The Tap Root of Western Civilisation

 Even new atheists now are beginning to recognise that the Christian ethos and tradition are what hold the West together and are also a bulwark against the forces of the barbarian and the alien.  It might be too late.  With the ongoing revolution in thought initiated by the Enlightenment, but with dark roots much further back, Western culture has become a vacuum into which forces such as Islamic belief are rushing.  Neither is the West any longer capable of protecting its physical borders.  

Some New Atheists want a cultural Christianity, whereby the transcendental truths of  the Church are mimicked and simulated while we pridefully maintain the claims of the Fall - Man actually neither believes or needs God.  A bit like marrying a person you do not love to have children, ending in divorce, faking religious faith does not work.  People will pick it up as phoney.  This perhaps has been the problem of the liberal Christianity of Western European churches.  And if you simply claim the ethos and the civilisational benefits, you have no justification for doing so, whereas Islam can point to its claimed transcendental justification.  Every culture and civilisation is based upon transcendental claims, albeit prior to the conversion of Rome these pagan metaphysical fundaments of cultures were parochial and culturally located.  With the conversion of the Empire the universal claims of the Church became the tap root of the world empire.

Therefore something changed with the Edict of Milan.  The very reason for persecuting the Church was its universal claim and rejection of local gods.  All of humanity is made in the image of the same God.  The particular and the universal, the problem of the One and the many is solved.  The solution is in the Incarnation.  Sin and death are defeated for all of humanity.  Each person has an eternal future and potential for theosis if they freely accept salvation.

This is the tap root of Western civilisation as well as being a true universal belief.  We can see political liberalism and philosophical humanism as being related to the Church teaching that man is free to choose (Mary's assent to the Incarnation and every free conversion and baptism since) and is made in the image of God and can be transformed into the likeness through Christ.  The problem with the West is that these beliefs rooted in the Church became detached from faith and led to the selfish individualism, the hubristic scientism and the secular vacuity of the modern and post-modern West.

The West has a tap root of the Church, but a cultural inclination to revolution.  Going back as far as the Schism, we see an assertion of rebellion and innovation in the seizure of power by the Papacy and the unliteral alteration of the Nicene Creed.  This seed of revolution would develop through nominalist rejection of universal truths, the fascination with magic and the occult, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and atheistic materialism, leading to the disconnection of Western thought from the transcendent spiralling into the madness of post modernism, deconstruction and existentialism - politically manifesting as wokeness and transgenderism and being further developed by the Silicon Valley demonic genii, trying to find everlasting mortal life in this world.

So we must understand the West as being disconnected from the tap root and this then growing into the deformed revolutionary spirit, promoted by secret societies and political ideologies from Jacobinism to Marxism and Fabianism,  so that the West now can neither defend its civilisation or really knows what its values are - equating them to the Jacobin revolutionary non-values of the revolutionary spirit. 

This tap root though did not only feed and nourish the West.  it nourished the Near East.  The Church emerged from the Middle East through the Greek world.  This is prophesied in John's Gospel, after the Jews reject Christ:

"The Pharisees therefore said among themselves, Perceive ye how ye prevail nothing?  behold, the world is gone after him.  And there were certain Greeks among them that came up to worship at the feast: The same came therefore to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and desired him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus.  Philip cometh and telleth Andrew:  and again Andrew and Philip tell Jesus.  And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified."

John 12: 19-23

Just as the Jews reject the Messiah so the Greeks accept him through the preaching of Paul. And the Church Fathers were Greek speakers and educated as Greeks.  Culturally the Church's conquest of Latin Rome through the blood of Christian martyrs was the deep Greek theology winning the Roman Empire.  

That tap root, that first sprouted in Judea, Syria then Greece and also Egypt won the West spiritually.  And yet from 1054 incrementally the West has broken its link to its tap root.  Even the emphasis on Judaeo-Christian culture is a tacit dismissing of the Hellenistic root of the Church, because the Jews rejected Christ and chose political revolution against Rome leading to the destruction of the Temple and the end of Temple Judaism.  Rabbinic Judaism would then emerge defining itself in opposition to the Church.

The result of this revolutionary and political choice to move away from the Church is the secularism and disintegration of the West, making it unable to resist the coming demographic and cultural conquest by Islam.  This is not only demographic.  The West cannot resist the demographic change, but more seriously it has no answer to Islam's transcendental claims.  In the bizarre and topsy turvy world of woke liberalism, where we cannot define a woman and are starting to offer suicide on demand as a service, more people of European origin will find answers in the clear message of Islam.  A religion that offers a political answer without the personal transformation of repentance and theosis.  In the crazy world of the West in freefall from any transcendent sense, Islam will be something people can grab a hold on to save them from the vicious spiral of Western degeneration.  Andrew Tate is a warning.

The West's tap root though presents a very different understanding.  God is triune and the second Person of the Trinity is incarnate.  He only became incarnate through the willingness of Mary to consent, the Mother of God.  Following from this salvation lies not in conquest but a personal assent. Death is defeated and Man has the potential to be transformed into the likeness of God through grace - deification is the gift.  Islam rejects this entirely and cuts us off from the salvation offered.  If the second Person of the Trinity does not become fully man, then man cannot be saved.  It must be full incarnation.  As Saint Gregory of Nazianzus put it: "For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved."

