An Orthodox Englishman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anointed Monarchs versus the veiled republic of oligarchs

 This weblog began some years ago with an article on the importance of anointing in the English Coronation service.  The precedent is Biblical – just as the kings of Israel of times yore were anointed with oil, so too our kings and queens.  Soon another coronation will be upon us with the crowning of King Charles III.  This great celebration inevitably following upon the sad loss and national bereavement of our longest-reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, whose coronation service formed the subject of the very first article on “A Voice From the Shires”.

With the falling asleep of Queen Elizabeth II and the imminent anointing and crowning of King Charles, it seemed a fitting moment to revisit the topic of monarchy.  One can see from the public reaction to the falling asleep of the abdicated king of Greece that monarchy holds a deep meaning for peoples even after official abolition – however much on paper the correct processes were followed to create a republic.

Monarchy is the most human of governmental institutions.  It is based both upon a connection with the transcendent and personal relationship.  It is the retold and accepted story of modern history that we shifted from monarchy, rule of the one, to democracy, rule of the people.  This is considered within our current paradigm to be a story of benign progress.  What our paradigm of thought fails to consider is that all that Weber categorised as the irrational and inexplicable is actually the most human aspect of our civilisation.  Within that seemingly irrational realm is faith, loyalty to an anointed monarch, folk culture, high culture – all that is not procedural or bureaucratic.  Most significantly a bureaucratic society cannot reach to or aspire to the transcendent.  The Transcendent is that which is beyond analysis and categorisation.  It is understood rather through tradition and revelation, without being contrary to logic – it is super-logical or over and above the rational.

History is only going in one direction because the oligarchies of the globe ensure it.  There is no natural law that means a breaking down of tradition and “modernisation” of systems is inevitable or better.  Only because he thinks within a limited paradigm can Sir (knighted by a monarch) Keir Starmer describe the House of Lords as “indefensible”.  What if we had permitted the restoration of the monarchy in Yugoslavia or Afghanistan?  Perhaps much bloodshed might have been averted because of the inspirational and unifying charism of monarchy.

In trying to get around this conundrum, this loss of the higher by reducing to the procedural, the English utilitarians thought they had an answer.  The liberal English journalist Walter Bagehot who wrote in the Nineteenth century for what today remains the voice of liberalism, the Economist newspaper, suggested the concept of the “veiled republic”.  He divided government into its efficient and dignified functions.  The efficient side of the constitution was the functional and bureaucratic part, which actually ran the country.  On the other side was the dignified part of the constitution, which included the monarchy, the ceremony, the ritual.  From his secular liberal perspective the dignified also had a function – to veil the English republic and to instil affection in British citizens for the apparent kingdom to which they felt they belonged.  While Bagehot believed utilitarianism worked, he acknowledged that it did not inspire or create affection in men’s hearts.

What though if we step outside the secular liberal paradigm and instead ask the question what if the coronation as a sacrament were a true sacrament?  And what if, instead of adopting a Protestant reductionism, we recognised the existence of an anointed monarch as an iconic participation in the divine rather than an idolatrous distraction from God?  Everything if perceived incorrectly can become an idol, but everything when viewed correctly points to God.

We would then be able to understand the power of Royalty as something real, not a deceptive veil pulled across the drab reality.  Ever since the Enlightenment the Western mind has been trained to imagine that there is something behind the tradition, something base and mechanical or an abuse of power.  We have become incapable of recognising that many parts of life are not a base trick, but instead point to a higher reality, something better, something even more true and something even more beautiful.

Of course the man who is crowned is a mere fallen mortal, but he participates through his holy and sacramental anointing in something higher than himself.  He is a bridge to the eternal.  This is why from the British monarch to the Emperors of the Byzantine Empire, there was something sacred about monarchy.  Before too in pagan times the Roman Emperor was actually recognised as a deity.  Christian faith put this right, placing the monarch in an anointed role, but no longer divine himself.

This is the reason for the Royal “we” as the monarch refers both to himself and the higher entity to which he belongs not from merit but through a sacrament of anointing.

From Weber to Bagehot an unremitting message is enforced.  Reality is reduced to the processes, the bureaucracy, but on the other side, everything that seems to participate in the good, the true and the beautiful is irrational and merely a veil across the base facts.

This though is not convincing if we step outside of the secular-liberal paradigm.  Anointed monarchy is personal not a rigid system.  Monarchy is a living and breathing institution, based not on abstract rules and processes, but personal relationship and history.  The Monarch is the father of the people, the government is based upon bloodline and the realm thereby is a family.

