our Anglo Saxon forebears and fathers that we find the character enthused by so-called Anglo Saxon economics that uproots communities and focuses on international trade. The Normans brought to this island the spirit of piracy. Even on the side of Brexit there are the Normans, wanting to turn this ancient homeland into a Singapore of the West, rootless and cosmopolitan, preoccupied with treasure and lucre. Whereas the Anglo Saxon yeomanry of England voted leave to secure their borders out of concern for loss of identity through out of control immigration.</p><p>Perhaps in the enthusiasm amongst our political class for foreign wars we see again that pirate Norman spirit. And it is our Norman blood that leads us to try to destroy Russia, with our addiction to the geopolitical Great Game. Here we inevitably think of a Russian thinker so critical of Anglo Saxon geopolitics, Aleksandr Dugin. He has resurrected interest in British geographer Mackinder, who saw geopolitics as a clash between liberal, free-trading sea powers and the heartland of Eurasia, focused on tradition and roots - the large empire based on God and Monarchy, not filthy lucre and trade.</p><p>Surely our island is in itself a microcosm of this geographical division. There is real conservatism in England and a rootedness to the land and our heritage. Contrast this with the enthusiasm of our elite for liberalism both socially and economically. The elite pushed the sexual revolution. The elite pushed the economic revolution. Sharks and bullies from lower status exploited the opportunities in making money and the working class has been destroyed by social liberalism and the sexual revolution. These revolutions were led by the elite with its Norman blood, with no real sense of rootedness or the ethics of the ethnos.</p><p>Another tragic trait of being conquered is a sort of obsequiousness of the subjugated as elites send our young men to die, exploiting our lionhearted bravery, or send their jobs abroad. Patriotic as we are, our trust in the elite has meant we have allowed agendas that destroy our identity and past to be pursued, from mass immigration and multiculturalism to sending jobs abroad. We are forced to abandon our history, our traditions, our faith to accommodate the multicultural society that suits the powerful.</p><p>That surrender to our current masters goes back to a pacific Anglo Saxon attitude post-1066 to accept the new masters. Nonetheless, the picture is nuanced. The Norman Royals ensured they married into the Anglo Saxon House of Wessex. The monarchy is the institution supported by the ordinary people even today and mocked by the shallow elites, who being alienated from the beginning have no affection for our history.</p><p>Not all the Anglo Saxons accepted the Conquest. Men of deep Christian faith they sought refuge, not in Papal Rome with the Great Schism still echoing through Europe, but in Orthodox Constantinople, joining the Orthodox Emperor's Varangian Guard and taking the fight to the Normans in Sicily, only to be slaughtered by their old enemy. It is said though that many Anglo Saxons were settled by the Emperor by the Black Sea as a "new" England.</p><p>The matter of the Great Schism is also of import here. Today's Russian Church recognises pre-Conquest Anglo Saxon saints as Orthodox. As an island England was untouched by many of the Papal innovations. From the point of view of the Orthodox the Anglo Saxons remained Orthodox. The schism only occurred a dozen years before the Norman Conquest. It seems, given their choice of refuge the Anglo Saxons also saw themselves as Orthodox at the time, not Roman Catholic.</p><p>In England post Conquest, the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, was to redefine the understanding of salvation as satisfaction by Christ's death to God, pictured as some feudal Lord. Anselm was canonised by Rome, but this theological innovation separated Roman Catholicism further from the Orthodox Church. </p><p>And what does this tell us about how we as the English should live today? The Anglo Saxons were a peaceful and deeply Christian people, an Orthodox people it seems. We can either metaphorically look to Constantinople or accept the settlement of the Norman Conquest. This does not mean political schemes, but rather a spiritual change - rediscovering our lost spiritual heritage. To some extent that would put us in the tradition of the English reformers such as Tyndale who reverted to the Greek rather than the Latin to try to rediscover a less legalistic faith. Of course that English reformation was seized control of by the elites and became instead an orgy of iconoclasm, very contrary to the spirit of Orthodoxy.</p><p>We need to rediscover the Grail of the faith. We need to return to English Christian spirituality prior to the Conquest and no longer accept the co-option into the Papal institution by our Norman conquerors. We must return to the faith of our fathers. </p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-71116465189482315662024-01-02T16:25:00.009+00:002024-01-02T17:32:32.555+00:00What is a woman? The divine feminine<p> When the leader of His Majesty's loyal opposition in the United Kingdom, one Sir Keir Starmer (a tricky lawyer by profession) was unable to define what a woman is he was rightly mocked. It also seemed to be revelatory of a joke played upon all of us by the woke lobby, A woman can be defined by biology and the woke postmodernists would have us deny scientific reality for the purposes of their political and cultural agenda of destroying the West.</p><p>In reality though, we cannot answer the question of a woman through biology alone. Human beings, male and female, while rooted in their biology are more than mere biological and material beings. The feminine as much as the masculine is only fulfilled if we achieve our cultural, even our spiritual telos. Just as we are not fully human until we are transfigured through a life of faith, so we are not fully Man or Woman until we fulfil our higher purpose. In this sense the postmodernists actually help us. They differentiate between sex and gender, dismissing gender as a social construct. And in a sense they are right.</p><p>Except it is not always just a social construct. We cannot be completely understood as biological and material beings alone. We are social, cultural and spiritual. The trouble with the post-modernists is they have not escaped the empirical Enlightenment paradigm, where things are understood from the bottom rather than the highest point. Reality begins in the divine, as real as the earth is in the hierarchy.</p><p>The story of the West since the Reformation onwards has been a project to erase the feminine from the world. First with the removal of the Mother of God by the more radical Reformers as the Reformation progressed, then with the rejection of the feminine attribute of intuition in favour of pure rationalism during the Enlightenment. Today this persists with Anglo-Saxon feminism, whereby a woman is understood to have reached her potential only if she behaves and works like a man in late capitalist democracy.</p><p>We remain thinking in an upside-down paradigm. Instead of understanding the world from the heavenly, we dismiss the heavenly and try to understand by material facts alone. If men and women are merely biological and have no spiritual side then we reduce them to mere male and female, determined by base natural urges. In this way we have the 1950s housewife as part of the economic system, motivated by her biological, material and pecuniary needs and preferences alone The answer from the feminists is not to rediscover the traditional feminine, but to turn women into men ( and a particular type of man at that - the office worker in global capitalism, the proverbial pen-pusher, the tech obsessive or the banker).</p><p>There is a more genuinely traditional understanding of Men and Women and it rests in complementarity and the erotic. Eve came from Adam's side. We are parted to be reunited in our complementary difference. Just as the monastic represents in a sense the feminine in his relationship with the masculine Christ or just as the Church is understood as the feminine in relationship with her head - Christ, so Man and Woman reflect the pattern of the divine. With this comes man's headship, the woman's fundamental support of the man and the full expression of our purpose and telos as a reflection of the cosmic pattern of Christ and the Church.</p><p>This does not mean reducing men and women to economic functionaries as attacked by feminism, but neither does it mean equality in the sense of identical interchangeability. It means rather divine vocation in marriage and even in every other interaction between the genders.</p><p>It means to be fully human we need to reach our potential as imago dei and as Man and Woman. In that sense we have the ultimate archetype in the Mother of God, who supplicates and protects with her veil over Constantinople. A figure of maternal care, but also feminine strength.</p><p>One saw this Marian strength in the babushkas of the USSR as they saved the Church, organising the baptism by priests of their grandchildren secretly. This was participation in the transfigured feminine in the mould of the Theotokos it seems.</p><p>At a lower level, and with care not to return them to an idolatrous status above the Theotokos, we even have the pagan pantheon, where the feminine attributes were understood in goddesses as different as Hera or Hestia, Athene or Demeter, Artemis or Aphrodite. These goddesses or daemons do tell us something about the feminine just as Hephaestus or Ares about the masculine - as long as we remember all these attributes are gathered up and transfigured in Christ and His Mother. </p><p>The 1950s housewife, infatuated with technology making bourgeois domesticity more convenient, or the radical feminist keen to become a wage slave are a false dichotomy and simply different faces of secular modernity that we must overcome if we are to be fully human. While in one sense there is neither male nor female in Christ, identity is only ever transfigured, never annihilated.