So if the West rejects its own degeneracy and begins to be transformed by Islam, thinking it has reached transcendental truth, it will be further cut off from salvation.   Liberalism, New Atheism, secularism might soon look more like a stage, clearing the ground for the final conquest of the West and the complete detachment from its tap root.  Through its revolutionary zeal the West will have brought about its end.  The Church remains, but Western civilisation, like the First Century Jews, has chosen political revolution over salvation. 

The Empty Shell of Cultural Christianity

 Strident and polemical New Atheist and biological scientist Richard Dawkins has described himself as a cultural Christian, by which he means he has a subjective aesthetic appreciation of the art and culture of Christianity and feels more comfortable with the ethos and values upheld by a Christian past than the alternatives.  Furthermore his new enthusiasm for the Christian heritage he worked hard to undermine is in part due to his fear of Islam filling the void created by the decline of Christian belief in the West.

Other public figures such as Douglas Murray have also identified with the culture and ethos of Christian heritage while being atheist in terms of their personal beliefs.  There are several problems with this.  Three spring to mind.  First it overlooks that aesthetic and ethical values are as much about faith as intellectual assent to a creed.  Secondly, to claim the Christian ethos and aesthetic heritage is superior is a value claim that depends upon the transcendent.  Thirdly, to ignore the cause of the values and aesthetics you believe should be adhered to removes the justification for what you are trying to justify.

Dawkins famously referred to his love for the aesthetic of Anglican evensong.  He does not seem to realise that this appreciation of the beauty of Anglican evensong is a participation in the beautiful, moving towards worship.  His attack on religion has only ever been on the assent to the creed and the conceptual claims of that creed.  He seems not to realise that another aspect of religious faith is affective.

This is because he only thinks within an Enlightenment paradigm.  He has reduced religion to its components and separated them out.  Therefore the affective experience of worship is separated in his mind from the intellectual assent to the credal claims of the religion.  These two are the beauty and truth of religion, just as the Christian ethos is the goodness of the faith.  You cannot detach these three aspects as though they can be enjoyed in isolation.  The truth manifests in beauty and goodness.  The beauty of evensong and the goodness of the ethos it teaches are because the creed is true.

We encounter religion through all three aspects of this Platonic trinity.  The immersing in the beauty can, if we allow it, help us to participate in the truth that generates the beauty.  And, if we allow it, this participation in the truth through the beauty helps us to live according to the ethos of the faith.

To break this down further.  The Christian heritage is beautiful and good, as Dawkins seems to acknowledge, because it is true - which he refuses to acknowledge.  If we look at it the other way around then there is no religious art without the belief.  The evidence of the modern art of secular society is proof enough of this.  There is no ethic without the metaphysical justification - the metaphysical truth justifies the ethics he so appreciates.

Islam is more harsh and less loving because it does not recognise Christ is the Second Person of the Trinity Incarnate.   Otherwise Dawkins must answer where does the ethos come from and why does he wish to follow it over Shariah law?  Is it simply his own subjective taste or was England participating in something of transcendental value before it became secular?

One is reminded of Kant's transcendental argument.  Without the justification of the transcendent what you rely upon falls away.  Without the Triune God, the second Person of which became man, there is no ethos and art will degenerate (as it clearly has done in the West).

There is  a sleight of hand with this atheist endorsement of the faith without participating in the faith - they have already acknowledged a hierarchy of values by stating that the Christian ethos should be preferred to the Islamic.   

A more intellectually honest atheist, such as Friedrich Nietzsche understood the implications of atheism.  It meant the old table of values would be smashed.  The compassionate love for the weak could now be replaced with the Will to Power, that was to inspire the Nazi movement and indeed the relativism of postmodernism.  

In his famous passage about the madman in the marketplace Nietzsche spelt out the real implications of atheism not understood by types such as the complacent bourgeois Englishmen:

'Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: "I seek God! I seek God!" As there were many people standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why! Is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a sea voyage? Has he emigrated? The people cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub. The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. "Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? For even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console our selves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has so far possessed, has bled to death under our knife, who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history so far!" Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers ; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished.'

Of course the God that had been killed, as Christos Yannaras demonstrates, was not the God of the Church, but the intellectual concept of God developed through scholasticism not met through prayer - the God of the philosophers.  In slaying that God the revolution of the Enlightenment might have done the West a favour inadvertently, in clearing the way for a rediscovery of the God of the Church and the Bible - the living God, not a dry conceptual theory.  And the real God is indeed encountered through the beauty of ritual and self -emptying goodness. 

Nonetheless, there may be something in the English character that is too pragmatic and fails to see the implications of what atheism really means.  Religion is only understood in terms of its social efficacy.  The Englishman is in his heart a utilitarian and he rarely escapes this curse that blinds him to the depth of reality.  Nietzsche understood and finally fell into lunacy himself.

That English utilitarian spirit is alive in this empty shell of Cultural Christianity - the faith in the personal and triune God is reduced to social uses.  It has a utilitarian benefit, but the transcendental truth, indeed the necessity of that truth is ignored.  And what that means is, if we simply use Christian heritage for social purposes then we are never personally transformed through a relationship with God.  In that way this cultural Christianity could be very dangerous.  It might on the other hand be a stepping stone for many to faith.  Whether this island once known as the dowry of Mary, the Mother of God, will be re-enchanted again remains to be seen. We pray it will be, God willing.  

