The Moral High Road

Posted on Thursday, 28 February, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

A few days ago, I watched Nuremberg (2000) on YouTube. The whole film is available for you to watch online or download.

From 1 hour 32 minutes to 1 hour 50 minutes, there is a dramatic cross examination of Hermann Göring who takes advantage of procedure to manipulate, monopolise and forward his arguments. Justice Jackson is brought to want to offer his resignation after the blows of Göring’s bloated arrogance, the judges following procedure and his own tactical errors. His aide Mrs Elsie Douglas handles Jackson in very simple terms, inviting him to bring out his own interior thoughts and values.

… if their values are stronger than yours, if they believe in their ideals more than you believe in yours…

Jackson then talks with the British judge who reminds him of his thoughts of moral superiority in prosecuting this trial.

– Do you see Göring as a statesman?

– No, I do not. I see him as reprehensible – and inhuman.

– Then treat him as such – the vile, conniving, fascist bastard that he is.

I once found this frightening recording of Göring, and you don’t need to understand German to discern his ability to crush and manipulate at will. Just his tone of voice conveys this psychopath’s personality.

These ideas came into my mind as I read Remainers should get ready for what this political chaos may bring.

This game can’t go on for very much longer and it won’t. Very soon, something will give and, depending what that is, it could create some real opportunities for remainers. So whilst it would be entirely premature for them to expect victory, remainers should learn lessons from the Brexiters when they didn’t expect their victory: they didn’t plan for it and so when to their and everyone else’s surprise they had their prize in their grasp, they didn’t know what to do with it. The consequence may now be that it slips through their fingers.

What is the essential point of fighting against Brexit? As I have mentioned before, two essential paradigms are opposed, both in the minds of politicians and ordinary voters: the revival of nationalism and a fear of the outside world (unless that outside world can be controlled), and on the other side, a healthy cosmopolitanism concerned for human rights and the welfare of the weak. If we are shaped by the latter world view, how do we conceive the idea of shaping the UK as a viable, credible and positive member of the EU?

Surely, there are practical benefits from membership of the European Union. One is freedom of movement: my right to live and work in France, Germany or Spain or any of the other European countries – and the right of people from any of those countries to live and work in the UK. Obviously, the concern is people from third countries getting into Europe via a country with slack immigration requirements, and then their being able to claim the same status anywhere of European citizens. To begin with, most of those immigrants are undocumented and illegal, not legitimately claiming refugee status. Obviously that issue has to be clarified – but without abolishing all freedom of movement.

The other main issue is discerning what really is “the will of the people”, an ideological euphemism or something real about whether a person’s vote is like the conditions of a mortal sin or any positive moral act: serious matter, full knowledge and full consent. In a context like this, we need to be clear and credible about our motivations for leaving or remaining. What is best for the country, above all for human beings and only then for the economy and business?

Whether we are Leavers or Remainers, we need to consider the purity of our own motives and their perceived motives. Are their values stronger than ours? Do we believe in our ideals more than they believe in theirs? If no-deal Brexit is something like our country declaring war on itself or shooting itself in the foot, then we have the moral duty to resist by all moral (and legal if we don’t want to get into trouble with the police) means at our disposal. Another thought is whether our adversaries in the ERG are true statesmen with the good of the country at heart – or whether they are vile, conniving, fascist bastards. Are the accusations of dark money and corruption true? If so, this is very serious, and it is our patriotic duty to fight and push our MP’s to such a position of resolve and determination to do what is right.

A very important thing for us to do is make judgement from facts, and not try to extract truth from opinion. We have to develop a critical mind, which partly comes from education, but also from a spiritual life that seeks the good, the true and the beautiful. Sometimes, events and facts bring us to change our minds and come to terms with a new truth. Most things we believe in turn out only to be possible or probable, not absolute. I have had written dialogues with those close to me who see things in a different way from the way I see them. My question is why they believe in what they do hold as true. Did they believe a lie – or did I? Are we all confused by the present shambles of British politics, the lies and corruption? What can be verified? We may never know for certain.

As for other matters in my life, like autism, we need a philosophical approach, an ideal to look towards. The European Union isn’t perfect. Nothing is. But, the founding ideas were born from the Nuremberg Trial and the lessons learned from defeating the Nazis and the fascists. There are two essential paradigms: one of competition and the absolute rights of brute strength, the other of compassion and the rights of all human beings and the natural environment in which we live. The latter must prevail as an ideal and be ever perfected and strengthened like our life of virtue and prayer as Christians.

What are those ideals at the foundation of the European Union? They are resumed briefly in this EU in brief. The project is eminently humanist and cosmopolitan, which appeals to anyone who has emerged from his cocoon to discover the world.

The first ideal is to put an end to war and genocide, to make sure that Nazism and fascism can never again happen or find fertile ground in our countries and continent. The second is to ensure our rights to freedom, life and the pursuit of happiness. Others concern our right and possibility to live by our work in decent conditions, our education and encouragement to use our rational faculties. If peace is to be maintained, we need to have our cultural identity as English, Germans, Greeks or whatever, and for our countries to live in harmony on common agreed principles.

Would it really be such a loss if the UK went over to the Euro? We already changed our money system in 1971, and the half-crown coin or the tanner are now a distant memory for me. Trade and banking would be so much easier, and we ordinary people wouldn’t be changing money as we crossed the Channel.

If the Church is semper reformanda, to be constantly reformed, then so has any country or union of countries. I don’t know about everything going on in Brussels. People I am inclined to believe tell me that there is less corruption and dark money than in the British Government. There are lots of lies and fables about square or straight bananas, or about some Orwellian scheme to bring about the 1984 dystopia. The UK already has one in its new “ministry of truth”! As I recommended above, we need to be ready to come to terms with changing our minds if new evidence convinces us.

I feel called in my life to pursue the goal of Christian Humanism, as reigned from the time of the Renaissance and has influenced our nobility of spirit ever since. Democracy is a difficult question, since it is authentic and possible only in small entities in which people are educated and have a moral and spiritual basis to their lives. Otherwise it is little more than mob rule. Churchill said in a speech to the House of Commons in 1947:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

Conservative Christians may find fault in what I have to say about equality and inclusiveness. These ideas will mean something when we are ourselves members of a minority (an Englishman living in France, someone with autism, etc.). I said to my wife some days ago that I am the most feminist man she is likely to meet, because I do believe in the ideals Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Pankhurst and others stood for. She seemed to give me credit for that. To go further, we need to build a whole new philosophical reflection on the complementarity between men and women as being equal in their diversity and difference. I will not go into the other “hot button” issues here, but they all need reflection from a humanist point of view.

Since my days with the traditionalist Roman Catholics, I have had to reflect on these questions. I found that many such Roman Catholics entertain ideologies close to fascism. It is the old question of relinquishing freedom to be constrained into salvation. People who think that way are likely to find some nasty surprises at the end of their earthly life. My own thought has been influenced by philosophers like Berdyaev and Tolstoy, and by the Romantics in the wake of the French Revolution, and by the entire humanist movement from Renaissance times. I am as unsatisfied by Socialism as by the various Capitalist systems on offer. There is the old joke about Boris and Ivan in Moscow, one asking the other what was the difference between Capitalism and Communism. The other answers: In one, man exploits man, and in the other, it’s the other way round. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the old conundrum of conservativism and liberalism. This is why I try to look higher and deeper, over the slogans of the man of the crowd. I find it is what Rob Riemen says when he finds the essential difference that makes us noble, that of man’s soul.