</p><p>In answer to the question, what is a woman? an Enlightenment scientific answer on biology alone will not do. Yes gender encompasses biological sex and the two are essentially linked, but it is far more and is fully realised through the telos of the feminine or the masculine.</p><p> </p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-21356880563962592712023-12-27T13:39:00.012+00:002023-12-27T13:50:42.791+00:00Man and the Mythos<p> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-2249190874470081832023-12-21T14:18:00.022+00:002023-12-21T16:49:49.024+00:00Christmas - returning home<p> 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. </p><p>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?</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-11988743642469591432023-11-21T19:19:00.022+00:002023-11-22T09:15:47.700+00:00Progress and Anomie<p>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.</p><p>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."</p><p>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. </p><p>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:</p><p>" That faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all."</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-2630284735734421312023-11-02T16:27:00.013+00:002023-11-02T22:08:10.174+00:00Progress and Power<p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>That means a kenotic self emptying that gives us access to love and community. It means freedom from the passions that enslave our souls.</p><p>Instead progress has only offered us power over others or power over our own lives.</p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-45927797575822584972023-10-22T18:16:00.003+01:002023-10-22T18:16:52.305+01:00Progress and Death<p> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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).</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p> </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-53488525645352528452023-10-01T20:28:00.013+01:002023-10-01T22:40:23.152+01:00Progress and Alienation<p> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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).</p><p>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?"</p><p>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.</p><p>This is what has led to transgenderism and will in turn lead to transhumanism in this quest for supremacy over reality.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>"And in those days men shall seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them." </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-3398375399831037822023-09-18T16:15:00.007+01:002023-09-18T17:16:34.266+01:00The Hideous Strength of Green Technocracy<p> 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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-14668335053287375182023-08-09T23:23:00.004+01:002023-08-10T00:38:50.132+01:00The Case against the Atheist Methodology to Knowledge - the Apophatic versus the Reductive, humility versus pride.<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hume as a sceptic destroyed
his own side so to speak by proving the impossibility of true empirical
knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Roman Catholic
philosopher Ockham struck a terrible blow to metaphysics and the philosophical
realism upon which religious faith is founded.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">What have we lost as a result of Ockhamite nominalism? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">For as long as we exist and think in such a paradigm
fundamental beliefs that make full existence possible are inaccessible to
us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead religious belief and the
spiritual life themselves become arbitrary and blind leaps of faith for each isolated
individual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is an underlying connection between arbitrary
faith in Protestantism and the arbitrary assertion of purpose in Twentieth
Century existentialism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It operated according to an ethos of humility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was followed
through by the apophatic theology of the Church Fathers, in particular Pseudo-Dionysius
the Areopagite and Saint Gregory of Nyssa.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Centuries later, Nicholas of Cusa would defend a doctrine of ignorance
in the face of the hubristic claims of Renaissance Humanist thinkers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This humility or recognising our finite minds cannot fully
comprehend divine Truth can also be seen at work in the Oecumenical
Councils.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dogma is a word much misused
today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, all the
Church could do was reject the heretical, that which undermined the Truth
handed down from God via the Apostles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So
the Councils themselves followed the via negativa of apophatic theology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What began to go
wrong could really only take place after the Great Schism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With the Pope’s supreme authority on
doctrinal matters the Western Church moved towards a more declaratory and
propositional theology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It did not take
long for a more propositional and reductive approach to theology to
manifest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury,
in the same century as the Great Schism, began to make syllogistic arguments
for the existence of God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most
significant was his reduction of the meaning of the crucifixion to satisfaction
theology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Christ died as a payment for
our sins to God as a vengeful feudal overlord.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course
the Pope himself would become the authority on dogma over and above the full
Tradition.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In such a climate Ockham became possible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was his reductionism that we see at work
in Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Western atheism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed atheism in the Western sense is only
really possible where a culture has taken a wrong turn into a strange cultural
aberration. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Being inside the paradigm
we cannot see how pathological and dehumanising it is in reality. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In the most prosaic and ordinary setting we find Ockham’s
reductionism at work:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ockham’s Razor!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the idea that the simplest
explanation for the cause is the true explanation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course this can be helpful, but it bears
no relation to reality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Often an effect results
because of the coalescing of multiple causes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Often a more complicated cause is the reason for something happening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">How has that manifested?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Roman Catholics claim the Pope is the sole authority on doctrine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Protestants rely on sola scriptura.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Holy Tradition, as continues in Orthodoxy,
takes all into account, the Bible, the Church Fathers, the liturgy itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This reductionism has led to a trap for the
Western mind, until we became so rationalist that we pulled down our
inheritance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Descartes even attempted in an act of intellectual hubris to “prove” the
existence of God through rational argument.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So much for the apophatic theology in the West.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In politics we saw revolution, regicide and sacrilege.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A spirit of prideful rebellion began to plague
the West.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A Luciferian animus prevailed
and was the ethos behind the secret societies that would foment revolution and
atheism. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The reductionist Westerner thought he understood man by
stretching his lifeless cadaver out and dismembering his body to see inside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hence the possibility of Darwinism, reducing
life to a base cause.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This hubris is fed by the technological power that the
scientific method achieves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This in itself
though is Promethean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is about power,
control and exploitation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the end as
we see today with A.I. it becomes dehumanising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We have lost the understanding that life and knowledge are part of a
collective tradition within which we make sense of our particular lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The very opposite of the Cartesian obsession
with individual verification.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even gender is no longer
clear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The objectivist scientists do not
understand they are the reason biological reality is being denied.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You cannot have biology with any meaning
without the transcendental.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gender has a
metaphysical aspect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A woman acts and
moves in a feminine way because of her feminine spirit, not just because of the