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The Victory of Liberalism

 It is a common theme in internet memes to contrast the degenerate world of postmodernity with what the young men on the Normandy beaches believed they were giving their lives for.  From the end of ethnic homogeneity to sexual degeneracy, the "values" of the contemporary West seem in stark contrast to the shared values of the Christian West of the thirties and forties.  Many believed they were dying for Christian civilisation.  We have ended up emerging from the two world wars and the Cold War with a society far removed, whose shibboleth might be "sodomy and usury", whose symbol is the six-coloured flag of the LGBT movement and whose geopolitical and domestic political power is exercised through debt.  A far contrast from Christendom where both charging interest and homosexuality were forbidden.

The victory in the Second World War was achieved by the joint forces of liberal democracy and Stalinist Socialism.  The Cold War sorted out whether the future lay in Stalinist Socialism or Liberal Democracy.  The liberal democratic forces won bringing in a new world order of globalism expressed through social and economic liberalism.

National Socialism, with its pagan and occult leanings, its fetishisation of power and its brutal suppression  and mass murder of those considered degenerate was not a continuation of Christian civilisation.  But neither was the Weimar Republic it overthrew.  There has been some comment recently about the fact that the first books the Nazis burnt were promoting transgenderism.  Weimar was not a Christian state, it was a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.  The Nazis provided a pagan answer, mixed up with Darwinian science, to attack the indisputable degeneracy of Weimar.  That solution comes not from Christian inheritance; by contrast, based on power and violence it is another contradiction.  As Jewish convert to Catholicism Max Picard pointed out, Nazism was an avant garde and profoundly modern and post-Enlightenment phenomenon.  It does not follow either that liberalism is the alternative answer that should be chosen, or communism for that matter.

The victors of the Cold War were the liberals, who provided bureaucratic human rights, but killed the soul of Man.  Even Soviet atheism was unable to kill the soul in the way consumer capitalism and human rights have killed the soul of Man.

While it was the liberals who won the conflicts, hot and frozen, of the Twentieth Century, this was not simply an organic process.  Geopolitically the use of colour revolutions and NGOs as a tool of Western foreign policy worked to undermine the Soviet Empire.  No ally was unacceptable.  In the Cold War we saw the development of an unholy alliance between the capitalist and secular West and Islamic extremism, beginning in Afghanistan, much as Israel uses Islamists as an asset against Arab regimes in the Middle East.

Domestically it was also important to turn the West from a conservative and traditional Christian culture into a liberal, amoral and culturally permissive place.  This actually involved the Central Intelligence Agency in promoting a cultural revolution in the sixties, including the promotion of modern art figures such as Jackson Pollock, to contrast with the more conservative genre of Soviet Realism in art.

Combined with this promotion of popular culture, psychological theories were put into practice through therapy and mainstream education.  Ideas of sexual suppression leading to Fascism as argued by Adorno in his "Authoritarian Personality" gave a political reason to stop teaching virtues and instead to create a permissive society that made people slaves to their sexual passions as much as they were slaves to avarice and greed through the economic system.  Freud's earlier work also provided a framework for this.  Meanwhile the theories of Holocaust-survivor Viktor Frankl were ignored.

In politics the political class also ensured the permissiveness society was promoted through changes to the law on divorce, homosexuality and abortion.  It is no surprise we have now reached a place where we are even confused about gender.  But confusion, lack of order and permissiveness were always the goal.   

A veneer of propaganda that the West was still Christian in opposition to atheist Soviet Republics was also sustained to keep malleable and slow-witted conservatives on side.  Now many conservatives are worried about globalism, the WEF, no borders, the Great Reset - but this was always the goal.  The post-war West was run by an establishment that found its ideology in the liberal philosophers of the Open Society.  And as Karl Popper pointed out, the open society has enemies.  He singled out Plato and Platonic thinking for attack.  He was hostile to any idea of transcendent values, but in something of a contradiction the tolerance and open-mindedness of liberalism should be enforced, not tolerating the "platonic" mindset. This is where cancel culture stems from - certain ideas must be eliminated for the survival of the open society.  Popper's close student George Soros, uses the idea of enemies for undermining democracy, from Brexit to the Ukraine.

The problem is that liberals, whose ideology really developed in the Anglo Saxon countries such as Great Britain and the United States, have fooled conservatives in such countries to believe that liberalism is conservatism.  Whether it be laissez faire capitalism at home or support for Zionism abroad, conservatives have been fooled and are the useful idiots of globalist liberalism. 

There was an alternative to liberalism in Britain.  From Disraeli to Chesterton there was a case made for an organic conservatism that held the country together.  One Nation conservatism is a much debased term that now means "remainer" Conservative MPs who are usually socially liberal.  Rather like the word conservative, one nation once meant what it sounds like.  It meant holding the nation together through the values of shared heritage, land and ethnicity.  We are one nation, not to be divided by the class warriors of socialism or the atomising individualists of liberalism.

What today passes for a "right-wing" British conservative whether on the Right of the Conservative Party or a supporter of Reform will usually be an ardent supporter of liberal economics, a close alliance with the States and with Israel.  Contrary to the implications of liberal economics British conservatives do tend to oppose mass immigration and do oppose the woke culture that emanates from the USA they so love.  These contradictions are overlooked, because the British Right remains a useful tool for the liberals.

In the States where the evils are spreading from there is a resistance that is much more aware than the likes of GB News.  From Tucker Carlson to Candace Owens there are genuine conservative voices appearing in a country predicated on liberal secularism.  This is enabling some American conservatives to break free from the post-war paradigm that defines politics in the West and defines it favourably to the liberal agenda.

