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 Western Sickness

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reactionary Rus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Novichok and Holy Russia

Russia’s recovery from Bolshevism and Return to Christian Values is a Beacon of Hope – yet where were these values in Salisbury?

It seemed like the Barsetshire Chronicles had met John Le Carre when a Russian former spy and double agent and his daughter were poisoned by a chemical substance.  The cathedral city of Salisbury has been the site of the first chemical attack on these islands.  Since then one British subject has died from novichok poisoning and another has finally been released from hospital.

The evidence appears to point to Russian actors.  Russia denies this.  The alternative, put forward by conspiracy theorists, that British intelligence was responsible seems far-fetched to British ears.  To regard such an accusation as credible would require most of us to reconstruct completely our understanding of how the British state functions.  This is far easier for a Russian who is familiar with a state that commits crimes. History is clear, the Soviet state committed moral crimes against its people.  One only needs to peruse Solzhenitsyn to find this out.  The idea that the British Government would have fabricated or staged the poisoning may seem incredible to us, but not to a Russian citizen.

Neither is it very persuasive to draw an equivalence with the British State’s assassination of Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Syria.  These are cases of war zones and the former state is one where the government is an ally of the British and the latter state is no friend of the Islamists.  By contrast, in Salisbury an attack was made on British soil with a chemical weapon, with callous disregard of the danger to lives and the local economy.  In parenthesis  it is simplistic to imagine that the vast state of Russia and its intelligence services are as centralised as those of the British state, nonetheless, on balance, as opposed to beyond reasonable doubt, the Russian state appears to be guilty.  Western allies rallied to the cause of Britain – showing Brexit Britain continues to have international stature.

Herein lies the main point – Russia may have seen many dramatic changes since the fall of the Soviet Union, but nonetheless its starting point is very low if we recall Stalin, the KGB and the GUlag.  It is a low that is now far more familiar to those in the West, as the Soviets enforced by the jack boot what left-wing university professors in the West are re-educating middle-class students to support – abolition of capitalism and suppression of the Church, mass abortion and shifting women en masse into the work place.  Once we grasp this then we can understand how a nation that is seeing a resurgent Church can also be connected to a crime that was committed with a cavalier attitude to the sanctity of innocent life.

After the regicide of the Tsar Russia began a moral decline into atheistic tyranny.  Truth was sacrificed to a materialistic ideology and the sanctity of the person was as nothing.  The state became all intrusive and claimed citizens’ loyalty over and above human loyalties to family, Church and God. 

Of course the resurgence of Orthodoxy and the veneration of the Romanovs is proof that for all this state oppression the human values of the Russians did not disappear, but simply went underground.  Yet as Jordan Peterson has pointed out, the effect of the totalitarian system of Communism was to replace Truth with the Lie.  In effect – the attempt to abolish the Logos.  It was in that sense a Satanic project.  Russia hit a nadir in its civilization, whatever the nostalgia now for the certainties of the Soviet period, following the abuse of the common weal by capitalistic oligarchs. 

Countries' stories are not straight lines, but always revert to national archetypes.  If we think of the history of nations and cultures as cyclical rather than progressive we not only get a more accurate understanding of what is happening, but can rationalise the apparent contradictions of that vast country Winston Churchill once described as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.  Russia has hit the bottom point of a cycle and now is rising up again, but that does not mean the powers that be in the Russian establishment are untainted by the brutal system of the Bolshevik state of which many of the current establishment were part. Furthermore, any revolution is disruptive and undoubtedly criminal elements have benefited from the collapse of the Soviet Union, just as there has been the opportunity to resuscitate former traditions of value.

Quite apart from the apparent direct attack on our soil, why is this so important to us?  Because, continuing the theme of the cycle in the history of nations, it seems that Western civilization has reached a tipping point and is in precipitous decline.  The doctrines of the postmodernists and cultural Marxists have spread like a destructive contagion out of the university campuses and into mainstream life.  These destructive forces are too subtle to manifest themselves in the same bloody way that they did in Russia, but these forces are now more insidious.  Therefore Russia’s rediscovery of Christian tradition is the great hope of the West and to see it tarnished by the apparent disregard for the sanctity of the human person can seem to undermine this hope.