mechanical operation of her biology.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This is all down to a Luciferian rebellious pride.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An assertion of my individual understanding
over long tradition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It means we only
understand the most base causes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are
blind to higher meanings.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have an
unquestioning faith in the laws of science such as physics, but they have no
reality in a random world of chance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
atheists believe the most simplest explanation of evolution and survival of the
fittest can explain love, art, religion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Communion and love between
persons is the highest point leading to participation in divine energies, not
survival of the fittest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Apply Ockham’s
reductive razor though and you are left with the lowest and most trivial
explanation.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Neither can the scientist ever overcome his contradictory
faith in laws of physics that he can never prove, as David Hume so powerfully
demonstrated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The scientific method can
never predict the same rules will apply tomorrow, because he rejects God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everything is random and arbitrary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A spirit of
humility applies to true science too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Quantum
physicists are ready to take Platonism seriously. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have the accumulated spiritual experiences
that feed into Holy Tradition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We also
have our own personal spiritual encounters that we are able to make sense of
within the wisdom of Holy Tradition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-29746991247955651872023-07-27T22:19:00.007+01:002023-07-27T22:36:51.382+01:00The Final Stage of the Revolution - technocrats, occultists, elites and sexual rights.<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the early USSR had been extreme in its
social progressivism after the Revolution, this changed during the Great
Patriotic War.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There was perhaps more to it than merely a good propaganda
opportunity to present the United States as the land of the free.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On both sides of the Atlantic, elite intellectuals
shared certain progressive ideals often meant to be achieved by sinister
methods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eliminating religious faith,
sexual liberation, feminism, eugenics and an all-powerful State were the ideals
of the Transatlantic elites.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Important families
- <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the Rockafellas, the Rothschilds, the
Huxleys, the Darwins were part of an elite linked to progressivism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Valiant opponents
spoke out such as G K Chesterton, C S Lewis via his novels, even George Orwell from
a non-traditional perspective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is sometimes
overlooked is the fascination with the occult sitting alongside commitment to atheism
and a religious scientism amongst these elites.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Secret societies were popular.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There was undoubtedly an elite agenda following in the tradition of the Eighteenth
Century Enlightenment, secret societies and the French and American Revolutions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is important to understand that atomisation and Socialist
Revolution go hand in hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The real technocratic
Socialism of Wells, Mr and Mrs Webb or Russell, rather than the small s
socialism of a Schumacher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Combined with this were to come structural economic changes
that created an opportunity to implement the final revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
the Post War era manufacturing’s time in the West was limited.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was not only militant unions that destroyed
industry.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Throughout the sixties Governments still obviously dominated
by liberal elites passed laws that “liberated” or atomised us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Homosexuality
and abortion were legalised.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Divorce was
made easy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They would
be a means to prevent discontent boiling over in the face of mass migration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whatever the merits of such laws, they were
drafted with an eye on the plans for the future. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Most central to everything was the sexual relationship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The powerful elites, with their occultist interests and their Darwinian
reduction of men to mere intelligent apes saw the power of sexual desire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We would become exactly the sort of alienated
and isolated individuals that would be passive in the face of an ever
encroaching progressive system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Furthermore if deviant relationships could be promoted, the family would
be undermined, the greatest bulwark as Chesterton pointed out against the oppressive
State.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Another development was in the elite’s favour – the invention
of television.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The visual image is far
more powerful than the spoken word of radio (already a propaganda tool).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Serials with popular characters were written
pulling at the heart strings to make radical changes in what was socially
acceptable achievable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The social revolutionary
themes of freemason Mozart’s operas entered popular culture with narratives of
oppressive patriarchs being ridiculed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
propaganda would develop to actively promote what was once seen as taboo in
sitting rooms across the country, via that glowing, talking box.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In America former propagandist Edward Bernays had already utilised the
social-engineering potential of advertising.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And so the elites who long planned this seem to have
achieved their goal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The bread and
circuses of entertainment, sexual promiscuity, LGBT, and the impact of feminism
have all helped towards Malthusian goals of population reduction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People are unable to think as they focus on
consumption.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Churches are in
decline.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marriage is in decline.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are the very aims of those Occultist
progressives at the start of the Century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is more they cannot tolerate the survival
of any foreign government not fully on board with the revolution of “liberation”.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>International tensions are therefore
escalated to pressurise countries to abandon not only economic freedom from
debt to globalist institutions, but also their traditional values.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The surveillance system via the
State and Big Tech is the other side of the revolutionary coin to the “rights”
rhetoric.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-82383194184225665552023-06-30T15:32:00.005+01:002023-06-30T15:38:57.633+01:00FAITH AND PLUNDER<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Western
media, very quick to report on arrests in Russia is silent about the
persecution of Orthodox Christians in the Ukraine.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This though is
nothing new and is a deeper reflection of our spiritual problems in the West.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The holy relics made their way back to
Western Christendom and flooded the market of indulgences.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Given the transactional theology of satisfaction via the
crucifixion in the West these holy relics quickly acquired a market value.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Buy your way out of Purgatory by purchasing
the relics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So egregious was the
situation that a certain German monk used the unedifying situation to nail 95
theses on the door of Wittenberg Church.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Thus were unleashed the powerful forces of the Reformation, destroying Western
Christendom and splintering further the schismatic Patriarchate of the
West.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And we then can see the journey of
the West into fragmentation, ideology and spiritual decline.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is from such a fragmented culture that there is something
grander than a mere geopolitical strategy emerging.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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 <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>- not the person but the mere consumer for
whom even gender and sexual preference are a purchasable choice.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A genetic journey can be