There is a genuine voice of opposition emerging.  It places emphasis on conservative social values, upon Christian faith and upon protecting our own people from the ravages of global capitalism.  In global politics it questions the support for Zionism and support for the Ukraine.  It has noticed the re-emergence of the Church in Russia and that our supposed allies of Israel and Ukraine persecute Christians.  A Trump victory will not only save us from escalation to a third world war, but will give space to genuine conservative voices to reassess our knee-jerk Cold War attitudes on Israel and the Russia-Ukraine question.

There is also a healthy scepticism these new conservatives have towards the Western establishment.  They are sniffing out the vested interests from Blackrock to AIPAC.  They are ready to ask questions that baby-boomer conservatives never did.  They recognise that while patriotism is a virtue, it can be used by scoundrels to further nefarious agendas, such as global liberalism. 

There seems to be a realisation from a generation less overshadowed by the Second World War and even the Cold War, that the shibboleths and stereotypes our parents fell for were really about pushing a liberal and globalist agenda.  There is not a binary choice between Left and Right.  There is another perspective, from voices of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, voices excluded from academia and political debate.  These voices put a Christian perspective forward that transcended liberalism, Communism, and Fascism.  There are signs that finally the Overton Window will be expanded.  Whether Donald Trump himself understands this movement, there are signs he does so intuitively if not intellectually, his victory will open up the space for new perspectives that can break free of the post- World-War, post- Cold-War perspectives that limit our vision from seeing the truth.            

 

       

 

Alchemy or Theosis - different paths to different illuminations

 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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

   

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anointed Monarchs versus the veiled republic of oligarchs

 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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Western Sickness

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reactionary Rus

Russia seems either both European and Asian or neither European nor Asian.  Is it Marxist or conservative?  Atheist or Orthodox?  Democratic or despotic?  The West is never really clear about Russia, as Winston Churchill once succinctly put into a pithy comment.

Today the liberal Western media is wringing its hands about a further step towards despotism, voted for by the Russian public.  What makes the media more upset is that the new constitution voted upon by the Russian people not only in effect seems to give Putin power for life, but has been sold to the people as a restoration of traditional values, particularly in terms of protecting marriage as between man and woman and including God in the constitution.

Traditional values are thus seen as the clever ploy and part of a despotic manoeuvre to seize power.  Worse is that the Western media regards this as an appeal to prejudice as though Putin has manipulated base instincts to rally support for his prolonged presidency.

The constitution itself does place a strict limit upon the presidency of two terms of six years.  It nonetheless resets the clock allowing Putin to begin his terms all over again.  Hence the accusation of an attempt to fix up a lifelong presidency. 

The role of a little-known body called the State Council is also raised in importance and power.  Again Putin’s critics have accused him of using this body to ensure he retains power as a member.

Whatever the politics, and this article is not meant to defend Putin, the interesting question is how Putin has relied upon social conservatism as an integral part of these constitutional changes.  By contrast, in the West, with its representative democracy, widely-held socially-conservative views remain excluded from political debate.  It is as though socially-conservative views cannot break through the dominance of liberalism in the Western party system, while Putin’s ever increasing power has meant the focus of accountability is directly upon him.  If Russia were to introduce same-sex marriage only one man could be held responsible for that.  Meanwhile in the United Kingdom a Conservative Government could introduce same-sex marriage with very little consequence in terms of electoral losses amongst small-c conservative voters. 

It would be a mistake to see social conservatism in Russia as somehow imposed as false consciousness from above.  Anyone who has encountered the revival of Christianity in Russia or discussed traditional values with Russians will have found that socially-conservative views remain mainstream for many.  It is far more likely that Putin is following the instincts of grass-roots attitudes that survived seventy years of atheistic Marxism to win his referendum.

What the overwhelming vote for Putin’s constitutional changes therefore demands from Western social conservatives is that they ask themselves why they are losing so badly compared to the victory in the cultural war in Russia.  And it is not just in Russia,  indeed many of the former Warsaw Pact nations are seeing a revival in both conservative Christianity and social conservatism, from Hungary to Poland.  Meanwhile, without any violent revolution in the West, values have been stripped away leaving a meaningless liberal anomie somehow fraudulently compensated for by Left-wing identity politics.  Most social conservatives will appreciate which of the cultural options will lead to greater human flourishing.  The disconcerting thing is that in Russia it appears to come at the cost of stable rule of law and democratic politics.

But is the political contrast so black and white?  While there is clearly a healthy bedrock and foundation of rule of law in the West, it is undeniable that as the cultural Marxist and postmodern outlooks have rapidly spread from the Academy into politics, law enforcement and the legal system, those fundamentals cannot be taken for granted.

 

There is a sort of totalitarianism-lite in the West.  In a free market economy it is vital to be able to survive in the world of employment.  With legislation on hate speech and equality goals any challenge to the cultural Marxist agenda can result in loss of employment - permanently.  There is no need for the Gulag or brutal oppression when people are scared about not being able to pay their mortgage or feed their families.  Meanwhile elections might change the finer details of economic policy, but whatever the voters want, the agenda of attacking traditional values continues under whichever party is in power.  There is a sort of liberal oligarchy installed in the West, with much more in common across borders than with the people within politicians' own nations.  In the UK the Brexit vote was a sign of this disparity and the same was true of Donald Trump’s election victory.  

Nonetheless, even without the heavy-handed legislation and the confident arrogance of the liberal oligarchy, the public in the West are very unsure about their conservative instincts.  While Russian babushka grandmothers ensured values survived Soviet oppression during the years of the Godless regime and the various nationalistic movements in Catholic Europe looked to Pope John Paul II, in the West the tide of consumerism and popular culture has almost drowned any residue of conservatism.  It is not just a detached oligarchy, but a confused public that ensures the onward and unimpeded march towards Sodom and Gomorrah.   

