Man and the Mythos

 What perspective brings together such an eclectic mix of writers as T. S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien and Aleksandr Dugin?  What ontology can find justification in the different perspectives of Plato and Heidegger?  At this time of year it is a perspective that we can and do encounter.  It is a recognition of the mystical encounter we often find at Christmas time.  The Virgin kneeling before the manger with the ox and ass nearby is a unity of the gritty realism of a hard birth without domestic shelter and the presence of the Divine Logos.  A thousand magical stars shoot from this one event forever relived in our various customs and traditions.  In our celebration of Christmas we rediscover the encounter with myth and meaning.

So writers as disparate as Tolkien and Chesterton on the one hand and Berdyaev and Dugin on the other recognise the truth of myth in contrast to the flattening out of the world that is the modern project - the Enlightenment deception.

As Orthodox icon carver, essayist and youtuber Jonathan Pageau has often explained - myth is where truth is to be found.  It is how we apply our attention to understand the meaning of seemingly random and material existence.  Not all truths are at the same level he argues, rather the higher level is at the level of myth.

There is another important aspect to the meaning of myth.  It is about participation in Truth.  Yes there is a flat and material meaning that can be found in the world of science, mechanical cause and effect and reduction to basic material explanations.  This though is how an alternative in Heidegger, the great anti-Platonist, and Plato himself can be found.

As Heidegger taught, meaning is found in the realm of encounter, rather than the alienated and dry picking apart of things by empirical science.  On the other hand Plato always points to material reality having a correspondence to the metaphysical Idea, in the realm of Being - where Truth is whole and not partial as in the world of becoming, always in a state of flux.  These very different perspectives can be united in the sense that our encounters can be mystical if we free ourselves from the Enlightenment paradigm.

Of course all our most important encounters and the stories by which we understand the world are far removed from the reduction to parts of empirical science.  The souls and personalities of our loved ones are at a higher level of reality and meaning, than reducing a human being to a talking ape determined by the mechanical laws of cause and effect.  And so while the Platonist attributes the reality we experience through personal encounter as revealing the higher meaning of the Forms, Heidegger might define this as the authentic encounter of beings prior to any abstract scientific theory.  The unity of the perspectives is a rejection of a reductive and abstracted approach as found in the Cartesian move towards subjects dissecting an objective and neutral reality.

Of course Heidegger and Plato have seemingly irreconcilable ontologies.  This is where Christmas provides the unity and the answer.  For Christmas is when the Word becomes flesh, when that outside the realm of beings enters our world of becoming.  By the miracle of Christmas, through a virgin birth, the universal and the particular, the immortal and the mortal, the world of becoming and the world of Being are joined and reconciled.

This also reveals further that as Saint Basil put it we like Moses have licence to plunder the Egyptians.  We can indeed take from and Christianise the pagan ideas and beliefs.  Paganism as a religion participated in a lower level of reality, worshipping angels and demons, rather than the Living God. 

Every level of meaning and belief participates to an extent in the Truth, insofar as it does it is good.  If it is taken as the complete Truth it becomes idolatry.  Everything is made new by the Incarnation.  pagan deities become the characters of fairy tale, the Wild Hunt of Woden is turned into the chivalric hunt of the Christian knight and the slaying of the dragon by Saint George.  All reality is transfigured by the Incarnation at Christmas and its fulfilment on Easter Day.  Death itself is revealed as an absence consequent upon the Fall.

And so, we look for completion not in a political, technological or economic progress to worldly utopia - for that will always lead to reductive ugliness, but instead we look to be transfigured by the Divine.  From Cromwell to Marx, the attempts to create heaven on earth have cut us off from Goodness, Truth and Beauty.

The whole Enlightenment project, with roots in the Reformation and earlier the nominalism of the Ockhamites, has alienated us and disenchanted the world.  Instead of finding in the beautiful a link to the Transcendent we have come to regard it with cynicism - the famous hermeneutics of suspicion, which kill our souls.  And it is these hermeneutics of suspicion that are the reason the powerful who dictate our narratives have taught us to abandon our myths, our stories and instead seek for utopia through political progress.  