Such a system raises alarm bells for the modern secularist.  Comes to mind the arbitrary rule of a James II or Ivan Grozny.  And yet historians now seriously question the Whig account of James Stuart’s rule.  Religious toleration and resistance to a narrow-minded and Protestant oligarchy is perhaps a more accurate understanding.  Even in Russia there are moves afoot to rehabilitate Ivan the Terrible’s memory and some even call for his canonisation.  Unlike Henry VIII who stripped religion bare (to whom he is often compared) he was of real significance in achieving Moscow’s status as the Third Rome after the fall of Constantinople.

We must remember as the cliché goes, the victors write the history.  And those victors of the “Glorious Revolution” in England could have just as easily been the corrupt oligarchs of the Seventeenth Century, just as today traditional institutions are attacked by the men of Davos.

Two of the most arbitrary rulers were of course the first two Tudor kings, who attacked commonweal and Church.  While they were anointed and crowned correctly, Henry Tudor was an usurper and not only did he exhibit miserliness, but his line under his son and Thomas Cromwell would bring forward a modern and more bureaucratic system eliminating the age of chivalry last symbolised by Richard III and his gallant and brave falling at Bosworth.

The anointing might have taken place, but it was based upon lies and thereby we see the danger of illegitimate power.  Monarchy works because the fallen man participates in the meaning of his anointing and is able thereby to transcend his compromised nature.  He then rules as a father of his nation, just as Nicholas II was determined to do, even abdicating to protect his subjects and finally achieving martyrdom at the hands of the Bolsheviks.

And France too is evidence of what the removal of a Christian Monarch can unleash.  The horror of the guillotine and the cruel and inhuman suppression of the Royalist-peasant uprising in the Vendee are the result of revolution in the name of progress and reason.  The successful revolutionaries, it must be remembered, first attacked faith and even paraded a statue of the female personification of Reason in a horrible parody of the Mother of God.

From the Vendee to the modern Greek public there is a supra-rational recognition of a truth of the link between them and a ruler anointed through Christian ritual as part of a family that has a right to rule.  And very powerfully was this demonstrated by the many who filed past the coffin of the late Queen Elizabeth, lying in state in Westminster Hall.  This was of course inexplicable to the new elites in this country who are cosmopolitan people of nowhere.

Faith in the transcendental God is vital to good monarchy.  To go further faith in an Incarnate God facilitates and promotes true and good Monarchy  There is always the risk of a fallen monarch who no longer fulfils his telos.  The alternative though is a compromise with man’s fallenness – a bureaucratic system that always plans for the worst in human nature.  It protects us, but prevents us reaching the heights.  It no longer allows for aspiring to virtue, only mediocrity.

Fear of arbitrary government has led to a procedural and bureaucratic existence where Reason remains an idol hostile to loyalty, faith and a Christian teleology for the people.  Or perhaps a certain narrative of the dangers of arbitrary personal rule has been used and exploited for a power grab by the oligarchs from whom monarchs were supposed to protect their subjects.

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 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. 

Types of Freedom

“Oh yes, we shall be in chains and there will be no freedom, but the time will come when, from the depths of our despair, we shall rise up once again in joy, without which man cannot survive and God cannot exist, for joy comes from God and is His greatest gift.”

Dmitry Karamazov, in Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

In Brothers Karamazov one of the key protagonists, Dmitry Karamazov, finds he is well prepared for his likely sentence to Siberia because of the internal freedom given to him by faith.  During the years of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe Orthodox priests in solitary confinement were amazingly able to transform solitary confinement into a spiritual journey.

In his recently published book The Cunning of Freedom:  Saving the Self in an Age of False Idols, Polish academic, political philosopher and politician, Ryszard Legutko wrote about the inner freedom of authenticity, the positive freedom of the virtues and the negative freedom of the liberal.  Inner freedom is the ancient and classical freedom of metaphysical man, homo metaphysicus:

“Metaphysical man is driven by the pervasive conviction that the goal of his existence transcends physical and societal limitation and though beyond his immediate grasp, it will determine his destiny.  Even the miseries that result from his finite nature, the failures, the fragility of life, the fear of death, point in this direction.”

Legutko therefore identifies three forms of freedom in European thought, first negative liberty – the dominant one of our contemporary era is the freedom from controls and restrictions.  Positive liberty is about the freedom to live consequent upon the virtuous life, so that a man is free insofar as he achieves his telos of virtue and is no longer enslaved to his passions.  Thirdly is the inner freedom of authenticity.  The last two freedoms are closely related, while the positive freedom achieved through virtuous living is in tension with the liberal idea of freedom, which in effect enslaves us to our passions.

