Revolution and Control

 We are living under a revolutionary regime in the West.  It has been a somewhat incremental revolution.  The revolutionary movement has deep roots and it has at each step revolted against the earlier stages in the process.

What is the ideology of the revolution?  In practice it means a deep psychological level of control through manipulation, but it preaches freedom - that is the biggest lie.  Its idea of freedom is closely connected with its anthropology and biology.  It reveals a new "truth" that has been hidden from us, always it works on the basis that truth is hidden and what we see is deception.  This great truth is that man is not a spiritual being with spiritual freedom, this was a lie to enslave you.  The "freeing" truth is that you are a biological automaton, determined by your passions and that you have no soul, but you can be reduced to tiny atoms - that is all that you are.  This liberating message will supposedly usher in a new dawn of freedom, tolerance and equality.

That is the ideology, but it is based on lies, partly believed in by the revolutionaries and partly understood as a means to deceive the masses.  There is a spirt behind this revolution and it is Luciferian.  It rejects tradition, religion, even human love as mere superstitions.   Politically it manifests as forms of liberalism.  Its mantra is "freedom", its goal is control. Biological determinism is its shallow ontology.  It is the doctrine of those elites who through secret societies and occult and hermetic beliefs share a common goal.  It actually turns out to be strict control in the name of freedom.  It is closely connected to scientism, to eugenics, to atheism and materialism and to progressivism.  Its political views, its ideas about sex, its science are taught as unquestioned doctrine in our schools.

The revolution is best understood as having its roots in the Renaissance.  Tragically, after the fall of Constantinople, the West did not seek to rediscover the Orthodox faith of Byzantium, but instead was drawn to the esotericism, the alchemy and occultism that thrived on the fringe of Byzantine culture.  In turn hermeticism grew in the West and led to the development of the new science.  Newton was a key example of a scientist drawn to hermeticism.  From this new science developed the idea of throwing off Christian doctrine and so the Enlightenment would manifest and produced the philosophical ideology of the Revolution that manifested in Jacobin France and Revolutionary America, with its deist and Enlightenment theology behind its constitution.   The new revolutionary elite was essentially atheist and by the Twentieth Century it was attracted to eugenics, manipulation of the masses and so-called "sexual liberation".

This is a basic overview of the story that many will be familiar with, but there is an important role for the Church.  Because the Roman Catholic Church was already in a state of revolution against the rest of the Christian Church.  In 1054 the Pope, having been regarded as Primus inter Pares by the other Patriarchs, broke from the rest of the Church through an innovation in doctrine about the Trinity, put forward in a unilateral change to the shared Nicene Creed - he added the Filioque.  This had theological implications, in which the Monarchy of the Father in the Trinity was to be undermined and as Scholastic doctrine developed, rejecting the energies-essence distinction, was to turn God into an unknowable Monad.

The Catholic Church itself, as understood by Dostoevsky in his Grand Inquisitor narrative, became not so much the manifestation of Christ's body, but an institution of safety and security and control.  The spiritual freedom of the Church was replaced by an institutional framework of safety.  This was a revolution and in the same spirit as the freemasonic revolutions that would in a few hundred years turn against the Roman Catholic Church and the ancien regime It replaced spiritual freedom through Christ with control of that spiritual life.  The seed of revolution had already been sown by the Great Schism later to transform into the Enlightenment.

Furthermore, the Protestant Reformation itself, claiming to restore the freedom of Christ only progressed the revolution further.  For example, Calvinist predestination prefigured the Enlightenment idea of determinism by cause and effect and biology.

So through a combination of the Great Schism and the Reformation, the stage had already been set for a revolution by the elites.  And these elites in large part owed their wealth and therefore their position to the plundering of the Church during the Reformation.  So a matter of bad faith and guilt drove both Enlightenment philosophy and the political revolutions.  What came before had to be proved as evil and entirely rejected.

The revolution did not stop with regicides and empirical philosophy.  Nihilism soon took hold.  The elites working in their cabals designed schemes for Luciferin utopias.  And after the violence of the first centuries of political instability from 1789 to 1917, the idea of a Fabian approach took hold.  Ostensibly granting more freedoms, while retaining control, through democracy and education for all the revolutionary elites were able to achieve a legitimacy for their long term goals of dehumanisation and total power.