While the Church has always understood the myths and customs of the world are imperfect and tarnished by sin, that is not the same as hiding an evil reality.  This though is the premise of the Enlightenment and has its roots in a Protestant rejection of Church ritual.  This pathological cynicism is the justification for Western progressivism that turns against its own myths that help us to access the mystical truth and instead forges a Faustian and Promethean world of hubristic ugliness.  It is also the reason why Christmas is so important in terms of re-enchanting the world and rediscovering the myths that help us to understand the deeper and higher realities of being human in a Fallen world that was created fundamentally as Good. 

Beauty will save the World

 

On encountering the portrait of a disgraced lady, whom he would later try to rescue from self destruction, the Christlike Prince Myshkin, exclaimed that beauty would save the world.  The scene is from Dostoevsky’s tragic masterpiece “The Idiot”, in which the writer examined the clash between the Christian ethos and Nineteenth Century society.  The reference the character makes to beauty is neither superficial nor shallow.  Instead it is a reference to the compassionate perception of beauty in those whom the world has wounded.

It is nonetheless a powerful claim and one far removed from our thinking in today’s world – the modern and postmodern world of ugliness.  T S Eliot discerned the encroaching darkness and meaninglessness in his poem, The Wasteland.  He saw the coming lack of beauty or meaning.  Writers of lesser stature than Dostoevsky, but who still believed in divine beauty, such as J R R Tolkien also perceived the coming and rising ugliness of the secular world.  Indeed modernity as Mordor is a powerful and resonant image for the twenty-first century man.

Here in thinking of beauty we are perceiving something of the ancient world of classical philosophy, when the form of Beauty was linked inextricably in the metaphysical trinity alongside Goodness and Truth.  In a civilisation orientated towards this trinity, social and personal life is understood as teleological and that telos is growth in virtue.  The virtues are good, true and beautiful.

How different our world of the secular and liberal democracy!  We have lost any sense of the mystical.   As Catholic Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has pointed out the world has become disenchanted.  Disenchantment means loss of beauty.  Architecture, art, even our understanding of economics have brought forth ugliness.  A person does not need to be a scholar in Platonism to recognise that there is a different aesthetic value in the sculptures of Classical Greece and Brit Art.

Perhaps modern art reflects back to us exactly what we have become, after we killed God without understanding the consequences (to reference the highly-sensitive atheist philosopher Nietzsche, who truly understood the implications of rejecting God and like Dostoevsky understood its enormity – in Raskolnikov’s words “everything is now permitted”).

In the Enlightenment, knowledge in itself detached from virtue became the goal.  In the end we reached a position where a British scientist would endeavour to reduce the meaning of life to random natural selection.  We had now truly severed ourselves from understanding the meaning of life as participation in the forms of Goodness, Truth and Beauty.  Instead life was understood as a brutal struggle of individuals for survival or a hedonistic and epicurean bourgeois existence of self-satisfaction.  For  utilitarianism pushpin has as much value as beautiful poetry, as the English themselves proudly boasted.

Beauty was reduced to a merely subjective value, in the eye of the beholder.  Nonetheless, this cultural shift did not come from nowhere.  As Greek philosopher and theologian, Christos Yannaras has argued, the God Nietzsche recognised had been killed was not the God of the Orthodox Church, but the God of the rationalist philosophers.  The West in its intellectualism created its own reductive idea of God, imprisoned within Scholastic rationalism and finally dismissed by their intellectual descendants as superfluous to the rationalist and discursive project of Western thought.

In its rationalism the West descended into legalism and the meaning of Beauty was forgotten.  Beauty not in the superficial sense, but in its highest sense as with the Son of God descending to be a self-emptying servant or the Theotokos giving her meek assent to bear the God-Man in her womb.  This is beauty as truth.  Sadly a culture premised on the idea that we are monkeys instinctively programmed simply to find the mate most likely to be successful has a very different, indeed opposite idea of beauty.  That type of civilisation, where Beauty is not a metaphysical truth, but a mere signal of reproductive value, will inevitably descend into surgical alterations and eventually transhumanism.

Our loss of connexion with metaphysical Beauty though also has major social and political implications.  As Western philosophy developed in a rationalist way, as a consequence of Western Christianity having already descended into a more legalist and rationalist spirituality, what came to matter was not achieving the telos of Beauty and thereby an ethical life, but introducing codes and procedures that were depersonalised and bureaucratic.  This was the great modernity envisaged by the Enlightenment thinkers – the secular state.  The human need for beauty was inadequately addressed by Romanticism, which ever teetered on the precipice that threatened descent into sentimentality or hysteria.

