A few days ago, I thought it a good idea to create a Substack account Going Substack. I set up the account with the option of not paywalling or using a lot of gimmicks. Last night, this message appeared.

We’ve removed your publication from public view due to a violation of Substack’s Spam & Phishing policy. If you believe this was a mistake, you can submit an appeal to our Trust & Safety team here.

It seems to be a problem of an algorithm or perhaps my e-mail address has been usurped. I have no way of telling. I do not scam, spam or phish. I am very careful about what I write to avoid hateful expression or anything anti-social. I have sent my “appeal” but I am not inclined to use Substack any more. I use Facebook for my “lighter” entries, and I will stick to this Blue Flower blog which has been going for 13 years and has established its modest reputation.

This was the first post I wrote on Substack with the intention of establishing something more serious and philosophical. Finally, I can do it just as well here. I am working on a new post about the Jena philosophers, and philosophers and psychologists since then, about the person and the world to which he relates.

The Beauty, Truth and Goodness thus disappears as a “trademark”, but remain as a principle in my work.

Learning from Romanticism

Light in the 1790’s and our own time

It is my pleasure to introduce this new Substack journal. Its purpose is one of promoting a school of thought and maybe even a small movement for the revival of a particular kind of Christian thought and life. The title is that of Plato’s transcendentals which describe a completely different basis to Christianity and other expressions of spiritual life. I certainly receive this idea as refreshingly different from moralising preaching and control of people. I largely reproduce my introduction to a pdf I published in 2018, and I have made a few modifications for a sense of continuity.

For many years, I have reflected on the relationship between faith and culture, a notion that has been present in many great Christian thinkers over the past couple of hundred years. I have largely come to the conclusion that the Christian message is utterly stifled by what is termed as modernity or the legacy of the Enlightenment. My own experience of life and as a Christian believer clearly brought me to the same kind of thought as the Idealists and Romantics of the end of the eighteenth century, a time when an old order fell and could not be restored. There had to be something new like when the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance. Man can only assimilate the truth of Christ through some experience other than being preached at with a hollow and tired message.

The same processes of thought and experience brought me to consider a succession of movements of culture and philosophy along the same lines since the French Revolution and the tumultuous upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Appearances and fashions change, but the underlying thoughts and conflicts remain essentially the same.

A Christian priest loves to discover divine revelation through the sources of Tradition and Scripture, through the work of the Fathers of the Church and the many theologians through the centuries. However, there comes a time when the spirit soars above the dry theological systems to embrace the beauty of creation, both by God and man. Revelation comes to us through symbols and allegory, through metaphor and poetry. Many of these signs are found in nature and speak of us of transcendence beyond our earthly experience. We respond to the Mystery with our whole person and not only by assent to doctrines and texts. Revelation is a continuing process which did not end with the deaths of the Apostles.

I will certainly discuss much more than simply a cultural and intellectual movement of the past two centuries, but a constant human experience faced with creation, nature, beauty and longing for the transcendent. German Idealism and Romanticism have many links with Neo-Platonism and even with ancient Gnosticism, and these aspects need to be studied and brought into the open, above all not condemned through ignorance and prejudice in the name of orthodoxy.

The process of conversion should be one of spiritual awakening and being on a pilgrimage. The way is shown by our instinct of Sehnsucht, an inconsolable yearning and longing for what is impossible to find in this earthly life. This is what is symbolised by the blue flower in the thought of a number of Romantic thinkers like C.S. Lewis, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) and George MacDonald. I am always sceptical about claims of sudden conversion, perhaps with the exception of St Paul. It is a process of growth and discovery, of yearning for a kind of light that illuminates people of all religions and philosophies of life. When we turn to this light, it penetrates our entire being and never leaves us unless we reject it. Christ is the full revelation of God to humanity, and expresses himself universally. He brings creation back to God in a work of recapitulation.

Our faith brings us to approach God as a child who at the same time is born and dies. We are indeed brought to face the mystery of death. Our “enlightened” times seek to prolong human life indefinitely by means of medicine and machines, and only reveal futility and the very theme of Frankenstein as imagined two hundred years ago in the year without a summer. Death is a part of Sehnsucht: our passage to the eternal Reality and universal consciousness that we cannot imagine in this life. We yearn for absolute love and beauty, which we believe we will find on passing over. Light and beauty triumph over darkness and sin. Salvation is an expression of god’s love. As is believed by the Orthodox East, it is a matter of “deification” (θέωσις) or evolution to the universal God-man who is Christ.

I wish to forsake the legalistic and juridical concept of Christian salvation, even if such terms are only metaphors and analogies. I remember reading something by Fr George Tyrrell to the effect that the soul is not brought to belief by force but by becoming aware that God is already present. St Athanasius of Alexandria said: “The Son of God became man so that we might become God“. This ancient mystical dimension of Christianity found renewal in the minds of those who were awakening from the spiritual aridity of the Enlightenment and modernity. For many years, I was tempted by Orthodoxy from having read authors like Dostoyevsky, Vladimir Soloviev and Nicholas Berdyaev, but the depth of this thought went far beyond the “ecclesial reality” I was idealising. Much of it went back, not to Holy Russia, but Jakob Böhme and to the Idealists of Jena, Leipzig and Berlin. As Böhme wrote about the Ungrund, that bottomless and indeterminate freedom of the spirit, Novalis explored the Night, as St John of the Cross before him. It is all tied together in one illuminating whole. The Night is a place of suffering and loss where God is truly revealed

One of my yearnings, as for so many before me, is a renewed Christianity, not one that is banalised and “adapted” to soulless modernity, but one of a sanctified universe and longing for eternity. Most religions lead us into a fear of death, especially what happens to us if we are bad or disobedient, but Christ reconciled us with death, something to be embraced and overcome with love. The Romantic does not fear death but yearns for what lies beyond. We must overcome materialism and the “modern” notion of science and rationalism. The idealist sees creation through spirit, and the things of God through symbols. The Blue Flower of Novalis is not a biological organism of interest to gardeners and horticulturalists, but a profound and moving symbol, our growth way from this earthly life and our deliverance. It is not a wish for death or a temptation to suicide, but a journey inwards to the Kingdom we seek. It is a dream, a journey towards a home for which we yearn. Indeed I would like this work to be an expression of my priestly calling through study and writing.