What must therefore be understood is this :  The shadow of brutal Bolshevik atheism is cast long over modern Russia, on the one hand.  On the other hand, the forces of tradition, religious faith and the Church were never extinguished and are now resurgent, with the support of the same state still tainted by a Bolshevik past.

Two parallel ideas are underpinning post -Soviet Russia, that of Holy Russia and that of Greater Russia.  In the figure of Vladimir Putin both ideas are honoured, although perhaps the latter to the greater degree.  Putin recognises the importance of religious faith and apparently was secretly baptised and raised as a believer.  Yet to believe he is manipulating religious belief and imposing it upon people to disguise his alleged tyranny is a complete misunderstanding of a very simplistic Western mind-set.

The Russian Church is a grass-roots phenomenon, its flame was kept burning by the people.  The Government has recognised this as a fact, just as Stalin had to recognise it during the German invasion.  A cultural Marxist narrative of religion being a means of control simply will not do as an intelligent analysis of what the situation is in Russia.

Furthermore, Putin is not having to contrive at remaining in power – he is very popular because he stood up to the oligarchs and because he, like the Russian people at large, felt the humiliation of the fall of the Soviet Union.  He is a patriot, for all his faults.

The western media may describe Putin as a kleptocratic reincarnation of Hitler, but this is almost a back-to-front misunderstanding.  Putin’s mind-set is defensive not aggressive, I believe.  He wishes to maintain Russia’s status and a sphere of national interest on the world stage.  That need not affect Western interests.  His speech at Munich in 2007 goes a long way to explain his world view.  The expansion of NATO, the stationing of US missiles on his border and Western intervention in the Ukraine, prior to his annexation of the Crimea have all created a feeling of encirclement. Russia had not expected this and initially believed that the end of the Cold War would mean a partnership of equality between the United States and the Russian Federation, with mutual respect for their different traditions.

We are rightly proud of our own turning point after another event in Munich, when we were to go on to stand alone against Hitler.  Yet this moment of true pride in our national valour sometimes misleads us into thinking every international situation is one of a moral test to resist the temptation of appeasement.  Anthony Eden arguably made this mistake over the Suez Canal.

Russia is changing or going full circle, rediscovering values and traditions we are on the point of losing.  Russia needs to know it is still an equal player on the world stage and that its own traditions, which are not liberal-democratic, can be regarded with respect.  Let us remember the U.S. started intervening in Russia’s choice of leader before Russia ever did so in US elections. 

For this reason President Trump, in the teeth of opposition from the Washington establishment and the military-industrial complex, is approaching Russia in the right way.  Friendship and mutual respect will bring the best out of relations with Russia.  Were Russia no longer painted as a pariah state we might also learn something from how traditional values can resurrect after Marxism.  This is a very necessary lesson we could learn as our own traditions and values, from Christianity to the meaning of gender are being corroded by unchallenged cultural-Marxists.

So what about Novichok?  Well again it seems that President Trump has it right in an approach that is both realist and principled.  While the UK is rightly going through the process of a criminal investigation, the President took a clear stand against Russia with the recall of diplomats, but he is now adopting the constructive policy of engagement.  For unlike National Socialist Germany, engaging with Christian Russia will undoubtedly lead to benefits for both civilizations. Engagement should not always be regarded as appeasement.   

WHY MONARCHIES FALL

Today is the anniversary of the brutal regicide of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II and the bloody murder of his wife Empress Alexandra (Queen Victoria's favourite granddaughter), their four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia (collectively referred to as OTMA by themselves in family correspondence) and the haemophiliac Tsarevich Alexey.  Their murders were brutal, clumsy and bloody.

Another anniversary occurred a couple of days before - the celebration of the storming of the Bastille in France in 1789 - which led to the state murders of King Louis XVI and his Austrian Queen Marie Antoinette.  Burke famously lamented the treatment of the Queen with the following words in his famous Reflections: 

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendour and joy.

Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness."

Marx despised this passage, which is reason enough for us to take it to heart.  For Marx was the inspiration behind the brutal crime against the Romanovs.  They were killed in the name of his ideology in a basement of their prison in Ekaterinburg and their bodies dumped and an attempt made to dissolve them with acid.  Thus modern regicide hit a new low of depravity.