The Academy, the political world and the media reinforce the enthusiasm and commitment of each other for pursuing an agenda of radical liberalism that can only end in anomie.  Those institutions (such as the Church and the Tory Party) that should give leadership in this cultural battle are dominated by the same group of people – liberal, privileged and tending towards a relativism learnt at university.  The non-values dressed up as worthy tolerance and open-mindedness that these powerful people share give them some sense of purpose while allowing moral decadence in their own lives and in society at large.  While ideas inherited from the Protestant roots of much of the West in terms of probity in public office and the rule of law persist at least for now, there is a programme of undermining the standards and meaning bequeathed to us by Christian civilization.  The corruption is benign and amoral at the moment, not violent and criminal.  In a sense that makes it all the more corrosive to the soul of Europe.  It is spiritually and morally bankrupt, but sees itself as righteous and worthy.  This is a very dangerous situation.

 

It is dangerous not because of the risk of some extremist movement from beyond the Overton Window (although such a risk should not be breezily dismissed, as we saw from the rise of Black Lives Matter with its Marxist agenda of erasing history and silencing opposition over the summer).  Even in the straitened times of Covid 19 and in the post- Credit crunch world, material life will not turn into unbearable suffering for most.  Instead there is a risk of falling into a state of anomie in part because of all our wants being met in a consumerist society and all our freedoms to follow our passions respected as long as we “respect” the driving passions of everyone else.  Fundamentally important to this nadir of Western civilization is the disappearance of Christianity.  What remains of the Church as an institution in most Western countries is run and led by that same anti-traditional section of society, thereby ensuring no genuine revival is possible.  Combine that with the continual pushing at lowering of moral standards and promotion of immorality in drama and in all aspects of the media and the trajectory of the West looks to be pretty vertiginous.

 

To look specifically at the UK, where social conservatism is almost silenced, there is no mechanism such as the primary system that the United States has, to give direct democratic input into the selection of the prime minister.  True we are a  monarchy, not a pure republican democracy.  A primary system for the potential Prime Minister does not necessarily mean that the Queen would not still have the formal role of appointing her first minister, only that the party would select him differently and then recommend him to the Queen.  That primary system would be a safety valve to overcome the control the party has over selection of candidates.  It would be a means to start dismantling the liberal oligarchy.

What the Left dismisses sniffily as “populism” must have democratic avenues to be expressed, because it reflects the attitudes and prejudices of a nation.  Despotism from the Right remains a very remote risk in the West of course.  The real danger is the growing power of cultural Marxism to which dominant liberalism has been unable to present any serious ideological resistance.  Freedom of speech, political diversity and honesty are all under threat from the cancel culture of the Left.  Electing a Conservative Government in the UK has done very little to slow down the increasing power of the Marxists, as has been seen by the ease with which they seized control of the streets and attacked precious monuments with seeming impunity. 

Thus there are a number of reasons why traditional perspectives are locked out of the public square – the lack of Church leadership, the cultural changes forced by the media, the infiltration of the Conservative Party by hard-line social liberals, the politically-correct restrictions enforced through intimidation and by means of new laws.  Meanwhile the Academy continues its programme of brainwashing our young people with Marxist indoctrination. 

Nonetheless, Russia faced all this too and yet retained its belief in traditional values.  Perhaps the iron fist causes a reaction of resistance; but more likely, despite Sergeism, the values were more deeply instilled in the Russian people and could not be erased.

In the West since before the Enlightenment, all the way back to William of Ockham and the Nominalists, truth and values have been attacked.  This has disorientated ordinary people, meaning they are not sure how to justify what they feel in their spirit to be true.    The real problem therefore lies in centuries of dismantling our Christian values.  It lies in the very liberal paradigm that tried to accommodate the fracturing of Protestantism into different sects and the loss of a coherent and sustaining tradition.  It lies in the European narrative from a Humanist perspective of an oppressive Church that played the role of Caesar.  It lies in the doctrine of Papal Supremacy that broke the West from the East and eventually led not to a rebuilding of cohesion, but everyone becoming their own Pope through Protestantism.

Therefore even with avenues for populist expression, whereby the residue of traditional values amongst ordinary people that have not yet been erased might find expression, that incoherence of tradition will not be overcome.  Instead only a spiritual renewal will achieve anything in secular society.  Only a rediscovery of Tradition in the sense of a uniting, objectively true and subjectively encountered reality can heal the West.  Its very dynamic scientific and material successes are in part both due to and a cause of the break down of that cohesive Tradition.  The worldly comforts and riches achieved were pursued after the loss of Tradition and distract from the need for a return to Tradition.  The West has gained the whole world, but lost its soul.

Russia undoubtedly has its problems, as indicated by high levels of both single parenthood and abortions.  There is financial and criminal corruption in high places.  It was badly damaged by the Revolution and prior to that there were Oriental forms of oppression by the Tsarist state despite its Christian ethos that was so deeply rooted.

Nonetheless what survived in Russia and what often seems alien to those of us unable to see the world from outside the liberal paradigm, is the tradition of faith that is life sustaining in an eternal sense.  Of course, even the Church was heavily compromised by the Soviet regime, but the Tradition through the Holy Spirit exists within each member of that Church, as Lossky explained.  It is far more possible to remain unperturbed in one’s faith in the Orthodox Church when there are profound sacerdotal failings than under the sacerdotal hierarchy of all forms of Western Christianity.  Priesthood and laity are understood differently.