Do I believe in these principles of human dignity, peace and freedom more than those with the ideal of power, competition and strength (physical and financial)? I have no simple answers, given the diversity of motivations that give each one of us our beliefs and convictions. The question is open:

What do you believe in?

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York Minster organ specification revealed

Posted on Monday, 18 February, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I mentioned some time ago that the organ of York Minster was being restored to more or less its 1931 specification. The project is due to be completed in 2020. This is an exciting development.

Specification from Harrison & Harrison.

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How do we deal with evil?

Posted on Thursday, 14 February, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

This is a theme that confronts us each year during Passiontide as the Church brings us to meditate on the rising wickedness of Scribes, Pharisees, Temple clergy and others against Christ, culminating in his death by crucifixion inflicted by the Roman occupying forces.

Some time ago I read Frederick Forsyth’s Odessa File, in which the diary of a former Auschwitz prisoner who had committed suicide is unfolded. It lays the entire foundation of the quest of a German journalist in the 1960’s to find the evil SS officer who was responsible for millions of deaths at the concentration camp and of his own father. The old Jew had written in his diary about when the Nazis killed his wife:

After her death, my soul died inside me. But my body and mind remained alive. I was determined to survive…

This is certainly the most poignant quote in the whole novel. It is the testimony of absolute destructiveness of evil. There is nothing positive in it. It does not build the personality, but destroys it. We will only find redemption by seeking a higher power, the good and true – which we call God.

Where did evil come from? There are any number of myths (not something that isn’t true but expressed via a narrative not intended to be literally understood) that try to answer this question from the Book of Genesis to the Gnostic scriptures and others in other world spiritual traditions and religions. Whichever narrative most describes the origin of mankind and evil, whatever happened in that parallel universe we will never understand fully in this life, man was driven from paradise into a world of evil. Thus we would encounter people who care about nothing, who lie, kill, swindle, are cruel bullies and everything we read about in the news. There are also the catastrophes that happen independently from human causality. It is a mystery that goes all the way back to origins.

In each of us remains the imago Dei, the spark of divinity that no amount of evil can extinguish. This enables us to choose to seek the truth, beauty and goodness. We can find our place among many philosophers and prophets, lessons of wisdom and the highest aspirations. This has to be our cause for optimism however dark the world becomes. Notwithstanding, as it comes and goes in waves, evil seems to win out until some miracle comes from where it is least expected. As a theological student, I often asked myself what was the point of the Redemption, since it seemed to have failed to change the evil in the world, or that its effect was limited in time. What I failed to understand – as we all fail to understand – was that we expected something that was never to be. The Redemption is situated at another level that abolishing evil in this world.

The power of the Archons continues in its full force. Everything is in our understanding of goodness and truth. Wars and persecutions continue in their fury against us, but we have not to fear those who kill the body, but who can annihilate the soul before sending both body and soul to hell.

It is a spiritual battle, but not only. We are endowed not only with the eternal and transcendent spirit of God, but also with reason and optimism about our lot in life. In the Renaissance, something new emerged, optimistic and filled with light. Human reason can choose to seek truth and goodness. It brought us to another understanding of sin and our dependence on God’s grace. The Enlightenment brought us awareness of our capacity to make ethical judgements, that our humanity may shine forth. Thus we reacted against the notion of the Church being the only ark of salvation, something which was necessary to cast off the evil that had entered its institutions. However, the Enlightenment also had its dark side in pride and arrogance. The foundation of the United States of America was a wonderful opportunity for a New World, but slavery and racism were accepted. When God, spirit and humanity are rejected, there are no moral constraints and only the motivation of pleasure and bestiality remains.

Nietzsche, is his own tormented way, showed us the consequences of nihilism and the loss of any meaning to life. Power and money have no knowledge of good and evil. We live in that nihilism from when our world died in the trenches of World War I, the gas chambers and battlefields of the second, and in the mounting evil of politicians and businessmen. We become no more than brute animals, like in the depiction of an English public school in the 1830’s. Nietzsche was right in that as religion and faith died, they would be replaced by the political ideologies of Soviet communism, Nazism and fascism. What is being concocted in the present British chaos can only lead the same way. When evil grows, it stifles everything, enters our homes and makes our clothes smell like old cigarette smoke. Humanity ceases to have the strength to resist the disease, and life ceases to have any value. It becomes normal for the weak to be killed without compunction by the strong, wealthy and powerful. At the end of World War II, Hitler committed suicide, Mussolini was shot and hung upside down by his feet in Milan, Franco died of old age – but the disease remained like bubonic plague in hibernation.

Is there any hope now? It is for us to find it, to be philosophers and prophets and create new values of truth and goodness, to shine like lights in the darkness. We can do something. I am trying to do so by studying and writing, since the pen (or computer keyboard) is mightier than the sword. My vocation is one of education, of taking my humble part in this great movement of spiritual renaissance and humanism.

Whilst we can say that humanity died in the twentieth century, not everything was annihilated. As our world is increasingly absurd, something remains of the old humanity. If I am thinking and writing like this, there is me – and others must be thinking and writing along similar lines. Indeed I know they are, because I read them. What constitutes the difference?

W.H. Auden asked himself in 1947:

If, as I’m convinced, the Nazis are wrong and we are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs?

It is a good question, when I read Theresa May’s record on human rights when she worked for the Home Office. There are many threats, and the anxiety is mounting as I write. If the end justifies the means, then anything is allowed like the killing of “undesirables”, the banishment and exploitation of the poor, racism, slavery and everything we keep reading about. What is the source of morality? What happens when self-interest is the only “good”, at the cost of freedom and justice? We don’t seem to want to know. As Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor levels at Christ:

People do not want freedom, they want to be happy; the burden of the choice between good and evil is too heavy. People want to relieve their conscience by submitting to the miraculous, the mysterious, to authority! That is what we, the Church, offer them.

In other words, Huxley’s Brave New World. We go beyond good and evil to modern corporate values: money, efficiency, market, being competitive, etc. This has become the modern “paradise”. Not only is there no morality. There is no truth. We live in a “post-truth” era and language has no value. The next stage is the amalgam of man and machine, the final death of the soul. Reason, technology and science have brought many benefits, but evil is still lurking, and always hidden or disguised. It is easy to understand the populist reaction as nationalism and xenophobia are resurrected. This revolt is utterly unpredictable, until the demagogue goose-steps onto the stage and has them all mesmerised like the guru of a sect. Like in the 1930’s mainstream political parties are discredited and they no longer have any usefulness. They are dinosaurs. Liberalism and social democracy seem to have outlived the usefulness and have to be replaced. By what? This is my concern when people tell me that Macron must go! Mme Le Pen doesn’t convince me! She too is in it for the money.

We live in anxiety and fear. Fr Jonathan Munn has just written Custard Pies, Spacetime, Joy and Brexit in which he expresses the same concerns as most of us at this time. Like Germans in the 1930’s, we are paralysed by fear and helplessness, and we are faced with the temptation to give in, to accept evil becoming banal. Even the “Remainer” Facebook groups contain many comments advocating the execution by guillotine or hanging or whatever of the chief powers behind Brexit: Boris Johnson, Rees-Mogg, etc. A women who watched an execution in France in the early twentieth century expressed her disappointment: “It’s already over?” I find myself having to look away from these groups, because they saturate me with anxiety.