Solzhenitsyn, the Russian intellectual, saw a direct link between the horrors of the French Revolution and its reign of Terror and the Bolshevik Revolution that tore down his own country's social fabric and hierarchy.

In our own island the British Monarchy remains and continues to hold the respect and love of its subjects.  It survived where others did not and it is often assumed that is because of the pragmatism of British institutions.  The British Monarchy unlike the Russian Autocrat adapted to a constitutional role in a parliamentary-representative democracy.

Yet such an understanding suggests a shallow and positivist perspective of history.  The British Monarchy has not simply survived because it adapted to the Whigs' Glorious Revolution.  Just like the Russian and French Monarchies it is closely associated with the Church and Tradition.  And if Monarchy is to be what it should be, it must retain a connection with transcendental Tradition.

Nonetheless it is true that while that transcendental aspect of Monarchy inspires loyalty and sacrifice, it also makes it a target of those who would flatten out our society with the aim of breaking any connection with the Transcendent.  Yet our own Monarchy is closely linked to the idea of transcendent Tradition and the power of this idea was demonstrated by the impact of the traditional Coronation service upon Queen Elizabeth II.  The anointing with oil within a tabernacle was a sacramental experience for Her Majesty, which has continued to sustain her through the many trials of her reign.

This claim to a divine connection led to attacks upon our own Monarchy.  It faced revolution and suffered regicide as a result of the Civil War.  Charles I approached his death with the stoicism of his Christian faith so that he is still regarded (albeit quietly) as a Martyr of the Anglican Church.  The same progressive and regicidal forces, somewhat moderated later in the Century, ensured after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that the Monarchy's powers were curtailed by Parliament, and its survival would be conditional on popular assent, as demonstrated by the lines in our national anthem:

"May she defends our laws
And ever give us cause
To sing with heart and voice
God save the Queen"

Yet the Monarchy itself has a place in our hearts and moves us because of its sacred and traditional elements.  This power of Tradition has also shaped Prince Charles' values and idea of vocation.  His Royal Highness has associated himself with perennial and Traditionalist ideas of religion, which has clearly drawn him to orthodox religion of many forms, from his own Greek Orthodox heritage on Mount Athos to traditionalist Islam (which should be distinguished sharply from the revolutionary Islam of the Salafists - unfortunately often misleadingly described as "conservative").

So the British Monarchy does not really fit the Whiggish mould and retains its connection to the transcendent Tradition, albeit less obviously than the Romanovs.  And it was that connection with the transcendent Tradition that meant the Bolsheviks needed to eliminate the Romanovs.  For the revolutionaries believed the Transcendental to be fake and that all could be explained by economics and materialism.  They wanted to break the connection with the Transcendent.

For Tsar Nicholas and his family however, their Orthodox faith was of central importance.  It was for this reason the kindly father and reluctant monarch Nicholas, resisted calls for a full parliamentary-democracy and remained the autocrat.  It was Empress Alexandra's Orthodox faith (combined with her Victorian and Protestant upbringing) that led her to bring up their children un-spoilt and un-corrupted by the decadence of the Russian Court, leading to resentment from the aristocracy.

Often the involvement of Rasputin in the Romanov family is used by secularist historians to point to the superstition of their religious faith and paint it as one of the causes of their tragic overthrow.  Yet this is to take the Bolshevik propaganda at face value and to fail to understand certain important elements of Russian Orthodoxy.

Empress Alexandra was a sincere convert (after initial reluctance) from Lutheranism to the highly Traditionalist Russian Orthodox Church.  A central sacred figure of Orthodoxy is the fool for Christ or yurodivy.  Alexandra became convinced Rasputin was such a figure and furthermore she depended on him because of the love she had for her family.  Only Rasputin had the power to heal her precious son of his haemophilia when the medical doctors could do nothing.  Is the Empress to be found at fault for this?  Rasputin (unlike the Romanovs -declared martyrs by ROCOR and Passion Bearers by the Russian Church) has never been acknowledged by the Orthodox Church, but it is our modern post-Enlightenment mindset that prevents us understanding his importance to the Royal Family.