We are also struck by the collusion between Romantic Sehnsucht and Christian mysticism from the middle ages and the Renaissance period in Latin countries like Spain. Here was an all-devouring desire and longing for the transcendent that was correlative with a feeling of being an alien on this earth. We would find this sentiment in the poetry of William Blake and Novalis. There is definitely a resurgence of a form of Gnosticism that found diverse expressions including the immanentism of the Modernists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Christianity has lived through the dialectics of the eschatological and the here-and-now all the way through its history, ever since the foundation of the first monasteries in the desert. Sehnsucht is central in the famous expression in many of our liturgical prayers: doceas nos terrena despicere et amare caelestia. We are aliens and exiles on this earth, and our longing is for something we will never find here.

After the French Revolution, it was remarkable that Christianity made any kind of comeback at all. The Revolution was born of the Enlightenment and destroyed it. Philosophical rationalism came from the privileged classes, those who most ridiculed the notion of God and the so-called superstition of the masses. The response of the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars brought an end to another illusion after that of the rationalists. A new philosophy had to emerge from the suffering and tragedy. Today, we find ourselves in another period of devastation of our civilisation, a watershed between the ultimate evolution of what is symbolised by Frankenstein’s monster and a return to barbarity and submission to the most repressive religion ever known to mankind. Romantics are called to continue the same combat, though with other words and outward appearances.

The nobility of the spirit is a theme that arises again and again. As the fish rots from the head, so I believe culture can be brought back to being ready to receive Christ. Christianity began a very tiny community of chosen souls. Some of us experience life and think in an “eccentric” way, in opposition to the “world” of social conformity, collectivism, fashion and competition. Perhaps we are predisposed through differences like some form of autism, perhaps. Predisposition is only a beginning from which we come to terms with ourselves, discover what God gave us when we were born and soar to a higher life that most people do not understand. The Christian Church operates at the levels of the collective and for this tiny concentration of noble souls. Unfortunately, the Church at the collective level has nearly failed or become so corrupt as to be unrecognisable as a sacramental symbol of Christ’s incarnation. It must turn to secular humanism or accept a new infusion of leaven. This leaven is one of prophecy. This higher soul suffers from barbarity, ugliness, banality and many of the things that are just part of the life of “ordinary” people.

Of course, such elitism can suffer corruption by contempt of the ordinary and commonplace. Berdyaev said, “Had the Gnostics won the day, Christianity would never have been victorious. It would have been turned into an aristocratic sect”. Pride is a sin as much as philistinism, and for this reason, Gnostic elitism could not be allowed to become the norm. The Romantic was always concerned for humanity, especially for the poor and forsaken. This spirit, not only of Sehnsucht but also of Sturm und Drang fired the zeal of the Slum Priests of Victorian England. This movement must be revived again from the small beginnings of the Jena Idealists, the Oxford Movement and La Chesnaie and the stubborn Breton, Félicité de Lamennais. Just two or three of us will do it.

In my view, Romanticism has the appeal of a wider vision than that of most institutional churches. I see the purpose of this journal not merely in terms of academic study of Romanticism and similar movements over the past two hundreds years, nor in the fuelling of a religious revival for its own sake, but in a wider vision that is capable of challenging modern über-rationalism, materialism and fundamentalist intolerance. Where we go on this journey is a mystery, and will depend on the material yet to be written.

Like in the beginning of the nineteenth century, there are signs of an analogy of Romanticism in the various subcultures of young and idealistic people who lack any experience of organised Christianity and church services. It is my conviction that churches are no longer capable of relating to such as aspiration like in the 1960’s and the so-called flower-power. We all revolted against an authority we perceived to be insincere, hypocritical and without any profound purpose beyond social respectability and convention. Some took drugs and slouched about in dirty clothes, whilst others tried to come to a compromise with bourgeois society or wrote and expressed themselves in art.

It would seem that an attempt to whip up support for a movement with its ideology would not only be futile, but opposed to its very purpose. We live in a time when every noble idea is taken, analysed, dissected and presented as a front of herd-mentality fashions and the profit of the businessman. This has happened to all ideas, including Christianity itself, and this one too should it ever become too popular and fashionable. It is for this reason that no attempt will be made to relate to “ordinary people” but rather to found a small and elite school of thinkers and artists.

My real hope is that my little contribution will work in with a number of authors writing on closely related subjects, who see something horribly wrong with modern secular society as much as with bloodthirsty fanatics.

Will there ever be a practical application of this work? It seems too soon to tell, and ideas may fall into place with usage and experience. Notions of alternative communities have been put forward and even put into practice. One must keep an open mind. Doing this journal will help its writers overcome laziness and to return to serious reading and study. That can only be a good thing. University is merely an initiation in a lifetime of learning, writing and teaching.