traced to liberalism and utilitarianism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Today as we stand on the cusp of a type of inauthentic and
materialist existence, in Russia itself there is a Christian cultural resurgence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There is though a higher level aspect to this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is the real Russian World that the
secular and liberal West fears.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And so it is not a mere coincidence that as the Slavic
Christian lands are ravaged by war an opportunity for plunder is taken.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not just any plunder, it is
sacrilegious plunder like the crimes of the Franks and Venetians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-69361095160744335262023-05-05T17:24:00.005+01:002023-05-05T17:37:49.744+01:00The Perennialist Prince – Gobalism and the New King<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal">King Charles III has long attracted criticism for holding
beliefs in what amounts to the veiled republic of the United Kingdom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The late Queen commanded respect in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a way it would be difficult for any successor
to inherit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her late Majesty represented
a better Britain of morals, manners, duty and faith.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It might be said that by entering the fray of public debate
the King lost the mystique of his mother, the Queen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It therefore became acceptable to show
disrespect to our new King.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is perhaps a reason
they singled His Majesty out for attack when he was Prince of Wales.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as Prince
Charles has become King though, it seems the liberal cabal has uses for
him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is why they pulled His Majesty
into opening the WEF meeting, playing on his genuine concern for the
environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now they find the Monarchy
useful to their ends.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">His Majesty must of course be careful in these febrile
political times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Too many associations
with the globalist international elites will alienate the very part of his
realm traditionally most loyal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are good
traditionalist reasons for placing emphasis on such matters, indeed His Majesty’s
reasons are Traditionalist with a capital T.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is different from relativism, syncretism
and theosophy on the one hand, but also different from the absolutist
exclusivity of the Church, historically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Personally the King seems particularly attracted to his late father’s
faith of Orthodoxy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His Majesty has
visited Mount Athos in a personal capacity on more than one occasion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The One Truth of Sophia manifests in the many
ancient world faiths of traditional roots.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Look into their roots and
they are a global network of Jacobins, no friends to Monarchy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sadly many of our own politicians are signed
up to the agenda of the WEF.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His Majesty
will not receive good advice on this.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Herein though does lie the danger of Perennialism itself,
even in its more Traditionalist manifestation in Guenon’s writings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The technocratic globalists such as Huxley,
were also Perennialists after all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
should as Saint Basil the Great put it “plunder the Egyptians” of pagan wisdom.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>The King then
as a Traditionalist will make a serious commitment to one faith and that will
be Christian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No doubt as it was for his
mother, His Majesty will be profoundly affected by the sacramental mystery of
the anointing at the Coronation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-indent: -36pt;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>I began this
blog with an article about the importance of the coronation and its link to our
Christian faith some years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
anointing is of central importance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Together as His Majesty’s Loyal Subjects, we
should cry :<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>God save the King!<o:p></o:p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-88227097220226334222023-03-10T13:07:00.006+00:002023-03-10T14:16:57.343+00:00An Orthodox Englishman<p> 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.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
was the more neoplatonic and mystical side of Burke combined with his practical
conservatism, as opposed to his more Whiggish elements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Burke who won over Wordsworth to
conservatism, not the Burke who was himself won over by Adam Smith’s liberal
economics.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A key turning point in my thinking was expressed in a blog I
entitled A Orthodox Voice in a Western Wildnerness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="https://avoicefromtheshires.blogspot.com/2014/01/an-orthodox-voice-in-western-wilderness.html">https://avoicefromtheshires.blogspot.com/2014/01/an-orthodox-voice-in-western-wilderness.html</a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People will be nothing more than individuals,
voters and consumers determined by their most petty passions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course there was still a long way for me
to go, especially in a spritiual rather than cerebral sense.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It was Constantinople not Rome that the Anglo Saxon
aristocracy sort refuge.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">With the Normans came <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anselm’s <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>theory of atonement that drastically distorted
Christian understanding of the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection,
further solidifying the Great Schism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In accepting the Conquest perhaps the English
have adopted a certain fatalism to a materialistic existence where the paradigm
is essentially reductive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In accepting
their subjugation a deep cynicism has resulted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But we know there was something more in our past, when we were still
part of the Orthodox communion.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the Pilgrimage of Grace showed,
the ordinary people still placed value on the old faith.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While that faith came to be identified with Roman
Catholicism, this was a striving back towards something yet more ancient.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We see this authentic striving in our country misdirected
due to lack of knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People seek
not Orthodoxy, but a pre-Christian paganism linked to our woods and
fields.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We all have a sense that there is something in our English
past we have lost contact with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was much more to discover in a
spiritual rather than rationalist way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The real counter-revolution is not in political activity, it is in
rediscovering our own ancient connection to the Orthodox Church.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will seem strange to many, but I have
rediscovered the faith of my forefathers through Russia.<o:p></o:p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-51192751996211583992023-01-16T20:05:00.002+00:002023-01-16T20:16:56.179+00:00Anointed Monarchs versus the veiled republic of oligarchs<p> This weblog began some years ago with an article on the
importance of anointing in the English Coronation service. The precedent is Biblical – just as the kings
of Israel of times yore were anointed with oil, so too our kings and queens. Soon another coronation will be upon us with
the crowning of King Charles III. This
great celebration inevitably following upon the sad loss and national
bereavement of our longest-reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, whose
coronation service formed the subject of the very first article on “A Voice
From the Shires”.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">With the falling asleep of Queen Elizabeth II and the
imminent anointing and crowning of King Charles, it seemed a fitting moment to revisit
the topic of monarchy. One can see from
the public reaction to the falling asleep of the abdicated king of Greece that
monarchy holds a deep meaning for peoples even after official abolition – however
much on paper the correct processes were followed to create a republic.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Monarchy is the most human of governmental
institutions. It is based both upon a
connection with the transcendent and personal relationship. It is the retold and accepted story of modern
history that we shifted from monarchy, rule of the one, to democracy, rule of
the people. This is considered within
our current paradigm to be a story of benign progress. What our paradigm of thought fails to consider
is that all that Weber categorised as the irrational and inexplicable is actually
the most human aspect of our civilisation.