Just as with the French Monarchy, the Russian Monarchy had to be eliminated in the opinion of those forces that emerged from the Enlightenment.  Monarchy maintained the connection between man and the Transcendent, right back to the early beginnings of our human story.  A Monarchy that has lost this connection, as it can do by becoming secularised or modernised, is no longer a threat to the materialist and anti-sacred agenda of the revolutionaries.  It is no longer a target.  It is therefore of great credit to the the Stuarts, the Bourbons and the Romanovs that they were considered such a threat as to be necessary to murder.  They courageously went to their deaths believing in the divine aspect of the kingly vocation.  To lose this sense is to lose the point of Monarchy.

While our own Royal Family has accommodated itself to modernism in the mixed economy of the British constitution, made up of representative democracy and monarchy as it is, our Queen has maintained the sacred nature of her vocation and this sense of the Transcendent has shaped her reign.  Albeit with his own personal perspective, Prince Charles too is clearly a believer in the Transcendent Tradition.  Yes such an aspect to Monarchy will always provoke the hostility of those who wish to break the connection with the Transcendent in the name of progress, but to lose that Tradition would make the Monarchy purposeless, causing it to degenerate into mere celebrity.

     

The War to End a Gentler World

Much of the gentleness of Europe had been dissipated anyway, before the First World War.  Commercialisation, the era of the sophist, the economist and the calculator that Edmund Burke long ago identified had already come about.  It co-existed however with a continuing gentleness of Faith, Monarchy, rural life and homesteads.  Alongside the grime and misery of industrialisation, the older world still lingered – sustained because that was the natural way to live.  A portrait of that world was powerfully painted by Siegfried Sassoon in his book Memoir of a Foxhunting Man.

The Great War was the first industrial and first fully-mechanised war.  Men were no longer bands of brothers, but pawns to be sacrificed.  When the clouds of smoke cleared and the barren landscape remained, that gentler world could no longer survive.  The pressures were building, but the Great War ensured the victory of Modernity. 

The combatants indeed represented different worlds.  Austria-Hungary and Germany placed their faith in the new power of mechanised warfare.  The descendants of the Holy Roman Empire again turned on the remnants of Byzantium, supported by the Ottomans.  In its harassment of the small state of Serbia, Austria-Hungary was only following in the spirit of the Catholic Crusaders who sacked Christian Constantinople in 1204 for gain of its treasure.

The new nation of Germany allied with the Hapsburgs made war on an older Christian culture in its attack on Serbia, bringing Holy Russia into the conflict, in defence of its tiny Orthodox brother.  The mechanised horror of modern warfare the Germanic nations wrought on Russia, brought an end to the Orthodox Monarchy and saw the forces of materialism and modernity Dostoevsky foresaw taking control of Russia.  The Russia of greedy, crass oligarchs that we see today is the result of the triumph of those forces and the Holy Spiritual Russia is still battling to re-emerge.

In England things changed forever.  For many the painful losses of War at least meant the forces of Progress triumphed – women’s suffrage, class distinctions beginning to dissolve and a greater faith in science and the Machine (that force identified with all its dangers by that Anglophobe Anglican R S Thomas).

Yet with those many, many young men who died for us – to protect us from a German-dominated single State of Europe – did not something of England’s spirit die too?  For all our progress, didn’t something intangible yet profound die with our boys on Flanders Field?  Haven’t we been left with an uglier world all round – a world where money does the talking, faith is seen as blind not as vital for our existence and our beautiful countryside is disappearing, subject to the forces of greed and gain?

Edward Thomas died for the land of England more than anything else.  The England his poetry describes, however, seems more like a distant memory.

Yet I would not dare say they died in vain.  For by resisting Germany we did retain our freedom in the West despite all the ugliness of the modern world.  By keeping that freedom – unlike Russia’s fate as it fell under the control of the merciless Bolsheviks - we at least have the power to make the choice to rebuild that gentler world.  Much as consumerism and technology can separate us from trusting in older values, the young men who died protected our freedom to resist the erosion by the forces of modernity of our spiritual inheritance.

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.

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.

