I have had very little to say these last few days about Justin Welby, resigned Archbishop of Canterbury, as with the English Prime Minister Kier Starmer. I have watched videos on YouTube and seen articles on Google News, at least those that are not paywalled. None of the the various clashing collective opinions have totally convinced me, and I was surprised that Archbishop Welby resigned. There are plenty of videos about Mr Starmer having being obliterated by Nigel Farage and left with the only option of resigning. It has not happened.
As is my usual way, I am not convinced by any of the positions, for or against, but one side seems to have a little more probability than the other. It would seem that Mr Starmer is a liar, a corrupt person and applies the law differently to different segments of the population leaving many people with a sense of anger, disappointment and unfairness. The only thing that can really refute lies is time, waiting for facts to be known with certitude. I am a sceptic in the way John-Henry Newman reserved his judgement until the truth could be known with certitude. Many years of pain and suffering have brought me to this way of thinking and resisting the baying of the crowd.
I discovered the YouTube channel of someone called Piers Cross, who has attributed the problems of church bureaucracy, and politics by extension, to posh boarding schools. I watched this one about Archbishop Welby.
I also watched his introductory video which he did about ten years ago. I recognised some of the things he went through like gangs and bullying. I too went to boarding schools because my father desperately sought a solution for a son who was clearly suffering from family life. My late parents were caring and good, not a trace of abuse, and I still have the best of relations with my brother and two sisters. During my childhood, one sister was quite “overbearing”, the other sister more distant in her little corner, and my brother also in his world of collecting things and developing his numerous hobbies. I did very badly at school, whether it was being bullied at Castle Street Primary School in the parish of St George’s, Kendal, or other solutions my father tried. I could tell Piers Cross that my problem was not boarding schools but all schools.
The two boarding schools I attended were Wennington School near Wetherby in Yorkshire and St Peter’s School in York. I discussed some aspects of this experience in my blog article Tom Brown’s Schooldays. St Peter’s followed a decision by my father in a more conservative direction after the failure of various more “modern” ideas of education. Nevertheless, St Peter’s had had the privilege of Peter Gardiner who was a reformer in something like the spirit of Dr Arnold of Rugby. I have an extremely good impression of this school today in bringing the best of young human beings, though I detect a slight whiff of wokery! I say in complete candidness that I was a case of undetected high-functioning autism for which I underwent psychiatric diagnosis just a few years ago. Such a condition would be unimaginable in the 1960’s and 70’s except in the most severely handicapped. The human psychè is so complex that no single system of education can be perfect.
If we want to be completely honest, the issue of not education, in day or boarding schools, but humanity. In its natural state, humanity follows the instincts of most animals in competition for food and sex. The power of dominant males ensures a natural selective breeding and the survival of the fittest as Charles Darwin called it. In human society, these instincts are expressed as power, money and sexual dominance. The dominant male kills his competitors or expels them from the tribe. These are thoughts that inspired Friedrich Nietzsche as he contemplated the Übermensch and Zarathustra. Jung would have found a very powerful archetype here as he sought a balance between brute strength and empathy as emphasised by Christ in the Gospels and the contemplative Christian tradition. Would a psychopathic or narcissistic criminal be no more than an unsuccessful alpha male who was beaten by another stronger than he and one who holds political legitimacy?
It is a very dark and nihilistic view of humanity, deserving nothing less than a planet-killing meteorite. It is this reductio ad absurdam that relativises the question of boarding schools. There are many institutions in which young men are educated collectively, not least the day school, the Armed Forces, university colleges, seminaries. You name it. Prisons are designed to bring out the worst in bullies and dominant criminals to destroy the weaker men who fell the wrong side of the law.
We Christians seek a kinder world where human beings matter to each other in a relationship of love.
At the Nuremberg Trials of the leading war criminals in 1945-46, the American Army appointed a psychologist, Dr Gustav M. Gilbert, to study the minds and motivations of the Nazi defendants. Gilbert reported to the Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson:
I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants: a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
Empathy is the capacity to recognise and venerate the experience, emotions and aspirations that one is aware of in oneself in other persons. This principle features in all religions and in the works of many philosophers and scientists. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself – as Jesus said. Empathy implies recognition of human dignity and worth in others that one recognises in oneself. This is often what lacks in comments written, less so in this blog than certain others, by some people otherwise claiming to be Christians. Empathy is surely the yardstick by which we can judge all morality, goodness or evil.
However, we can be drawn to empathise with toxic and bad people, and that is our Achilles Heel of weakness. It can cause us to conform to mass ideologies contrary to science and reason. It is through empathy also that totalitarianism and ideology can poison humanity. We approach the very bottom of the rabbit hole of sin, that of humans and that of the powers of darkness. Errors of empathy and exploitation made by the evil “Führer” of that openness to the other bring us around full circle as we are forced to defend ourselves, even by killing in a just war or another situation of self defence.
Christ came to save us from ourselves, to give us the hope of being newly created as human beings in the created world. I don’t blame boarding school for my difficulties, but rather this reality of humanity that can soar high and fall to the darkest places. It is easier to discover the depths of the ocean or the furthest reaches of space and other worlds than to understand the other person just next to me. We can communicate by language, become friends, fall in love, but something always emerges from the nozzle of weirdness sooner or later. I spend most of my time alone, though I try to be good and kind with others. I try to be a gentleman as my parents and schoolmasters expected of me – but prudence, that Queen of Virtues, has to remain.
Some of you reading this will have suffered in life, others have breezed along in the corridors of institutional conformity. I have less and less trust in institutional churches and political ideologies. Evil in individuals can be rooted out and punished. That is less easy at the level of societies and nations. Consider the cost of defeating Hitler and other similar archetypal monsters. The worst was not the absurd methhead with the Charlie Chaplin moustache and the shaking hand, but the ideology that had possessed the souls and minds of millions of ordinary people.
What goes around comes around. Reading and hearing all the hype about the US Presidential Election, the lovely Easter carol comes into my mind and leaves me with a smile.
Till trump from east to west shall wake the dead in number
Of course, the carol refers to the trumpet of the Final Judgement that will announce the general Resurrection prefigured by the Resurrection of Christ. Will Trump from New York to San Francisco wake the spiritually dead in number? The joke seems irreverent, but it sticks in the mind.
I wrote a post on exactly this subject back in 2016 – End of the Season. I am wintering my boats as it is the end of the season and the clocks have gone back. The autumn colours are with us. The weather is dry but cloudy, and the days are shortening, and we still have nearly two months to go before the Winter Solstice. The other difference is that I am now divorced and living my re-found bachelor’s life in my village house in the Mayenne. Solitude has to be carefully distinguished from loneliness. Since April 2021, I have never had any doubt about having done the right thing to preserve my own mental health and perhaps even my very life.
My assessment of the American situation is enlightened by the UK with the Two-Tier Kier Starmer regime and the uncertainty in Europe. The UK had Brexit, and we on the Continent consider the green agenda with trepidation. It all seems to be the same as a force greater than our nation states and federations seems to be on the ascendancy, with the sole objective of increasing the power and financial wealth of the billionaire elite. It all looks like those old James Bond films featuring Blofeld and the diabolical organisation SPECTRE. The endgame seems simply to be organised crime and the abolition of law.
The anguish still revolves around the same subjects: the war between Zionism and Islam, Putin and Ukraine, uncontrolled illegal immigration, who is going to pay the enormous national debts. Does the western world still have a culture and values to preserve faced with the advent of the Caliphate or the New Soviet Union run by the billionaires? I cringe when I hear the positions of both Left and Right. It is fashionable to be Woke and left wing, but we have to be honest. It is a mental and spiritual cancer. Will Trump do better this time if he wins the election? I am sceptical. However, I cannot afford to be indifferent to the consequences of American domestic and foreign policy for those of us who live on the other side of the “pond”.
We dread the advent of totalitarianism, but we have to consider our own health of mind and ability to reason independently. I encourage you to listen to this following podcast which essentially gives us the same message as Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Wojtyla, Rob Riemen and many others who have experienced the collectivist “utopia” in gulags and concentration camps. We must not be parts of a mass but autonomous human beings.
I keep away from all political demonstrations and protests, where people chant slogans. I suppose it gives people energy to be part of a crowd or at a football match. I cannot think of anything more horrid. I try to analyse the various ideologies from a philosophical point of view, and to keep informed. I suppose I am slightly to the left of centre, because I believe in the welfare of the poor, the weak, the sick and the exploited at work. At the same time, I am utterly opposed to collectivist socialism. I also abhor the pigs of Animal Farm, and admire George Orwell for his prophetic vision.
May the tide turn in one way or another. May the Prophets of the Old Testament bring us hope, which is the central theme of Advent, hope for the Messiah and the Redeemer, who is Christ. As we are let down by the institutional churches, themselves following the same insane political ideologies and corrupt self-interest, we have to find God and the Holy Spirit within ourselves and in all things beautiful, true and good.
Miles Dent – The Water Rat, 14′ Whisstock gaff cutter
Patrick Hay – Salvo, 16’6” Tricorn
Mark Smith – sailed with Frédéric
Bob Pierce – sailed with Patrick, with Frédéric and with Miles
Michael Pierce – sailed with Frédéric and with Patrick
The original plan was for each boat to be provisioned for several days so that we could sail to the Île des Moutons, the Îles des Glénans, the Odet river, Beg Meil, and other harbours and anchorages with limited chances to re-stock. Strong winds forced some changes to the schedule, but with the exception of Île des Moutons all the objectives were achieved.
Bob and Michael decided to not bring Bob’s newly acquired Wayfarer (Whiskey) as originally intended because weather conditions seemed unsuitable for a maiden shakedown cruise. Instead they sailed on board the other boats.
Monday 09/09
by Anthony Chadwick
After a miserable windy and rainy Sunday in the port of Loctudy, Frédéric’s boat Marc’h Mor and Patrick’s Salvo were launched in their turn from the excellent but shallow-angled slipway. Miles would arrive later in the week to join us in time for our passage to the Glénans. A study of the forecast convinced us all we would have to adapt our sailing plan to the weather conditions. On this Monday, it was mostly dry, but there was a strong north-west wind. If we stayed near the coast, we would be largely sheltered from the Atlantic swell and chop.
We were joined by Frédéric’s charming American friends, Bob, already a DCA member, and his brother Mike whom we recruited to membership during the course of the rally. Bob joined Patrick on Salvo for the day while Michael sailed on Marc’h Mor. Mark, who had come over from England without his boat, sailed all week with Frédéric.