Within that seemingly irrational realm is faith, loyalty to an anointed
monarch, folk culture, high culture – all that is not procedural or
bureaucratic. Most significantly a bureaucratic
society cannot reach to or aspire to the transcendent. The Transcendent is that which is beyond
analysis and categorisation. It is
understood rather through tradition and revelation, without being contrary to
logic – it is super-logical or over and above the rational.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">History is only going in one direction because the
oligarchies of the globe ensure it. There
is no natural law that means a breaking down of tradition and “modernisation”
of systems is inevitable or better. Only
because he thinks within a limited paradigm can Sir (knighted by a monarch)
Keir Starmer describe the House of Lords as “indefensible”. What if we had permitted the restoration of
the monarchy in Yugoslavia or Afghanistan?
Perhaps much bloodshed might have been averted because of the
inspirational and unifying charism of monarchy.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In trying to get around this conundrum, this loss of the
higher by reducing to the procedural, the English utilitarians thought they had
an answer. The liberal English journalist
Walter Bagehot who wrote in the Nineteenth century for what today remains the
voice of liberalism, the Economist newspaper, suggested the concept of the “veiled
republic”. He divided government into
its efficient and dignified functions.
The efficient side of the constitution was the functional and bureaucratic
part, which actually ran the country. On
the other side was the dignified part of the constitution, which included the
monarchy, the ceremony, the ritual. From
his secular liberal perspective the dignified also had a function – to veil the
English republic and to instil affection in British citizens for the apparent
kingdom to which they felt they belonged.
While Bagehot believed utilitarianism worked, he acknowledged that it
did not inspire or create affection in men’s hearts.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">What though if we step outside the secular liberal paradigm
and instead ask the question what if the coronation as a sacrament were a true
sacrament? And what if, instead of
adopting a Protestant reductionism, we recognised the existence of an anointed
monarch as an iconic participation in the divine rather than an idolatrous
distraction from God? Everything if
perceived incorrectly can become an idol, but everything when viewed correctly
points to God.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We would then be able to understand the power of Royalty as
something real, not a deceptive veil pulled across the drab reality. Ever since the Enlightenment the Western mind
has been trained to imagine that there is something behind the tradition,
something base and mechanical or an abuse of power. We have become incapable of recognising that
many parts of life are not a base trick, but instead point to a higher reality,
something better, something even more true and something even more beautiful.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Of course the man who is crowned is a mere fallen mortal,
but he participates through his holy and sacramental anointing in something
higher than himself. He is a bridge to
the eternal. This is why from the
British monarch to the Emperors of the Byzantine Empire, there was something
sacred about monarchy. Before too in
pagan times the Roman Emperor was actually recognised as a deity. Christian faith put this right, placing the
monarch in an anointed role, but no longer divine himself.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This is the reason for the Royal “we” as the monarch refers
both to himself and the higher entity to which he belongs not from merit but
through a sacrament of anointing.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">From Weber to Bagehot an unremitting message is enforced. Reality is reduced to the processes, the
bureaucracy, but on the other side, everything that seems to participate in the
good, the true and the beautiful is irrational and merely a veil across the
base facts.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This though is not convincing if we step outside of the
secular-liberal paradigm. Anointed
monarchy is personal not a rigid system.
Monarchy is a living and breathing institution, based not on abstract rules
and processes, but personal relationship and history. The Monarch is the father of the people, the
government is based upon bloodline and the realm thereby is a family.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Such a system raises alarm bells for the modern
secularist. Comes to mind the arbitrary
rule of a James II or Ivan Grozny. And yet
historians now seriously question the Whig account of James Stuart’s rule. Religious toleration and resistance to a
narrow-minded and Protestant oligarchy is perhaps a more accurate
understanding. Even in Russia there are
moves afoot to rehabilitate Ivan the Terrible’s memory and some even call for
his canonisation. Unlike Henry VIII who
stripped religion bare (to whom he is often compared) he was of real
significance in achieving Moscow’s status as the Third Rome after the fall of Constantinople.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We must remember as the cliché goes, the victors write the
history. And those victors of the “Glorious
Revolution” in England could have just as easily been the corrupt oligarchs of
the Seventeenth Century, just as today traditional institutions are attacked by
the men of Davos.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Two of the most arbitrary rulers were of course the first
two Tudor kings, who attacked commonweal and Church. While they were anointed and crowned correctly,
Henry Tudor was an usurper and not only did he exhibit miserliness, but his
line under his son and Thomas Cromwell would bring forward a modern and more
bureaucratic system eliminating the age of chivalry last symbolised by Richard
III and his gallant and brave falling at Bosworth.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The anointing might have taken place, but it was based upon
lies and thereby we see the danger of illegitimate power. Monarchy works because the fallen man participates
in the meaning of his anointing and is able thereby to transcend his compromised
nature. He then rules as a father of his
nation, just as Nicholas II was determined to do, even abdicating to protect
his subjects and finally achieving martyrdom at the hands of the Bolsheviks.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And France too is evidence of what the removal of a Christian
Monarch can unleash. The horror of the guillotine
and the cruel and inhuman suppression of the Royalist-peasant uprising in the
Vendee are the result of revolution in the name of progress and reason. The successful revolutionaries, it must be
remembered, first attacked faith and even paraded a statue of the female personification
of Reason in a horrible parody of the Mother of God.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">From the Vendee to the modern Greek public there is a supra-rational
recognition of a truth of the link between them and a ruler anointed through
Christian ritual as part of a family that has a right to rule. And very powerfully was this demonstrated by
the many who filed past the coffin of the late Queen Elizabeth, lying in
state in Westminster Hall. This was of
course inexplicable to the new elites in this country who are cosmopolitan people
of nowhere.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Faith in the transcendental God is vital to good monarchy. To go further faith in an Incarnate God facilitates
and promotes true and good Monarchy There
is always the risk of a fallen monarch who no longer fulfils his telos. The alternative though is a compromise with
man’s fallenness – a bureaucratic system that always plans for the worst in
human nature. It protects us, but
prevents us reaching the heights. It no
longer allows for aspiring to virtue, only mediocrity.<o:p></o:p></p>
<span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Fear of arbitrary government has led to a procedural
and bureaucratic existence where Reason remains an idol hostile to loyalty,
faith and a Christian teleology for the people.