Our historical period seems to be one of the Night, a new middle age of purgation and conversion, a long and hard Lent. I have resolved to read more, good philosophy from past eras and our own times. I get piles of grouped e-mails about the problems in the Roman Catholic Church and its Pope – and see parallels with the government of my country. That said, Pope Francis seems to have a higher moral calibre even though he is not a conservative or a traditionalist. I have to filter the saturation of information and concentrate on what is essential and fundamental to truth, beauty and goodness. Bad news, whether true or false, builds anxiety and bad judgement. Things are not easy to understand, and that is why there are conspiracy theories – some of them as ridiculous as they are absurd. We have to filter and be aware of our own limits. Otherwise we burn out!

Both reactionary politics and technocracy will promise us paradise and a solution against evil. Paradise is not attainable in this world. The battle between good and evil is eternal and never ending. However, we can look within ourselves and make a difference there… It may seem to us that Christianity has been mortally wounded, something I often think about. There may be any amount of evil in churches as in secular politics, but Christ remains as does his message to us all.

Every time my faith seems to be flickering away and dimming, it always bounces back with every spark of goodness and light. The sunny weather of our mid-February is already a sign and an encouragement. A full order book assures me of being able to earn a living. Blessings abound where we look for them and have the gratitude to receive them from the God who is pure love.

The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Romans xiii, 12.

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Tom Brown’s Schooldays

Posted on Tuesday, 12 February, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Last night, I watched the 2005 film of Tom Brown’s Schooldays with Stephen Fry as Dr Arnold. We are very lucky to have the full film available on YouTube. It is worth getting one of those special software packages to download the mp4 file onto your hard disk – either that or buy the DVD.

It is a film with which I can relate, quite different in nature from Lindsay Anderson’s If… The latter is a parody of the English public school intended to convey a different message, one very much in vogue in the late 1960’s.

I was myself formed in the English public school system (St Peter’s York), but I was thankful that I had an enlightened and progressive headmaster by the name of Peter Gardiner (he has just died in his 90’s) who was replacing the old spirit of competition and rule of strength by humanist principles. I went there in 1972 at the age of 13 years after a troubled time and several attempts by my parents to find the right thing for me. Already, the year before, I had experienced the progressive vision of Kenneth Barnes and Brian Hill at Wennington School. In September 1972, off I went with my trunk and tuck box to my place at The Rise, where I had my bed in the dormitory and a desk in the Junior Common Room. I still have the tuck box, which I use as a portable chapel. Peter Gardiner had been appointed headmaster in 1967, so he was still relatively new and youthful. His predecessor J. Dronfield had maintained the old tradition of fagging and flogging, success in competitive sports and masculinity. Gardiner dragged the school kicking and screaming into the 20th century by transforming fagging into a rota system of junior boys performing set tasks in the senior boys’ common rooms. They were simple and light chores like washing pots and cleaning shoes. It was a tremendous improvement on the old system. Fagging was really a relic of the old medieval knights and squires. As for flogging, I was never whacked at St Peter’s but received punishments consisting of copying pompous texts about “discipline” or various restrictions, for infringements of school or house rules. We still had rugby and cricket, but these team sports were only compulsory for my first two years, after which I was allowed more freedom to choose non-competitive outdoor activities. I was teased a little in House for joining the Chapel choir and having organ lessons. Boys were still quite brutal and cruel in the 1970’s but were a universe away from Rugby in the early nineteenth century. Gardiner encouraged the arts, music and drama. We had House singing competitions, musical productions, Gilbert & Sullivan operettas and many more. A boy could be as “sissy” as he wanted, and the old brutality was definitely melting. My memories were a world away, but the experience prepared me for independent life away from home and seminary (which was quite “cushy” in the midst of gilded mirrors and silk drapes).

Rugby School in the 1830’s was another world. Dr Thomas Arnold was a visionary for his time. He set the standards from which my headmaster reacted in his modern and progressive way. Boys’ schools in those days were brutal and cruel as pupils were left to their own devices, and tyranny by bullies was the result. Dr Arnold introduced new subjects on the curriculum like history, mathematics and modern languages like French. He did not favour the natural sciences on account of their materialism and his Romantic idealism, but rather favoured philosophy. He introduced the prefect system which gave sixth-form pupils powers over the younger boys. In my school, they were called monitors and had the privilege of wearing blue college gowns. It can work as a system if it is carefully watched, lest bullying and cruelty enter the system. Our tradition of sports entered the picture through being an alternative to fighting and delinquency.

Arnold’s priorities were the cure of souls (he was a clergyman of the Church of England), moral education and only then intellectual development. It was a philosophy of education akin to German Bildung. In my time at St Peter’s, learning German was encouraged (I did very badly as I also did in French) and some pupils went on exchange programmes to a school in Münster. Already, there was a European dimension that sunk deeply into many of us. Anyway, back to Rugby and Dr Arnold.

In the film, I closely watched the depiction of Flashman the bully and the psychological study of the toxic pathocracy in a society dominated by force and cruelty. The film is a tear-jerker with the death of a young boy who had been tortured by Flashman by being lowered into a well. The extent of Flashman’s evil cruelty is astounding for us in our time. Flashman was a fictional character, but they exist in the real world – and in England’s political establishment. There is an element you might miss if I don’t mention it, that Arnold found Tom Brown being morally poisoned by a school he could not reform quickly enough, and sent him home. Tom Brown returns to school with a strengthened and more noble character, able to face Flashman’s tyranny as a man.

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If only….

Posted on Monday, 11 February, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I’m sure most of you know the classic film by Charlie Chaplin made in 1940. It is a caricature of the Hitler regime and there is the mistaken identity between the World War I veteran and Jewish barber and Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of Tomania. The Leader is arrested by mistake and put in a concentration camp and the Jewish barber is taken to speak to the people. Here is his plea for humanity and peace, which I find intensely moving.

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Fascism and Nobility of Spirit

Posted on Monday, 11 February, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The following is a short article by Rob Riemen. After having nearly finished his second book To Fight Against This Age, I looked him up using Google, found his e-mail address and wrote to him asking him if he would be interested in writing something for my blog. I doubted I would receive a reply or anything substantial. I was wrong. He has been following my blog for some time and sent me this piece as an attached document. I was very moved to have received his warm reply which I found in my e-mail just after I had finished reading the book I mentioned above.

He was also open to my suggestion of studying Aspergers / autism from a philosophical point of view, and this is certainly going to be a great challenge for me to be asked to participate in a symposium at the Nexus Institute in Amsterdam (I don’t speak any Dutch, but I have never met a Dutchman who didn’t speak fluent English). I find the prospect quite thrilling.

Anyway, here is his précis of the book I have just read. There is a way to fight, not with weapons of war or aggression, but bringing back Princess Europa is a matter of caring for our soul. This is the real meaning of Europe.

* * *

What if the world of tomorrow turns out to be the world of yesterday? No, not that world of yesterday of Stefan Zweig’s evocative memoir of the splendor of the world before the first world war, but the era that came after that war, the fascist era?