The True European is no friend to the Eurocrats

To talk of scepticism about the European Union, that political and economic project, as being an anti-European phenomenon is (often) a complete misunderstanding of that position.  Of course, there may be a minority of Euro-sceptics who genuinely loathe their European kin, but what really fires mainstream Euro-Scepticism is opposition not only to loss of democracy, but more fundamentally opposition to the standardisation of Europe.  That standardisation is the destruction of European culture in all its various national manifestations.

T S Eliot, in a radio lecture to a German audience in the Post-War years, stated:

“For the health of the culture of Europe two conditions are required:  that the culture of each country should be unique, and that the different cultures should recognise their relationship, so that each should be susceptible of influence from others.”

What is relevant here in terms of the political project in Europe today is that it is based upon standardising and making all Europeans the same.  If we believe in a European culture however, we must understand that it is strengthened by the different local expressions of that heritage.  If everything is forced from above by a political and legal authority to be the same, there can no longer be the cross fertilisation necessary to sustain European culture.

This blogger does believe in European culture and that there is something unique and special that Europe has to offer the world.  It is from the interaction between Christianity and the heritage of Greece and Rome.  These two societies, which valued humanity, were fertile ground for this new Semitic faith from Galilee.  Greek was the language of Scripture and Rome the ecclesiastical centre of the new religion.  Today we are all still shaped by that interaction between these forces.  All Europeans have this in common, including Eastern Europe with its Christian Orthodox and Byzantine heritage, which can trace its genesis to the same three roots.

However, that cultural unity is achieved through the diversity of local sub-cultures, from the Anglo-Saxon to the Italian.  Our strength lies in our difference and our culture is not the same as politics.  The trouble with the European Union is that it is trying to replace European culture with European politics.

The two forces are in complete antithesis, because the predominant political ideology is anti-cultural.  The dominant political outlook, to the exclusion of all others, is secularist, liberal and materialist.  To value Europe’s cultural heritage is to destroy your career in the European Union.  One only has to call to mind the debacle of Rocco Buttiglione’s candidacy for the European Commission to understand that the Commission is instinctively opposed to European values.  It was precisely because Buttiglione as a Roman Catholic held to a moral and spiritual code that sustained our culture since the Holy Roman Empire that his candidacy was undermined.

So the European Union is more about secularism and liberalism than sustaining European culture.  It would rather see a Europe in which the only value was the legitimacy of personal choice – a moral code described by American Distributists as similar to that of “the psychopath”, in which one choice is no more morally valid than another.  This is in contrast with a European culture based upon real values.

Furthermore by its aggressive project of standardisation the strength of Europe’s different cultures is being eroded.  A key example is weights and measures.  This may seem a mundane subject, but weights and measures are part of everyday life, they become part of our unique colloquialisms and our sayings.  They reflect an outlook on life and are therefore part of popular culture.  Thus imperial measurements in England do not adhere to an abstract theory of measurement, but rather commemorate specific events or individuals – the foot for example, mythically being based upon the size of King Edward’s foot.  This uniqueness is of course anathema to the anti-cultural European Union and so selling goods in imperial measurements in England has become a criminal offence!

So the argument of this blog is that the true European loves what makes Europeans different and what makes them the same.  The English, with our common law, adversarial politics and law, our foxhunting, pubs and yes selling our goods in pounds and ounces, and of course with William Shakespeare and our poets.  The French: with their painters, their strong secular state, sustained rural way of life, their gentler form of capitalism, their wine and cuisine.  The Germans: with Goethe, with their music, their philosophy, their consensual industrial relations and yes their beer festivals.   The Italians: with Dante, their opera, strong family-values, their Catholicism.  It is sad when these traditions diminish and standardisation undermines tradition.  Politics undermine culture.

In the same way, what holds Europe together is inheriting the universal and cultural values of Christendom, expressed differently throughout Europe, from the severe Calvinism of some parts of the North to the sumptuous Catholicism of the South.  Whatever the local manifestation, that common culture holds us together and a political system so averse to that inheritance also undermines what Europeans share.

The European political class must realise that Europe’s spiritual and cultural survival does not depend on political unification, but local diversity.  We saw in the last century the danger of that impetus to unite politically when Germany became a political unit and standardised, it went on to try and create a standardised, political unit of the whole Continent and its archipelagos.     