Or perhaps a certain narrative of the dangers of arbitrary personal rule
has been used and exploited for a power grab by the oligarchs from whom
monarchs were supposed to protect their subjects.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-89620976104448619072022-12-29T20:17:00.006+00:002022-12-30T12:05:22.598+00:00Beauty will save the World<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">On encountering the portrait of a
disgraced lady, whom he would later try to rescue from self destruction, the
Christlike Prince Myshkin, exclaimed that beauty would save the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The scene is from Dostoevsky’s tragic
masterpiece “The Idiot”, in which the writer examined the clash between the
Christian ethos and Nineteenth Century society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The reference the character makes to beauty is neither superficial nor
shallow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead it is a reference to
the compassionate perception of beauty in those whom the world has wounded.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">It is nonetheless a powerful claim
and one far removed from our thinking in today’s world – the modern and
postmodern world of ugliness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>T S Eliot discerned
the encroaching darkness and meaninglessness in his poem, The Wasteland.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He saw the coming lack of beauty or meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Writers of lesser stature than Dostoevsky, but
who still believed in divine beauty, such as J R R Tolkien also perceived the
coming and rising ugliness of the secular world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed modernity as Mordor is a powerful and
resonant image for the twenty-first century man.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Here in thinking of beauty we are
perceiving something of the ancient world of classical philosophy, when the
form of Beauty was linked inextricably in the metaphysical trinity alongside Goodness
and Truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a civilisation orientated
towards this trinity, social and personal life is understood as teleological
and that telos is growth in virtue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
virtues are good, true and beautiful.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">How different our world of the
secular and liberal democracy!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have
lost any sense of the mystical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Catholic Canadian philosopher Charles
Taylor has pointed out the world has become disenchanted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Disenchantment means loss of beauty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Architecture, art, even our understanding of
economics have brought forth ugliness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A person
does not need to be a scholar in Platonism to recognise that there is a
different aesthetic value in the sculptures of Classical Greece and Brit Art.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Perhaps modern art reflects back to
us exactly what we have become, after we killed God without understanding the
consequences (to reference the highly-sensitive atheist philosopher Nietzsche,
who truly understood the implications of rejecting God and like Dostoevsky
understood its enormity – in Raskolnikov’s words “everything is now permitted”).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">In the Enlightenment, knowledge in
itself detached from virtue became the goal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In the end we reached a position where a British scientist would
endeavour to reduce the meaning of life to random natural selection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We had now truly severed ourselves from
understanding the meaning of life as participation in the forms of Goodness,
Truth and Beauty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead life was
understood as a brutal struggle of individuals for survival or a hedonistic and
epicurean bourgeois existence of self-satisfaction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>utilitarianism pushpin has as much value as
beautiful poetry, as the English themselves proudly boasted. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Beauty was reduced to a merely
subjective value, in the eye of the beholder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Nonetheless, this cultural shift did not come from nowhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Greek philosopher and theologian, Christos
Yannaras has argued, the God Nietzsche recognised had been killed was not the
God of the Orthodox Church, but the God of the rationalist philosophers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The West in its intellectualism created its
own reductive idea of God, imprisoned within Scholastic rationalism and finally
dismissed by their intellectual descendants as superfluous to the rationalist
and discursive project of Western thought. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">In its rationalism the West
descended into legalism and the meaning of Beauty was forgotten.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beauty not in the superficial sense, but in
its highest sense as with the Son of God descending to be a self-emptying servant
or the Theotokos giving her meek assent to bear the God-Man in her womb.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is beauty as truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sadly a culture premised on the idea that we
are monkeys instinctively programmed simply to find the mate most likely to be
successful has a very different, indeed opposite idea of beauty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That type of civilisation, where Beauty is
not a metaphysical truth, but a mere signal of reproductive value, will
inevitably descend into surgical alterations and eventually transhumanism.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Our loss of connexion with metaphysical
Beauty though also has major social and political implications.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Western philosophy developed in a
rationalist way, as a consequence of Western Christianity having already
descended into a more legalist and rationalist spirituality, what came to
matter was not achieving the telos of Beauty and thereby an ethical life, but
introducing codes and procedures that were depersonalised and
bureaucratic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was the great
modernity envisaged by the Enlightenment thinkers – the secular state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The human need for beauty was inadequately addressed
by Romanticism, which ever teetered on the precipice that threatened descent
into sentimentality or hysteria.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Beauty was in a sense compartmentalised
into an emotional and aesthetic zone, much valued by effeminate aesthetes and
even by men of business, but no longer of real importance in comparison to the perceived
real purpose of life - making money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Beauty was no longer a goal of the virtuous life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Virtue itself was forgotten as the legal codes
of liberalism left people to do as they willed as long as they did not violate
others’ boundaries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The liberal secular
society is a cowardly withdrawal from making a metaphysical or ethical
commitment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All beliefs are equally
valid, as long as no one interferes with anyone else - there is no specific and
transcendental telos to society.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">As a consequence each one went his
own way and every specific and idiosyncratic route became perceived as legally sacred,
however ugly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People could descend into
complete degeneracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At first this was
merely tolerated by respectable liberals, then all became celebrated precisely
because they were idiosyncratic aesthetics.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">It was the turn to utilitarianism
that was the final breach with beauty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It was no longer understood that Beauty and Goodness and Truth are
linked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ethical life is the
beautiful life. Being a good person is achieved through striving to love beauty
and be beautiful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Heroism, self-sacrifice,
compassion are all beautiful, and of course they are beautiful in part because
they are freely chosen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the modern
though any choice is valid, there is no telos to our existence.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Only if we can again understand
Beauty has a reality over and above the subjective or the objective will we also
rediscover virtue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Charles Taylor also
pointed out that in the disenchanted society we came to perceive ourselves as buffered
individuals, impervious to external forces, thus making our choices entirely