‘No, not possible’, is what an academic and political class wants us to believe. Populism, yes, but fascism – are you kidding? Yet this kind of denial, as the memoir of Zweig reminds us, is so not much different from the mindset in Europe in the first decade of the 20th century. A World War? Impossible!

And yet it happened.

That was the first chapter of the 20th century.

The second chapter was the rise of fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, the love of millions of a nationalistic, xenophobic, resentful mindset and their hatred against the values of a liberal democracy.

The third chapter was a second world war.

The fourth chapter was based on the premise: ‘Never again!’. And we build a new society, this time a commercial society with economic growth, science and technology as the guardian angels for an enduring peace, progress and prosperity. But with almost blind faith in this new Holy Trinity of Money, Science, Technology, we no longer even wanted to remember what caused a First and Second World War. A political amnesia could get hold of our society.

The fifth chapter of our more recent history, our time, presents already one obvious fact: just one look in the better newspapers will tell us that the idea, the wish of  ‘never again’, is simply no longer true. Those who still believe this, are delusional – and ignorant.

Ignorant that with his novel La Peste Albert Camus already warned in 1947: fascism is a political phenomenon that will never disappear, as it is the dark side of every democracy! When democracy degenerates into mass-democracy whereby demagogues, stupidity, propaganda, claptrap, vulgarity, and the lowest of human instincts increase their dominance, that will inevitably give birth to that bastard child of democracy: fascism.

Ignorant about the fact that fascism will never return in black uniforms, and of course it will deny being fascist. But the characteristics of its mindset will be the same: the politics of resentment, the incitement of anger, fear and violence, the vulgar materialism and xenophobia and need of scapegoats, its hatred of the life of the mind; it’s hatred against the democratic spirit.

Ignorant about the fact that fascism is effective as a secular religion because it offers exactly what Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor knew that a people who live in fear of freedom and devote their life to the pursuit of happiness and likes really want: myths, wonders and authoritarianism.

Ignorant about the fact that a true democracy, a pluralistic society of free people where everybody can life in dignity, is an elitist idea! Elitist in its original meaning: an expression of the best; of what a good society is. But like every expression of “the best” it comes with conditions and demands.

A democratic society demands the cultivation of moral and spiritual values which will set us free and create a culture in which we can try to make life meaningful and find understanding of our world and ourselves.

A true democracy will cultivate the tradition of European humanism, which teaches us that the quest for freedom and a living together of all kinds of people, demands of everybody that they practice: to live in truth, to do justice, to create beauty, to have compassion.

It was Cicero who captures this humanism in just four words: cultura animi philosophia est – the cultivation of the human soul is the quest for wisdom.

This humanism defines European culture and it is the key to a true democratic society. However when this mindset of nobility of spirit is replaced by the kitsch of nowadays money-culture with its idolatry of quantity, and the blind faith in science and technology, just one economic crisis will trigger all those dark instincts with which fascism will return.

Can we stop it? Of course we can. But that demands a fight, a fight against this age – for a human world tomorrow.

Rob Riemen

Author of Nobility of Spirit. A Forgotten Ideal (Yale UP)

and To Fight Against This Age. On Fascism and Humanism (W.W.Norton, 2018 )

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Dead Rats

Posted on Sunday, 10 February, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have just received a new book I ordered, Rob Riemen, To Fight Against This Age, and began to read it in bed with the accompaniment of some music playing quietly on a little portable speaker under my pillow. The vision of this author is amazing, as he analyses an état d’esprit that predisposes some people to a violent and indifferent “don’t care” attitude towards their world. I have had the advantage of reading about this problem of humanity from a psychological point of view – the various personality disorders and psychopathy. Not only do such people have no empathy, they couldn’t care a (you name it) about anything.

In this book, we read about a doctor in Northern Africa during World War II who found a dead rat on his landing. He took no notice. The next day he found three of them, and the caretaker of his block of flats dismissed the problem as a prank. More rats were dying, and then an increasing number of patients came to see the doctor with nasty symptoms leading to death within two days. The epidemic turned out to be bubonic plague. Denial become a situation of absolute emergency. Human nature brushes many things under the carpet until it is too late. In 1947, the French existentialist Albert Camus wrote the novel La Peste (The Plague) as an allegory of Fascism. The Nazis had been ostensibly kicked out of France in 1944, but the germs remained. You can never get rid of plague bacteria. They will go dormant for years and decades, and then they find a new vector to wreak devastation and death.

Riemen dissects and analyses the disease, and there are so many times as I read his words that I exclaim – I knew it! The nefarious potential is within each one of us. Even in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the bacillus would remain virulent in humanity.

I won’t reproduce Riemen’s book here. He deserves his royalties and I advise my readers to buy this slender hard-bound volume that says everything in so few words. I give you above a scene of two rival gangs of Yellow Vests in Lyon this weekend. One side is nationalist and the other is left-wing. Both sides share the same bestiality and violence. As I continued to read, I discovered the notion of the mass-man, the man of the crowd, the rot already detected by Göthe in 1812 and Alexis de Tocqueville who had been to America in the 1830’s to research its attempts at constructing true democracy. Nietzsche was the prophet of the consequences of nihilism. The man who has nothing and who lives for nothing becomes aggressive and violent. The “mass-man”, the man of the masses, has no mind of his own, no critical sense. He follows fashion and refuses any challenge to his certitudes. Man’s social instinct brings him to the lowest common denominator.

I have commented considerably about the British situation and the looming threat of no-deal Brexit. I live in France, but sheltered from the troubles by living in the country. I sympathised with the early Gilet Jaune movement, because the elected authority of a country has a duty to listen to its citizens and institute reforms for the sake of social justice, welfare and humanity. Many of us find it hard to make ends meet and increasing financial pressure makes people very bitter. Even though President Macron showed good will and willingness to dialogue with those expressing these grievances, the breakers and fanatics continued to break, burn and terrorise. Now they are fighting each other. Here in France, the alternatives to Macron are the extreme right Marine Le Pen or the extreme left Jean-Luc Mélenchon who is a kind of “French Corbyn” and as anti-European as his English opposite number. The Plague is no solution to our woes!

Look at this video. Is this what we want in our world in the name of populism or opposition to oligarchy and extreme capitalism? A man using “Byzantine” as a part of his handle has sent toxic comments to this blog with personal insults. They were trashed and that e-mail address has never been admitted to freely commenting here. I suppose this man is one of those fanatics who converted to Orthodoxy and in no uncertain manner carries the bacillus of the dead rats. He can’t kill me from where he is (USA) nor can he haul me off to a concentration camp, but I feel pity for him in his blindness, bitterness and anger. Only prayer can do anything good there.

I have no pretensions about my own “holiness” or resistance to the disease, but there are certain things in my life that I consider essential. There are the Transcendentals of Truth, Beauty and Goodness – but also a willingness to be critical about my own certitudes, to be constantly thinking, feeling and caring about others. Another important thing is that I have empathy, even an excessive degree of it thanks to autism which in my case is not “self-diagnosed”. It isn’t a label to absolve me of any responsibility for moral failings, merely a “tool” that helped me come to terms with myself and begin to find knowledge and balance. Three things are especially vital: faith, reason and humanity. Over the past five hundred years, humanity in the Christian west has seen the sublimity of the medieval cathedral, the Renaissance and art, the Enlightenment and science, and then the re-humanisation of both faith and reason by the Romantic movement. Religion without humanity can be truly evil like the atheistic and nihilistic ideologies of Soviet Communism and Nazism. Only humanism will save faith and spiritual life.