If we were to live in a world different from our own, where the cultural idea of freedom were positive rather than negative, then the inner authenticity of the person would also be strengthened.  The liberal man, who is free to live his life as an individual following the drives of his passions is likely to be unable to withstand the situation where his appetites are unsatisfied and he must instead endure suffering.  Because his freedom has meant nothing more than following his passions or appetites, when the liberal is threatened with the totalitarian state he will discover he does not have the inner resources of the inner freedom that positive liberty, with its emphasis on freedom through the virtues nurtures.

Yet as with Dostoevsky’s Dmitry Karamazov, a character distinctly lacking in virtue, inner freedom is still attainable directly through faith and then comes virtue afterwards.  Instead of living virtuously authenticity of the inner life could just as easily be the result of a shock or a crisis.  Such a situation often occurs when one has lived according to one’s passions selfishly for too long and life takes a terrible turn in consequence.  To survive inwardly though still requires an underlying faith in something greater than oneself, even if one has avoided participating in that until the great shock or crisis comes.  The liberal does not believe in anything greater than himself or his own choices.

The strength of character and virtues resulting from the positive liberty of virtue ethics will always defend the person when his temporal benefits and distractions are removed, as Boethius discovered many centuries ago.  It is at that point, the point of arrest and the GULAG that one will know whether one’s freedom was merely of the negative type - that freedom of liberal ideology, mere individualism, or the true freedom of the metaphysical man.

When we reduce the situation to its extreme the concept of inner freedom based on a vertical spiritual participation versus the negative freedom of the liberal to follow his animalistic or even unnatural appetites is revealed.  The liberal will be far more vulnerable and have no inner depth, if he only lives for his passions.  The man whose freedom is about participation vertically in the higher realm will survive, as has been evidenced by the men who survived the prison camps of the Twentieth Century, such as Viktor Frankl.  Those who were not metaphysical men, such as Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn survived by becoming such during the shock of their imprisonment and from their encounters with imprisoned Orthodox Christians.

This reveals which freedom is true and which is actually a sham and no more than a form of enslavement to the things of the world.  It also has some worrying implications.  We celebrate liberal freedom in the West with our consumerist society that encourages all types of irresponsibility and sexual deviance as freedom.  And yet when deprived of our things, our fetishes, our appetites are we still really free?  The man living in Stalinist Russia, with few of our choices, survived through the strength of inner freedom.  It is a disconcerting thought that brutal oppression rather than the free society might create an inner freedom.  Is it any wonder that Christianity today flourishes in Russia and is in decline in the West full of things and opportunities to focus us on our passions?

It would be helpful to remember the etymology of passion, linked as it is to the Greek word for passivity.  When we are driven by our passions something has control of us other than ourselves.  Through attainment of the virtues we are freed from our passions.  Passions being indulged are not evidence of freedom, as the liberal believes, but slavery.  Living the liberal life denies the possibility of transformation through transfiguration.  On the other hand not only the virtuous man, but the prodigal son recognises the higher freedom.

The free man is the one who has the inner strength through faith to look hard labour in Siberia steadfastly in the eye and still he will remain joyful. 

As Dmitry Karamazov exults the day before his trial in the novel:

“If they drive God off the face of the earth, we shall welcome Him down below!  It is impossible for a convict to be without God, even more impossible than for someone who is not a convict!  And then the time will come to pass when we, the underground people, will join in a solemn hymn to God, who is the source of joy!  Praise the Lord and His joy!  I love Him!”

Liberalism and Militant Islam – different forms of arbitrary power

 

I have often made the assertion that liberalism and militant Islam share certain philosophical premises, making them both different manifestations at opposite extremes of a dark theology.  Such an assertion is greeted with bemused looks, amusement and confusion.  Here is one more attempt to say what I mean.

Liberal reductionism

On the face of it, liberalism and militant Islam could not be more different.  The former represents individualistic freedom, the latter oppression of the individual by a patriarchal theocracy.  Nonetheless, the strange fact about these two ideologies is their common ontological root.  Both operate in an amoral universe, where in effect might is right.  The difference is not so much in their ontology as in where they place authority.