For the first time ever, I took in both reefs in my mainsail and mounted the smallest of my three jibs (I don’t have a furling jib). We were all cautious with this cool and sometimes severe north-west wind that would persist until Friday morning. Until then, the wind would moderate each evening only to return by morning and blow strongly in the afternoons.
We sailed to Sainte Marine at the mouth of the Odet River where we moored to the visitors’ pontoon and let ourselves be guided by Frédéric around the pretty village where his grandfather had taken him sailing and fishing as a boy. A prominent pink building in a 1920’s architectural style turned out to be the Abri du Marin seaman’s refuge charity hostel. It reminded me of the equivalent building in Douarnenez. Brittany is full of these testimonies to solidarity with those who needed a good rest after their labours as fishermen. Their working conditions were and still are dangerous and exhausting. We had a welcome drink in the “Café de la Cale” that had once been a fisherman’s house. This day would not be one of long distances sailed. We had a picnic lunch on the pontoon as we were all stocked with food for self-sufficiency.
We sailed back to Loctudy and went for a steak dinner at the restaurant “La Boucherie”. Our attitude to the sea this day had to be one of modesty and carefulness. The short trip brought a welcome change from being moored to the pontoon on Sunday with the boom tent up all the time to keep the rain off! As we found our places on the pontoon, my tent came out of its bag and went over the boom. I had adapted it from a plastic garden tarpaulin by sewing hems and attachment points. It has lasted well. The night was quiet in the calm water of the sheltered harbour, just right for a night’s sleep in my little cabin.
Tuesday 10/09/2024
by Mark Smith
Tuesday, our second day of sailing, was a longer trip. And without Bob and Mike who were exploring other parts of Brittany by car.
Setting out again from Loctudy the first part was a repeat of yesterday’s trip to the entrance to the Odet river. Our route went past long sandy beaches with the occasional rocky bits to avoid.
After a few hours Frédéric suddenly announced that it was “time to fish” and produced a large box containing his fishing tackle and a long line on a reel with several hooks. To my surprise we soon got our first big mackerel, after that there were a few that got away, but it didn’t take long to get the 4 we needed for lunch. Incidentally, although DCA rallies are not meant to be races, Salvo and Marc’h Mor don’t seem to know this! Salvo was usually first to reach our destination but I should point out that Marc’h Mor often had reduced sail, as Frédéric tells me that you can’t catch mackerel at more than 3 knots!
We then sailed further East along more sandy beaches towards the Baie de la Foret. Rounding the headland (Pointe de Beg Meil) Frédéric warned us not to take photos of what looked like a coastguard watchtower but apparently had a secret military role.
Once in the bay we sailed to the lovely seaside town of Beg Meil. We didn’t land (not all our boats were happy on sandy beaches) but all three boats rafted up on a buoy where we had a tasty fried fish lunch cooked by Frédéric on his little stove. This place had happy memories for Patrick as he had swum there as a boy 65 years ago! From our buoy we could see Concarneau on the other side of the bay and were entertained by an assortment of boats from the sailing schools of Beg Meil.
After lunch we sailed under jib further into the bay towards the harbour town of La Foret Fouesnant. This has a very large marina with a very interesting selection of boats – old and new, big and small – and is the base for several of the French yacht racing teams. We tied up to a pontoon at the far end of the marina next to several of the Imoca 60 boats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMOCA_60). These were really impressive with a mainsail of 180 sq.m and a draft of 4m and dwarfed our little boats. Even more impressive was that these big boats were sailed single-handed across the Atlantic; and not all by men – Violette Derange is only 23 years old. We were lucky to be able to talk to some of the crews and to see one of the boats sailing next day.
Patrick and myself treated ourselves to a meal in one of the marina restaurants while the others cooked on board. I was lucky to find a grassy place to put up my tent right next to our boats.
Wednesday 11/09/2024
Part 1
by Patrick Hay
After a wet night in La Foret Fouesnant marina the occupants of Marc’h Mor, Novalis and Salvo emerged from their respective shelters to a grey morning with a wind of 12-15kn from the NW. Though our vessels are all compact, Frédéric’s and Anthony’s at least have cabins with windows and hatches. My living space on board Salvo offers little more than an access hole through a bulkhead leading to a tiny dark cave under the foredeck. Or at least, that’s how it feels when you have to creep out of it into a cockpit where everything is wet and there’s an inch of water on the floor. I even felt a little jealous of Mark who had spent the night in his micro-tent a few yards away on a grassy spot at the edge of a car park.
We all made efforts to spread stuff out to dry a little before stowing tarpaulins and other damp gear back on board. We were just three tiny boats among the dozens of ocean racing behemoths which brazenly flaunt their sponsors’ brands on hulls, sails – and even backup crew uniforms, each of which probably cost more than my boat is worth.
No such flagrant commercialism adorned our three little craft as we slipped out of the marina on our route southwards along the coast to the small fishing harbour of Trévignon – with a planned stop for exploration and lunch at Pouldohan on the way.
The following wind freshened as we headed southward. Salvo, with only her mainsail set, was able to comfortably outpace the other two boats. Sometimes her speed is a bit of an embarrassment when sailing in company but on this occasion I received my comeuppance for ‘showing off’ when one of the foil assisted swinging keel IMOCA racers swept past me at 4 times my speed.
Frédéric in Marc’h Mor led his flotilla into the bay of Pouldohan and then even further up its picturesque creeks which dry out at low water. Anthony was constrained by Novalis’ draft, but Salvo and Marc’h Mor ventured under motor through a dramatically narrow gap between spectacular rocks guarding a hidden reach of the Minahouet river. The ebb had already started, so we backtracked out to the bay where we picked up moorings for a lunch stop.
The wind had increased considerably and the moorings were exposed to the wind and swell from the NW so, though safe, it was not a comfortable place. After lunch Frédéric led the departure for Trévignon just as I heard from Miles, who was out at sea in The Water Rat, heading to meet us on the way from Loctudy. So instead of following Marc’hMor and Novalis I pointed Salvo’s bow in the direction of the little red sail I could see on the horizon. Not long later The Water Rat and Salvo were close enough for a couple of shouted greetings and both headed off to catch the others.
Wednesday 11/09/2024
Part 2
by Miles Dent
I was unable to join the rally on the Monday, as my wife and I had the funeral of a close friend to attend on the Tuesday. I was determined, however, to get there as soon as possible, so left home at about 2030 on the Tuesday evening for the 500km drive to Loctudy. I stopped just over half way and slept in the car for 4 or 5 hours, arriving at about 0930 on Wednesday. At the capitainerie I bought my pass for the slipway (15€ parking included) and launched and loaded The Water Rat for a 3/4 day cruise.
I had a trip of 14/16 NM to do, across La Baie de Fouesnant, to catch up with the rest of the fleet, mostly in an ESE direction. I was lucky to have a B3 NW wind – so motored out of the port and quickly hoisted full sail. I had the paper chart SHOM 7146L and a few waypoints entered in my GPS – the first being ‘La Voleuse’, a S cardinal about 6NM away bearing 106° which I reached at about 1300 – my old Garmin 72H handheld GPS delivering me to within 100m of it.
My next waypoint, and destination for the night, was the little port of Trévignon on a bearing of 100° about 8NM away. After about an hour I received a VHF call from Patrick to say they were just leaving Pouldohan, a little inlet just S of Concarneau. I altered course to 90° to try to intercept them on their way SE to Trévignon.
The wind started to really strengthen so I stopped to reef and continued much more comfortably but soon had to roll up the stay sail as well. Patrick had spotted me and came out to meet me so we could continue SE together towards Trévignon. The wind strengthened even more and we dropped mainsails to run down under single headsails only. Salvo is always so much faster than The Water Rat so I used some motor to keep up. There are several rocks to the N of the entrance to the port marked by the worryingly named W cardinal ‘Le Dragon’ ! We picked our way around them and aimed for the entrance to the port – now with motors running. Quite an alarming sight greeted us with waves breaking against a huge concrete mole – but once inside all was calm and we found places on the last row of buoys with our anchors run out up the beach.
I have to mention the highlight of the rally for me which was next morning sailing through a school of dolphins halfway between Trévignon and Île de Penfret (the largest of the Glénan islands). What appeared to be family groups of adults and juveniles were jumping and playing around my boat in the beautiful clear blue water.
There’s a lot of talk these days about ‘mindfulness’ as an antidote to stress, anxiety or pain. After a week of dealing with the death of a close friend I found dinghy cruising to be the perfect therapy.
Thursday 12/09/24
Day 4: Trévignon to the Îles Glénan
by Bob Pierce
Everyone had come on this cruise with the goal of getting to the Glénan Islands that sit almost 9 miles offshore of Trévignon. A few in the group had personal experiences here in their youth, which made the trip especially important. As for me, I was looking to simply survive the rally with body and spirit intact. I had brought along a non-sailor brother with whom I had not spent meaningful time in approximately 40 years; and this would be my first sail offshore in a small boat.
The islands are famous for sparkling white granite sand and turquoise water. They host a bio-preserve designed to protect the Glénan Narcissus (Daffodil) flower. Among sailors, talk about this place is filled with lore, especially about a famous international sailing school that has its expert training ground here.
During our passage, the last of the previous week’s foul weather hit us in squalls, the occasional strong gusts hitting us at our beam. On Water Rat, after his crew became paralyzed in the face of adversity, Captain Miles took matters into his own hands by single-handedly bringing the main under reef. Notably, his reefing system uses an efficient and tidy dual-line-and-bungee trick taught by Chris Waite, so he was done in a wink.
About half-way to our destination a radio call came from Anthony in Novalis. “We have dolphins! A pod of dolphins surrounded the boats and even swam with us. Sometimes jumping into the air at nearly arm’s length.
Once on shore, we took a walk to the far side of the island and heard about edible plants from Miles who taught science during his noble career. We chewed on sea cabbage (aka Sea Kale), a voluminous leafy affair on shore; err, yum. We also had wild spinach (aka Sea Beet), similar, but less yum. Then a few bites of “sea grapes,” a kind of kelp found in large quantity along the French west coast; much much less yum. I’m sure commando Frédéric eats it all for dessert every night.
Man does not live on salty vegetables alone, so we settled into the island’s quite well-visited bar, populated by a mix of ferry tourists and local sailing and scuba diving instructors. A few rounds of cider for everyone and sleep came easy.
Water Rat, Marc’h Mor, Salvo and Novalis moored off-shore. For me, a simple sleeping bag on the beach, staring at an intensely star, planet, and satellite-filled sky all night was profit enough.