Beauty was in a sense compartmentalised into an emotional and aesthetic zone, much valued by effeminate aesthetes and even by men of business, but no longer of real importance in comparison to the perceived real purpose of life - making money.  Beauty was no longer a goal of the virtuous life.  Virtue itself was forgotten as the legal codes of liberalism left people to do as they willed as long as they did not violate others’ boundaries.  The liberal secular society is a cowardly withdrawal from making a metaphysical or ethical commitment.  All beliefs are equally valid, as long as no one interferes with anyone else - there is no specific and transcendental telos to society.

As a consequence each one went his own way and every specific and idiosyncratic route became perceived as legally sacred, however ugly.  People could descend into complete degeneracy.  At first this was merely tolerated by respectable liberals, then all became celebrated precisely because they were idiosyncratic aesthetics.

It was the turn to utilitarianism that was the final breach with beauty.  It was no longer understood that Beauty and Goodness and Truth are linked.  The ethical life is the beautiful life. Being a good person is achieved through striving to love beauty and be beautiful.  Heroism, self-sacrifice, compassion are all beautiful, and of course they are beautiful in part because they are freely chosen.  For the modern though any choice is valid, there is no telos to our existence.

Only if we can again understand Beauty has a reality over and above the subjective or the objective will we also rediscover virtue.  Charles Taylor also pointed out that in the disenchanted society we came to perceive ourselves as buffered individuals, impervious to external forces, thus making our choices entirely sovereign, but also entirely contained and disconnected from the transcendental.  The Medieval man understood differently that he was porous and subject to permeation by angelic and demonic forces.  He could, he knew, become a slave to his passions.  To the secular mind the passions are not an enslavement, but integral to his individualism as a consumer and human being.  To be driven by them is his perverted idea of freedom.  

The Russian writer, Konstantin Leontiev, referred to by some as the Christian Nietzsche, understood that progression in society was disintegration from the whole into atomistic individualism – like a body suffering a progressive disease.  This indeed seems to be what is happening to the Western commonwealth.  With its increased atomisation and complete loss of telos or a sense of virtue, it appears to be disintegrating into idiosyncratic forms of ugliness.

Why has this arisen in the bureaucratic, secular and procedural system of liberal democracies?  On a mystical level Rene Guenon explained that when the reign of quantity fulfilled its final and ultimate logic, cut off from the supernal, cracks would appear from below and the infernal would replace the secular.  Undoubtedly this is how the West now looks, especially with the growing interest in darker and preternatural forces.  Empty people trapped in anomie are turning to Crowley not the Church.

A more pragmatic angle on this is that by its very neutrality the liberal secular system, like Pontius Pilate, washes its hands of truth.  It refuses to discern between Good and Evil, Beauty and Ugliness, Truth and Lies.  Instead whether good or evil, beautiful or ugly, true or false, all is subject to the same neutral procedure.  Virtue ceases to be an aspiration and vices are treated as equally valid.  Consequently society itself starts to become vicious, as long as the rules are not broken.  Legalism fully replacing Beauty, Truth and Goodness.

This must be why Beauty will save the world.  Beauty, whatever the deconstructionists attempt, still reaches us in a way that is not subject to discursive rationalism.  Its appeal and attractiveness are ineffable.  We recognise truth and goodness in them. 

Whatever approved lies we recite, we can see beauty in the happy and bonded young family, the romantic beauty of love between a new husband and wife, the delicate and awesome beauty of Creation, the heroic beauty of self sacrifice.  These manifestations of beauty take us far beyond what is correct in process or in the abstract codes of rights and duties.  There is something intrinsically personal and collectively shared in an encounter with beauty.  It can give us access to the other two metaphysical forms of Truth and Goodness.  It enables us to discern the difference between Good and Evil, Truth and Lies, Beauty and Ugliness. 

Cut off from an aesthetic sense, under the power of codes and rights, we do not discern between the loving and natural relationship or the vicious and lustful interaction, the beauty of a holy icon or a self-indulgent expression of abstract art, the false validity of ideological claims or the Truth of Holy Tradition.

Lies can obscure Truth.  The Bad can intimidate people from being Good.  But if we begin again to understand that participating in Beauty is a virtue and perceive it again, ugliness will be undone and access to the True and the Good will be restored.

For now though, surrounded by the ugliness that many writers of the last two centuries saw was coming and even already established, we remain confused and blind celebrating the wicked and despising the good, but all in the bland spirit of due process and tolerance.  

