I saw that Post Modernism keeps the Mystery alive links to one of my earlier articles on this blog. I am a little nonplussed about the concept of post-modernism being erected into a “philosophical movement”. If this is a movement, what is a movement?

I am brought to think that we are not dealing with a movement at all, or a political tendency, or an ideology, or a religion or anything. To me, it seems like the way some individual persons relate to the society in which they live and by what means they defend their own personality. In short, an Englishman’s home is his castle.

Society at large goes through various phases. In the western world, you are everything if you have money (and everything will be done to take that money away from you) and nothing if you don’t have money. Apart from the technology we have, our society seems little different from the early nineteenth century, the eighteenth or even before. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer – and eventually you get a revolution, an oscillation of the political pendulum over centuries, and the machine is reset and started up again. And so begins a new cycle. In between times, there has been a number of attempts to implement various types of socialism and nationalism, and they all failed sooner or later.

Society is all about making human beings relate to each other by the constraints of law and economics. A man is worth his money, and then when that doesn’t impress him, he can be clobbered by the law for being anti-social. Thus, human society self-regulates. As churches became institutionalised, they all had to some extent or another acquiesce to this society model based on money and law. In the end, the Church becomes a part of society and follows its conventions and norms. The drama of Jesus Christ was the relationship between the human person and the “machine”, “system”, “matrix” or whatever we want to call it according to our favourite analogies.

The dream of a post-modernist church is utopian like the idea of anarchy. As a system for society, any kind of utopianism falls on its face, Soviet communism being a prime example. Anti-capitalist egalitarianism seems something close to the Gospel, and it can work for individual persons and even small communities like monasteries, but it becomes corrupted when applied to a nation or some kind of “empire”. Communism as first thought up by Marx, Gramsci and others was not very different from what is described in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles – but it became corrupt and influenced by “The Pit” (money and power, the Third Temptation or all three of them) and killed millions of human beings in the twentieth century. Nazism was national socialism, also based on good intentions – and we still reel from the slime of its evil.

My own thinking, since childhood, has brought me to a fairly “anarchist” way of thinking, but I know that the structures in place cannot be demolished and society will never be other than what it is. This dialectic between the genius of individuals and society is the reason that explains why Christianity splits. Renewal is only possible by leaving the corrupt institution and beginning anew with the ideals rather than the structures of political dominance and power. After a time, the process repeats itself. The key to authentic Christianity seems to be keeping institutionalism to a minimum and keeping communities small and geared to persons rather than the cohesion of society.

We will not change society that is based on power and money, consumerism and comfort. As persons, we have to make our choices in life. We give in and sell our souls, or we find a way to live with the system and remain free in the spirit – the theme you find in Berdyaev and many of those who lived under Soviet communism and Nazism, and those who live in modern cities and work in large corporations. Another way is “living off the grid”, needing as little money as possible, living under the radar. That is the way of life that characterised the Hippies in the 1960’s and men like Bernard Moitessier whose world was the sea and his boat. It is the “secular” version of St Francis of Assisi’s vocation, the radical choice of following Christ.

There is a half-way house, which is quite illusory and which I have tried to practice myself, living in the system but outside cities, living in the country. The problem is making enough money to keep it going. Even with the radical decision, for example going to sea, you still need an income to eat, maintain the boat, pay port fees, get medical help when needed and so forth. Living in a small village is something of a compromise. You need more money, and the more you get, the more you have to pay in taxes and social contributions, and the more the vicious circle gains momentum.

We have to situate our freedom elsewhere, for as long as we live in bodies and are driven by the survival instinct. The way we do this is what is called vocation. We have to count the cost for every decision we make in life to have the freedom to love and bring beauty to this world. One man will cast off his boat, and another will enter a monastery, and another will get married and negotiate with the system in order to enable his children to grow up in the best conditions possible. It’s a choice for all of us.

If there is a post-modernism, it is a capacity to be critical of our conditions of life and their constraints. We won’t change Leviathan but we will think about the way we live with it and keep our distance, even if only invisibly. It all depends on our perception. If we get something of this, we will begin to understand what Christ was getting at in his criticism of the “system” of the Scribes and Pharisees and his Kingdom parables and the Beatitudes. The meaning is inward and secret.

Attempts to found “emerging churches” on such inner intuitions seem to be a contradiction. I have never seen an “emerging” church. I have read many theories and ideas but have seen nothing in reality. What is reality? That is the question. Again we are faced with choices: the official state Church, Rome or one of the ancient Patriarchates, one of the older non-conformist churches or the non-conformism to different extents of our own age. Many people leave churches like Moitessier left society for the sea and the Pacific islands, in order to find their spiritual relationship with the Absolute and the Transcendent. We then begin to explore the idea of pantheism and the metaphysical unity of creation and Creator. Left to ourselves, we become the “vilest of heretics” in the eyes of the institutionalised religions whose gods increasingly identify with Mammon and political power. Yet the very principle that makes us persons is the relationship of Communion. It is a paradox we have to live with.

This is why it would be futile to want to institutionalise our personal aspirations. We live with what we have and make the best of it. Like little children, we all have secret gardens and parcels of heaven. There seems to be nothing more to say.