Friday September 13 2024
Îles des Glénans to Benodet
by Frédéric Lopès & Patrick Hay
A cold night but the reward for spending it in the Glénan islands had been a spectacular show of stars in a dark clear sky. Our four boats lay moored to visitors buoys in the anchorage known as La Chambre, sheltered from the northerly wind by the islands of St Nicolas and Bananec. The tents of the shore-sleeping party could be spotted above the high water mark on the beach.
As Marc’hMor began a ferry operation to recover the three campers, the harbourmaster called to collect mooring fees. After hearing an explanation of the DCA and the cruising objectives of our little fleet, delivered by Anthony in fluent French, the kindly official decided to waive any harbour dues on the grounds that our boats were “too small”!
Today the marina at Benodet, an attractive holiday town at the mouth of the Odet river, was to be the destination. The wind was still in the north but much lighter than we had been used to all week, so reefs were shaken out. With the forecast for a moderate breeze from the NNW at first, veering to ENE but dropping further and ending the day with light airs from the SE, Frédéric, Anthony and Miles opted to depart the archipelago by way of the Chenal des Bluiniers taking a route to the west over the drying sands between St Nicolas and Ile de Drenec then threading their way through a channel flanked by many rocks, some visible, many others lurking just below the surface. Patrick, with Bob and Mike sailing Salvo, chose to exit the islands by way of a shorter channel known as La Pie which led northward towards the rocky reefs of Les Pourceaux and Les Moutons. His passage plan, to pass East of these, was stymied when the wind shifted to the ENE much earlier than expected so Salvo tacked onto starboard to go west of them instead. Happily this put Salvo on the same trajectory as the other three boats, although some distance ahead.
The breeze dropped as forecast so that motors were needed to negotiate the approach to the Odet. Benodet marina found enough space on the end of a visitors pontoon for all four DCA boats to moor close together.
Once again Frédéric had caught enough mackerel to feed the whole party. He prepared and cooked them and we ate a late lunch together sitting on the pontoon.
In the evening Mike treated us all to an excellent dinner at a waterfront restaurant. The Breton pastry dessert called “Kouign Amann” was discovered and enjoyed, and one or two limericks were recited by those who could recall the words. Back to the boats, except for Mark who pitched his tent in a park next to the marina, for another cold starry night.
Saturday September 14 2024
Benodet – Odet River – lunch at Anse de St Cadout – Loctudy
by Mike and Patrick
It had been another cold night, but the sun was shining and the day was warming as we prepared to explore the Odet river. Miles had had some outboard motor trouble and decided that the river trip might be pushing his luck a bit. He decided to go straight back to Loctudy to get an early start on his drive home. The rest of us waved him off and sorted ourselves out among the remaining 3 boats. Mike sailed on Salvo with Patrick, Bob joined Mark and Frédéric on Marc’hMor while Anthony singlehanded Novalis.
The Odet is a most attractive river running, mostly placidly, between thickly wooded banks. On its wider lower reaches some magnificent chateaux and grand houses stand on manicured lawns sloping down to the water. Moored yachts line both sides of the broad channel. A mile or two upstream it narrows, running faster in short zigzags with no room for moorings. The banks seem more densely wooded here, with big houses occasionally partly visible but mostly hidden discreetly among the trees.
There was not much river traffic, but in one of the narrowest stretches we moved aside to allow plenty of room for a large tourist trip boat to pass from astern. Many of the passengers gave us a jolly wave, and we returned their greetings. After a while the river broadened out, the city of Quimper became visible in the distance and the steep banks receded into a more meadowy landscape. We had spotted an interesting looking creek on the left bank so, it being lunchtime, we turned back half a mile to squeeze into its peaceful secluded anchorage (Anse de St Cadou) where our 3 boats rafted up and we shared provisions, bread, wine, cheese, pâté, cake, chocolate, for a relaxed meal.
After lunch we returned downriver, although the flood was still running against us a little. Marc’hMor tried sailing for a while but there wasn’t enough wind to make satisfactory progress until we had passed under the Pont de Cornouaille at Bénodet where sails could at last provide enough drive to tack through the moorings and out to sea. From the mouth of the river it was a close reach in a moderate breeze all the way back to Loctudy, though, as we were on port tack all the way we had to keep a good lookout for a fleet of windsurfing learners who were tacking and gybing unpredictability around us.
Arrival at Loctudy and recovery of all three boats to their trailers went without a hitch, leaving us with just enough time to enjoy a farewell drink together at the waterfront bar and to receive some topical limericks from Miles who had managed to compose one for each of us on his drive home.
Finally
Thanks to:
Frédéric for organising and for catching and cooking the fish
Bob and Mike for coming so far and Mike for buying us all dinner in Benodet
Miles for the map and the limericks
Anthony for gluing and screwing Salvo’s damaged rudder
Îles des Glénans for letting us off harbour dues because we were “too small”
Something I encounter very frequently in my own thinking and in some others is the way we think and process knowledge, and what seems to represent truth. I am highly concerned by the way most people I encounter have a notion of possessing a truth and refuse to entertain the possibility that they might be mistaken or partial in their knowledge.
One thing that attracted me to Novalis and other philosophers in ancient and modern times is the notion that truth, like spirit, is something to be sought through quietness, inquiring, questioning and thinking independently. Dogma as taught by the Church is good and guides our thought and spiritual life, but it is not meant to bind us, rather to set us on the way to perceiving God in our lives. I have become decidedly allergic to the barrage of “true church” apologetics that surrounds us, forming a fanaticism in the thought processes of some people. I am a sceptic, not that I deny the existence of truth, but rather our right to claim to possess it. We need to be enchanted by beauty, wonder and mystery. We yearn for truth as for the spirit of God that is already within us as well as transcendent.
This is in my thought as a priest living in the remote French countryside, often going to sea with my boat. I sometimes go with a group of people with their own boats, sometimes on my own and meeting beautiful souls living on their boats or moored in a port for the night. I am a priest, but I feel that I do not have the right to invade the conscience of that other person, perhaps someone who is searching his or her own inner and magic world. Myself, I refuse to be invaded by the zealot Roman Catholic or Evangelical, often with a junk message about how God is about to punish the world for not converting – when most people are ignorant or repelled by the moral failings of institutional churches. Such invasions are assimilated to spam phone calls intended to sell us something or to “convert” us in some way. How do we propagate the Christian faith? We cannot directly, nor do we have a right to attempt to do so. It is only through beauty and wonder that we might have an element of an answer to someone’s question. The rest is in our own spiritual life and moral honesty. We can provoke thought through a few words and not expect a response. We plant seeds and someone else will reap the harvest. Christ taught in parables, and the idea often escapes us.
A philosopher will share a thought, not to convert the other person, but to test his own purity of thought and coherence. We are called to get people to think about their beliefs rather than simply accept ideologies. Can our own beliefs withstand intellectual and logical scrutiny? A Romantic is a rationalist with creative imagination! Learning to think critically is not easy. It involves thinking, enquiring and questioning ideologies. Where are my own faults and fallacies? What are my problems before I blame the other? How are we going to take being wrong or mistaken? This is surely where humility comes in, like staying in port in foul weather rather than entertaining the illusion that we can challenge forces so much greater than ourselves. La mer nous apprend la modestie ! The sea teaches us modesty. The force and mystery of our planet are an analogy of the mystery of the human soul. We have to forego sophistry, pretension, judgement – and we become free and open-minded. Surely, this must be the spirit of Christ.
We are called to provoke free thought in others. That is the Christian mission.
It was back in June 2017 when I wrote a piece on that fictional and archetypal figure Captain Nemo. The Nemo Syndrome I bring this subject up simply because I decided to have a relaxing evening watching the 1954 Walt Disney film Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. I would love to go up to Amiens and find a living Jules Verne to ask him what he really intended as he manufactured Nemo’s personality. Unfortunately, that is not so and we can only rely on literary experts and critics. The film removes the extensive descriptions of sea life and scientific data from the nineteenth-century novel, and maybe some aspects of Nemo are unjustly portrayed.
What are we going to imagine of the succession of scenes where Nemo clandestinely takes Aronnax to an island where Imperial slave drivers are using their slaves to mine minerals to load onto ships and make into explosives for weapons of war? A highly convincing James Mason put on the face of the terrifying fanatic as his character prepared to ram those ships as they left the island on the tide. Is this not the fanaticism of a terrorist who flies a plane into the World Trade Center or Hitler whipping up the crowds to back his intentions to invade England in 1940? At the same time, Nemo shows his culture and scientific knowledge and devotion to the world under the sea.
We need to ask the question differently, not about an imaginary character but about its author. Jules Verne was born in Nantes in 1828, and was a product of his time. This was the France of restoration of some kind of Monarchy and a revival of Christianity through monasteries and popular devotions. At the same time, there was news of great scientific discoveries and explorations of men like Charles Darwin. Ordinary people become more interested in politics and individual rights than ever before. Verne was a socialist (one who believes in communal ownership of property and a strong central government), but this was a pre-Marxist notion. He espoused the ideas of the French philosopher Henri Saint-Simon (1720–1825) and put great faith in the Industrial Revolution. As Marxism corroded the political status quo in Europe and the United States, Jules Verne remained a supporter of aristocracy. All that being said, I could not imagine that Verne was ignorant of the Romantic movement, Lord Byron in particular, and Nietzsche with his theme of the Ubermensch.
Both Twenty Thousand Leagues and the Mysterious Island portrayed as Nemo as an “anti-hero”, a mysterious and secretive figure. His origins were exotic, the son of an Indian Raja with fantastic wealth and education in European culture. He embodied Verne’s devotion to science and technology, to human progress. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he devised a submarine that far pre-dated the first practical mechanically-powered submersible vessels. This article gives a fascinating history of the submarine. Verne’s dream came true but shortly before this machine de guerre. Ironically, as surface vessels would be used for transporting freight, pleasure and fishing, the submarine had but one purpose – destroying ships and killing. Nemo’s machine would do so by ramming the ship and often cause damage to itself. Real submarines in the opening years of the twentieth century would carry torpedoes and missiles to do the destructive work in their place.
How ironic that a man motivated by hatred for the British Empire that had taken him and his family into slavery would use this terrifying machine! As I first saw this film in the late 1960’s in our local cinema, the ideas flooded into my mind of rejection of mainstream civilisation, authority, seemingly senseless convention and conformity. Two keywords also fired my childish imagination: independence and the secret. Nemo’s secret was the volcanic island of Volcania where he built the Nautilus and presumably found the inexhaustible fuel (nuclear?) to power its engines. Here was an exciting way out of the humdrum of family and school life, but could I identify with that hatred and fanaticism? I could not, and the conflict remained in me. My personality simply did not fit this archetype.