Why are the goals so evil?  Because this deal with power and this faith in their own intellectual superiority was a Faustian pact with Lucifer, the light of the rational mind.  The enslavement was dressed up as freedom.  When men could be convinced they were simply highly-developed monkeys then to become a slave to bestial passions was portrayed as freedom.  The 1960s sexual revolution was by design.  Evidence exists of CIA involvement for example.  And all the social changes from promotion of homosexuality to abortion were pushed by the elites, not as a result of popular demand.

It is openly declared in the published literature of the elites that the utopia is one of population control, eugenics and the elimination of religious faith.  Of course many useful idiots who promote these goals, in education, in churches, in politics are unwitting agents.  They have been convinced by the system that these goals are beneficial for mankind.

Who though are these shady elites?  They are the experts and the rich.  They are perhaps themselves somewhat unwitting in their evil.  They have fallen into the trap of their own pride and become themselves slaves of Lucifer who hates mankind.  They are those who control the global institutions such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.  Currently their political tools are wokeness, covid and environmentalism.  They see the resurgence of faith in Russia as a threat.  It is their propaganda in school sex education.    Their chief writers in recent times are the likes of H G Wells and Bertrand Russell.

What we must understand from this is that the establishment is working to separate us from true freedom that is to be found in the person of Christ.  They have managed to subvert most of the Western churches to their agenda. They have also promoted atheism as an ideology through the likes of Richard Dawkins and the rest.  They call much of what they do "freedom" when it is turning us into bestial slaves to the passions.  Technology is used to transfer us from the real world to a virtual world making us all the more malleable and easy to control.

If we wish for true freedom then we must take the intimidating step into placing our faith in Christ through trust and love.  We must free ourselves from the whole coherent, but dark narrative imposed at every level of education and reinforced in popular culture such as the messages promoted in Hollywood.  And this goes back to Dostoevsky's account of the Grand Inquisitor.  We can either place our trust in the security of the control by the revolutionary regime or become spiritually free through Christ.  

Person-centred economics

 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.

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.  

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.  

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

 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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.   

      

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAITH AND PLUNDER

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Perennialist Prince – Gobalism and the New King

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Orthodox Englishman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

Burke versus Gramsci – the Great British Institution and the Conservative Dilemma

 Conservatives look to Edmund Burke as their great founding father.  Central to Burkean thought is the institution with its historical memory as a repository of the wisdom of the ancestors.  In terms of modern philosophy and the Burkean tradition one might also look to Alasdair MacIntyre in his account of institutions and nations acquiring a tradition of virtue and as a Burkean opponent of Burke’s dreaded sophists, economists and calculators .

If conservatism depends for its philosophy upon manmade institutions there is always the risk such institutions will prove fatally fallible and corruptible.  Such could well be the problem in today’s United Kingdom.  Unlike the United States with its revolutionary origins, there has not been such a strong suspicion of Government and institutions within the British Right, sometimes quite the opposite.  The Crown and the Church as Margaret Thatcher once outlined are of far greater import to a Tory than the economy.  This perspective, it should be remembered, was held by the Conservative Prime Minister now looked to as an exemplar by today’s sophists, calculators and economists – the libertarian and neoliberal Right.

Margaret Thatcher though experienced the problem of the dilemma I intend to outline at first-hand.  All the British institutions, the Church of England, the BBC and even the hierarchy of the Conservative Party were opposed to her.  This tension has only grown more stretched and extreme.  While the Conservative Party has moved culturally to the Left, it is still faced by a hostile hard Left in control of the institutions that it should naturally be at home with.

The Church of England is no longer the Conservative Party at prayer, as the saying had it.  The BBC is faced with calls to be defenestrated by conservatives not radicals, because of its cultural Marxism.  Even the Conservative Party itself, at least its high command, is now a proponent of the hard-left cultural agenda in terms of same-sex marriage, “diversity” and equality of outcome.

It seems as though the Gramsci agenda of the “long march through the institutions” as extreme Leftist German-activist Rudi Dutschke put it, has been emphatically achieved in Great Britain.  The universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, the BBC, the Church are all advocates of a hard-line cultural Marxist agenda dressed up in palatable phrases such as “diversity”, “equality”, “openness”.

So what does a Burkean conservative do when the institutions its whole philosophy seeks to conserve and be guided by have fallen into the hands of the Marxists?  One answer is the populist response, looking to the American Right as an example.  Here characters like Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks are notable champions for such an agenda.  Indeed, despite being placed upon the Right, their populist agenda sometimes puts them on the Left.  For example, whereas an earlier Eurosceptic like Enoch Powell was a keen defender of the House of Lords, as well as the Crown and the established Church, Farage and Banks are radical constitutional-reformers.

