The Final Stage of the Revolution - technocrats, occultists, elites and sexual rights.

 

 

Western Churches in their rather ineffectual and half-hearted attempt to resist the sexualisation of our society (sometimes turning into their full abject surrender to the agenda) are often accused of being obsessed by sex.  Of course the real problem for the churches is they are trying to survive and perhaps even rescue the sinners in an age dominated by sexualisation.  It is becoming all the more apparent that in the 1960s there was not so much a social and sexual revolution as a major project in social engineering directed by elites in power.

The CIA now acknowledges its own involvement in the cultural revolution of the 1960s with the MK Ultra project encouraging drug usage and in other manipulation with the promotion of abstract art against traditional forms, by supporting artists such as Jackson Pollock, or in promoting radical politics such as backing Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse.  In terms of drug usage, sexualisation of society and feminism it seems highly likely the CIA was generally involved. Ostensibly this was to present a Western society as “free” and avante garde in contrast to the Soviet Union’s oppressive restrictions and its Soviet realism in art.  While the early USSR had been extreme in its social progressivism after the Revolution, this changed during the Great Patriotic War.  Stalin, party to the original social liberalisation, recognised to win the War and defeat the Nazi threat he needed to give people access to their churches again, bring a halt to abortions and homosexuality and restore some level of traditional values again.  For pragmatic reasons, the Soviet Union had dispensed with the path to moral degeneracy; in a couple of decades time, the West fully embarked upon moral degeneracy during the 1960s.

There was perhaps more to it than merely a good propaganda opportunity to present the United States as the land of the free.  On both sides of the Atlantic, elite intellectuals shared certain progressive ideals often meant to be achieved by sinister methods.  Eliminating religious faith, sexual liberation, feminism, eugenics and an all-powerful State were the ideals of the Transatlantic elites.  Important families -  the Rockafellas, the Rothschilds, the Huxleys, the Darwins were part of an elite linked to progressivism.  The Fabian idea of a slow technocratic revolution promoted by the Webbs, H G Wells’ vision of a new world, Betrand Russell’s dry atheism, all were complementary to each other in an overarching elite and anti-Christian idea of progress.  Valiant opponents spoke out such as G K Chesterton, C S Lewis via his novels, even George Orwell from a non-traditional perspective.  What is sometimes overlooked is the fascination with the occult sitting alongside commitment to atheism and a religious scientism amongst these elites.  Secret societies were popular.  There was undoubtedly an elite agenda following in the tradition of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, secret societies and the French and American Revolutions.

It is important to understand that atomisation and Socialist Revolution go hand in hand.  The real technocratic Socialism of Wells, Mr and Mrs Webb or Russell, rather than the small s socialism of a Schumacher.  And we should not be too distracted by Socialism, an ideology that has probably served its purposes – one of which was to violently destroy Holy Rus and another to achieve a type of Benthamite panoptican.  An obsession with free love, population control and elite power were the Babel preoccupations of the Western elites at the beginning of the last Century.  A brave new one- world government would be achieved by the elites managing the talking monkeys (a degraded view of Man and rejection of Man as the imago dei).

Combined with this were to come structural economic changes that created an opportunity to implement the final revolution.  As capitalism moved from its Fordist stage which had been aided by social engineering to replace the extended family by the nuclear family, the capitalists in the late Twentieth Century now needed dislocated individuals, they needed women in the workplace and a certain cosmopolitan rootlessness as capitalism in the West became global, factories moved abroad, migrants were brought in as labour.   In the Post War era manufacturing’s time in the West was limited.  It was not only militant unions that destroyed industry.

Throughout the sixties Governments still obviously dominated by liberal elites passed laws that “liberated” or atomised us.  Instead of living a life in a context of traditional values and responsibilities we were encouraged by legal changes and engineered popular culture to think what was good was what was pleasurable and aided my passions and appetites.  Homosexuality and abortion were legalised.  Divorce was made easy.  In America elite liberals had pushed for the creation of an effective contraceptive to break people from the responsibilities of child bearing (an early transhumanist move). This further facilitated the shifting of women out of the family home and into the workplace, usually into lowly jobs trying to find money for childcare.  Racial hatred laws were introduced for what would be the inevitable future multiculturalism of an increasingly global capitalism based on shifting cheap labour from poorer countries into richer countries.  They would be a means to prevent discontent boiling over in the face of mass migration.  Whatever the merits of such laws, they were drafted with an eye on the plans for the future.   

Most central to everything was the sexual relationship.  If the most personal and sacred encounter between two people, the act at once most intimately physical and spiritually unifying could be extracted from the sacramental union of marriage and taken out of the family home and was no longer between two spouses, but rather made casual, then alienation and atomisation would be achieved.  The powerful elites, with their occultist interests and their Darwinian reduction of men to mere intelligent apes saw the power of sexual desire.  If taken off the yoke of social taboos unrestrained sexual desire would create a new race who could never really connect, who were driven by their passions, which they felt it was their right to sate.  Harm between persons and distrust would turn us into the isolated individuals subject to anomie and self-loathing, but preoccupied with our rights, and the technocrats knew they would be able to control people thus demoralised.  We would become exactly the sort of alienated and isolated individuals that would be passive in the face of an ever encroaching progressive system.  Furthermore if deviant relationships could be promoted, the family would be undermined, the greatest bulwark as Chesterton pointed out against the oppressive State.

Another development was in the elite’s favour – the invention of television.  The visual image is far more powerful than the spoken word of radio (already a propaganda tool).  Serials with popular characters were written pulling at the heart strings to make radical changes in what was socially acceptable achievable.  The social revolutionary themes of freemason Mozart’s operas entered popular culture with narratives of oppressive patriarchs being ridiculed.  The propaganda would develop to actively promote what was once seen as taboo in sitting rooms across the country, via that glowing, talking box.  With the removal of the Lord Chamberlain’s role television could be used to push boundaries of taboos until unwittingly a conservative society would become liberal.  In America former propagandist Edward Bernays had already utilised the social-engineering potential of advertising.

And so the elites who long planned this seem to have achieved their goal.  The bread and circuses of entertainment, sexual promiscuity, LGBT, and the impact of feminism have all helped towards Malthusian goals of population reduction.  People are unable to think as they focus on consumption.  Churches are in decline.  Marriage is in decline.  These are the very aims of those Occultist progressives at the start of the Century.    What is more they cannot tolerate the survival of any foreign government not fully on board with the revolution of “liberation”.  International tensions are therefore escalated to pressurise countries to abandon not only economic freedom from debt to globalist institutions, but also their traditional values.  Western NGOs are often focused not only on protecting human beings from oppressive regimes, but more on promoting the new subverted values of the revolutionary West.  So much so that the six-coloured banner of LGBTQ+ has come to be seen as a flag of globalist imperialism in many non-Western countries.

The “rights” of sexual freedom, from heterosexual promiscuity to LGBT are now being used to increase the reach of the Panoptican, so that speech is suppressed if it makes a case for a return to traditional values.  The surveillance system via the State and Big Tech is the other side of the revolutionary coin to the “rights” rhetoric.  And so in the name of freedom not only have we been enslaved to our passions and appetites, isolated and atomised, but we have lost the freedom to speak out and question the agenda imposed by long-established families and secret societies that are in their deepest beliefs hostile to God, the Church and Tradition.

FAITH AND PLUNDER

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Perennialist Prince – Gobalism and the New King

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Orthodox Englishman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.