These festering ideas motivated me to leave home at the age of twelve with a carrier bag of supplies and steal a boat from its anchorage in Arnside. My parents must have been aware of my variations of behaviour, glossed over by independence and secret. I was caught in the bathroom taking my secret bag from behind the washbasin. My mother was very angry but my father took a more rational position. What is going on? My father analysed the contents of the bag, mainly food and tools with some fishing tackle. The next day, in the early months of 1971, we went to Arnside by car – not a single boat in sight. In any case, as I have learned since then, no small boat owner leaves all the rigging, rudder and engine. He might do if the boat is anchored or lying on Morecambe Bay quicksand. It was all followed by a long drive and a father-to-son talk. I thank my father to this day for his rational and emphatic approach, for his imagination in looking for activities that would pull me out of my darkness and moroseness.
There was this literary creation of the French Jules Verne. I became attracted to France far beyond our family holidays going back to 1966 (Beg Meil in Brittany where I anchored a month ago with my little group), and I ended up living in this country. In those last years of the 1960’s and the first of the 1970’s, I came across the notions of Romanticism. As I have already expressed, Romanticism is essentially an epistemological reaction against the extreme devotion to human reason by wanting to emphasise the imagination and subjectivity. There were aspects that become quite morose, especially in the minds of Byron and his guests at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, Percy and Mary Shelley. Many of those thoughts influenced Nietzsche in Germany as he condemned Christianity for its “softness” and unwillingness to confer virtue on the strong. After all virtue comes from virtus meaning strength and the word vir meaning a man. What place do compassion and empathy for the weak occupy? There is something enthralling but also very unhealthy about the Byronic Hero.
The poem Prometheus was published in 1816. It portrays a figure from Greek mythology known for stealing fire from the gods to help humanity. Prometheus claims the values of resisting tyranny and self-sacrifice. Was that not Churchill’s Britain in 1940 like Greece facing Turkey in Byron’s time? Strength comes out of suffering, and this dimension is exactly that of Christ. We live in a time of vacillation between pandering to the weak and people of diverse cultures coming to our countries in large numbers, and preserving our own. Byron’s Prometheus is the solitary, suffering, defiant hero is meant to empower readers, reminding them that revolutions begin with individuals who dare to imagine the future differently. He is the Ubermensch of Nietzsche, of whom Hitler made but a caricature. Death is turned into victory. This is the poem Prometheus in question:
Titan! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity’s recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,
Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.
Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate,
Refus’d thee even the boon to die:
The wretched gift Eternity
Was thine—and thou hast borne it well.
All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
Was but the menace which flung back
On him the torments of thy rack;
The fate thou didst so well foresee,
But would not to appease him tell;
And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his Soul a vain repentance,
And evil dread so ill dissembled,
That in his hand the lightnings trembled.
Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;
But baffled as thou wert from high,
Still in thy patient energy,
In the endurance, and repulse
Of thine impenetrable Spirit,
Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
A mighty lesson we inherit:
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself—and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter’d recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.
There is also the monumental drama-poem Prometheus Unbound which inspired Vaughan Williams for his Antarctic Symphony, with its paean to human heroism and stoicism in the face of adversity.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
Modern psychology will make a double-edged sword of the Byronic Hero, generally a Cluster B personality profile between the sociopath and the narcissist. I noticed much to admire about Verne’s Nemo, but the arrogance, hatred and fanaticism repelled me – and still do. He and others like him will be ruthless, arrogant, sexually appealing, melancholic, unable to overcome suffering, manipulative, angry, self-destructive. They can descend into the depths of depravity and evil like so many of the Nazi war criminals who were judged and executed after World War II. Not all Byronic types would go so far, but this is the dark and dangerous side of Romanticism.
1971 was a turning point in my life, between the naïve and superficial understandings of the Byronic Nemo’s emotions and my excitement faced with an Atlantic storm on the pier of Viana do Castello in Portugal (and my mother coming to ensure my safety!). In the autumn of that year, I went to my first boarding school founded on Quaker ideas and experienced new and not very successful notions of education.
As my marriage failed and I asked myself what my own problems were before those of my ex, I discovered the explosive conflict between Asperger’s autism and what I could only conclude was narcissistic personality disorder. Are they perhaps variations of the same thing, since psychology is not a very empirical field of science? I needed elements of an explanation of my mind going back to the encounter with Nemo to my present life dominated by reality and common sense. Jung was very much based on a theory of archetypes and symbols, a notion of Gnosticism and liturgical Christianity alike. As the years passed, I shed the secretiveness of Captain Nemo as I was highly sensitive to this archetype when I encountered it with certain Catholic priests looking for their narcissistic supply. We have to keep some things secret, but not make a cult out of it. Independence, on the other hand, was something I kept. The American Transcendentalist Emerson called it Self-Reliance. Individualism can be good only so far, and it becomes unacceptable beyond certain limits. Everything in moderation!
Verne’s Nemo repelled me when I read (and heard):
“Professor…I am not what you call a civilized man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons which I alone have the right of appreciating. I do not, therefore, obey its laws, and I desire you never to allude to them before me again!”
Yet he sunk ships that came from the society he rejected! What if he had simply been someone who wanted to share an eccentric life at sea with his friends and not cause harm or take revenge against anyone? He could still build a ship or a submarine and devote his life to technology, science and culture. I spend little bits of my life going out in my boat, but I don’t set out to do evil. Nikolai Berdyaev made distinctions between civilisation and culture. All the same, we have a social contract, a duty to respect others and do good whenever possible. Other people can be more mysterious than the bottom of the sea, but we are their “other people”. Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets. (Matthew 7,12) – the golden rule of both Christianity and Judaism. We find here the limits of anarchism!
My experience as a humble coastal sailor has taught me that our response can only be humility and modesty faced with the Leviathan of the sea. I was particularly impressed by the jagged black rocks on the coast of the peninsular of Quiberon, any one of which could have instantly sunk me. There is really nothing romantic about sailing. It is common sense and the decision to stay in port when the conditions are too dangerous! What is awe-inspiring are the things far from the boat, of planetary dimensions.
There is no sense in rage and fury as Nemo ranted like Shakespeare’s King Lear:
Strike, mad vessel! Shower your useless shot! And then, you will not escape the spur of the Nautilus. But it is not here that you shall perish! I would not have your ruins mingle with those of the Avenger!…I am the law, and I am the judge! I am the oppressed, and there is the oppressor! Through him I have lost all that I loved, cherished, and venerated—country, wife, children, father, and mother. I saw all perish! All that I hate is there! Say no more!”
What unhappiness that can be healed by turning to Christ! “He who seeks revenge digs two graves” is attributed to Confucius. The vengeful Prometheus will do himself more harm than his intended victim. The final condition of such a man is empty and hollow, that of the psychopath or narcissist who meets his karma. I rejected Nemo as an archetype long ago, and my own eccentricty followed other lines – above all by respecting God’s and my country’s laws and doing to others as I would have them do to me – even if they don’t always. We can’t always have justice in this life! This is the drama of modern politicians and the so-called oppression narrative.
Verne rehabilitated his character to some extent in his later novel Mysterious Island. The submarine and its crew were sunk, but somehow he survived and found some element of redemption. I thank Verne for his humanity by extending hope for the dying Nemo. Professor Aronnax also refrained from judging him as a criminal or a terrorist, but saw an element of altruism standing in opposition to his hatred and refusal to forgive.
There is a consequence in modern life that I can surmise, that of the complete chaos of politics between Marxist critical theory to the rage of those who see their lives being eroded by corrupt politicians and their policies. It is perhaps my interior pilgrimage that I have been spared from the brainwashing and the ideologies. My scepticism made me doubt other people’s truths and encouraged me to search – even if the finding would take such a long time.
Some of us need a different way of life, every one of which carries its risks and perils. I have rejected city life. One marriage was enough for me, not only because of the indissolubility of Christian sacramental marriage (if mine was) but because the experience caused so much psychological and spiritual damage. Most of my life is one of solitude but I appreciate the company of people with at least some common interests. The issue of priestly ministry is a difficult one. I am not interested in integralist politics or seeking to impose some kind of authority like the Pope or the Bible or even the Church Fathers. I believe in the idea that beauty will save the world as expressed by Dostoevsky. I first found God through music, even through Nemo’s Phantom of the Opera-style caricature of playing the organ in his submarine. I came to prefer something more gentle and harmonious as I began organ lessons a year after my tumultuous 1971.
It might seem so selfish to go on at such length about my own feelings and experience instead of “church planting”. I am incapable of charming and influencing people. Ste Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus said Je veux passer mon ciel à faire du bien sur la terre. One of my sailing friends damaged his rudder, and I was able to repair it with epoxy resin glue and stainless steel screws. It was a simple enough job for me but it meant a lot to him! Our little rally of September was summed up:
Thanks to:
Frédéric for organising and for catching and cooking the fish
Bob and Mike for coming so far and Mike for buying us all dinner in Benodet
Miles for the map and the limericks
Anthony for gluing and screwing Salvo’s damaged rudder
Îles des Glénans for letting us off harbour dues because we were “too small”
Mark for introducing Patrick to Navionics
Cidrerie Kerné for the Cider
The dolphins for playing with us
I find this more of a life for a priest than many things I have seen in my life. It won’t make people who will go to church, read the Bible and say their prayers, but it might bring about a little more good being done in this chaotic and sad world.
I have had a little time to digest the events of the political world in my own country and the nation of France which has adopted me as a citizen. I voted for the RN of M. Bardella and Mme Le Pen, not because I agreed with everything they seem to stand for, but because I saw the need for change from the failing Tories in England and the technocracy of M. Macron and the obscenely rich oligarchs and corporations set to be the SPECTRE of a new world – but without James Bond to challenge them. How coincidental that two countries seem to follow such a similar trajectory!
I have a better impression of Kier Starmer’s Labour Party and its apparent honesty in its desire for change and social improvement. Different people will say different things between praising him or accusing him of the worst evils. I suspect that the truth will fall somewhere between these extremes. I am English and have been brought up to seek the Via Media, St Thomas Aquinas’ In medio stat virtus, moderation, the middle way, and attempt to go ahead with courtesy, tolerance and a sceptical idea of truth. I am an Idealist. Idealism has no place in the cut and thrust of political power-mongering.