The other response is the classically liberal agenda, advocated by the sophists, calculators and economists that conservatives should instinctively distrust.  From this free-marketeer liberal perspective privatisation rather than conservation is the answer to the BBC’s political subversion.  The free market is not really a conservative response to dealing with preservation of the institution.  We are not talking about a nationalised industry, but a British institution which is a custodian of many great British traditions.  Would commercialisation and advertising culture really be a conservative answer?

One might contrast arch-liberal free-marketeer George Osborne with populist Nigel Farage as two contrasting answers to the Gramscian victory within British institutions from Oxbridge to the BBC.  To abolish our institutions though is surely not a conservative solution, whether it be BBC privatisation or Church disestablishment. 

The populism of Brexit might have unleashed patriotic forces against the Gramsci institutions, but populist nationalism is not inherently conservative, as any cursory knowledge of Nineteenth Century nationalism will tell us.

It is undoubtedly the case that while the Right and conservatism look to be in the ascendancy, the whole movement is riven by internal contradictions.  This new populism rightly unleashed against the EU has now turned on British institutions like the House of Lords (admittedly corrupted into a culturally Marxist institution by the likes of Blair, Cameron and Clegg).  It could just as easily turn upon the Monarchy and nationalism again would have reverted to its radical-Leftist Nineteenth-Century roots.

It has to be admitted that when the Marxists own and control what you are trying to defend it is difficult to know how to proceed.  The only answer I believe is not one for people looking for instant solutions.  Only a gradual return to the values of Tradition will rescue our institutions and our culture.  And this might have to be carried out in a radical and unconventional way, outside of the apparatus of British institutions.  It might mean home schooling of our children, to teach them traditional values outside of the Marxist-run education system.  It might mean leaving the Church of England as a Church of Laodicea for a more traditionalist denomination that might feel foreign at first, such as Eastern Orthodoxy.  It might mean stepping back from the rat-race of the neoliberal economy with more self-sufficiency and less consumption.  In short it might mean letting the light of conservative tradition shine before men as an example, rather than trying to fight for it and impose it through democratic elections and the party system.  From the small acorn and with Providential nurture we might see a large oak of conservative counter-culture grow that provides a genuine alternative to the anomie of cultural Marxism and its insipid shadow, neoliberalism.  Only with a cultural change, rather than election victories will conservatives see their institutions restored and again linked back to the Burkean wisdom of ancestors. 

Twenty-first Century Bear-baiting

The bear has a sore head and it is on the loose, out of its pit.  Anyone who doubts bear baiting is cruel only has to see the suffering of Mr. Putin through his torment at the hands of Western powers.  NATO has crept up to Mother Russia’s borders, the West arbitrarily pushed for Kosovan independence, through which it broke from Serbia – Russia’s ally.  The United States invaded the sovereign state of Iraq (ruled by a brutal psychopath), ignoring Russian opposition.  The West encouraged a crony capitalism to rise from the ruins of the Soviet Empire, allowing the hated oligarchs to prosper.  Russia is smarting and now it is flexing its muscles.  The Crimean crisis is of course about protecting a Naval base and pipelines, it is about extending its sphere of influence, it is about protecting Russian speakers in the Crimea, but it is also about Russian pride, even Russian hurt pride. 

This outlook may seem like Russian paranoia to those of us in the West, but it could still be a genuinely-held world-view and it seems this is perhaps how the world does look and feel to Putin and his allies.  I am sure there are many liberal Russians who would not see things this way.  It does seem the case though that the rising tensions between the West and Russia are at root to do with a failure to understand each other.

It also seems difficult for the West to understand why the Crimean people should vote in a referendum to join Russia (having arbitrarily been given away to the Ukraine by Krushchev) and thereby avoid closer links with the apparently morally-good European Union.  However, looked at dispassionately, the West might have offered material wealth, but it also offers spiritual poverty. The conservative society of Eastern and Southern Ukraine is presented with a liberal-individualist culture in Wetern Europe manifested through abortion on demand, same-sex marriage, secularism and materialism – is that really such an appealing culture to join?