Of course militant Islam usually emerges in more tribal and traditionalist societies.  Nonetheless, as we saw in Timbuctoo or indeed with the Buddhist sculptures in Afghanistan, tradition and history are not safe in the hands of the radical Islamist.  He is a revolutionary and he is such because he has no sense of participation in a telos of  the Good, the True and the Beautiful.  There is not the emphasis in Islam and especially not in militant Islam on Man as being made in the image of God with the potential for participation in the Divine.  This of course has implications not only for iconography, but how we treat humans as the ultimate icons of the Divine.  It deprives us of the foresight to recognise that Man’s telos is to participate in the Divine.  Rather than a dynamic participation in divine love we find in both systems a legalistic framework – at each end of the spectrum, one focusing on rights, the other on restrictions: but legalism as the answer in both cases.

It must at the outset be acknowledged that while liberalism has a brutal and dark side with regard to abortion, euthanasia and suicide, most people in liberal societies are not living under a regime that will exercise power with such brutality as the Taliban or Islamic State.  The purpose here is not to relativise all perspectives, but point to some common roots that explain why liberalism is not enough in itself to resist militant Islam.  Enlightenment values will not do; it is a rediscovery of real Christian values that will protect the West.  Indeed in the liberal respect for the individual there is a hint of Christian sanctity of life, but the idea of the human being has been hideously distorted and reduced by the philosophical twists and turns of Western thought.

Despite a chasm in policy differences with Islam, fundamentally, liberalism, with its roots in English Puritanism, like militant Islam, has an amoral and reductive view of humanity.  Despots are the Hobbesian alternative to the sovereign individual.  Individuals are all potential despots who have no telos of participation in the divine; they are simply permitted to be despots or caliphs, so to speak, in the realm of their own private domain.  The ontology of power and sovereignty is addressed in a different way from Islam, but it still boils down to power and sovereignty.  Liberalism is a political way to manage a world that is just about will and power, with no higher purpose.  Militant Islam makes a religion of will and power.

This tendency in liberalism is in part likely due to the dim view that Puritans took of human nature, with an over-emphasis on original sin.  People had to be managed in a punitive way for a functioning society it was assumed.  The liberal perspective is also due to other broader religious influences, in particular that of the Franciscan theologians of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries in Britain – men such as Dun Scotus and William of Ockham.

 

The Franciscan School and Islamic Influence

The Scottish Dun Scotus is responsible for the theory of univocity of Being, failing as with all Roman Catholic theologians to distinguish between essence and energy.  For Dun Scotus God was not fundamentally different ontologically, but the ultimate form of Being.  This differs from Thomism with its analogy to the unknowable God and also Orthodoxy where God is knowable in His energies, not His essence.  As Anglican theologian John Milbank has pointed out, in this view, men in God’s image were able to become omnipotent rulers in their own domain, like the omnipotent Godhead.  Individuals free to dispose of their property and even their bodies as they wished. 

We cannot rely on Milbank very far, as being a Thomist he too fails to distinguish between energy and essence.  Instead he hides God away entirely as an unreachable and unknowable Being – the mistake that Saint Gregory of Palamas once pointed out would lead the West to atheism.

Combined with the Scottish -Franciscan Duns Scotus’s idea of univocity of Being and haecceity of things (all being particular and individually complete) we have the English-Franciscan William of Ockham.  With his rejection of universals there was nothing at the metaphysical level to participate in.  He denied the reality of generals and universals, reducing them to mere names or constructs.  Thus Man in the image of God was denied his telos to be spiritually transformed.

It is no accident that this stripping Man of his reflecting the Divine glory and denying him the possibility of true theosis is similar to an Islamic view.   Undoubtedly Islam has strong neoplatonic tendencies, with the Monad, the geometrical art and yet the interactoin between West and East led to a loss of understanding of participation.  Thinkers such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham were heavily reliant upon the interpretation of Aristotle by Islamic theologian Averroes, who had rejected any neo-Platonic leanings of participation in Forms in Islamic teaching in favour instead of an entirely reductive and nominalist perspective.  Here then European Man in his denuded and materialistic form is very similar to the Islamic Man, who probably was not even made in the image of God and has no telos of theosis, because Allah is far beyond us.

Arbitrary Voluntarism

In effect this means that both Europeans and Moslems are living in an arbitrary world where their purpose is exercise of power – either on behalf of themselves or a despotic God.  The difference is where power lies.  For the Europeans it is found to reside in the individual and laws protect that individual unit.  For Muslims it lies with an arbitrary and unknowable divine power and Shariah law enforces that Divine Will.

