The Person and the Individual

The human being is identified in the West as an individual and from this concept stem the individual rights codified into human rights legislation and the market economy that works on the basis we are rational agents.  The sense of autonomy that underpins liberal values also depends on the human being conceived of as an individual.

There are many implications from regarding humans as autonomous units. This way of viewing us was not always so natural as it seems. A process of atomisation and objectification took place in the West, linked to changes in metaphysics, the development of scientific methodology and the growth in technology. Closely linked to the process of objectification, the atomisation of individualism leads us to see ourselves as self-contained units surrounded by a world not of encounter, but one of objective data ripe for exploitation as standing reserve. And the more we exploit through techne, the more isolated and atomised we become - stuck on our mobile telephones not encountering what is around us. This is where individualism leads and in the process greatly diminishes our capacity for empathy. The self-contained atom is a deeply reductive view of the human being - a mere consumer or subject of political power.

Much as we lost some connection with Scripture when it was translated from the more expressive Greek into the more legalistic Latin, so our way of defining the human being is too Latinised. The individual is the indivisible unit, who by dint of being indivisible is also a self-contained and self-sufficient autonomous agent. There is another way to describe the human being and that is as a person.

While “individual” is linked to the Latin etymological root for the indivisible, “person” comes from the Greek “prosopon”, meaning to face towards. Thus in the very definition of the person, he is relational and not autonomous. This is a very important difference. It means the human being exists in relationship, not as an autonomous unit and what atomises us does not free us, but diminishes our humanity.

In his seminal work, A Secular Age, Canadian Roman Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor distinguishes between the understanding of self in the enchanted Mediaeval world and the disenchanted and secular world of modernity. Mediaeval Man saw himself as porous, but in modernity Man is a buffered self. What this means is that the human being in the Mediaeval world was porous to cosmic forces, angelic and demonic. He was thus relational both vertically and horizontally with his community. Modern Man is the buffered self, autonomous and protected from external forces and thus his world becomes disenchanted and he therefore becomes alienated and atomised.

Perhaps the darkest definition of Hell was articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre, when he said “Hell is other people”. This is a statement of the atomisation of the atheist West. Other people are an imposition to the buffered self that does not relate, but might (like Sartre) indulge in totalitarian Marxist fantasies of imposed community while not belonging to his own parish or village.

An Orthodox perspective on the person comes from the leading Greek Orthodox theologian, Christos Yannaras. For him the human person, using Heideggerian language is always a being-towards, not an isolated and atomised thing. Individualism is, for Yannaras the consequence of the Fall and the life under the curse of death. Existence becomes a struggle for individual survival, not life in communion, more in accordance with Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” than the Gospel. Yannaras writes:

“For Orthodox theology, the fall of man takes place when he freely renounces his possibility of participating in true life, in personal relationship and loving communion - the only possibility for man to be as a hypostasis of personal distinctiveness. The fall arises out of man’s free decision to reject personal communion with God and restrict himself to the autonomy and self-sufficiency of his own nature.”

And this fall leads to a fragmentation whereby the natural needs of man turn into enslaving passions - leading to death. And now Man living under this curse of death brought about by autonomy leads to an inescapable ancestral sin:

“For nature does not exist except as personal hypostases, and the first man identified the fact of his existence, not with the personal distinctiveness of his natural hypostasis, but with its survival and self-existence. Thus each new human person is born subject to his individual nature’s need to survive as existential autonomy. He is born condemned to be the bearer of an individual or natural will subordinated to the absolute need for survival.”

Yannaras thus contrasts the existence of the person in communion with the diminished and post-lapsarian life of the autonomous individual. The person relates to the Trinitarian God - three divine Persons or hypostases in relationship.

In the secular West there is a great deal of emphasis on individual autonomy as the expression of authenticity. Once we realise the human being is a person this ceases to be a credible perspective. As much as he attempts to assert his freedom the individual becomes a slave to his passions. Many of the expressions of individuality in the form of New-Age tattoos or following particular subcultures simply amounts to becoming absorbed in a new collective identity that does not embody any higher meaning, but is simply cliched and participation in what Heidegger would call the “they self”.