Here in France, things are more worrying with a Left Wing that shows that much more fanaticism and taste for violence. Now is a time to stay out of towns and cities, live in our little country dwellings and hole up for however long it takes for sanity to return. Many things are hidden from us, including the stratagem of making it impossible for the RN to win its desired majority.
As I take my eyes away from the computer screen, YouTube, Google News, various more “philosophical” analyses of what happened both sides of the Channel, the green leaves on the trees and the extremely light drops of rain bring me back to the world that is magical is impregnated by God’s sprit. My trips on my little sailing boat have taken me around the Cap Frehel on the north coast of Brittany, and have filled my imagination with the swirling melodies of Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave which portrayed the waves of the sea among those enchanted rocks.
Our political world once again has become unstable and conflicted. It is not healthy to read too much news or “fear porn”. We should be informed, but rather by reading those who are both informed and can understand the meaning of things better than we can. We must learn to think for ourselves and not follow the mass. This is the condition of our not being seduced by ideologies and their violence. I have written a few things about the theme expressed by Wordsworth at the dawn of the French Revolution, believing it was going to be the Right that would win. I almost have the same feeling on seeing the advent of Mélenchon and his desire to revive Marxist Leninism. If that happens, our only response can be that of men like Nicholas Berdyaev and Solzhenitsyn among so many others whose humanity and divinity refused to be “cancelled” or obliterated. Whilst this instability continues, we can hope for a resolution from the conflict of the opposites as immortalised by Hegel and C.G. Jung.
I do believe that this has come upon us because Europe has lost its Christianity. As Novalis said in 1799:
Seine zufällige Form ist so gut wie vernichtet; das alte Papsttum liegt im Grabe, und Rom ist zum zweitenmal eine Ruine geworden… – Its [Christianity’s] accidental form is as good as annihilated. 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. Should there not be presently once again in Europe a host of truly holy spirits? Should not all those truly related in religion become full of yearning to behold heaven on earth? And should they not gladly join together and begin songs of holy choirs?
Christendom must come alive again and be effective, and, without regard to national boundaries, again form a visible Church which will take into its bosom all souls athirst for the supernatural, and willingly become the mediatrix between the old world and the new.
I take into consideration that Novalis did not experience the 19th, 20th and this early part of the 21st centuries. He had no idea where nationalism or cosmopolitanism would go. He saw the “magical ideal”, not what we in our age would call “reality”. This is why I cut Novalis a lot of slack. We have to see him in his historical time. We have to read Christenheit oder Europa (or the English translation) in its German Idealist context of the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th and not the puerile reflections of some of the traditionalists of our own time.
The institutional Churches are doing nothing other than the political institutions – self-interest, power, money, manipulation and control. We find God in beauty, and there we find wonder and vocation. We are called to live these Hymnen an die Nacht and hold up a light in the darkness. Enlightenment rationalism is being replaced. The Romantics sought to enlighten rationalism by the creative imagination and what it really means to be human. There will be a new Romanticism, but there will also be some very ugly things like political and religious fanaticism and totalitarianism. We may be called to give our lives. I am reminded of the film Mission from 1986 and Fr Gabriel faced with the Portuguese slave traders:
If might is right, then love has no place in the world. It may be so, it may be so. But I don’t have the strength to live in a world like that.
Perhaps I feel the same way, in a world where I feel an alien. I hope still to have some time to write and express a different view of the world that God created. I am very privileged to live in my little house in a quiet place, to be able to put to sea in my little boat and experience something of that holiness and freedom to pursue the good, the true and the beautiful.
People in the 1920’s and 30’s had no idea of where they were going. Men like Thomas Mann had more insight, and wrote about it. It is a human problem, and the good or evil begins within ourselves.
News has broken over the past few days about an alleged intention of the Vatican (the Pope) to ban the “extraordinary form” of the liturgy once and for all. I have been listening to various podcasts on Youtube from devout traditionalists and information claiming to be a little more serious on Rorate Caeli. The story goes that Pope Francis, with his archons in the Vatican department that deals with the liturgy, intend to bring out a document on 16th July to bring a formal end to the old Roman liturgy. Obviously, it would be a massive act of intolerance, institutional hypocrisy and iconoclasm.
We do well to read with an open and sceptical mind the following interview between a traditionalist Italian blog and the lay expert Andrea Grillo: An astonishing interview of the main lay ideologue behind Traditionis Custodes and the desire to ban the Traditional Mass. With my somewhat bitter experience with Roman Catholic traditionalists between 1981 and 1997, I would be tempted to cheer him on and “get my revenge”. Such an attitude would not be Christian, and more than some of the exaggerations of the traditionalists. I find something of a parallel between Grillo and Robespierre in his intolerance and fanaticism. Such men die on their own guillotine!
I have sometimes found sympathy with Pope Francis, with these ideologues and with other globalist liberals and their cultural Marxist ideologies. However, I see through the gaslighting and the cigarette-and-the-fist approach in manipulating other human beings. The biggest argument of this ecclesiastical Robespierre is blind fidelity to the institution. At the same time, traditionalists have not really been able to extricate themselves from this cognitive dissonance. We find ourselves at the same Achilles heel I confronted in the 1990’s as I concluded “from Anglicanism whence I came, to Anglicanism I return”. Even Anglicanism is far from perfect with the same paradigm consisting of a Protestant institution with a desire to re-find a “magical-idealist” Catholicism. The English way has softened and become more tolerant, and founding parallel churches is less taboo, but I see the analogy. Many people of our time struggle with the tension between the Christian ideal and the merciless political institution the “official” Church has become. Either one finds a way to live as a Christian as an outsider (read Simone Weil’s works) or one sheds belief in God and anything other than brute matter.
Before you abandon this posting in despair, I give you this link to Michael Martin’s Report from the Between. He and I have converged from our different experiences of life onto Christian Romanticism. Roman Catholic priest and theologian Fr. Dwight Longenecker published an essay in which he discusses Michael Martin’s poetry collection, Mythologies of the Wild of God. From having been a hard-core “one true church” apologist, Fr Longenecker says:
His poems are rooted in his life in the countryside, and in our increasingly artificial life, they resonate with a reality that is refreshing. These are poems with blood on their hands—they reek of the guts and glory of farmland—the worms of woodland, wild beasts, meadows, livestock, hunts, and hard labor. Envision Robert Frost filtered through Cormac McCarthy.
Within the earthy musk of these poems there simmer sexuality, sensuality, and spirituality. Martin is deeply, physically, spiritually Catholic, and his poems wrestle with his masculinity, humanity, and reality. They surge with a surprising, stunning insights and enlighten with new perspectives. They meld poetry and prayer together just as they should—modern, intimate, powerful, and personal. I will come back to Michael Martin’s poems because they remind me of a gutsy and gritty reality that I have lost in this gasping, gurning, gargoyle world.
He has understood something that our Grillo-Robespierre in Rome will never understand, at least from what we read.
I have little to say about the present-day political situation in the UK and Europe. It seems the tide is turning from a kind of liberalism that has shown its intolerance and hypocrisy, to nationalist populism in its various forms. The demonstrations on both sides are shrill and noisy, not something with which I can relate. At an intellectual level, I see the need for change and for a forward view of history, as happened in 1789. However, France got Robespierre and the guillotine. It sufficed to disagree with the Jacobin ideology to be sent to La Veuve. At the end of the Terror, the change had to come, even if people rarely understood the deepest issues. Grillo might despise the Pilgrimage of Chartres, but I see it in parallel with the present populist uprising. He fails to see the new page of history beyond his liberal certitudes.
I have many memories from my time at Fribourg University. My tutor was Fr Jakob Baumgartner (1926-1996) who represented the ideal of liturgical reform in its most radical Swiss-German form. He also showed me the tolerance of a university scholar as he dealt with my desire to write about the Tridentine Reform of 1570, Missa Tridentina. He merely expected my tolerance. This relationship taught me many things in life. I admired his scholarship and knowledge of his subject. He was a passionate and fatherly man, and I wish I could find the same qualities in Andrea Grillo. He would not answer the interview in the way he did without such qualities.
Grillo makes a caricature of traditionalists. His first argument is numbers. What for him is the winning group? The one that is the most collectivist and that tolerates no difference?
Little more than a sect that experiences infidelity as salvation, and is often linked to moral and political positions, and very concerning customs.
I have found sectarian tendencies in the traditionalist movement, but also in his camp. We can only deal with fanaticism and ideology through tolerance and kindness, not through pogroms and killing (physically or spiritually). Repression, force and fear will only make the perceived problem worse.
The Church is not a “club of notaries or lawyers” who cultivate their aesthetic passions or plan to instrumentalize the Church as “the most famous museum”.
Who said it is? You’re not going to blow the whole thing up with an atomic bomb because a minority might be young or old fogeys. What are you going to do? Send them to Auschwitz? Line them up in front of a machine gun or stuff them into a gas chamber? If you are a Christian, Grillo would see that Christ did not scheme with the Sanhedrin to have the Pharisees repressed. The living word and the spirit were what was needed, then as now. There are indeed many problems with the traditionalist world, including nineteenth-century stuffiness and another form of identity politics. You don’t deal with that with a machine gun, but through teaching, writing books, the nobility of spirit.
… forms of fundamentalism
I wonder if he would say the same about American evangelical mega-churches or Islamist terrorists. There is the old joke about the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist – you can negotiate with a terrorist. Ha,ha. There is some truth there. Grillo has a point that some aspects of traditionalism might have roots in post-modern identity ideologies. The point merits study and research.
First, the “dearth of seminarians” and “young people fleeing” is not just a negative fact: is the sign of a necessary travail for the entire Church. The “easy” solutions (i.e., let us fill traditionalist seminaries with militarized young men modelled on 17th or 18th century priests) are only blunders, whose costs are primarily borne by those involved. They don’t generate a life of faith but often great resentment and personal hardening.
This resonates with me, and my own fragile spiritual and mental health was not strong enough in this world. Perhaps I should have been a boat builder! Seminaries and regimented monasteries are very much a product of the Counter Reformation. I belong to a small Church body that ensures that candidates for the priesthood follow a course of theology, typically through a university faculty – like the old Church of England, and then spend a time mentored by an experienced priest in parish ministry. There are no easy solutions, but clericalism has been a justified target of Pope Francis. Unfortunately, he fights clericalism with clericalism – the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of politics.
Grillo expects complete conformity and collectivism in the name of fidelity to the Pope and Magisterium. At the same time, the Pope is making concessions to establishment Anglicanism and Protestantism. We have a clear situation of double standards.
Responding to the idea of “failed” liturgical reforms, Grillo traces the history of people finding problems with the liturgy in their time.