Populism and voluntarily contracting the Plague is not the way. Those who catch the germs will die from them. Perhaps this warning comes too late. At Mass this morning, I read the Gospel of St Matthew about the the storm at sea and Jesus sleeping.  Lord, save us: we perish. And he saith unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? In one way or another, we will return to the night of the middle ages: darkness and bestiality or light and sublime beauty. The choice is ours.

Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm. But the men marvelled, saying, What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him!

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Christian Humanism

Posted on Saturday, 9 February, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

In this posting, I will take apart the term I used in Humanist Europe, that term being humanism. Why does this notion interest me apart from the fact of being myself a human being? My overriding thought in the present maelstrom is seeking a positive philosophy of life – for myself and others – in the place of the current trends towards post-humanism, totalitarianism and a new and larger-scale form of feudalism. The very antithesis of humanism is human evil. This notion of evil is something I have often dwelt upon in some articles in this blog. It is one of the most perplexing mysteries of faith, philosophy and science.

I was searching for the word ponerology in Google and came across this article Ponerology, the Science of Evil by a person going by the name Howard. He draws many ideas from the Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski, but expands them with research from others who have also studied borderline and narcissistic personality disorders and psychopathy. Howard’s judgement of religion, as with any political ideology, is severe. Is religion an intrinsic cause of evil, any more than atheism going by its own or a neighbouring ideology? Is the notion of humanism vain, passé, nothing more than a delusory dream? I wrote some days ago about Nikolai Berdyaev for whom humanism had come and gone, and that we had to return to the purgation of a new middle ages, only this time without faith or beauty, only the limitless void of the Ungrund. Is there no hope for humanism? Is it a part of an inevitable historical process of man returning to a default condition of evil?

I have just finished reading Graham Vanbergen’s Brexit: A Corporate Coup D’Etat. The present situation, which is nothing to do with any kind of populism, is all about having the UK gutted by big business without any regard to humanity, human rights, the population or any concern other than profit. Considerations of recovering sovereignty from foreign globalist agendas and improving the economic situation are only red herrings. There is plenty of fear-mongering in the media, largely fuelled by the line of the current Prime Minister: my deal or no-deal. The real problem is that the financial resources of the UK are not adequate to maintain a welfare state, and that the choice it faces is the same as that of Hitler in the 1930’s and 40’s. It is a problem of population and Lebensraum. Priority could be given to people and the environment, and solutions could be found to deal with the sick, disabled, unemployed and refugees fleeing war and persecution. But, that would mean something along Socialist lines or some system where people would be voluntarily open to the other. If we are not prepared to open our own homes to strangers and people who might have evil or deceitful intentions, only the solution of survival of the fittest and brutal competition remains. We find ourselves at the same watershed as in the 1930’s. Our consciences are torn apart until we close our eyes and sense of pity.

What do we do? At this stage, the sacrificial victim would have to be the entire political system in the UK. The problem is that the extreme left-wing or right-wing replacement solution would be worse. Whether we crash out or stay in the EU, at this stage, we face something like what Berdyaev saw during the 1930’s in the rise of Nazism. The future is darkness, hatred and death – or God and humanity.

Does our Christianity or adhesion to Christian ideals retain any validity? In most of their expressions, probably not. The Christian ideal has been hollowed out and manipulated to such an extent that our only reaction can be that of Dietrich Bonhöffer as he witnessed the accommodation the state Lutheran Church and other denominations made to Hitler’s regime in Germany. According to some ways of seeing the rise of the Third Reich and World War II, it was all about hidden and obscenely wealthy corporations and individuals depressing the value of everything, buying it all up and reselling at a profit, no matter how many would die. Hitler had to be financed by someone, and he was just a useful idiot – who threw himself on his sword when it was all over for him. What makes humanity so dispensable? In a word – technology.

Mortality is something we all have in common. We are all called to die, at any age and from any cause. Man has always sought and desired a meaning to this finite life, and philosophers from every age have given ideas of transcendentals known as truth, beauty and goodness. Christian philosophy treats the transcendentals as a part of theology. They are described as the desires of man above his animal existence of something that eats, reproduces and defends its life. These transcendentals in these or other words are shared by all human cultures. In the spirit of a desire for these transcendentals, humanism is a philosophical expression that cares for the welfare and needs of humanity. A human being has intrinsic value which gives the basis of rights like those of life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Human beings are autonomous, moral and rational. Secular humanism comes in when institutional religion is perceived as opposing this positive notion of humanity, usually through some kind of theocracy motivated by human greed and evil. From its reaction against institutional religious ideology, it rejects the very notion of God and places the emphasis solely on reason and science. However, humanism is recovered on the top of both faith and reason by adding human emotion and imagination. This is the Romantic world view.

Humanism has taken many forms. As a system of thought in the western world, it sought to recover the values of antiquity to temper the harshness of medieval Christianity. This was the new world of the Renaissance, which emphasised aesthetics, freedom and the study of ancient Greek and Latin literature. The Renaissance had a tremendous amount of influence in the European Church in the wake of the Reformation and the Council of Trent. We are brought to think of the early Jesuits and their selfless service to humanity in other parts of the world, exemplary bishops like François de Sales and Charles Borromeo and eccentric “fools for Christ” like St Philip Neri. From this came a whole new paradigm of Christian humanism. Christians also become interested in the sciences and exploration of the world, in discovering new horizons in the desire for a greater degree of human potential. In theology, it encouraged study, reason, free enquiry and the original and pure meaning of liberalism.

A humanist will see humanist ideas in the teachings of Christ recorded in the Gospels, and the whole ideal emerges as something fresh and new in comparison to the way it had all been suppressed under different forms of theocracy and totalitarianism. Some of these ideals emerged in the teachings of some of the Reformers until they imposed their own orthodoxies and tyranny. Christian humanism is constructed on several key notions like man being created in God’s image and likeness. We are created with the image of God or a “spark of divinity”. We are to love our neighbours as ourselves, do to others as we would have them do to us. Our nobility is measured in terms of compassion for the weak and not competition and greed. St Paul attested to the value of a classical education as did Justin the Martyr. Christianity contains a vast kernel of Gnostic notions that were suppressed in later eras. Thus St Paul can be read in a totally new light when we have discovered the wealth of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures and a whole tradition of esoteric wisdom. We find a whole new notion of truth as something we yearn for rather than possess as property.

Christian humanism promotes the arts and everything we do for a cause above and beyond our selfish needs and desires. It is a part of that nobility of spirit which is the highest apologia for Christ and his ideals.

This ideal is mostly rejected in favour of totalitarian theocracy and ideology, seeking to crush all but the wealthiest and most powerful. The Renaissance gave way to Classicism and the abolition of faith in favour of cold rationalism. In its turn, the Enlightenment was darkened by the mob and Jacobinism in the 1790’s. The nineteenth century was blighted and marked by violence and revolution. Romanticism was only ever a tiny beam of light from individual persons, but the general situation of Europe was one of darkness. That current of thought developed into the horrors of the twentieth century, and which continue today.