Yannaras places emphasis on personal distinctiveness and irrepeatability as the key aspects of the person. By contrast the individual is humanity reduced to repeatable atom, driven by passions and in his very autonomy no longer sovereign. This personal distinctiveness of Yannaras's person is something like that which we term in common parlance, the personality.

We derive the word “personality” from the person. Our personality exists in relation to others, not in isolation. And once we are isolated we cease to empathise with the other’s personality. Another word derived from person is of course “persona”. Again, looking at modern secular ideas of authenticity, the word “persona” linked as it is to the word mask, is seen as suspect and inauthentic. That though is because we are thinking of it within the paradigm of modern individualism. A mask has important ritualistic and social functions. In his work on ethno-sociology, Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin looks back to the most primitive culture and the role of the persona in ritual and social meaning. For primitive societies the individual was not a concept. The individual, as Nietzsche explained, is a very modern idea.

Dugin explained the role of the persona thus:

“It is significant that the Greek word for 'persona' or 'person' literally means mask. In the ethnos, everything is a mask. The structure of ethnic being is personified. Ethnic thought does not question who the mask conceals or whom the mask indicates. ‘Personality’ is a moment of ethnic noesis and possesses qualities but no substances.”

The persona exists only in the ethnic context, only in communal meaning. Clearly, as Dugin’s work shows, tracing the shift from ethnos, to people, to nation, we are not in that same cultural existence now. Nonetheless, it teaches how the persona can only exist in a non-individualist communal way. Clearly each persona performs a ritualised and socially determined role.

That though is the most authentic form of existence.  The shaman is gone, but it is when we perform socially-defined roles today, such as husband or father, wife or mother, that we find our personal distinctiveness and therefore true freedom. We are no longer drifting atoms, buffeted by our passions, but real people.

As Yannaras, using Heideggerian language, explains:

“Beings are [einai) only as phenomena, only insofar as they become accessible to a referential relation of disclosure. We cannot speak of the being-in-itself of beings; we can only speak of being-there or being-present (par-einai), of co-existence with the possibility of their disclosure. We know beings as presence (par-ousia), not as essence (ousia).”

Both the Palamite and Heideggerian undertones here are noticeable. Dasein itself is disclosed through its energy, not its substance. And here we are at the heart of Yannaras’s argument about the person. It all hinges on the Palamite distinction, but not separation, between energy and essence (ousia). We encounter the personality through its energy. And we encounter God through His energy. Yannaras famously refers to how we can recognise a piece of newly-heard Mozart from another composer’s work because of the energy of Mozart’s personality.

With Yannaras we avoid the univocity of Being of the Franciscan schoolmen. God is not simply the biggest autonomous Being and we the smaller autonomous beings - despots within our own boundaries of Nozik individualism. No, with Yannaras we turn to apophaticism and with the help of Heidegger understand the following:

“As the refutation of exclusively conceptual affirmation of God and of the practical necessity of God [Niezschean as per Heidegger} nihilism stands for a radical denial of the ‘conceptual idols’ of God, and as the unrestricted limit to questioning it offers further possibilities of rescuing the divinity of God.”

For Yannaras Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche’s nihilism consigns metaphysical accounts of God, the God of the philosophers, to the realm of defeated ideas thereby opening us to the possibility that God is or is not. For Yannaras this can lead to apophatic knowledge as personal participation.

Once freed from the conceptual constraints of metaphysics and rationalism the human being can again engage with God as a person. One might say the person is Being-towards- God through communion.

As individuals in our fallen and atomised state we rebelliously verify and conceptualise. When reconnected with our personhood we do not adopt such hubristic Cartesian methods. For Yannaras we are freed from this prison by Christ’s Incarnation, the second Person of the Trinity - the relational Godhead. He unites the human and the divine in communion through his Theanthropic nature as the God Man.

Life in the Church leads to a personal knowledge through participation, not fallen subjective and reductive knowledge. It is the encounter with the energy of God, which is articulated in catholic knowledge.