The Slavic world has not done well out of contact with the West.  Before the Napoleonic Wars, Russia was an agrarian society based around the institutions of Monarchy and Church.  Invasion by France woke Russia up to its technological backwardness.  It therefore embarked upon a programme of modernisation and industrialisation, with all the ugliness and brutalisation that industrialisation brings.  We know in the West that industrialisation can lead to the loss of something precious – one only needs to think of Ruskin, Carlyle, the Romantic poets and the Distributists to hear the literary mourning for a lost world.  There is a constant theme in our men of letters that a better world has been cast away for riches.  Yes we have an easier life physically in the industrialised West, but are we not poorer emotionally and spiritually?  Church attendance is down, marriages are fewer and break more often, teenage-pregnancy rates are high, employees often suffer mentally (stress, nervous breakdowns) from the demands made of them by corporate employers.  What we have cast aside - the hard work of a traditional, agrarian life - might even have been the praxis leading to virtue.  The Russians would understand that.

Hyper-modernisation in Russia went hand-in-hand with a sort of hyper-Enlightenment.  Bolshevism reared its ugly head, throwing off the Church and tradition by taking the ideas of the Enlightenment to their inevitable conclusion – political violence and atheist values.  Thus, while the West preserved the Church and its political institutions, Russia took the pseudo-science of Enlightenment theory seriously and plunged into bloody revolution, followed by brutal oppression by an atheist regime.

Russia as the Soviet Union oppressed its own people and its subject peoples brutally.  People disappeared to the Gulag for opposing a regime that can only be regarded as evil, particularly under Joseph Stalin.  Whole peoples were moved to different locations, as a means of undermining the concept of nation that binds us together.  The West remained as a beacon of hope for many in that dark time. 

The Cold War saw the West win, not only because of its economic strength, but because there was still virtue residing in its culture, handed down by its heritage – a heritage Russia had violently forsaken.  However, during the latter part of the Twentieth Century the West became more and more detached from its own cultural values and developed a liberal-individualist anti-culture.  Liberal individualism would not have defeated Nazism and neither did it win the Cold War.

A financially and morally bankrupt Russian Empire disintegrated in the 1990s.  The West did not think it necessary to offer its heritage of political tradition and cultural values; rather, it introduced Russia to capitalism unlimited by values and cultural norms that still applied (however diminished) in the West.   The hated Russian oligarchs prospered.  Once again Russia was brought into contact with the worst aspects of Western culture.  Selfishness and materialism, not tradition and religion, were seen as the alternative to Socialism. 

The West might see itself as a bastion of the rule of law and political freedom.  To Russians it probably looks like the preacher of selfishness, licentiousness and materialism.  Western Europe was once built upon Church and Monarchy, now it appears to have subsided into moral turpitude.  The only value that matters is individual freedom or rather selfish licence unconstrained by values or taboos.  That at least is probably how we look to the Slavic world.

Of course it is difficult really to imagine how we look to others, if not impossible.  Notwithstanding that, we must at least feel some unease at simply proselytising the post-Soviet world into value-less liberal-individualism.  It really is a rather corrosive world-view and the Slavs, with their own traumatic history of destructive atheism and an all-powerful, oppressive State can probably see that.

Yet in the West we still presume that our earlier moral integrity means that even today, what we do is right because we are the ones doing it.  Thus, invading Iraq or supporting the breaking away of Kosovo is the morally right thing to do, but for Russia to annex Crimea or for the Crimeans to choose to leave the Ukraine is wrong.  Well perhaps it is wrong and certainly Russia is signed up to respect the Ukraine’s borders as part of the deal on nuclear weapons.  The West is therefore on relatively firm legal ground in opposing the annexation and it is right to be concerned about the fate of the minority Tartar people.  However, now that the modern West has descended into a value-less liberalism it is not in a position to preach to others.  So perhaps it would be less hypocritical to see this international crisis as a battle to extend spheres of influence on the part of the West as much as the East, rather than trying to claim the moral high ground.

Bring back the age of chivalry!

When a gentleman acts courteously towards ladies, he may often receive the welcome comment that “The age of chivalry is not dead after all!”  Of course the age of chivalry was about much more than behaving as a gentleman towards ladies, but it was certainly an integral part of it.  Etymologically the word comes from the French for horse and was the code of honourable and Christian behaviour for the Knights of Western Europe. 

Back to Troy

G K Chesterton saw the roots of chivalry as going back to pagan times and being embodied by the character of Hector, whose epithet in Homer’s Iliad is “the tamer of horses”.  Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man:

“Hector grows greater as the ages pass; and it is his name that is the name of the Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat.  The name anticipates all the defeats through which our race and religion were to pass; that survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph.”