There is another factor here common to both Islamic and secular Western thought – voluntarism, from the Latin for will.  It is the sovereign exercise of the will.  Now Islam and liberalism differ in who exercises the will – the individual or Allah, but still will is the source of Right.

The atomistic individual of the West and the Monad of Islam have a key characteristic in common: their non-relational aspect.  The God of Islam is an Ultimate Individual – self-contained, sovereign and arbitrary in his exercise of power.  He is the Monad. The Western individual has complete sovereignty over his acts and is not a part of an organic whole, like many, many monads.  Neither of them can relate to God in a transformative way, participating in the energy of God.  He is unknowable and beyond us.

The Christian Answer of Freedom in Love

Contrast this with Eastern Christian theology.  As theologian Christos Yannaras has pointed out, in a reflection of the Trinity as inter-relational hypostases, human beings are human through relating, through love.  We relate both to God and to our neighbours.  We are not atomistic individuals, but relational personalities.  This is where Orthodox Christianity differs fundamentally from both liberalism and Islam.  Man remains the relational image of God imbued with the possibility through love of transformation.  A latent telos though is not compatible with voluntarist sovereignty, whether that sovereignty simply be over oneself or over others.  To be one’s own master as with the liberal is to deny any higher purpose for which one exists.  Meanwhile, the Muslim is unable to participate in a God because of an ontological chasm between Himself and His creation.  Both the liberal and the Muslim live in a sort of random space, made secure through enforced laws.

Participation in the Good requires there to be more than mere will and power.  Liberalism’s alternative to the despotic God of Islam is to turn each of us into individual despots, within our own boundaries.  This is not a positive alternative to militant and political Islam.  It has already conceded the ontological field of Being to a random exercise of will through power.  Many in the West contrast our culture with Islamic extremism and the surface differences are very apparent.  Nonetheless, we will not be able to resist their powerful and militant aggression without a fundamentally positive assertion that human beings have a meaning and telos beyond subjugation.  Freedom used merely to exercise sovereignty over my own domain is no real freedom of possibilities.  To reassert a positive view of humanity requires rediscovery of a positive theology that regards the human being as a relational personality – a sacred icon of the Divine.  The icon has the potential and the possibility to reflect its Creator through Goodness and Love.  Neither liberalism nor Islam has this positive view of the human being.  Liberalism will not defeat militant Islam, because it is atomised negativity in the face of collective negativity.

Political Implications

The key difference between liberalism and militant Islam is how liberalism diffuses the exercise of power to the atom of society, the individual.  That same power is exercised at a collective level in the militant Islamic society, making it more effective in a clash of wills.  Individualism, with more spontaneity and innovation, produces more wealth and technology, but not the fanatical fighting spirit of the collective will.  Neither option gives human beings true freedom – the freedom to be a whole person through love rather than domination.

The answer for both the West and the East is indeed  the freedom to realise our telos, the participation in the Divine through the God-Man.  This cannot be forced upon people or sold to people like a product.  It has to be lived as the Body of Christ in community.  In terms of politics what does this mean?  It means an openness in political systems to that freedom.  This question asked of those political systems that suppress the possibility of theosis whether by political correctness and secularist institutions or violent oppression in a theocracy does not change the Church, which has often grown through the blood of martyrs or in the catacombs.  It is rather a question asked of Political Islam and Liberalism - whether they have yet participated in supporting such a freedom to be truly human, or instead striven, kicking against the pricks, to hinder and remove this freedom.  In effect this would mean treating every human being as an icon of God. There is the same onus upon liberal and Islamist to honour the real freedom, the freedom that matters.

Liberalism and Disintegration

 

What is meant by liberalism?  In every day language to be liberal means to be open minded and easy going.  In politics there is a link and that link is not necessarily positive.  As G K Chesterton pointed out, one’s mind, like one’s mouth, should on the whole be closed unless receiving something nutritious.  To be open to everything is in a sense to be willing to undergo disintegration.  It is to lose integrity.

The great proponent of open-ness, the French-Jewish philosopher Derrida referred to the Old Testament story of Rahab the whore who aided the Hebrew spies in the taking of Jericho with its supposedly impregnable walls (as pointed out by Jonathan Pageau).   Here we have two key symbols – the whore who loses her integrity of her body for money and the walls, which, when they fall end the integrity of the city.  Derrida promoted a radical open-ness, but for us we can see the fundamental attack upon integrity of  a radical open-ness.

The reactionary Russian thinker Konstantin Leontiev regarded Western liberalism as something like a progressive disease that destroyed the integrity of the body politick.  His use of “progressive” is interesting given its adoption by the most radical wing of liberalism.  If our concern and priority is integrity rather than open-ness, then progressivism does seem to lead to disintegration.