In this sense the rediscovery of the human being as a person not an individual leads to a re-established relationship with God. However, this can only happen through Christ, because Christ became incarnate. We were trapped in the paradigm of the individual and of autonomous survival. Christ changes that and recapitulates our existence as a personal existence of communion.

To return to the atheist existentialist Sartre, Yannaras has an answer for his famous misanthropic comment, by turning to Dostoevsky:

“Before Sartre, Dostoevsky had already defined hell in a similar way but more fully, summarising the theological teaching on hell of the Orthodox tradition: ‘Hell is the torment of not loving.’ It becomes evident from this definition that ‘other people’ are the occasion of my own hell, although the cause lies in my own inability to relate to them, in my imprisonment in the egocentric autonomy of atomic individuality, in my own ‘freedom’. Hell is therefore all the more tormenting when the ‘other’ is not an atomic individual at a distance from me who nullifies the possibility of relation, but is a person who presents himself to me as a living ecstasy of self-offering and calls me to a fulfilling communion and relation for me remains unattainable. This inability to relate, the punishment of someone not loving, is the ultimate failure of existence which summarises the Church’s teaching on eternal punishment. It is not God who is the punisher and creator of hell.”

Therefore, to be reduced to autonomous individuals from relational persons who can participate in God’s energy, is not simply a difference in terminology, but the road to Hell.




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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 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.




     

GLOBALISM TRUMPED?

After a long hiatus and many major political events having taken place I have decided to resume this 'blog.  This year is the centennial anniversary of both the end of the Great War and the regicide of the Tsar - two events that were to shape the next century in so many dreadful ways.  From the perspective of the English shires neither event brought much happiness.  The Great War drastically and tragically reduced the number of young men in the fields and was arguably the cause of the next cataclysm, the Second World War.  The Tsar's murder and the murder of the Empress, the Tsarevich and their daughters, made hard-line Socialism a real alternative that inspired some of the British Left's worst attacks on the English of the shires.

The Century went on to see rapid mechanisation of agriculture, the replacement of smallholders with agri-business, the mass shifting of women into the workplace, with all the implications for family, and a profound loss of confidence in faith and patriotism.  After the Second World War the move towards the abolition of the nation state by the powerful elite of Europe gathered momentum and became more formalised with the first steps towards a United Europe.  With National Socialism vanquished in the Second World War and International Socialism with the fall of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War, Fukuyama's End of History with the triumph of liberalism seemed to have been reached.  The secularist individual whose only guiding principle is choice has become the ubermensch, so contrary to the actual Nietzschean idea.

Yet this victory now seems hollow.  If the new liberal world can be seen as globalist and cosmopolitan, so that everyone is just an individual, not defined by culture, religion or nationality - a citizen of the world and therefore a citizen of nowhere to paraphrase the current (at the time of writing) Prime Minister - then human beings seem to be rebelling against this individualist, consumerist globalism.

And this rebellion is completely understandable, because we are more than consumers, more than individuals and life is about more than choice.  The effect on the English shires of this liberal globalism has been profound.  The high street has become a uniform entity from John o' Groats to Lands End.  Agricultural workers are cheaper migrant labour, and even more noticeably to most, retail and services have recruited from abroad, changing the fabric of small communities and the pressure to accommodate a massive influx of foreigners means the green and pleasant land young men went to die for a century ago is to be turned into housing.  Meanwhile a political class that has become absorbed into a globalist elite has no sensitivity or understanding of the impact of these issues, only able to think as it is, in terms of GDP and economic calculation.

Globalisation can certainly be said to have had a greater impact on the third-world economies, for better or worse.  Economic growth has certainly been achieved (and we cannot surely begrudge that) but at the expense of traditional lifestyles and has brought in the Western-liberal influence that cannot tolerate the traditional family structure and wants to pull women out of the family home into the workplace.

