I recently had the honour of being invited to dialogue with two Americans, Michael Sauter and Dr Michael Martin who runs a site The Center for Sophiological Studies which contains his old blog and The Druid Stares Back on Substack. Dr Martin is a philosopher, poet, musician, songwriter, editor, and biodynamic farmer. There is also the YouTube channel Regeneration: Mike Sauter and Michael Martin with more than a hundred videos that need to be seen. I noticed over time that Michael Martin was interested in the Christian Romantic (or Romantic Christian) theme in the same spirit in which Novalis wrote Christenheit oder Europa – in English (see the essay written by Pauline Kleingeld, Romantic Cosmopolitanism: Novalis’s “Christianity or Europe) in 1799, in that of C.S. Lewis and the other Inklings, and in a number of contemporary thinkers and authors. Michael Martin attracted my interest, and I began to correspond with him.

He has put up a posting on his Substack blog The Parallel Structure of Christian Romanticism. We are greeted by a photo of a group of people praying in the ruins of a bombed church. The implied symbolism is an institution devastated by man’s pride, and the essence of Christianity in the ordinary lay people imploring God in their distress in those dark days of World War II. From the ruins of institutional Christianity comes the inkling of a new Christian spirituality, a new Christian blaue Blume, a yearning for the truth of God through beauty, goodness and nobility of spirit.

I first discovered Novalis on reading a short quote in an article:

To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.

Now compare this with the saying of Christ:

Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18).

Children have a sense of wonder that is most often forgotten in the homme du torrent (the modern person who has no time for anything) according to the expression of Louis-Claude de Saint Martin. A child takes nothing for granted, and this is the essence of the Romanticism of Novalis and other German Idealists before him. Since reading Christenheit (in English because my German isn’t up to much) and the Hymnen an die Nacht, along with other fragments, poems and his novel Henry von Ofterdingen, my attachment to this historical figure became very intense. He, like I, was gifted by a passion for music, language, thought – and technology and machines. He was a mining engineer, studied law and saw the world through the eyes of the Romantic, even though the term had not yet been invented. He had no need of an identity label to be what he was. I am not a mining engineer but have worked in organ building. Machines fascinate me, but yet I am drawn to beauty, music and the arts. What really interests me in being human with the culture that has formed us as a species and as individual persons.

I have said it many times: and it is reflected in Michael’s article

Like me, Fr. Anthony has embraced the notion of Christian Romanticism as an important—perhaps the only—opportunity for religious renewal in the Age of the Archons.

This places a great deal of responsibility on my shoulders. I have no parish duties. I am too confused by conflicting propaganda to contribute to Christian-inspired politics. Michael has expressed many ideas in common with the Distributists of the 1920’s following on from the earlier Arts & Crafts movement. These ideas represented a stream of Christianity that was decentralised and was more based on the person than the corporate entity or institution. I have discovered a world which is not merely my own private rabbit-hole but a movement or genus of thought that can be traced through the centuries. We can now write to each other, use modern means of audio-visual communication like Zoom, and we can write articles and books to teach and dispel ignorance. That would seem to be a most noble ministry for the priest I am, living a hermit’s life.

We can talk of Romanticism for the simple reason that we have to use words and language to communicate. Like all words and terms, it is imperfect and it is not understood to mean the same thing for everyone. I make a point in our interview that the conventional understanding of the term was the brief period from more or less the 1780’s to the 1820’s or 30’s. During my studies at Fribourg, in church history with Fr Guy Bedouelle OP, I noticed the convergence between the group of La Chesnaie (Lamennais, Montalembert, Chateaubriand, Guéranger and others) and the Oxford Movement in England mostly led by J.H. Newman and Pusey – and of course the architect A.W.N Pugin. Great minds think alike! In all modesty, I have found kindred spirits with whom I can dialogue with so little disagreement.