What we see in Russia is a suffering nation and through suffering Christianity flourishes.  Western material success combined with a reductive strand of theology has led to a hollowing out of the Tradition. Only from the small seeds of faith and re-connection with the Holy Tradition will the West be rescued in a sense far more important than maintenance of the rule of law and democratic rights.  Perhaps a time will come when those fundamentals of law and freedom are lost so that providentially we might rediscover what is important.  In the West we have lost the sense of what is most important and that is why we have become obsessed in a maniacal way with cultural Marxist causes.  The rise of Left wing extremism is indicative of the craving for meaning, but it will not be found there.  It will only be found in a return to Traditional Faith and the Church.  Russia has already learnt that lesson the hard way and furthermore at a grassroots level it never fully lost touch with Tradition.   We need to be able to understand what is happening in Russia and we can only do that by stepping outside of our liberal secularist paradigm.    

The Christian Roots of Cultural Marxism

To many conservative Christians the belief system known as Cultural Marxism, like its close cousin, post-modernism, is a hateful ideology bent on destruction of our Christian culture.  To many on the Left the analysis by conservatives of Cultural Marxism is a type of shibboleth denying progressive forces.  Any mention of "Cultural Marxism" is an indication to many on the Left that their interlocutor is really a right-wing extremist, perhaps even a White Supremacist.

It does not help that many of the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, who articulated the key ideas of Cultural Marxism, were Jewish, thus adding to the impression on the Left that those who complain about this philosophy are on the Hard Right and inclined towards anti-Semitic conspiracies.  Cultural Marxism being a dog whistle for anti-semites.  Nonetheless the Jewish aspect to Cultural Marxism is important, as will be argued here below.

In the West and indeed in the Orthodox East, we live in a Judaeo-Christian culture and the beliefs and values of Christianity, emerging as it did from the Jewish milieu, still set the paradigm within which our ethics and politics are worked out and discussed.  Cultural Marxism's power is that it touches on many of these deep cultural-values, while denying and attacking the faith upon which these values were founded.

It was Nietzsche, with his attempt to smash our table of values, who identified an inherent tendency to self destruction in Christianity, which he saw as a slavish and Semitic faith (going back to the validation of slaves as chosen people, not subhuman, and their liberation in the story of Exodus).  Other thinkers on the Right, such as Julius Evola utterly rejected the Christian values of compassion and what he saw as a celebration of weakness, looking instead to a religion of heroes as he believed existed in the Aryan world before Christianity.  Yet as Rene Guenon pointed out, the Tradition of our ancestors was to be found passed on to us within our traditional Christian inheritance.

To understand the political extremes of Left and Right, we really need to pay attention to the powerful and fundamental cultural symbol of Christ as the victim.  Nietszche and Evola were right, without Christianity our moral values would not have been centred on the victim.  Instead, more likely we would have looked back to Imperial Rome or even the earlier Dictators, with their symbol - the fasces, which was to give its name to a Twentieth Century ideology.

Cultural Marxism itself is simply what it claims to be.  It extends the Marxist economic critique to all aspects of society.  Thus it is no longer about dividing the world into economic oppressors of the poor in the form of the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat.  Now every relationship is to be understood as one of group oppression.  Just as we are defined by our economic identity in the struggle of economic power, so we belong to groups in our social interactions, either as oppressors or victims.  As men we inevitably oppress women, as Whites we inevitably oppress other ethnic groups, as heterosexuals we oppress people of non-heterosexual inclinations or passions.  From this stems the absurd idea of intersectionality, which leads to the bizarre "oppression Olympics" of groups competing for entitlement to power on the basis of their greater level of victimhood.

Such an ideology is of course destructive, debilitating and depersonalising.  The individual person is defined by his power status as understood by the ideological narrative.  When revealed as it is , the ideology is about nothing more than power.

While so much is wrong with this ideology, we must understand that it is a phenomenon that only a Judaeo Christian society could spawn.  It is a form of heresy and like all heresies there is only a small deviation from truth that leads to major consequences in terms of actions.  For Christ is indeed the victim, Who calls upon us to love the victim.  On this holy weekend we remember Christ as the sacred victim and scapegoat who suffered and died for us.  Weakness, vulnerability and compassion are all emphasised in the heart of the Christian faith as so powerfully attested to by Christ's willing sacrifice upon the Cross.

With the Cultural Marxists however, there is nothing redemptive about being a victim.  Instead dependency and wallowing in a feeling of being oppressed is encouraged, with the consequent resentment that causes.  It therefore takes us far away from the Christian ethos of forgiveness leading to redemption and towards a revolutionary attitude based upon resentment and self righteousness.

And of course, Christians themselves are ideologically defined as oppressors.  This denial of the founding value-system leads to the bizarre situation of Cultural Marxists turning a blind eye to oppression by other faiths, because it is not possible to comprehend in terms of the ideology that other faiths might cause oppression.  Thus Cultural Marxists are quick to defend those who carry our violence against Israel, yet the Muslim oppression of Christians is deliberately ignored.