Against a backdrop of institutional paralysis and greed in the government of my country, we have to turn our eyes to what is positive and healthy, away from the influence of those who lack empathy and care for humanity. To seek the good, true and beautiful, we need a better understanding of evil. Evil is essentially a lack of empathy, which is our ability to respond to the emotions and thoughts of other people. Those who have no empathy treat others as objects to exploit. During the Nuremberg Trials, the army psychologist Captain G. M. Gilbert was assigned to observe the Nazi defendants from a psychological point of view. He summarised all his observations as follows:

In my work with the defendants, I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have 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 men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

Mahatma Gandhi is quoted as having said:

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall — think of it, always.

And finally Christ himself:

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

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Dreadful!

Posted on Thursday, 7 February, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I find it very odd to be reading about hell in the news, in a story surrounding Donald Tusk of the EU saying: “I’ve been wondering what a special place in hell looks like for people who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely”. It has been rattling around the newspapers and social media sites on the internet, and has caused quite a sensation – in a world we would have thought had no interest in religious notions thought to have disappeared from modernity. The quote seems quite reasonable when faced with a political situation in the UK that is trying to make itself seem irrational and almost insane. The biblical and mythological notion of hell, Hades, Shoah, any number of names, still means something to our contemporaries, whether it be the traditional religious imagery of fires and torture chambers – or the idea of a person so closed in on himself that he becomes his own hell.

Here is an excellent blog article on the “hell” question among others – Britain in a tailspin. The man who runs this blog Chris Grey seems to have the qualifications to know what he’s talking about.

It does look as if our political figures are writhing around in agony, clutching at straws and fraught with delusions. Some journalists are astute enough to see the mal du siècle, not as a problem of the Irish backstop or other obstacles to the great new future of flying unicorns (another popular image from mythology) as something existential at the level of a nation or the current state of disillusionment in the western world. At less than two months from the date of Brexit (29th March), we all experience a feeling of anxiety, dread and revulsion. These feelings are multiplied by the prospects of a catastrophe falling on the UK, something akin to what happens in the event of a declaration of war like in September 1939. There is no need to list them here.

It is another element attesting the relevance of Romanticism in this early twenty-first century like two hundred years ago. We live in an era of Angst, of dread and unrelieved revulsion as the clock ticks and we await the prison Governor, the chaplain and the hangman. One supreme expression of this dread is the Dies irae in the Catholic Mass for the Dead. We fear the unknown, be it a future disembodied life that we can’t imagine or utter annihilation and disfigurement. I find it ironic that the flagship newspaper of “leavers” in the UK, the Daily Express, constantly refers to prophecies, conspiracy theories and everything that flies in the face of modern rationalism.

This theme of dread was as present in the age of Romanticism as when medieval friars and monks sang the newly composed Dies irae. We find it in the legend of Frankenstein as in Byron’s Darkness. The history of Christianity is profoundly marked by its alternation between eschatology and the Church by Law Established in Christendom. The UK has not lived in a state of dread since World War II and moments during the Cold War era. As a small boy in the years following the Cuban Missile Crisis, I had nightmares about atomic bombs and all the dreadful ideas that filtered to me as my parents listened to the radio and watched television. Apart from that, our life in western Europe and the UK has been calm and routine. If something has been dreaded, the endgame never played out. Nothing was ever resolved.

Dread is not simply fear, but looking forward with anxiety, almost relishing the moment of resolution as when a condemned criminal faces execution. The famous novel of Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, has left a lasting impression on me. Dread sometimes goes in a pair with the nihilistic lust for annihilation. This novel intertwines a number of themes, fear and fanaticism among others like lust for the flesh, knowledge or even death. Lust and addiction become subjects of fanaticism, and people take themselves too seriously. When we go down that road, we live in fear and dread of something that will overturn our certitudes. Eco introduced humour and satire as the antidote to such fanaticism. The book by Aristotle had to be kept hidden because it gave legitimacy to humour.

Dread is our state of fear when we think about the future. Another element in this future is inevitability. We are up against something much stronger than ourselves, invincible and all-powerful. This is the case with death, but also with other events of our lives. It is interesting to note that much of the Christian tradition of asceticism has been dread-based. The Dies irae is an example, as are many texts from the middle-ages like sermons, books of devotion, allegorical poems and others. Dread is an emotion that can be easily used to control people through obedience. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, as we read in the Psalms.

Søren Kierkegaard’s Begrebet Angest (1844) translated as The Concept of Anxiety or The Concept of Dread is a masterpiece on this subject. We find fear distinguished from anxiety because fear has a defined object, like being on the edge of a cliff or a tall building. On the other hand, dread or anxiety comes into play when we are responsible for our future through free will. Fear becomes dread when the person feels an impulse to throw himself off the cliff: it is an act of the free will. This fact of being able to choose causes us to dread. This is one of the greatest paradoxes of freedom. Kierkegaard had a most interesting theory of original sin in that Adam’s choice came from free choice. He would have suffered anxiety from this freedom and God’s commandment that he should not eat from the tree. Anxiety preceded the sin. The same anxiety is also a way to salvation, and becomes a signal of our freedom, self-awareness and responsibility. Only through experiencing anxiety do we become aware of our potential and true identity. Kierkegaard seems to have well understood the meaning of this emotion from the middle-ages to the Romantic era in philosophy, literature and theology. The meaning of dread began to be banalised in the nineteenth century in popular literature and entertainment. Our present use of the word dreadful is synonymous with very bad or serious, with terrible, frightful, horrible, grim, awful, dire, etc. For example, “Come quickly, because X has had a dreadful accident“. It reminds me of the way some people, especially Americans, use the word awesome in a meaning other than awe-inspiring.

It seems to be more or less in the Romantic period that this word was in transition. Anxiety is nowadays usually the word given to describe a medical condition akin to depression. It is something I often feel without any rational basis. Certainly this consideration of freedom or choice is one of many keys to understanding this emotion and its basis in the sub-consciousness. Anxiety is one of the symptoms of Aspergers / autism (no, I am not “self-diagnosed”) and it can be quite debilitating at times. Doctors talk of panic attacks, and they can be completely baseless in terms of the normal reaction to a situation of danger. Pills from a doctor can help when it gets really bad! Thus anxiety is both a normal reaction to danger and something abnormal arising from some pathology.

I have read in some of the Facebook groups set up to help UK citizens living in Europe that some suffer from extreme anxiety because of the possibility of a no-deal Brexit and they don’t have all the paperwork needed to obtain settled status. It is not always easy to help, because many of the worries are unjustified or irrational. Nevertheless, the British Government is responsible for widespread human suffering, not to mention the effect on business and civil order, tolerance for foreigners and the general sliding of popular values into some kind of “acquired psychopathy” or ponerisation. These will certainly be considerations in a future court of law when our rogue politicians are brought to justice.

Finally, to get our own dread and Angst into perspective, there is a new Guardian article, A no-deal Brexit won’t result in a siege. The EU will be more clinical than that by Tom Kibasi. What this article basically says is that if a no-deal Brexit occurs, the consequences will not be dramatic as we currently imagine. First of all, the stories of chlorinated chicken and the health system going “American”, among others, are coming from the Government. It is a crude propaganda trick to force through a botched deal or even to call off Brexit altogether whilst controlling damage to political institutions. We members of the general public are the last to know about anything, and no one is going to tell us anything secret!