sovereign, but also entirely contained and disconnected from the transcendental.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Medieval man understood differently that
he was porous and subject to permeation by angelic and demonic forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could, he knew, become a slave to his
passions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To the secular mind the
passions are not an enslavement, but integral to his individualism as a
consumer and human being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To be driven
by them is his perverted idea of freedom. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">The Russian writer, Konstantin
Leontiev, referred to by some as the Christian Nietzsche, understood that
progression in society was disintegration from the whole into atomistic
individualism – like a body suffering a progressive disease.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This indeed seems to be what is happening to
the Western commonwealth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With its
increased atomisation and complete loss of telos or a sense of virtue, it appears
to be disintegrating into idiosyncratic forms of ugliness.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Why has this arisen in the bureaucratic,
secular and procedural system of liberal democracies?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On a mystical level Rene Guenon explained
that when the reign of quantity fulfilled its final and ultimate logic, cut off
from the supernal, cracks would appear from below and the infernal would replace
the secular.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Undoubtedly this is how the
West now looks, especially with the growing interest in darker and preternatural
forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Empty people trapped in anomie are
turning to Crowley not the Church.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">A more pragmatic angle on this is
that by its very neutrality the liberal secular system, like Pontius Pilate,
washes its hands of truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It refuses to
discern between Good and Evil, Beauty and Ugliness, Truth and Lies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead whether good or evil, beautiful or
ugly, true or false, all is subject to the same neutral procedure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Virtue ceases to be an aspiration and vices
are treated as equally valid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Consequently society itself starts to become vicious, as long as the
rules are not broken.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Legalism fully
replacing Beauty, Truth and Goodness.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">This must be why Beauty will save
the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beauty, whatever the deconstructionists
attempt, still reaches us in a way that is not subject to discursive
rationalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its appeal and attractiveness
are ineffable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We recognise truth and
goodness in them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Whatever approved lies we recite,
we can see beauty in the happy and bonded young family, the romantic beauty of
love between a new husband and wife, the delicate and awesome beauty of
Creation, the heroic beauty of self sacrifice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>These manifestations of beauty take us far beyond what is correct in
process or in the abstract codes of rights and duties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is something intrinsically personal and
collectively shared in an encounter with beauty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It can give us access to the other two metaphysical
forms of Truth and Goodness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It enables
us to discern the difference between Good and Evil, Truth and Lies, Beauty and
Ugliness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Cut off from an aesthetic sense,
under the power of codes and rights, we do not discern between the loving and
natural relationship or the vicious and lustful interaction, the beauty of a
holy icon or a self-indulgent expression of abstract art, the false validity of
ideological claims or the Truth of Holy Tradition.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">Lies can obscure Truth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Bad can intimidate people from being
Good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But if we begin again to
understand that participating in Beauty is a virtue and perceive it again,
ugliness will be undone and access to the True and the Good will be restored.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">For now though, surrounded by the ugliness
that many writers of the last two centuries saw was coming and even already
established, we remain confused and blind celebrating the wicked and despising
the good, but all in the bland spirit of due process and tolerance. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-14713573153040074192021-10-04T13:37:00.000+01:002021-10-04T13:37:03.993+01:00The Western Sickness<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal">Many Traditionalists will link the decline of the West to
the Enlightenment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some on the Far Right
link it to the coming of Christianity itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The former view does not go far enough and the latter is in itself
indicative of Western decline.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Tradition in the West has long been linked to power and
authority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It explains the idiosyncratic view of Christ in the West, the rise of
liberalism and the hardheartedness of reaction.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The dichotomy is a false one, but it has roots in the very
beginning of a Western interpretation of Christianity:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is also why Renaissance Humanism, with its rediscovery of
pagan virtu appeared in the West.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
must be understood as an anti-Christian move prior to the Enlightenment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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).<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a simple yet
seductive narrative, whereby all institutions and traditions are restrictions
upon our true freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In politics this
narrative is accepted by both Left and Right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Importantly in the Western mind legalism is
linked to Tradition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And in the West
legalism and Tradition were linked, as was power of enforcement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roman Catholicism was based upon a punitive
idea of God whose Vicar on earth, the Pope, acted with unilateral
authority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus the stage was set for a
spirit of revolution in the name of Christ against the institution that claimed
to enforce for Christ.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the root of the Western sickness.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That though was due to a heady mix of Eastern
collectivism and Western Enlightenment ideas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Marx was after all a creature of the Enlightenment and a warped offshoot
of liberalism, with roots in Rousseau, that beguiling and demonic philosopher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no battle between
Church hierarchs and mystics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Church
is not an institution, but a loving community of Christ’s Body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The laity are as much a repository of Tradition
and there is no claim to unilateral authority by the bishops.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is therefore no tension between power
and freedom manifesting as Tradition versus Revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no root of theology in Anselm’s
punitive account of God as a feudal overlord demanding payment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The crucifixion is not so much our punishment
by God taken for us, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but Christ living
out the perfect love of the perfect human as God incarnate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, importantly, traditions are not imposed
from above as an expression of power, but sustained by both clergy and laity.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This is not to sentimentalise the East.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It too has problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">If we go farther East we find another tradition that is
unforgiving, iconoclastic and legalistic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is not about East versus West.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In the West however, all is still seen through the prism of Tradition