The Curious Case of Western Foreign Policy

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been renowned for its expertise on foreign climes and cultures so it really is mysterious why British foreign policy seems currently to be focused on destabilising areas where its interests require stability.  Perhaps the more pertinent question is why American foreign policy is all about making the world more uncertain, when its interests seem to depend on a certain world.  That must be the more pertinent question because to a large extent British foreign policy is a shadowing of American policy.

Indeed the foreign policy of “Old Europe” when independent from the United States, can be best represented by the Congress of Vienna, where British statesman, Lord Castlereagh, was instrumental in ensuring an agreement that secured the existing political establishment and prevented a major European war for a century.  This was an anti-revolutionary and anti-nationalist treaty, which worked in its goal of achieving peace. 

Today the United States take the lead in Western foreign policy and have adopted policies in recent years that have destabilised the Middle East (particularly through the invasion of Iraq) and thereby allowed Islamist extremism to gain a foothold in the region and also given Iran the opportunity to fill the new vacuum.   It was apparent to the most naïve of foreign-policy observers that remove the strongman Saddam Hussein (hideous as he was) and a factional and internecine power struggle between religious groups would result. 

Despite the example of that consequent bloody civil-war, the United States have recently abandoned their ally Hosni Mubarak to a revolution.  This has sent two messages to the world – that the West does not object to revolution as a means of seizing political power and secondly, that it will not stand by those who take the political risk of allying themselves to the West.

This is not to defend the two dictators, Saddam Hussein and Hosni Mubarak; rather, it is to point out that being rid of brutal strongmen at all costs, even bloody revolution and civil war, is not always right or justifiable.  In Iraq and Egypt, not only were there all the usual risks of revolution – bloody civil war, persecution of minorities, a far worse dictator arising – but, there was also the looming threat of political Islam just waiting for an opportunity, with all its hostility to our interests.

The latest manifestation of the failure of the West to speak out against revolution was the ongoing crisis in the Ukraine.  No doubt the deposed government was especially corrupt and toadied to Russia, but it was elected for a term and there was a mechanism of a general election, when voters would have had the opportunity to throw out the crooks.  Even when there was a possibility of political compromise, the West seemed to pull the rug from under the negotiations.  On the face of it, supporting the Pro-Western revolutionaries seemed more coherent than Middle Eastern policy, but the unintended outcome – a more dominant Russia in the region – shows again that supporting destabilisation is always the high-risk strategy.

This strange foreign policy emanates from the United States and the only explanation (given Western interests have been harmed so much in the Middle East as a result) is a romantic attachment to the idea of revolution.  It is here argued that through a misunderstanding of its own history, perhaps even the “Hollywoodisation” of its own history, in the eyes of a section of America, the revolutionary’s cause is always just.  Well, one only needs to look at real history to see that real revolutions are bloody and destroy custom and morals.  They mean a nation state suffers a sort of ontological violence, because its genesis as a revolutionary state was through violence.  The French Revolution led to the Terror and then to Bonaparte.  The Russian Revolution led to the Bolsheviks and then the terror of Stalinism. Revolution is rarely the way to achieve stable government. 

Dominant American thought imagines their own creation as a state and concludes that throwing aside of custom, law and convention leads to a sort of secular freedom.  Well, there was not an “American Revolution”, there was only an American War of Independence.  That is why the United States emerged as stable and democratic.  The American, slave-owning establishment broke away from the rule of an island across an ocean, but it took with it a political and legal heritage – representative democracy (as opposed to direct democracy) and the common law.  It continued as a functioning state after a war of independence.  There was no one to terrorise as the remote oppressors were the other side of the ocean.  The American establishment continued with the reins of power, but independent of that remote, previous rule.

Indeed where American politics breaks down, such as in the gridlock between President and Congress, is down to those elements of the constitution based upon abstract, French theory of separation of powers, rather than reliance on inherited precedent.

Where the United States are weak is not through their relative newness as a state, but through the fact that they came into existence at just the time when Europe was smashing its table of values.  It therefore took on board the new enlightenment secularism, writing a constitution that set in stone a valueless or neutral society.  Perhaps it is these origins that explain why the United States continue with an apparently overly-optimistic and simplistic view of other cultures, despite the experience of their own bloody civil war. 