The importance of the victim in Christianity has degenerated into the fetishization of victimhood.  The distortion from Christianity involves the denial that Christ redeemed us and was victorious on the Cross, but retains the cultural symbol of the victim.  Without that redemption and possibility of eternal life, all is about this passing world.  The victory must be achieved in this world, where victims are only ever victims and have no hope of Paradise, but must instead fight for Utopia politically and even on the street.  That is the original fall from Christian theology and with a centrifugal force the heresy moves the Cultural Marxists farther and farther away from Christian Truth, until they turn on Christianity itself.  Thinkers such as Evola and Nietszche were wrong, Christianity did not contain inherently the seeds of its own destruction.  Instead Cultural Marxism is only possible, as with the Left wing ideas of their day, because of a heretical turn.

That turn had its root in a heterodox over-emphasis in the West on Christ's humanity at the expense of His divinity.  The Catholic Church focused so much on the suffering of Christ as a victim that it forgot His ultimate victory.  The Protestants did not do very much to break away from this fetishization of Christ as a human victim, rather than triumphant Godhead in the flesh.   Our art and iconography powerfully portrays Christ as a dying or even a dead man.  This is so much so that Fyodor Dostoevsky was shaken on his visit to Europe when he saw Holbein's famous painting of Christ dead in the tomb.  As an Orthodox Christian to see Christ in this way had been unthinkable to the Russian writer, who went on to experience a crisis of faith. 

The fetishization of victimhood was to be combined with another reductionist aspect we inflicted upon Christianity - justification by faith alone.  While faith is central on the journey into the full stature of Christ, if it becomes reduced to justification by adherence to specific statements of a creed, the personal interaction and growth is gone.  Being Christian is no longer about becoming a full human being through faith in Christ, but believing a true creed is sufficient.  This is not so very different from what Jordan Peterson describes as ideological possession - belief in the correct ideology covers all sins and justifies the means.  This is why so many Leftists seem to be so insufferably self-righteous, exhibiting the intolerance of Seventeenth Century Puritans.

There was one key ingredient left before the subversion of our Judaeo Christian culture could begin.  To return to our roots - back in the First Century, the Jews rejected Christ for various reasons.  For the Pharisees, His teaching they thought would endanger their uncomfortable compromise with the Roman Empire that allowed them a level of religious autonomy.  Yet there was another element to Jewish society that became embittered by Christ - the Zionists of the time.  Zealots and others foresaw a Messiah who would by military means overthrow the Romans and establish a Kingdom based upon justice for the poor and oppressed.  Christ taught instead an internal change manifested in a life of love.  This caused severe disappointment and the welcomes of Palm Sunday in defiance of the Sanhedrin led to an unholy alliance of Zealot and Pharisee.  It was about political revolution to establish social justice, rather than hoping in faith for Paradise.  One can see that combined with Catholic emphasis on the victim and Protestant justification by faith alone, this Jewish emphasis on political rather than spiritual solutions was another key ingredient.  First came Marxism and then today, with its long march through our institutions we have Cultural Marxism.

We cannot blame true Judaism any more than true Christianity; yet the Western Churches weakly seem to accept the Cultural Marxist narrative and allow Christianity thereby to be dismissed as oppressive and as rigid tradition.  Instead our culture, based fundamentally upon Christianity, must find its voice again, to counter this corrosive ideology of resentment and materialism.  The answer is to be found in the Patristic writings, from Chrysostom to the Cappadocian Fathers - all of whom took the plight of the poor and oppressed very seriously.  Only then will we again understand that while Christ might have appeared as a victim, a stumbling block and foolishness to many, He is the victor over death and the Church is not a powerful and oppressive institution, but His body on earth.




     

PROGRESS - THE MODERN IDOLATRY

What is very interesting about the typical progressive is their dismissal of religious faith based upon personal revelation and inherited tradition as blind. The ideology of the progressive does not stand up to the sort of scrutiny to which traditional Christianity is continually subjected.  By that ideology I mean the unquestioned premise that the direction of history is towards a positive state and that the new is good by dint of being new.

Such an ideology can be traced back to the Victorian Positivists and further back to the Whiggery of Eighteenth Century England.  The Whigs won the battle of history and wrote history as though it had a providential direction towards the Hanoverian state.  This was taken up as a sort of pseudo-science and spawned the social Darwinism of Spencer, the Dialectical Materialism of Marx and Engels and the liberal assumption that society will become ever-more liberal and ever-more free.  The irony is that such philosophies of blind faith in blind progress have led to persecution, eugenics, concentration camps, class war, the GUlag and the destruction of freedom under the heel of the jack boot of the modern state.

It is to these dangerous roots that the modern Progressive consciously or unconsciously receives the succour for his ideology.  And the key point is that while religious faith is rejected as superstitious and as contradicted by empirical evidence, the Progressive himself places a blind faith in an ever-improving society as state power, censorship and bureaucracy increase, despite the overwhelming lesson of history that from Oliver Cromwell, through to Robespierre, Lenin and Hitler, the radical rejection of inherited society in favour of state-enforced progress has led to misery for countless millions.  From the French Terror to the millions dead in Ukraine from the collectivisation of farms, this blind and superstitious faith in progress has led to misery.

At root is the heresy often criticised by the late Seraphim Rose, the American convert from atheism to Eastern Orthodox Christianity - the heresy of Chiliasm.  That heresy was the belief that God's Kingdom could be created on earth, by political action.  Like so many heresies it moves away from orthodoxy by only the slightest degree, yet the consequences of the original error increase exponentially, so the last state is far worse than the first.  The second commandment of loving one's neighbour is distorted to create an ultimate solution for all our neighbours even at the expense of love of God.  The result has always been and always will be misery.  Utopia on this earth is impossible and to achieve it shows a lack of genuine faith and instead a dangerous blind faith in the inevitability of progress resulting from political action.