John Major, during his more beleaguered years as Prime Minister, trying to gain acceptance of the Maastricht Treaty emphasised the Catholic concept of subsidiarity - a principle that was championed by that English Catholic and Distributist G K Chesterton.  The Roman Catholic Church has learnt from history what a dangerous path it is to ignore local conditions.  It had to face the Reformation as Northern Europe began to express its Christianity in its simpler, more democratic way.  The European Union should learn from the Church and in that way Europe will become stronger through its diversity of Protestantism, Catholicism, different languages, customs and different national traits.  The best way to achieve that European diversity is through that tried and tested political institution – the nation state.

The nation state is large enough to unite, without being too large to gain popular engagement and acceptance.  It is of the same size as a nation of people by definition.  It is the nuclear family, with those special ties, as opposed to the extended family of a whole Continent.  It holds together a people who have specific things the same in common: language, race, history, religion.  Of course all European nations are part of something bigger, but they are the local manifestation of that culture and because they are of the same size as a people they command the political legitimacy a super state could never command.  Men will die for their country and thereby save democracy from threat; they would not die for an international bureaucracy. So Europe should not vest an international bureaucracy with law-making powers and all the trappings of a nation state.  No one will come to save it when it falls under threat.

Lifting the Veil on Modern Culture! Some reflections in the wake of Sir John Tavener's passing

With the passing of Sir John Tavener there has been much coverage of his explanation of where he received inspiration from and how he was able to create beautiful music.  The fuel for his talent was he believed his religious faith – and words such as “inspiration” and “create” have particular resonance for those with religious faith.  It is also very interesting to note that Sir John Tavener’s work was both modern and popular – usually mutually-exclusive adjectives where classical music is concerned. 

Sir John’s spiritual background was rich – he began life as a Presbyterian, but spent time adhering to both Roman Catholic and the Russian Orthodox Churches.

Sir John  said:  “I think I’ve been very lucky all my life because the writing and the faith seem to go together.”

The point is of course that the late Sir John’s music was beautiful and we can all appreciate beauty.  It sometimes seems as though today’s artists and composers try to avoid beauty and distrust popularity.  There is a strange snobbishness against beauty – this blogger however is a simple soul and believes that the point of art, music and poetry is beauty.

It is the argument of this blog that Sir John achieved beauty, which led to a broader cross-section of popularity, because of his faith, which gave him a profound understanding of objective truth.  The danger for many modern artists is that they have gone down the dead end of subjectivity.  In fact they make a virtue of subjectivity!

Surely though, this is exactly what art should avoid – it should rather bring us closer to the truth if we are to share a common appreciation and all be inspired in response.  Subjectivity can sometimes risk becoming self-indulgent; following the truth is an act of selflessness.  Was it not subjectivity that the Old Testament prophet in part condemned when he spoke of each going their own way like lost sheep?

It is often commented that religion at least gave us great works of art.  Well, I would have thought that by definition religion leads to great art, because it leads us to truth and there is a true form of beauty that is not subjective (to paraphrase Keats).

Richard Wagner commented that the atheist cannot produce art.  Indeed, Sir John Tavener found his ability to compose greatly inhibited when he had a crisis of faith.  Speaking of this he said:  “When I became ill . . . I became conscious for the first time, the religious zeal I had before, I found had gone, but so had my ability to write music.  It was about three years without anything, I just wanted to lie in a darkened room.  And then the faith came back in a different way, with writing.”

The question that is begging is how can the atheist be inspired?  Well of course he can be inspired, even if he does not identify the source of inspiration.  It seems to the blogger that the trouble is that the artist will find his own subjective outlook gets in the way.  Much modern art seems indeed to regard subjectivity as conferring authenticity on creation.  Well we are all individuals and have something unique to say of course.  The danger is that once we start making an idol of our own talents and ideas then we become inaccessible to others and are no longer able to communicate beauty.  And that is not something to feel superior about!

What Sir John Tavener gave us were works of music that were a result of his own individual talent and personal outlook interacting with a shared concept of truth.  That is why he was able to achieve popularity with his modern music.  Surely to be authentic and popular is the aim of all creative people, because you thereby speak to many more people about the truth you wish to impart.