This is not to suggest American people (as opposed to the Washington establishment) are in any way naïve.  Many on the American Right recognise the danger of existing under a secular or neutral constitution.  That is why there are campaigns for the Ten Commandments to be placed in schools, despite the historic exclusion of religion from the public square.  Meanwhile in Europe, with our heritage of values that have shaped our own constitutions, we are far more complacent and arrogant than many Americans about the encroaching of secularism. 

It was an American, T S Eliot who warned of the dangers of a neutral society and made the positive case for a Christian society.  It is American Catholics today who are campaigning for one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest Christian apologists, G K Chesterton, to be canonised. 

It is of course difficult to fully understand the history of another state, but it is easier for us as British to understand the United States because they were once legally connected with this polity and they adapted this nation’s institutions and laws to a new continent.  If it is accepted that the United States have misunderstood their own genesis, this would explain its seemingly irrational belief that revolution will lead to pro-Western democracies, as opposed to extremist states bent on hostility to its and our interests.  One can only hope American schools start to teach their children about the War of Independence instead of the American Revolution and that we will see a different, more historically aware foreign policy from a future generation.   

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.    

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.

The Devil is in the detail

 Surely it is deeply troubling and unsettling to people of faith, whether they be zealous in conviction or just vaguely assenting to the faith of their forefathers, that at baptism the established Church will offer the option not to refer to sin.  This may well blend in with our choice-based, consumerist society, but is it not surely profoundly contradictory to ignore sin and the Devil at the very moment he and his ways are to be renounced?  Of all the services at which to ignore the Devil, surely the sacrament of Baptism is the last at which this should be done.

It may be argued that this is merely a trial, evil is still mentioned, it is only an alternative and no definite decision has been made.  It is my concern that a trial alone and its being targeted at the least religiously-aware congregations suggest the Church does not recognise the gravity of what it is doing.  It just should not have gone down this road in the first place.

In my blogs I have often praised the Church of England as an important force for good and I passionately believe in the need for an established Church, but when such a vital piece of doctrine as the existence of a personified force of evil is denied, one can only assume that the established Church has been corrupted at least by the society it is meant to evangelise and at worst corrupted by the very force it is attempting to sweep under the carpet.

C S Lewis pointed out in his Screwtape Letters that the Devil is at his most powerful when he is thought of as an unbelievable caricature.  It seems as though modern Anglican theology does not spend much time on the personification of Evil.  One does not have to be a Manichean to recognise a malevolent and fallen force that deceives and leads astray; one simply needs to read Scripture clearly rather than through the prism of over-intellectualised theology.

In England it must be the case that for the maintenance of a Christian society the established Church is a significant and indeed vital factor.  Disestablishment would seem to be a renunciation of the whole of society’s Christian heritage and the reduction of Christianity to a disconnected sect.  It is however possible to believe in establishment and yet be very troubled by the direction that the established Church is taking.

In many ways, through its rootedness in communities, through its links with Royalty, through school education, through its sanctifying of national celebration or mourning and indeed family occasions for the irregular attendee, through weddings, funerals and of course christenings, the Church of England ensures Christ remains at least a small part of all our lives and that everyone is part of a parish.  Such a role requires a different tone from the free churches or the Church of Rome, in that these other parts of the Universal Church are completely separated from the State.  However, as T S Eliot argued in his essay on the Christian Society, the purpose of an established Church must be to Christianise our society; it most certainly is not to live-and-let-live. 

It is also pointed out by Eliot that an established Church can be corrupted and is particularly at risk through its connexion with the State. For this reason its hierarchy may from time to time need to come under attack from the community of Christians.  In the case of ignoring the Devil, has not the Church been corrupted to please the existing, liberal, multiculturalist establishment, which advocates free choice and non-condemnation as its values or rather non-values?

Is the Church not also failing in its pastoral responsibilities to those who are least familiar with their forefathers’ faith?  If a personified, fallen deceiver is kept secret and hidden and moral dilemmas are simply portrayed as a matter of autonomous choosing rather than a matter of the risk of being led astray, are we not joining the predominant idolatry of choice and subjectivity that the Church should be crusading against?  How much more difficult it is to make the right choice, when your religious leaders tell you that there is no fallen angel attempting to tempt you and lead you astray!  It is all very well to say evil is within man just as good is within man, although this sounds more Quaker than Anglican, but an awareness of the Devil brings vigilance against sin.  Truly this secrecy about sin and the Devil at baptism is a dereliction of duty on the part of the established Church.