According to this article, dystopia just isn’t going to happen. Our anxiety is wrongly placed. If no-deal Brexit goes through, we might not even notice anything in the short term. I would be totally unjustified in fearing that I would not get to my Church’s Diocesan Synod because of the roads being gridlocked or ferries not running. I can travel between the UK and France because I have my British passport to go one way and my Carte de Séjour for getting back as more than a three-month tourist.

What would happen, according to Mr Kibasi, is that the EU would begin to eat the UK from within. Very rapidly, food prices would rise sharply as the pound sterling slumps. Living standards will go down radically. The EU would continue to open new opportunities for business outside the UK and would increasingly dismantle the country’s industry.

The problem with abandoning the rules of the international order is that you no longer enjoy their protection.

The UK would find it increasingly difficult to sell goods and services. Without earning the same amount of money as before, buying power goes down. The country was already weakened in the Thatcher era as manufacturing was run down. The EU can simply put exorbitant tariffs on British export goods to recover the £39 billion outstanding. One truly dreadful consequence would be the lot of the poorest and most vulnerable. Famine, as usual in history, would be a factor in a possibility of revolution.

In the mind of this journalist, the Government and the hardest right-wing ministers would know far more about the prospect of their country being slowly cannibalised and made into something like Germany in the 1930’s. They cannot afford no-deal Brexit and there is little chance of a deal (with the backstop the EU insists on) getting through. Only one possibility remains…

Supposing it all goes belly-up, my speculation is no better than anyone else’s. The political establishment has to implode and be replaced by something else. Aren’t we then going to be anxious about lots of foreign people coming in and feeding off our welfare state taking our jobs and driving up housing prices? I have no answers of my own, apart from my being less willing to believe everything I read on alt-right websites and Facebook one-liners. Whatever happens, we are faced with our own freedom, as persons and as societies, and we are responsible for our future and our present.

For our dread and anxiety, we can find peace through spiritual means, and through medicine if our suffering is acute. We need to be as self reliant as possible. I do hope that our present crisis, however it turns out, will spur us to seek to be whole human beings, free from lust, fanaticism and ideology – transformed by faith, reason and humanity. We need to read more and be less reliant on newspapers, television and social media. We need to study philosophy and discuss serious things with other people. Having our beliefs challenged is salutary, because it brings us to seek a new wholeness and sense of identity. Accepting challenge will give us the ability to be critical and make more right free choices. This is the drama of conversion, not only to a religion, but to one’s deepest self.

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Humanist Europe

Posted on Saturday, 2 February, 2019 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have tried several times on this blog to express political views, and – as would be expected – they were not always well received. I came from a Tory-voting family, but one with moderate and tolerant views. You don’t get owt for nowt we say up north. We are not entitled to anything in life but we have to earn it. It is a simple philosophy of life, one in which we take pride in ourselves and our own achievements. We have the idea in our minds of a craftsman who built up his little business and takes great pride in doing an excellent job for a fair price. The same principle applies to the craftsman as to a teacher or a doctor. So far, great, but then comes the idea of larger and larger businesses and employees not getting a fair wage or safe working conditions. This problem dominated the era of the Industrial Revolution and the nineteenth century, and up to our own times in both manufacturing and services.

As I went through university and seminary, I came across Catholic social teaching from Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI and the attempt to defuse the tensions between international and national socialists in the 1920’s and 30’s. There was an attempt to revive ideals of medieval corporations and workers owning the means of production, and these notions were highly seductive. However, in the traditionalist Roman Catholic milieux in which I found myself, there was always the totalitarian temptation, the restoration of Christendom by taking away man’s freedom by means of military dictators. This would be one interpretation of the notion of Pius XI in Quas primas on Christ the King. I believe that this idea of Christ the King came about to soften and dilute the nefarious influence of ideologies like Fascism and Nazism in which the human person could be totally crushed by the needs of the all-powerful State. From there, certain right-wing Catholics would make of Christ an absolute monarch, and therefore these powers would be conferred on the institutional Church and enforced by a Catholic caudillo like Franco or Pinochet, or any number of two-bit military dictators in South America.

Since I returned to Anglicanism, I reverted to my old sympathies for the world view of Romanticism and German Idealism, of so-called Modernists like George Tyrrell – and a more social-democratic view of social teaching. The events in England since 2016, which I did not take very seriously until last October, have been something of a process of catharsis in me. This change in me coincides also with a notion of Gnosis I encountered in Russian philosophers like Berdyaev and Soloviev when I was at university. My neurological condition of high-functioning autism or Aspergers Syndrome gave me an extreme degree of emotional empathy and the ability to see the hollow and corrupt sociopathy (or its influence) of a large proportion of humanity. From trusting people almost without condition, I found myself in a very cold and hostile world about as supportive of life and freedom as outer space or one of the outer planets of our solar system. What would that do to my faith in God, let alone humanity? It was by will that I refused to believe that most of us could be so horrible, but that many of us can get manipulated by those who are truly corrupt.

I am English and lived in that country until I was twenty-three, the time when I set off for France seeking my own unicorns and the ever-elusive paradise. Aspergers makes aliens of us, travellers and pilgrims who never find our rest – until we come to terms with things and make a compromise. My mother died six years ago, and with her earthly life went the last fragments of my childhood. I see the last illusions of a heavenly destiny of England and the other nations of the UK being sold to rapacious billionaires and returning to a new form of feudalism. We seem to be moving to a time of evil and darkness. In what form? It is impossible to say with any clarity.

At this point, I find myself at one with Thomas Mann and Nikolai Berdyaev as they faced the black heart of Hitler’s empire. The darkness is not in something with an identifiable appearance or some buffoon shouting at the crowds, but a state of mind, a kind of personality in individuals and collectives. This is something I have seen on videos, the callous disregard and indifference of politicians whose job would normally be the common good, the winner take all attitude. What Mann and Berdyaev taught us is that there is a nobility or aristocracy of spirit that comes from the divinity within and man’s transfiguration. In Europe, including my native country which I see as part of Europe, I have seen too many great glories of art, science and philosophy. If men and women like Bach, Göthe, Böhme, Michelangelo, Novalis, Kant, Beethoven, Wollestoncraft, Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman and so many others brought such beauty to our world, then there is a humanity capable of redeeming the rest of us in such need of restoration and rebuilding. Much of this humanism came from the Renaissance, but also from antiquity and pre-Christian spiritual traditions.

Berdyaev had a fairly original view of history, with the idea that we had reached the end of Renaissance humanism, and that modernity would bring us to a new middle-ages via a period of purgation and darkness. We find these ideas in German mysticism, Jakob Böhme in particular, who attempted an original theory to explain evil and the role of freedom. Redemption in Christ is impossible without freedom, but the institutional Church has tried so many times to take it away from us. Light is only light as it contrasts from darkness. Böhme left us with a meaning of darkness, the night and the Ungrund (ground without a ground) of chaos. It is the history of man that provides a source of light. Berdyaev also wrote at length about a new middle ages, certainly the key to understanding Von Herdenberg’s Christenheit oder Europa. His notion of evil to some extent reflects the “shadow” of C.G. Jung, an aspect not to be eliminated but integrated into the good.  Evil is overcome from within by knowledge of the deepest self. St John made plentiful use of the metaphors of light and darkness, day and night. This understanding of the mystery of evil will give us context for the symbols of darkness and the night. They are not merely metaphors of good and evil, but rather reason and mystical union with the God within.