You say, “the liturgical reform has failed” and you reason in terms of numbers. You think like this: if something in history is before something else, then what is before is the cause of what comes after. It is not difficult, thus, to believe that the responsibility for the evils of the 70s-80s-90s, up to 2024, lies with the Second Vatican Council, and particularly the liturgical reform. This way of reasoning, however, is not historically well-founded. The crisis in the Church began in great part before the emergence of liturgical thinking: Guéranger and Rosmini speak of a “liturgical crisis” as early as 1830-40.
The argument is not wrong, but is weak. However, Grillo is not going to convince me that the liturgical movement beginning with Guéranger and promoted in French and German monasticism is the same in terms of ideology and culture as the Bugnini reform of the 1960’s.
I come to some form of provisional conclusion based on my own experience and observations about the modern world to which I have alluded. The biggest error of all institutional Churches, including Anglicanism, is the principle Cujus regio, ejus religio. The king we are talking about is not the dwarfed Charles III of England – but the real powers like the banks and multinational business and finance. It is the god of Mammon, raw money and power to which human beings will lust in their competitivity and primeval struggle. Perhaps this is the Ubermensch of Nietzsche, if his idea was not something more noble. This is the issue of politics, not the common good of persons and society – but money and power for the winner. The endgame is techo-feudalism and The Machine. This is the Archon King, and its religion will be that of the established Church.
Perhaps the tide is turning, but national populism will only go so far. The true King is Christ, not as a political ruler (or whose name is used as a justification for a particular political ideology) but as nobility of spirit. Maybe right-wing politics will help to clear the way and challenge the Machine, but it will only succumb to the same corruption unless it is based on the love, tolerance and kindness, spiritual mind, of the Gospel.
Grillo would have his place in the House of Commons, sitting there on his green leather bench with his legs crossed and a smirk on his face.
“I always voted at my party’s call.
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.”
I thought so little they rewarded me.
By making me the ruler of the Queens Navee”.
Sartre expressed it in his little book as La Nausée. I sense our age as one that makes us sick of being human. Mélenchon and Macron in their little manœuvres make me feel as nauseous as Starmer and Sunak the other side of the Channel. Common sense has been crushed under the weight of technocracy and greed. Our Continent is ripe for revolution, which I why I quoted Wordsworth as it happened in France in 1789: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! I reserve my enthusiasm lest the ghost of Robespierre should blind us all and summon us to the triangular blade and the basket. Our only way out is Christianity, but one that is neither of the caricatures of Grillo or the traditionalists as a mass movement.
The temptation is to be done with institutional, and therefore sacramental, Christianity. Perhaps the Quakers have a problem with historical relevance. Atheistic materialism, the basis of The Machine, will not satisfy our Sehnsucht any more. This blog is the main part of my ministry as a priest of a small Church, too small to become corrupt with the Archons of this world. I have a feeling that things are going to change. However, Oscar Wilde gave us this salutary warning:
There is something so unique about Christ. Of course just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ. For that we should be grateful. The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since. I make one exception, St. Francis of Assisi. But then God had given him at his birth the soul of a poet, as he himself when quite young had in mystical marriage taken poverty as his bride: and with the soul of a poet and the body of a beggar he found the way to perfection not difficult. He understood Christ, and so he became like him. We do not require the Liber Conformitatum to teach us that the life of St. Francis was the true Imitatio Christi, a poem compared to which the book of that name is merely prose.
He wrote these words in prison, a system designed to kill him spiritually. I say to the traditionalists that Benedict XVI, though I esteemed him as a scholar and one who sought to reconcile Scholasticism with German Idealism, was such a false dawn. What I went through with the TAC and the Ordinariates in c. 2010 reiterated my bitter experience with the traditionalists. The traditionalists, and traditionalist Anglicans too, are a false dawn. We can only wait in our poverty of spirit to receive the new and true dawn with Christ’s blessing. Living as a solitary here in the French countryside, I will probably be long forgotten before the Spirit of God, the Word, is breathed onto our parched and barren world. I am of no importance. If we can arrive at such a degree of humility, then there is hope.
Rewilding is a theme that is not easy to understand or conceive. I already mentioned Michael Martin, and have had a recorded talk with him. He is a layman, a country dweller, a farmer, an intellectual, a family man. He writes so beautifully in his blog. I am a priest, shortly to resume writing my book Christus, the person and not only the ideal of Christianity or Christendom. I will be in a sailing rally next week, but the month of July is coming, when I intend to be at home. That will be my time of reading, writing, prayer – and doing practical work. Things have to begin on the ground, in our own hearts – the place where we can do something. Rewilding can take different forms, surviving on one’s own away from institutional bureaucracies, or maybe small Churches on condition that the bishops and priests have learned a lesson of humility and remember the real purpose of any Church (or communion in which the Universal Church is present). The word will resonate in our minds without our having any fixed idea. As Novalis thought, magical idealism comes with hovering (schweben) as reality and truth remain beyond our grasp. As we yearn and wait for the Blue Flower, our indeterminacy or restlessness keep us in that state of instability whose dialectical opposition bring us to new ways of thinking and feeling.
The world changed tragically and optimistically at the close of the eighteenth century. We now face an analogy of the same revolution and revival of the Romantic and Idealist spirit. I go forward with hope and faith…
History does not repeat itself, but it seems to produce analogies of itself in more or less predictable cycles. This is the fourth time on this blog that I have introduced a posting by this famous and poignant quote from William Wordsworth:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!
Each time, I approached it with a different and more or less profound understanding. So, here is another one.
We find here an expression of exhilaration as the world reached a cusp between an era of increasingly contrasting wealth and poverty, power and helplessness. It was the beginning of joy experienced by those who were sick and tired of the madness of George III, the opulence of the French King Louis XVI (though he was trying to introduce reforms) and the political power of the Church. Revolutions were happening everywhere in the late eighteenth century: American independence, the emancipation of slaves, the later reaction against Napoleon. The Industrial Revolution employed starving country folk in factories, but they were hardly better off in terms of wages and working / living conditions. The Romantics responded, not by political activism and violence, but by poetry and the liberty of the spirit. Perhaps some of the most powerful poetry in this movement were Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Ode to Liberty. As the world changed for good or for evil, noble souls sought to understand the inner workings of the collective consciousness.
The initial elation of change in France of the 1780’s quickly became a revolting sight of guillotined heads on an industrial scale, since it sufficed to be opposed to Robespierre’s Jacobin ideology to be condemned to die. Wordsworth fled back to England and the peace and safety of my native Lake District.
Our own world is beset by so many problems in society and politics. Economically, we all become poorer as house prices soar, as do food and energy costs. On the other side it becomes more difficult to find employment or succeed in business. Wages and salaries stagnate. Homelessness is at monstrous rates, all over – the UK, Europe, the USA and all over the world. Illegal immigration is at such a level as it is not only an economic problem but a cultural one too. Liberalism and democracy faced being replaced by any number of possibilities: Islam, techno-feudalism and The Machine, cultural Marxism aka “woke”, the stuff of dystopian novels written by Orwell, Huxley and others. We are governed increasingly by fear or force, threatened by fines for things we took for granted only a few years ago – all in the name of apocalyptic climate change. At the same time, we still find catastrophic quantities of plastic and toxic substances dumped in the sea by industry. Is all that about to change?
There will be activists of all political tendencies, left and right, but the concern of my own thought is to do something about the problems in another way entirely. We have to renew our own minds, just a few of us, but with the weapons of the spirit in the words of St Paul.
Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints; and for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in bonds: that therein I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.
The weapons of war are therefore truth, righteousness, preparing the Gospel of peace, faith, the Spirit, the word of God, prayer, boldness. Plato would have added beauty and goodness to this knowledge of truth. These weapons do not kill, destroy or devastate, but they build a new world. Novalis sought to make a way ahead over new paths, to innovate in the ways of tradition and in what has proven to be good. His key to understanding his vision of a renewed medieval Christendom was a concept known as magical idealism.
Atheists use this notion to condemn Christianity for lacking realism. What is real? Power, money and sexual satisfaction? Materialism? Magical idealism is built on German Idealism but with an added human dimension on top of the use of reason. I am presently reading Laure Cahen-Maurel’s Novalis’s Magical Idealism: A Threefold Philosophy of the Imagination, Love and Medicine which claims to demonstrate that “Novalis’s views on both magic and idealism, not only prove to be perfectly rational and comprehensible, but even more philosophically coherent and innovative than have been recognised up to now“. I have yet to get my mind round this concept, so much that I have been indoctrinated to consign children’s fairy tales to the dustbin of things we put aside on becoming adults. We all have gone from this sense of imaginative wonder to the ugliness of modernity!
Everything is converging in my mind with Jakob Böhme, Nicholas Berdyaev whose books I “devoured” when I was at seminary to counter the semi-nominalism of scholasticism, with Novalis and the Jena group, Steiner, Owen Barfield and the Inklings. Every single mind who has inspired me found the same Gnosis, Sophiology and spiritual wisdom. What I have not yet understood philosophically, I feel in the depth of my being.
Romanticism was born of the early dreams and aspirations of the Revolution and the run-up in the second half of the 18th century. There have been other currents of thought and human experience since that time, perhaps using other names and labels. Cynics who “know the cost of everything but the value of nothing” (Oscar Wilde) will call our world Cloud-cuckoo land. There will be a new Romanticism, a new world brought about by divine souls. This Romanticism never died because it is a part of the immanence of God in those human souls that accept it. Those who call us deluded or mad are challenged to produce their own fruits of truth, beauty and goodness.
I received some messages on Facebook about what I would call the ideal parish, the stuff of old people reminiscing about the distant past (40 years ago or more) or even priests who remembered their days of World War II and earlier. A few days ago, I turned 65 and wondered why I did not have the same nostalgia about the 1970’s. 1974 was fifty years ago. For me, it was a brutal time that had no esteem for beauty. I have never understood why some people like ugliness and noise. In many ways, our own times have continued the same brutalism, though some urban architects have adopted more classical and aesthetically pleasing designs for their projects.
In 1982, I was living in London, one year after I had converted to Roman Catholicism through the Society of St Pius X. I had listened to the noisy apologetics salesmen and taken it all in. I went to traditional Masses both with the Society of St Pius X, the elderly retired monk Fr John Coulson in Wimbledon and the Latin Mass Society in various “real” churches in London. It was all impressive to the Anglican I was from a middle-of-the-road background with a passion for church music and the organ. At the same time, I played the organ for Mass in an east-end parish church with a most uninspiring Novus Ordo liturgy, resembling our old 1970’s Series 3 services I had known at school when modern English was being rolled out.