Yet in the West, from which the reductionist doctrines of individualism and globalism emerged, resistance too can be found.  The referendum in the UK in which the public chose by the highest ever turnout to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States were serious blows struck against a detached elite's vision of one globe of atomistic individuals.  Immigration has been the very real problem that has galvanised popular resistance; yet other issues, such as deindustrialisation and firms relocating to countries with cheaper labour on the economic side, and on the social, an aggressively liberal vision of human beings that places choice of lifestyle above any sense of a human telos in family, were also being rejected.

In reaction to the perceived effrontery of ordinary people rejecting the ideology of their betters, the elite has responded with ferocity to both Brexit and Trump.  At every turn the political/globalist establishment has attempted to subvert these two Anglo-Saxon rebellions.

Part of the tactic of the liberal elite has been to attempt to tarnish Brexit and Trump by association with the bogeyman caricature of Russia that its allies in the media have created.  Anyone in Britain must be unnerved by the prospect of Russian interference, given the recent appalling crime in Salisbury, where a British subject has now become a fatality; yet Russia is being portrayed as a bastion of reactionary conservatism by the elite in an attempt to discredit the valid cause of Anglo Saxon conservatism.  Russian politics is far more complicated than that and this caricature has been created by the elite for its own propaganda purposes.

What is the vision the Anglo Saxon people on either side of the Atlantic have voted for, which has so horrified the establishment?  It is no Corbynista socialism (our elite seems far more comfortable with Corbyn, than with President Trump or Nigel Farage interestingly!).  It is rather a more compassionate version of our own economic system.  Donald Trump with his emphasis on protection is not a Socialist revolutionary, but is a patriot.  He is proposing economic policies that protect domestic jobs.  He wants capitalism to serve people rather than people having to serve a capitalism with no roots in any country.  President Trump recognises that globalisation and mass-immigration are choices made by the elite and that they are not inevitable.

In just the same way Brexit was about restoring national control, in terms of democratic accountability for laws that we live by and an end to the right to freedom of movement of virtually a whole continent to our small island.  This is not revolutionary, it is the restoration of common-sense and a capitalist economy that enables people's lives to get better, rather than live at the whim of globalist companies.

This vision won the democratic battle, but now the battle continues in the corridors of power and in the media, which is compliant to and complicit in the globalist agenda.  Given Theresa May's decision to betray the public on Brexit and the continued attempts to undermine the Trump presidency, it is by no means clear whether two victories in two battles against globalism will ever translate into winning ultimate victory.

Pantheism like Deism can only give a partial picture

 In the declining West with its twin maladies of political correctness and the kitsch there is a growing tendency for thinking and sensitive people to look for the Divine and the cultural in Nature.  The Church seems to have been captured by those forces people of taste reject – I mean a politically-correct outlook that would replace the reaching out to the sublime with value-neutral and gender-neutral language.

Of course this is depressing and cultural decline in the West is a real phenomenon.  I have argued before in this blog that this decline has much to do with the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, with its attempts to universalise, deny the local and the traditional and move from the Incarnation to Deism or even atheism.

Nietzsche of course recognised the decadence of the West and produced a powerful critique in his writings.  He knew that the attempt to explain all by science was a mistake and thought his emphasis on the aesthetic and the subjective Ubermensch was the answer.  I think he was wrong in the way he laid the blame for Western decadence at the door of Christianity.  The self-loathing of political correctness today has its roots in the decadence Nietzsche perceived, but it is not an evolution of Christianity; rather it is a falling away from Christianity.  Christ did not teach us there was no Judgment, only that we were not the judges.  Remove God and we are left with a society with no values (something Nietzsche came to embrace of course).

More perceptive than Nietzsche in his definition of this Western decay was Charles Baudelaire, that old sinner.  As much as that son of a Lutheran minister Friedrich Nietzsche probably never committed a significant carnal sin in his life, Baudelaire in his seedy, garret existence perceived the Divine still through the murk generated by Western liberal dogma.  Rather like the woman washing Christ’s feet grasping the nature of grace better than Simon the Pharisee, so Baudelaire saw that it was a falling away from religion, not religion that brought about decay.