The vision Novalis laid out in Christendom or Europe is capable of being read at many levels or layers. It is like reading the Scriptures historically and literally, allegorically, morally, symbolically as described by Origen. Novalis’ fragment is a parable, like Christ conveying the meaning of the Kingdom of God (Βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ). It is not a reactionary political manifesto, but an attempt to illustrate an idea, a Christianity for the future unlike the mind of the classical rationalist or the French revolutionary. Novalis had much in common with William Blake, Joachim of Fiore and the humble German cobbler Jakob Böhme. We are looking to the future, a regenerated Christianity, and not merely a caricature of some past period like the mid twentieth century. This is the true meaning of Modernism to which George Tyrrell aspired as opposed to the secularising and demythologising movement in the 1890’s that sought to suck everything spiritual or miraculous out of Christianity.

We need to broaden this vision and aspiration to include Sophiology and the Alexandrian school of Christian Gnosticism. We need to learn about Jakob Böhme and the beginnings of Theosophy before it took on some of the more grotesque trappings in the late nineteenth century. Yes, we should read Owen Barfield on the intuitions of Rudolph Steiner and Anthroposophy.

Novalis, born into a Protestant family, aspired to the fulness of Catholicism, but not as an adept of the Papal cult.

The old Papacy lies in its grave and Rome for the second time has become a ruin. Shall Protestantism not cease at last and make way for a new, enduring Church? The other continents await Europe’s reconciliation and resurrection in order to join with it and become fellow-citizens of the heavenly kingdom.

The future does not lie in a moribund Roman Catholicism or Protestantism. Eastern Orthodoxy is too imbued in nationalism to take the banner. Christianity is neither nationalist nor globalist, but its universality, its Catholicity, aspires to a higher dimension that transcends nationality and local cultures. At the time when the UK decided on Brexit, or separating from the European Union, I was opposed. At the same time, it is a parody, a caricature, a faceless bureaucracy. What needs to happen is not individual countries to leave the EU, but the countries of the EU to rid themselves of the shackles of the unelected Brussels machine, and unite in the sweetness of Christian faith and humanist culture. How could this happen? Certainly not in our days of such intellectual and cultural poverty!

We are little people. We have no power or influence. We dream of free and “wild” Christianity, something based on the union of humanity with divinity. We believe that something will come about, first and foremost in our spirits, minds and hearts. I wrote in an earlier blog article:

Berdyaev (in particular in Freedom and the Spirit, English translation London 1935) wrote about the relation between priesthood and prophecy, especially when priesthood carries the burden of clericalism. I suspect that the Church of the future might lose the priesthood or much of it. That does not need to mean the end of the world or the closing of channels of grace and salvation. With it would go the institutionalism, bureaucracy and clericalism. The liturgy may also disappear, except for prayer offices that can be recited or sung by lay people. In the place of priesthood would have to come mysticism and nobility of spirit of which Berdyaev and many others wrote, including Novalis.

It is easier for me as a priest. I can celebrate Mass and the Office in my little upstairs chapel. I have suffered doubts about my vocation. Sometimes, only the thought of nothing positive being gained from giving it all up would keep me in this gift I received from God and which is still confirmed by the Anglican Catholic Church, which is a legitimate episcopal and synodal institution. No one in this village where I live has ever asked me about the possibility of attending Mass in spite of the village church serving for very little other than funerals. My chapel does not conform to modern health and safety standards to be a public place of worship. I am more of a pastor in casual dress and not talking about religion than if I traipsed around the place in a cassock. Perhaps I converge with post World War II French Catholicism and the worker priest movement – in a way – but actually with totally different ideas. I became a solitary, a hermit, with an openness to other people and their well-being and happiness. My priesthood is underground. I had no choice about my vocation to be a hermit.

Indeed, Michael Martin and I have converged, but not through wanting to copy each other or plagiarise our work. We need to renew our religious and spiritual life, not by imitating secular values and ideologies, but by putting God first and looking after our souls, as Rob Riemen in his Nobility of Spirit, exhorted us. This is the only way to avoid the evil and fury of the mob, of mass humanity.

Here is the dialogue I had with Michael Sauter and Michael Martin.