The answer to this serious error in Western thinking is to view society as being better or worse depending upon how much it participates in Truth.  This then removes the philosophical error of assuming history is going in one direction.  Further, rejecting this premise makes us aware of the danger of decline and decadence, and helps us to look for ways to maintain and achieve human flourishing through inherited wisdom.

Man lives a more flourishing life the closer he conforms to Truth, not as a result of being more modern or forward thinking.  This living life in a full and flourishing way can appear reactionary or old-fashioned - for example living life in the vocation of a husband and father or housewife and mother.  It can also be progressive, but not for the sake of being progressive.  William Wilberforce did not fight slavery through an appeal to abstract theory or the demands of progress; he fought and defeated slavery by an appeal to the internal and inherited traditions of Western civilisation - Christian values.  One might say Judaeo-Christian values when one thinks of the emphasis in the Old Testament on God freeing His people from slavery to a human master in the form of Pharaoh.

It is quite simply shallow to place one's faith in an ill-defined concept of progress.  We need to ask rather, does this social or political reform bring us closer to or further from the Truth?  An idea of progress for the sake of progress cannot help here.  We cannot know whether a change is for good or bad unless we turn to inherited tradition and personal faith (if these two work against each other something is very wrong with a civilisation and culture).

To give a specific example, there is a lot now said about the role of the male gender in a society.  The aggressive assaults upon our cultural understanding of what it is to be a male role model by the feminist ideologues has confused many.  They have conflated men when they fail, are violent, drunk or purposeless with the Gentleman.  The Gentleman is close to the Truth, tracing his antecedents in the idea of the Christian Knight, that civilised savage, courteous and true, yet strong and brave. To be fully-developed as a man is to look back to that inherited wisdom, which taught men to use their superior physical strength to defend the weak.  To avoid degenerating into a brute men should not be emasculated, but fulfil their potential as Gentlemen.  Here then we see that looking back enables us to reach closer to the Truth, as opposed to the confused situation resulting from progressive ideologies such as feminism.  When men behave as gentlemen it will be far more difficult for the Harvey Weinsteins of this world to misbehave - their behaviour would reveal them as cads because of the stark contrast with a social norm of chivalry. Our current progressive and socially-liberal milieu allowed cads and scoundrels to pass unnoticed for many years.

Progress as an idea is a false and shallow chimera.  It is superstition and nothingness.  It is far more irrational than faith placed in a personal God, discovered in personal revelation through the institution and inherited traditions of the Church. The progressive really should stop projecting their own flimsiness in their faith upon those who follow a deep, prescriptive and traditional religion.  The empirical evidence is clear, a belief in Utopia rather than Heaven has caused the greatest levels of misery in history, while those social reforms that have endured - equality under the law, the abolition of slavery, political freedom all rest upon an ancient and inherited notion of each man being made in the image of God.

If Mr Cameron’s Easter message was divisive then he has struck the right tone!

There has been some criticism of David Cameron’s assertion that this nation, Christian for over a millennium, remains Christian and that this is a heritage that is to be valued.  Apparently a number of self-appointed intellectuals regard this assertion as divisive.  First and foremost it seems difficult to argue with Mr Cameron in terms of the facts.  We have an established church, our national holidays, such as the recent Easter break, celebrate Christian festivals, not Islamic or Hindu festivals, the largest religious group in the nation remains Christian.  It is true that this current generation is making a hash of handing on this Christian heritage to the next, but that does not mean this inheritance is non-existent.  Perhaps this generation will fail to honour the trust it owes its descendants, but the inheritance will no doubt be rediscovered. 

Just as the monks during the Dark Ages, safeguarded this nation’s Christian culture, for it to be rediscovered by the converted Anglo-Saxon invaders much later, so a small number may keep this inheritance safe through the current tide of secularism, for it to be rediscovered in the future.  The inheritance exists, even if Polly Toynbee and Terry Pratchett are selfishly trying to deprive future generations of their right to it.

The criticism that actually needs to be addressed is not the absurd and laughable suggestion that this is not a Christian country, but the further assertion made by the pseudo-intellectual letter-writers to the Telegraph that it is bad for this nation to be Christian because it is divisive and impedes the progress of the ideology of relativist multi-culturalism.

Well just because something is divisive does not mean it is bad.  I am sure Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a divisive figure for Germans living under the Third Reich.  He, in following his Master, did not balk from divisiveness in his pursuit of what was Right.  Whereas multiculturalism may not seem as monumentally evil as Nazism, it is a sort of insidious nihilism, which eats away at our values.

Evil under multiculturalism is not organised by a tyrannical State, but it is permitted and never condemned, for fear of judging non-indigenous cultural values.  Let us remember that Christianity is supposed to be divisive.  Christ said he did not come to bring peace, but division.  He described Himself as coming into the world as a sword, to set people against one another, even within families.  Well the reaction of the letter writers is evidence that Christianity is divisive.  It is divisive because like a sword it sunders the gold from the dross, the good from the evil.  If Christianity were not true it could be compromised within a mishmash of other cultures in a grey and relativist nihilism.  It is precisely because Christianity is so clear that it is the only way that it will always divide people.  If we as a nation wish to aspire to truth and moral values, then we will inevitably find that some will disagree with us even violently.  That is not to say we have got everything right by any means as a country, but if we hold true to our inheritance of values then we will rightly be called divisive – and that is something to take to our credit.