Liberalism’s roots can be found in the disintegration of metaphysics.  With the Franciscan thinkers Duns Scotus and William of Ockham we saw the development of two new ideas that caused a schism with the classical world of thought.  With Duns Scotus we find the development of the “thisness” of things or their haecceity.  What the essence of this new philosophical outlook entailed was that the classical idea of participation  in the metaphysical was lost.  It meant this because Duns Scotus believed that particular things are irreducible and individual (indivisible).  On the face of it that might suggest support for integrity, but the problem is that it works both ways.  In reducing everything to the particular, the integrity of universals is undermined.  By atomising everything it becomes impossible to participate meaningfully in general identities or the transcendental; or at least as the centuries unfolded such a problem was to be revealed.

When the Franciscan Duns Scotus is linked to the other revolutionary Franciscan thinker, William of Ockham, the momentum towards disintegration is further intensified.   With his nominalism Ockham denied the existence of universals.  Forms were merely names given to link disparate things (hence nominalism).

Such a philosophical paradigm can clearly be contrasted with Platonism, with its mystical and otherworldly intellectual forms; but it also breaches withAristotle with his empirically-derived forms and for our purposes, most importantly Aristotle’s telos or the goal towards which all things that exist are oriented (Man’s telos being virtue).

When this reductionist philosophy was applied to the world of Man it eventually became impossible to sustain the idea of the telos – that Man had an overarching purpose that he might fulfil or of which he might fall short.  We can see here the foundations of liberalism, which denies some overarching purpose such as virtue as oppressive and from which we are to be liberated.

Alasdair MacIntyre has identified this lack of telos as the key reason why liberalism cannot give an account of virtue and why liberal societies are falling apart.  It is not surprising that once Western theology and philosophy had taken such a reductionist turn, the philosophy of John Locke became intellectually possible.  The very hierarchy of the State no longer had any claim to universals over the particular.  The anointed Monarch no longer could rely on his participation in the transcendental, but must strike up a contract like a merchant to bring men out of the Lockean ahistorical fiction of a state of nature.

Combined with this disintegration is the influence of England’s religious internecine struggles.  The Protestants saw themselves as being liberated from Rome.  A narrative of liberation fed into popular consciousness and was very compatible with this new ontology of nominalism, where the hierarchies could no longer appeal to universals.

Here we find the moralistic tone of liberalism’s project of demolition.  To destroy general identity and any  chance of participation in higher meaning is narrated as “liberation”.  If we no longer participate in higher meaning or any collective identity then we are free to be the reduced and directionless atoms we really are, driven by our passions.  That in essence is the liberal project.

Contrast that with the more elevated vision of human nature – one that sees us as having a telos and belonging to more general categories.  We are not simply atoms, but are peoples, we participate in religious tradition, we are gendered. 

It is no accident, however uncomfortable classical liberals feel, that the activists at the extreme fringe of liberalism – wrongly termed cultural Marxists – are pushing to dissolve the most fundamental aspects of general human identity, including even gender.  This is simply the narrative of liberation from meaning and belonging being followed through to its nihilistic goal.

What is attacked by liberalism is the integrity of categories and the possibility of participating in higher meaning.  That is not to say any collective identity or means of achieving collective identity is right.  There is a Royal Path between liberalism and the worldly-focused totalitarian agendas (themselves bastard offspring of the Enlightenment).  A cultural and political environment that fosters participation in higher meaning and collective identities is that for which conservatives should strive.

The misleading rhetoric of liberalism suggests that it can provide such an environment, where all can pursue meaning in their own way.  The reality is that liberalism like all ideologies has its own totalising narrative.  The narrative of liberation means that all general and higher identities become categorised as oppressive and as a result must be abolished.  This means that in practice liberalism cannot stop at a compromise between conflicting higher identities, but must wage a campaign against them all.  This is exactly how the Western cultural journey of progressive decline is being played out.  First a collective telos of society, usually religious, is undermined.  In trade, barriers to influx of imports are torn down.  The integrity of the nation state ( once the liberal successor to the conservative empire) is undermined.  Even normative sexuality and then gender are overturned in the name of liberation.  As Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin has argued, the final stage of liberation will be from human nature itself and it is likely that such a “liberation” will be played out with technology, artificial intelligence and even, at the risk of sounding melodramatic (which is difficult in a culture where gender is no longer considered a real general category) – the cyborg.