Baudelaire wrote of the liberal French writer, George Sand:

“Consider George Sand.  She is, first and last, a prodigious blockhead, but she is possessed.  It is the Devil who has persuaded her to trust in her good-nature and common-sense, that she must persuade all other prodigious blockheads to trust in their good-nature and common-sense.”

The blogger considers this to be a devastating definition and categorisation of the liberal do-gooder.  Baudelaire saw that these liberals, with their non-judgemental and modern outlook were falling away from Western culture with its concept of sin and redemption.  You cannot have the redemption without the sin.

So the argument of this blog is that what repulsed Nietzsche was not Christianity, but a partial picture of Christian values – it was liberalism, spawned by the least traditionalist and most secularist aspects of Enlightenment thinking.  The decent and intelligent man attracted to Pantheism should not reject Christianity because liberalism casts pearls before swine.  He should first know exactly what it is he is rejecting!  He is not rejecting liberalism, he is rejecting what G K Chesterton called “The intolerant Truth”, which is “full of grace and truth.”

Pantheism does indeed identify something very powerful in Nature and the Pantheist is right to feel awe and perceive something revealed of the divine in Nature, just as Job in his revelation saw God in Nature.  Job however could tell the difference between the Creator and the creature.  The Pantheist has the two confused.  The Pantheist sometimes caricatures the Christian as Manichean or Gnostic, but the Church always regarded the hatred of the material world as heresy.  Baudelaire pointed out:

“The mystery of Paganism.  Mysticism:  the common feature of Paganism and Christianity.”

This may seem arcane, but it is surely profound, and the blogger may not have fully understood Baudelaire’s meaning, but no discussion of Christianity can be complete without reference to the Incarnation and is not the Incarnation nothing less than the Divine coming into its creation and thereby sanctifying and redeeming it?  So both pagans and Christians see the mystery in the world around us.

If creation is imperfect but beautiful, the Incarnation can make it perfect.  We must turn to a far more saintly character than Baudelaire to complete this blog – G K Chesterton.  The Roman Catholic Church is currently investigating whether this rotund Englishman of wit and letters was actually a saint. 

Chesterton demonstrates in his work, the Everlasting Man that Paganism can only eventually lead to depravity as evidenced by Roman decline into the Circus and perverted emperors.  This is of course a reiteration of the first chapter of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans.  In another work, Chesterton defined the problem of paganism in his book on Saint Francis of Assisi:

“What was the matter with the whole heathen civilization was that there was nothing for the mass of men in the way of mysticism, except that concerned with the mystery of the nameless forces of nature, such as sex and growth and death.  Thus, the effect of treating sex as the only one innocent natural thing was that every other innocent natural thing became soaked and sodden with sex.”

Thus the decline of the classical world.  And thus also the need for a redemption from Nature worship.  That redemption came through the Divine entering its own creation – Nature - from the outside.

Acknowledging the specific nature of Christ’s incarnation has important practical implications for today however, because if we take the Incarnation completely seriously, we realise that the Universal has become local, the general, specific and the Divine, individual.  Thus local tradition and custom in religion become sanctified because they are specific to a certain people.  If redemption is achieved by God becoming a real, physical person in a particular place and time in history, so the way we worship and reach out to the universal, which is sublime, must be practised in a customary and traditional way. 

We meet the Universal Divine here in this world, in our places of worship with words handed down to us from previous generations.  As T S Eliot put it in the Four Quartets:

“Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere.  Forever and always.”

The Book of Common Prayer helps us to reach the sublime because of the beauty of its language and because it is English tradition.  New and transitory language is a step away from the Incarnation and towards Deism.  It will refer to the Incarnation in words, but the underlying assumption is that the words should be detached from local context and tradition, they should be “modernised” – this is a major intellectual concession to Deism I believe.

And so the belief or rather faith in the Incarnation achieves what both Pantheism and Deism fail to do:  it brings us into touch with the Divine where we are now in both our personal lives and in our own culture and traditions.  Only the Incarnation can redeem us.