Traditionalist Roman Catholicism in London seemed to be resumed into rubrical nit-picking, devotional crankiness and apocalyptic ideologies. I even met one of Oswald Mosley’s old supporters whose opinions on Jewish people and Freemasonic conspiracies could have been taken from Streicher’s Die Stürmer! Had I known the full extent of this man’s ideas, I would have run more than a mile! Truth to be told, I was more fascinated by medieval English Catholicism and its surviving churches in the English countryside, the pre-Reformation ideal, the Sarum liturgy and other local uses like York. I was tempted by the idea of monastic life until I eventually discovered its collectivist, regimented and repressive reality. I had also been to France on holiday with my family several times. What if France was a “new old England” without the Reformation or modern liturgies?
I erred by Idealism and Romanticism, forgetting the role of Reason and thinking out the realities. Nevertheless, I decided to go to France – by bicycle (apart from the Newhaven to Dieppe ferry crossing, and the journey from London by train). Fr Coulson gave me a list of names and addresses including Fr Montgomery-Wright in Normandy and a few monasteries and old eccentric priests. I have already related the story:
Fr Montgomery took his Anglo-Catholicism to the RC Church, and discovered that he would have more or less the same freedom to be an eccentric priest in France as in the Church of England. In his mind, more or less, was a merger between the idealised Sarum liturgy of medieval England, the surviving local rites of Normandy and the Roman Catholic “one true church”. He sympathised with Archbishop Lefebvre but kept his distance from the political and collectivist ideologies of many French traditionalists. During the few months I spent in the presbytery in Le Chamblac, I remember the visits by young French traditionalist idealists from Paris. Each week, Fr Montgomery went to Paris and celebrated a private Mass at St Nicholas-du-Chardonnet. I know, because I served that Mass. At the same time, he kept a respectful distance and a discreetly critical attitude.
The people who went to Mass at Le Chamblac were mostly traditionalists coming from a certain distance. A very few were actual parishioners. Le Chamblac consists of the church and presbytery, the chateau, the Mairie and a few farms dotted around. That’s all. He had two other parishes which were already dead. Fr Montgomery said Mass during the week for a community of nuns in Bernay and Sunday evening for a group of traditionalists in Alençon. The chapel was a hired room and everything was set up before Mass and taken down afterwards, and kept in someone’s home. He got about, accompanied by Christian, who was a man with Down syndrome. This life might be idealised, but the actual parish life was quite bleak which certainly motivated Fr Montgomery to minister to traditionalists in the area. It was less of a local-community parish than one would like to imagine.
When I was at seminary, after my Fribourg days, in the early 1990’s, I had the occasion to use my organ-building skills I had acquired with Harrison & Harrison and London College of Furniture. I began to be asked to find redundant organs in England, transport them and reassemble them in churches. One such priest who asked me to provide an organ was Fr Jacques Pecha at the parish of Bouloire in the Diocese of Le Mans. Fr Pecha was born locally in 1920 and went to seminary in the late 1930’s. He lived through the misery of the Nazi occupation from 1940. His family narrowly escaped being deported to Germany for slave labour for health reasons. He was ordained a priest in 1943 by Cardinal Georges Grente of Le Mans. Like Fr Montgomery, his parish tenure was very long until his death in 2002. I found the organ in Nottinghamshire, dismantled it and loaded it into a van, and installed it in 1992.
The parish of Bouloire is quite unlike Le Chamblac. It is a large village / small town of two thousand inhabitants.
I spent some time with Fr Pecha during the installation of the organ, and also in 1997-98 when my vocation was in a mess. He acted as Archdeacon at my uncanonical ordination to the priesthood in 1998 by an independent Ngô Đình Thục succession bishop living near Limoges. He was an independent-minded priest, also in regard to political and “militant” traditionalism. Some of his congregation were from the parish, but most were traditionalists who drove from their homes to Bouloire. Liturgically, Fr Pecha was less eccentric than Fr Montgomery, and celebrated in the Roman rite with some adaptations from the 1965 pre-Novus Ordo rite. He was much more inspired by French monastic styles than medievalism. He got on very well with his brother Olivier who played the organ, and we often went to have supper with Mme Alix (la “Mère Ollie”) the sacristan or some of the other people who had known him for decades.
Some years before I went there, the diocesan bishop decided to put a stop to this independence. Fr Pecha Pecha replied something like: “I won’t be there when you come, but I fear that my people will be guarding the church with tractors and pitchforks“. A very Vendéen response (sometimes called Chouannerie) lodged in the collective historical consciousness of French Catholics. This courage and independence is something that attracted me to France, even though some of the political reactions (both left and right) of the past few years are quite intimidating. My experience of a whole different world, confirmed my own anti-authoritarian instincts as someone on the autistic “spectrum”. My idealism prevented me from recognising toxic religiosity and fanaticism for what it is.
My prognosis is harsh with the conflict between idealism and reality. My discovery of Idealism and Romanticism has innoculated me from many of the absurdities of internet religion and literalism, or indeed any kind of metaphysics based on materialism. Fr Pecha only ever wanted to be a hard-working and pastoral parish priest. Fr Montgomery was also hard-working and pastoral, but never ceased to be an Anglo-Catholic.
There are still parishes where there is a good sense of community. The liturgy might or might not be to our taste. The fact is that the parishes are dead or dying, except in the cities where people are more educated and motivated by ideas and ideologies. The church in my village (Champgenéteux, Mayenne) is a seventeenth-century building and usually open during the summer. It is well maintained by the Mairie (moderately green and left-wing), and there are occasional Sunday Masses, funerals and weddings. I discovered the old presbytery when I went for a walk yesterday evening, a building that seems to be in fair condition with modern windows, but without sign of life. Perhaps the Mairie has a use for it.
My prognosis? It is the end of Christendom, and Christianity will become an underground movement in cities. The countryside is becoming a desert, and many houses are secondary residences, at least in touristic areas. My own village is slowly becoming a refuge for very modest income people looking for cheap houses – as is my own case. Interestingly, many people here are English expats – who can aspire to some stability if they have a French passport or permis de séjour, since Brexit has put paid to free movement. Many such people have a rather resentful view of life and have absolutely no interest in religion. So much for the idea of an “ethnic” community! Someone came up with the idea of turning the old boulangerie into a café which is run as an association and not as a business. It is one of the brightest ideas anyone has come up with here, but the melancholy remains. I feel it.
Georges Bernanos said in his Journal d’un Curé de Campagne – “Je me disais donc que le monde est dévoré par l’ennui. Naturellement, il faut un peu réfléchir pour se rendre compte, ça ne se saisit pas tout de suite“. The world is devoured by boredom. It needs thought to become aware of it because it is not obvious. Boredom is like dust that gets everywhere, on your face and hands, everywhere. So, to be rid of the dust, people resort to activity and agitation. Am I an exception? I think not except for something intellectual and spiritual that makes me human. Bernanos was writing a hundred years ago. It was as modern then as now! Village life is boring except to someone with something of a monastic view of life. I stayed for six months with the monks of Triors in 1997, but I could not relate to the absolute collectivism and regimentation of their life. It was a brutal reality that clashed with my inner idealism. It seemed so little different from The Machine of the modern world – so paradoxical. Contemplative life can only be lived by those who are aware of their humanity, person and spiritual freedom. Where is the balance between self-disciple and structure – and letting go of the shackles, like sailing a ship into unknown waters and a new world.
I have found American Transcendentalism (Walt Whitman, Emerson, etc.) very appealing in its optimism compared with the gloom of English Romanticism. Perhaps in a past time, I might have wanted to go to the New World. I was tempted in the early 2000’s as I found sympathy with the late Dr John Grady of the Order of St John in Tennessee and an independent traditionalist bishop in Florida. Something held me back. America is mostly an illusion and a deadly error I had the good sense to avoid. Many Americans I know are very good people, but something always kept me away.
I read many prognoses about the future in America and here in Europe. Are we teetering towards some kind of “Communist-Islamic” nightmare? Or an even worse nightmare of The Machine and techno-feudalism? Christ taught us not to worry about the future – carpe diem. Many threatened future events will happen only after our own deaths. The old priests I knew in their parishes are now gone. I have seen their graves and the signs of their flocks’ love and memories. They take their place alongside Dr Pusey, Fr Mackonochie, the Curé d’Ars and so many others, canonised by the Church or forgotten.
I quote from Michael Martin’s introduction to Novalis’ fragment Christendom or Europe.
A belief in the omnipresence and immanence of God would not on the surface suggest heresy – or even atheism, as some have suggested – but it does lead to an existential moment in which, if God is truly immanent in Creation, “present equally within everyone alike, then we all have equal access to him, and there is no need for a religious or political elite to establish and confirm our relationship with him”.
Christianity or Europe is not a nostalgic fairy tale, but a piece of writing that laments the loss of the Christian imagination. Novalis sought to re-enchant medieval Christendom to counter both the materialist Machine and the west’s own “islam” – bible-bashing Protestantism. Bucolic French parish life is a tiny contribution to the vast vision of those hundreds of young people at the Chartres Pilgrimage. I see the link, but the efforts of the traditionalists pale before the Idealist and Romantic vision. Ironically, those we used to call Modernists may well have had a more firmly grounded aspiration to Christendom than today’s traditionalists. Simply, the label Modernist was glued onto anyone who in the 1900’s dared to suggest the immanence of God and seek a deeper and more spiritualist vision than Aristotelian materialism (you only arrive at the Universal Idea by abstracting from particular matter or foundational truth) and ecclesiastical authoritarianism. The real enemy is aggressive secularism!
We look to the past in order to sheet in the sail and steer towards a new world, one of childhood and magic, of imagination and beauty, of humanity and spiritual freedom. Reality divorced from Idealism is a mirage and an illusion. I am a priest but my parish is cosmopolitan via the technology of the internet. It has taken all this time to learn to be myself, through experience of those ebbing lights of French parishes to the imagination that always “clears new ground”.
I have a friend who is cultured, courteous and has a good sense of humour. However, he has an almost unique position of upholding Christianity (to some extent) whilst denying God, the Spirit or the supernatural. He seemed sympathetic to my being a priest, but he could not tolerate anything that would deny ordination for women, pastoral welcome to LGBT people. I think he draws the line at transsexualism, but I am unsure. Am I being intolerant at being totally confused with a conviction I have not encountered.