The meaning of night and darkness is vital. As St Paul said “We see through a glass darkly“. Night is a symbol of sleep and death, but also of resurrection, a source of love and the ascetic life. I look out of my window and see the Stygian gloom of night, and I write this article whilst listening to Rachmaninov’s setting of Byzantine Vespers. I feel the Russian spirit acutely, something shared with the German spirit of Novalis, Göthe, Schelling and so many others from that era, with our own William Blake. This is knowledge of the divine spark within. Through the love and hope Christ brings us, man can become creative in art, which becomes a prophetic expression. Only this inspiration can enable Europe to emerge from nihilism. The Ungrund touches one of the most unfathomable mysteries of Christianity. The notion is one of a bottomless abyss, dark and irrational, a basis for the infinite in the finite. It is also a kind of primitive freedom, a blazing fire in the darkness. Freedom is contrary to nature, but nature came from freedom. This freedom is not light or darkness, good or evil, but lies in darkness and yearns for the light. Here we find the root of the Romantic Sehnsucht, this freedom that gives light. This is the context in which we will understand something of Von Hardenberg’s Hymnen an die Nacht (1897 translation of George MacDonald) that paean of darkness and longing for eternity. These poems are an expression of grief for the death of his beloved Sophie, but there is another layer of interpretation and meaning

Berdyaev’s notion of the middle ages is not the historical period we call by that name. It is characterised by asceticism and the struggle against the base nature that enslaves us. However, its mission was far from perfect because it involved dominance and constraint. The humanism of the Renaissance rebelled against the old theocracy and affirmed an optimistic view of man. Humanism affirmed nature and antique paganism. The Reformation sought to restore freedom from ecclesiastical constraint, but not in respect to God. The Enlightenment extolled human reason, but denied mystery and humanity. The French Revolution sought to affirm freedom and human rights, but took them all away under the tyranny of Robespierre. Berdyaev’s view of Romanticism was somewhat limited, seeing it as promoting man’s imaginative and spiritual resources but stopping short of his destiny. He saw our age (early twentieth century) as a new barbarism manifested by Soviet Communism, Nazism and the total war. Man becomes no more than a machine for the use of the rich and powerful. Art is destroyed and culture means something we cannot relate to.

It may be that England’s destiny is penance, a long and hard ascetic night in which freedom and hope will be rediscovered. Maybe something great lies down the road in a totally different perspective than that of politics. A vision such as that of Novalis of a new Christendom in an England of misery and the images conveyed by William Blake seems unlikely. What has been experienced a posteriori will remain, and innocence is gone forever. Our shattered country is one of bestial competition and deceit. We must take a leaf out of the book of the old Gnostic tradition within Christianity: look within ourselves rather than from without, find the object of our yearning in the inner light or the imago Dei.

We often look outside ourselves for beauty, hope, love and light, but the light is within, not to be found anywhere else. We alone as persons can bring about that new light. We find an analogy of this light in history, and this is why we look for it in time, why we connect it with our sense of destiny and purpose. This term of light is also an analogy for spirit or spirituality. Spirituality is not that narrow idea of retreating into a comfortable inner world from the suffering of this world but blossoming or opening out of what is prophetic and mystical within us. We turn to something which is new, exciting and challenging the status quo. Another way of expressing this notion is aristocracy or nobility of spirit. Many would bring about converging ideas like a new age, a point of hope beyond the present cave of shadows. This theme is found in several historical movements of thought, not only in Romanticism but also in much older tendencies like Gnosticism which was too easily written off as a heresy by the Church.

We look to a higher consciousness and reality. In this quest, it is a temptation to sin by pride. However, humility is truth, not unjust abasement. It is present in any person who is deeply shocked by man’s inhumanity to man. Such inhumanity is not only expressed by torture and killing like in the case of totalitarian regimes and criminals, but also by high ideas that become banal, cheapened or perverted. This inspiration is also known as the life of the mind, but something beyond intellectual learning. It is what keeps us distinct from barbarism and from our reptilian and animal instincts. Human history is full of this value of humanism against which the evil forces of this world fight.

I have been particularly uplifted by Rob Riemen’s book Nobility of Spirit[1]. This slim tome has no need of being rewritten, but there are elements in it that need to be expanded and correlated with thoughts that are already present in the minds of the Romantics and men of the same line of thought to the present day.

Thomas Mann was profoundly shocked in his native land by the way any thinkers and artists allied themselves with the Nazi regime. The way education, politics and “culture” have been democratised go against the notion of nobility of spirit, coined by Walt Whitman. There is a notion of excellence which is accessible only to very few. Only thus can there be freedom and a quest for love, truth, beauty and goodness. I will also add that it is the condition of true liberalism, of law confirming the highest freedom guided by virtue and rectitude.

As goes England and the United Kingdom, so goes Europe. The European Union is not Europe, but is an economic entity which seems to have only a passing interest in humanism. The Belgian EU politician Guy Verhofstadt is one of the rare personalities who thinks outside the box of money and power. I often look at his column on Facebook in which he expresses notions of freedom, human rights and peace as being of highest priority. Europe itself, in its diversity of languages and cultures, became the mother of humanism and civilisation. It inspired those who fought for justice and truth against the all-powerful tyranny of money, power and stupidity. Humanism is largely the fruit of the Christian way. Christianity was very severely corrupted by its contact with secular power, but it continued to bring a world view of compassion and pity, of love and mercy. Humanism brought the optimism of the ancient world.

With the bitter experience of Brexit, it is my hope and prayer that we in Europe can devote ourselves to promoting our long tradition of culture and philosophy, the true role of Christianity and other spiritual traditions. We need to rediscover the influence of Christianity on the ancient Roman Empire, but also the heritage of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. I would like to see a renaissance of schools and universities, the renewal of the old German notion of Bildung, a philosophy of education aimed at giving students moral awareness and above all a critical mind, going back to ancient Greece. Without such a liberal education, such as I myself experienced at Fribourg in the 1980’s, democracy is impossible and civilisation collapses. I discovered the infinite distance between university Bildung and indoctrination in seminaries! My time as a “convert” to a certain type of Catholicism was at an end.

We need to understand current events through philosophy, a balanced notion of epistemology and founded truth, the art of logic and debate. English public schoolboys are taught the art of debate, but one wouldn’t believe it seeing the shambles in the House of Commons with the embattled Speaker, John Bercow crying Order! Order! and trying to teach people these simple rules of respect and courtesy. We need to learn from diversity, Christians in dialogue with Muslims, Hindus and everyone present in our continent, right-wingers with left-wingers, even with the wealth of the rest of the world.

I believe that the light will prevail, and that we will not lapse into the conditions in the 1930’s that brought Hitler to power. Our identity is cultural and spiritual, steeped in the ages of Christendom and the Renaissance, tempered by the Enlightenment and Romanticism. There is a vital interplay between faith, knowledge, reason and heart that makes the whole Mensch. This is my inspiration and vocation as a Christian priest and ordinary guy living in France.

I wish you all a holy feast of Candlemas.

[1] Rob Riemen, Nobility of Spirit, a forgotten ideal, Yale 2008.

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