versus Revolution, power versus freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We are therefore in a perpetual revolution against what are seen as
traditional restrictions upon who we really want to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The revolutionaries prove to be just as
punitive as the traditionalists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Meaning
is inevitably found outside the Church, written off as an institutional form of
power through tradition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3301765407315386372.post-10570965381340269532021-08-19T21:37:00.008+01:002021-08-19T21:52:10.861+01:00Types of Freedom<p><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>“Oh yes, we shall be in chains and there will be no
freedom, but the time will come when, from the depths of our despair, we shall
rise up once again in joy, without which man cannot survive and God cannot
exist, for joy comes from God and is His greatest gift.”<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Dmitry Karamazov, in <i>Brothers Karamazov </i>by Fyodor Dostoevsky<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In Brothers Karamazov one of the key protagonists, Dmitry
Karamazov, finds he is well prepared for his likely sentence to Siberia because
of the internal freedom given to him by faith.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>During the years of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe Orthodox
priests in solitary confinement were amazingly able to transform solitary confinement
into a spiritual journey.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In his recently published book <i>The Cunning of Freedom:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols, </i>Polish
academic, political philosopher and politician, Ryszard Legutko wrote about the
inner freedom of authenticity, the positive freedom of the virtues and the
negative freedom of the liberal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Inner
freedom is the ancient and classical freedom of metaphysical man, <i>homo metaphysicus:<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Metaphysical man is driven by the pervasive conviction that
the goal of his existence transcends physical and societal limitation and
though beyond his immediate grasp, it will determine his destiny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the miseries that result from his finite
nature, the failures, the fragility of life, the fear of death, point in this
direction.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Legutko therefore identifies three forms of freedom in
European thought, first negative liberty – the dominant one of our contemporary
era is the freedom from controls and restrictions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Positive liberty is about the freedom to live
consequent upon the virtuous life, so that a man is free insofar as he achieves
his telos of virtue and is no longer enslaved to his passions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thirdly is the inner freedom of
authenticity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The last two freedoms are
closely related, while the positive freedom achieved through virtuous
living is in tension with the liberal idea of freedom, which in effect enslaves
us to our passions.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">If we were to live in a world different from our own, where
the cultural idea of freedom were positive rather than negative, then the inner
authenticity of the person would also be strengthened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The liberal man, who is free to live his life
as an individual following the drives of his passions is likely to be unable to
withstand the situation where his appetites are unsatisfied and he must instead
endure suffering.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because his freedom
has meant nothing more than following his passions or appetites, when the
liberal is threatened with the totalitarian state he will discover he does not
have the inner resources of the inner freedom that positive liberty, with its
emphasis on freedom through the virtues nurtures.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Yet as with Dostoevsky’s Dmitry Karamazov, a character
distinctly lacking in virtue, inner freedom is still attainable directly through
faith and then comes virtue afterwards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead
of living virtuously authenticity of the inner life could just as easily be the
result of a shock or a crisis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such a
situation often occurs when one has lived according to one’s passions selfishly
for too long and life takes a terrible turn in consequence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To survive inwardly though still requires an
underlying faith in something greater than oneself, even if one has avoided participating
in that until the great shock or crisis comes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The liberal does not believe in anything greater than himself or his own
choices.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The strength of character and virtues resulting from the
positive liberty of virtue ethics will always defend the person when his temporal
benefits and distractions are removed, as Boethius discovered many centuries ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
is at that point, the point of arrest and the GULAG that one will know whether
one’s freedom was merely of the negative type - that freedom of liberal
ideology, mere individualism, or the true freedom of the metaphysical man.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">When we reduce the situation to its extreme the concept of
inner freedom based on a vertical spiritual participation versus the negative
freedom of the liberal to follow his animalistic or even unnatural appetites is
revealed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The liberal will be far more
vulnerable and have no inner depth, if he only lives for his passions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The man whose freedom is about participation vertically
in the higher realm will survive, as has been evidenced by the men who survived
the prison camps of the Twentieth Century, such as Viktor Frankl.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those who were not metaphysical men, such as
Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn survived by becoming such during the shock of their
imprisonment and from their encounters with imprisoned Orthodox Christians.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This reveals which freedom is true and which is actually a sham
and no more than a form of enslavement to the things of the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also has some worrying implications.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We celebrate liberal freedom in the West with
our consumerist society that encourages all types of irresponsibility and sexual
deviance as freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet when
deprived of our things, our fetishes, our appetites are we still really
free?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The man living in Stalinist
Russia, with few of our choices, survived through the strength of inner
freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a disconcerting thought
that brutal oppression rather than the free society might create an inner
freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is it any wonder that Christianity
today flourishes in Russia and is in decline in the West full of things and
opportunities to focus us on our passions?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It would be helpful to remember the etymology of passion,
linked as it is to the Greek word for passivity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When we are driven by our passions something
has control of us other than ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Through
attainment of the virtues we are freed from our passions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Passions being indulged are not evidence of
freedom, as the liberal believes, but slavery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Living the liberal life denies the possibility of transformation through
transfiguration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the other hand not
only the virtuous man, but the prodigal son recognises the higher freedom.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The free man is the one who has the inner strength through
faith to look hard labour in Siberia steadfastly in the eye and still he will
remain joyful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As Dmitry Karamazov exults the day before his trial in the
novel:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“If they drive God off the face of the earth, we shall
welcome Him down below!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is impossible
for a convict to be without God, even more impossible than for someone who is
not a convict!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then the time will
come to pass when we, the underground people, will join in a solemn hymn to
God, who is the source of joy!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Praise
the Lord and His joy!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I love Him!”<o:p></o:p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0