In fact I have encountered it in my old Vicar from Kendal Parish Church. He was honest and resigned his post to devoting his life to his interests, his family and nature. It is something people from our part of the country do, whether it is hiking on the mountains or sailing or rowing on the lakes.
The Church Times wrote in his obituary:
Until he embraced atheism, John Hodgkinson, who died on 11 June, aged 91, was an outstanding Vicar of Kendal for 19 years. He had been swimming in the Sea of Faith movement and had concluded that the Church was mistaken to interpret the resurrection as implying a life after death. He thought that the idea of heaven was a distraction from seeing transcendence in the real world. (Though he enjoyed the writings of Richard Holloway, he considered him to be not a proper atheist).
No longer able in conscience to recite the Creed, at the age of 62 he took early retirement into the barn-conversion home he had built with his own hands. Relieved of the burden of official subscription to what he considered the unnecessary add-ons of the Creed, he remained a willing celebrant at weekday eucharists and a much-appreciated occupant of rural pulpits, preaching only what he honestly believed. He was always a much-loved pastor and, in spite of or perhaps because of his doubts, was often invited to conduct humanitarian funerals. He took his last funeral only a few months ago.
We his faithful and choir members (I sung there under William Snowley from 1975-76 and had organ lessons with him), loved John Hodgkinson and esteemed his love of nature and his skill at making musical instruments in his home workshop. Above all, this was a man of integrity and complete honesty. What went wrong with his faith in God? We have truly to go back to our theology. What or who is God? One thing of which I am sure if that materialism is too grim and bleak to consider as “all there is”! I cannot be so simplistic as to judge and condemn – but it is a terrifying mystery why someone would deny God. Perhaps it is a case of:
I don’t believe in the god you don’t believe in.
Would he have believed in God with a different understanding? At the same time, the venerable Canon had studied theology and the Scriptures at Cambridge University. What came out in the obituary is that he was a part of the Sea of Faith movement, something considered as quite eccentric, but sharing in the general tone of secularising Modernism and the demythologising promoted by some German Lutheran theologians in the nineteenth century. I suspect that my friend had come into contact with this or a similar movement during his student days, or something like that.
What was the point of Jesus Christ if there is no God? Was he a social justice warrior or a political activist against the Roman occupation and hypocritical Judaism equally? Could we transpose this notion to the present times and use “spare parts” of scrapped Christianity to persuade Christians to become Marxist materialists? That seems to be what Liberation Theology is all about, oversimplifying it. It is certainly subject of current concern with the Woke and BLM movements and the extension of these claims to other minority groups.
So, how can someone claim to be Christian and atheist? I have been grappling with this one for a long time, as I have read authors like Stephan Höller, Elain Pagels and some integral traditionalist authors like René Guénon about Gnosticism. Gnosticism (there are orthodox versions like Origen and St Clement of Alexandria) classically makes a distinction between the Demiurge or Yaldabaoth and the God above God, the ultimate divine principle. The real issue is the problem of evil. How do we reconcile the cruelty of the Old Testament God and the spiritual nobility of Christ. Many have attempted to delve into this terrifying mystery. I think of Jakob Böhme the German cobbler who was detested by his local Lutheran pastor, and had such influence on men like Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, Novalis and Nicholas Berdyaev.
He agreed with mainstream Christianity about the Fall, and that there were fallen angels, and that God was set to restore the world to a state of grace. However, he rejected the Lutheran teaching on justification by faith alone, and had an alternative explanation, closer to Catholicism. Not did he not claim that God sees evil as desirable, necessary or as part of divine will to bring forth good. Evil was necessary for man to reach God, almost as the later thesis-antithesis-synthesis of Hegel. What is clear is that this mystery of evil is beyond any of us. We can either find an acceptable way of understanding it partially through theology and philosophy – or we say that God is a load of bunk, a mere symbol created by the human mind.
On the other hand, Christ shows a spirit of goodness, kindness and refusal to judge. We are particularly moved by the Sermon on the Mount. However, how do we understand the miracles? Healing from sickness and spiritual trouble or diabolical possession. Do we just take the bits we like and spit out the rest?
Our modern “culture” rejects the supernatural and the spiritual, and all that remains is a minority of “cultural Christians” – who go to church but only for the social aspect.
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I began to write this article on 3rd March, and became quite distracted. I was set back on the rails by a discussion with some gentlemen who advocate the “rewilding” of Christianity. This term would seem to mean the continuing of some spiritual form of Christianity without the institutional churches (Anglican, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, etc.). This is a tendency we will find from about the time of World War II with figures like Simone Weil and Dietrich Bonhöffer among others. We find ourselves at a branch-off movement between “free” spirituality and living according to Christian moral principles without belief, prayer or belonging to the institutional church.
I should mention the extraordinary personality of Simone Weil who is described in The Year of Our Lord 1943, Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs. The Allies and the Soviets defeated Hitler’s evil regime, but would the victors continue their life with more moral virtue and nobility of spirit? Darkness was beaten by blood and tears, but in 1943 darkness still covered Europe and most of the world. This book makes previously unseen connections between the ideas of five major Christian intellectuals in WWII — T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, Simone Weil, and Jacques Maritain. Society had to be based on an authentic spiritual life without need for force or fear to keep order.
The French Jewish philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909 – 1943) died very young. She is often called “a kindred spirit for church outsiders”. The point I make is that too many people get complexed about what they do in church, as if it mattered to other people or the collectivity. I have known holy and silent souls who just evaporated away after having sown the seeds, allowing others to reap the harvest. Many such souls will not be seen or noticed in church, but it doesn’t mean they are atheists or bad people. If we can comprehend such an idea, maybe the experience of institutional churches and liturgy will be that much more authentic and a source of grace. We might judge Weil for not accepting Baptism, but in her view of the Church, there was another way to Christ. I say this as a priest, horrified by the example of too many churchgoers.
The institutional church has been exhausted for a long time, and attempts to found alternative institutional churches eventually leads to the same impasse. The “wild” church idea seems to be an appealing message. What is a “wild church”? A family? A group of friends? What? An agreement to found such a thing would involve some measure of institutionalism. On reading different opinions on the subject here and there, the essential message seems little different from various strands of early Protestantism and the rejection of priesthood or clerical structures, except the various boards of “elders” who would become a new clerical caste in time. Perhaps those who are attracted to such a vision could simply join the Quakers. I have a great deal of respect for the Quakers, and they seem to represent the notion of a community without the problems of an institutional church and with an aura of sincerity and firm principles.
My best experience of Catholicism has been spending time with old country parish priests in France and who resisted the post Vatican II changes. It was a form of the traditionalist reaction, but less radical and more rooted in the place where the parish was situated. Sooner or later, such parishes came to an end with the mortality of the ageing priests. I joined the Institute of Christ the King after my university days in Switzerland and encountered the spirit of the founders, not so much Msgr Wach and Fr Mora who were ordained in Italy under the aegis of Cardinal Siri of Genoa, but the old French parish priests of Opus Sacerdotale. This association still exists and I am happy to see that it has a website. I don’t think that spirit of simplicity went very far in the Institute as it went the way of the old chapters of secular canons. Those little French parishes seemed to me to embody some degree of “wildness” but within essential canonical boundaries all in resisting anti-traditional authoritarianism.
It was quite a number of years ago that I looked at the idea of the intentional community after the example of Eric Gill and Ditchling. I am sure there are some very good and democratic communities, just as there are collectivist, communist and sectarian communities. It seems to be a domain where certain contemporary Marxist-inspired ideologies can take hold. They certainly need to be visited and acquaintances made with people. I remember a conversation with a Benedictine abbot who admitted to me that monastic life is totalitarian and collective, a form of communism – though opposed to Marxism as a philosophical system and theory. The thought is sobering and the alternative is living alone. How far must self-sacrifice go?
“Wild” Christianity is given the analogy of a biological organism, generally a plant or a tree. The seed is sown in the ground, which then germinates into a plant with roots, a stem and leaves, then with a reproductive system, generally flowers with insects as the vectors of pollination. For a “wild” Christian community, must the idea come from a single person or a group? How do we distinguish the good leader from the narcissist lusting after power, money and control? There are spiritual communities, both Christian and following other religions and ideas, and each has to be assessed on its own merit. There are many others also outside the UK. Some are almost “lay monasteries” and others are less structured.
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After this little excursus on “alternative” Christianities, I set out to criticise this idea of Christian atheism. It is not a monolithic movement, but rather a tendency with different strands and variations. A good introductory article is Christian Atheism. The article ends with a quote from C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity objecting to the claim that Jesus was merely a moral guide:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.
The apologist is treading on brittle ground, and often suggests triumphalism and an attitude that suggests “ownership” of truth. Any apologetic argument can be circumvented, in particular by claiming that the choices on offer are not the only ones. I appreciate Lewis like the other scholars in the 1920’s and 30’s who represented a kind of neo-Romantic movement.
Christian Atheism is a formidable foe. The notion is quite depressing, but reveals many fault lines in traditional teachings about God. For many of us, the notion of a dictator who rewards and punishes like a Judge & Jury or an old-fashioned school headmaster with his well-worn cane no longer holds authority. Some Gnostic views suggest a God who is beyond human imagination other than being the transcendence that lives in us all and in whom we participate with love. Plato’s metaphysics give more of an understanding than fundamentalist “biblicism”. Josef Ratzinger was insistant on the role of philosophy and the role of reason to give credibility to Revelation. Faith and Reason must cohabit.
The thought of life without spirit is too bitter and depressing to contemplate, leaving only brute materialism, itself without lasting credibility and leading to insanity. As we were taught in university, morality and ethics are a consequence of spirituality and love. We may be swimming in the sea after the ship of the institutional church has sunk. We may be struggling and experiencing solitude, being on the outside and without roots. God is understood in many different ways, but they all give meaning to life.
The Jewish discovery that God is not a god but Creator is the discovery of absolute Mystery behind and underpinning reality. Those who share it (either in its Judaic or its Christian form) are not monotheists who have reduced the number of gods to one. They, we, have abolished the gods; there is only the Mystery sustaining all that is. The Mystery is unfathomable, but it is not remote as the gods are remote. The gods live somewhere else, on Olympus or above the starry sky. The Mystery is everywhere and always, in every grain of sand and every flash of colour, every hint of flavour in a wine, keeping all these things in existence every microsecond. We could not literally approach God or get nearer to God for God is already nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is the ultimate depth of our beings making us to be ourselves. – Herbert McCabe
This is my personal blog concerning my philosophy of life as a Christian following the Romantic world view. I am a priest in the Anglican Catholic Church – Original Province and live in France.
The Blue Flower 