Hector does seem in many ways to prefigure the Christian Knight – he is a type, albeit from a pagan world.  Hector of course was loyal and loving to his wife, but is primarily remembered for giving his life for his brother’s sins inasmuch as he died for his City to protect it from Greek vengeance against Paris.  Chesterton went on:

“And as with the city [Troy] so with the hero [Hector]; traced in the archaic lines in that primeval twilight is found the first figure of the Knight.  There is the prophetic coincidence in his title; we have spoken of the word chivalry and how it seems to mingle the horseman with the horse.  It is almost anticipated ages before in the thunder of the Homeric hexameter, and that long leaping word with which the Iliad ends.  It is that very unity for which we can find no name but the holy centaur of chivalry.”

The Origins of the Knight

Mediaeval knights emerged from the chaos of the end of the Carolingian Empire, when Christians fought Christians.  The Church and the Knights themselves felt that there was something profoundly anti-Christian about brethren of the faith killing one another.  The chivalric code therefore grew up to control these mounted warriors and initially dealt with how they should deal with their defeated opponents.  Ransoming your defeated opponent replaced the pagan approach of killing prisoners.  So the Church attempted to restrain Christians in war.  Later with the crusades in response to calls for help from the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, Pope Urban II tried to employ Saint Augustine’s much earlier concept of the Just War, which became part of chivalry in the fight to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslim invaders.  Further crusades such as those to drive the Muslims from Catholic Spain led to the just war becoming a positive duty for the Knight.

Courtly Love and Hunting with Hounds

Later the code of courtly love became part of chivalry.  The knight began to serve the lady and the Christian idea of defending and venerating the weaker sex, particularly linked to the veneration of the Virgin Mary, became integral to chivalry.  This is where our idea of behaving as a gentleman towards ladies can be traced.  It is a uniquely Christian cultural approach, where the woman is honoured rather than oppressed.  The lady goes first through the door, not walking behind her man.

One aspect of modern culture where chivalry survives is in hunting with its codes of behaviour.  Hunting was another integral part of being a knight.  The poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a key example of this, where the moral of marital fidelity is combined with long pieces on hunting with hounds.

The Modern Attacks on the Chivalric Code

Today in the modern world there are many forces arrayed against chivalry.  Feminism attacks the gentleness of the gentleman towards the lady as a form of oppression.  Islamist extremists burn poppies when the modern day soldier returns from defending Afghans from the oppression of the Taliban (our armed forces are surely the strongest example of the chivalric code today).  And the anti-hunting movement seems to be motivated not by concern for animal welfare (hunting clearly being the most humane way to control the fox) but through an atavistic loathing of the symbol of the mounted hunter, which can be traced back to the Knights of Christendom.

Of course, even when chivalry was the dominant code there was hypocrisy and a failure to live up to the ideal.  Abuses took place and prisoners were slaughtered.  Because of this, the opponents of all that chivalry represents attack the concept itself, rather than concede flawed humanity will always fail to live up to the ideal.  Does this really mean the knights should have abandoned their code not to kill prisoners because sometimes it was violated?  It is beyond the blogger why the fact individuals fail to live up to a good code should mean the code is wrong.  This seems to be flawed logic.  Let us keep the ideals of chivalry and the gentleman, because those ideals can only be a force for good, raising us up from our flawed nature, however infrequently and fleetingly.

The Moral of Camelot

One is reminded of the story of Camelot.  Of course Camelot failed in the end and part of that failing was Sir Lancelot’s and Guinevere’s adultery.  And yet Malory is clear that the true fault lies with Mordred who exposes Lancelot and thereby brings the whole kingdom down.  Yes Lancelot failed as a human, yet he was still the “noblest knight”.  The real sin was Mordred’s, as revealed at the end of the tale.

Is this not a metaphor for all those who would pull down our inherited moral codes because they detect individual failure.  The exposure of hypocrisy is enough justification to pull down the whole edifice we have inherited from our ancestors.

Living in Ugly Modernity

Returning to Hector, for those of us who believe in that moral code of the knight that evolved into the idea of the gentleman, are we not living in a strange world today?  All that is good and symbolic of that code is disparaged and attacked.  So that like Hector’s widow, Andromache, we find ourselves in a foreign and strange country.  To quote Charles Baudelaire as he bemoaned the loss of traditional Paris:

“Andromache I think of you – this meagre stream,

This melancholy mirror where had once shone forth

The giant majesty of all you widowhood,

This fraudulent Simois, fed by bitter tears,

Has quickened suddenly my fertile memory

As I walked through the modern Carrousel.

The old Paris is gone (the form a city takes

More quickly shifts, alas, than does the mortal heart).” 

An Orthodox Voice in a Western Wilderness

There has been a tendency for rebellious Westerners to reject their cultural heritage and to seek it in the East.  From the Beatles onwards this has been a popular trend, yet strangely these Westerners do not gravitate towards that great edifice of Eastern culture based on a view of truth West and East share, the Eastern Orthodox Church, but rather choose those manifestations of belief that renounce all that the West regards as most precious about our humanity.  So the rebellious Western youth chooses Buddhism, a philosophy of renunciation, rather than complementing his own Christian heritage by learning how the East has understood those same truths upon which Western culture is built.

The irony of this is that when a Westerner attempts to abandon his culture in a Cartesian effort to shape the world according to his partial view, he finds an Asiatic culture that places far more emphasis on tradition, wisdom of the ancestors and renunciation of novelty.  The blogger suspects however that this attraction to belief systems that some Westerners engage in is an individualistic fascination with the novel.  It all goes back to Descartes’ great attempt to believe only what he himself could justify.  From that step so much of what is wrong with Western culture followed.

Western culture has always been more individualistic than the East, but that individualism can only function in the context of tradition and a reference to the accumulated ways of doing things, based on valid lessons long since forgotten.  The error of the Westerner who thinks that he can pick and choose his culture is that he can never really escape the traditions and cultural values that have shaped him.  Thus a Western convert to Buddhism or Taoism can never be completely that, he will always be a Christian Buddhist or Taoist, just as an atheist in the West still acts in accordance with the values shaped by a Christian post-Roman culture.

And yet if Western culture is individualist, perhaps we are especially free to pick and choose who we are, like existentialists who think we can define our own meaning?  Well actually the West does have a tradition and when that tradition is strong then we are far more fulfilled and free.  Edmund Burke, a defender of the liberties of the Glorious Revolution recognised this.  As much as he believed in the freedoms won for us by Parliament, he understood that we are shaped by our traditions and history.  We hand on those rights, liberties and traditions passed on to us by our ancestors.  Our social contract is not some individualistic arrangement between us and the State, but a contract between us, previous generations and generations to come.  It is a contract based on trust; we hold what our ancestors have left for us on trust for our children.  Thus Church, Monarchy, nation and tradition should be sustained (including necessary reforms for their survival in a changing world) so that they can be passed on to the next generation.

Burke emphasised the wisdom of the ancestors, the importance of prejudice and, in his aesthetic philosophy, the importance of the Sublime.  With reference to this, I now want to return to the East.  Burke was often accused of a Catholic sympathy and yet was he not pointing out those aspects of a culture necessary for its survival that are often neglected in the West?

In the Catholic and Protestant Churches there is a strong emphasis on the individual being saved by Christ taking our punishment.  When Christianity was accepted in the West it moulded a pre-existing individualist and humanist culture.  These Indo-European races with their human-like gods and god-like heroes and their democratic ideals, placed a strong emphasis on the individual human and the personality.  True to the spirit of the Incarnation the Church met people where they were.  Yet can we not learn something from the East?  And I mean here where the East is relevant to us.  Surely the Orthodox Church has far more to say to us than Buddha, Confucius or the Dalai Lama?

The Orthodox Church places a greater emphasis on the teachings of the Church Fathers than Roman Catholics or Protestants and is this not in some way similar to Burke’s emphasis on the wisdom of the ancestors?  Its emphasis on obedience and authority (as opposed to the more subjective notion of individual interpretation of Scripture in Western Protestant Churches) is similar to the Burkean critique of Descartes.

The importance of the Patristics in Orthodox theology is something the West could perhaps learn from.  You only value learning from the Patristics if you recognise your faith is handed down to you by others who have learnt much on the way.  It is surely a recognition that the Cartesian outlook is by definition severely limited.  From the Orthodox outlook we can learn to value our own fathers’ teachings and our own traditions.

For those who look to the East, Orthodoxy provides a greater emphasis on tradition and on a meditative state through the theosis, which is difficult to achieve in the materialist West, shaped by Calvinist ideas that worldly success is evidence of election.  And most importantly of all the Orthodox Church is an expression of the universal values that the West is also in touch with – the truth of Christianity.

We will always be Western, but we can learn from Eastern Christianity, because we are starting from common ground.  From the East we can learn that Western individualism and liberty can reach their fullest potential with due recognition and reverence of tradition and the wisdom of the ancestors.