Idealism, Realism and Churches

Posted on Wednesday, 21 March, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

My intuition of going the philosophical way seems to be confirmed by my posting on the recent developments in the American Anglican world and the emerging Old Catholicism from the Nordic Catholic Church and the PNCC. I am confronted by the recurring issue of uniting Christian communities with a similar ethos but often with other ideas and practices that make such a union impossible.

Though I remain a priest in the ACC and warmly support all initiatives to resolve our conflicts and separation, I have always been sceptical about the theories behind ecumenism and the way things are attempted at various meetings and think tanks. I am very impressed about the success of the movement between four Continuing Anglican Churches (including the ACC) and am encouraged to know that the work is far from finished and will be continued at other synods and meetings. The Continuing Anglican world is united and compatible once the difficulties caused by personalities of some bishops in the past have been resolved. Being a bishop these days is more about ideals, service and hard work rather than bolstering the self-importance of cantankerous and bitter old men! There is no comparison between the ACC I now serve and the same Church as it suffered in 1997 from the “Bishops’ Brawl”.

I hope that our united Continuum will continue in its way of integrity and idealism, and from that high road engage dialogue with other apostolic churches sharing the same or similar ideals. For this to work, the ideals have to be understood without ambiguity of language and reflected upon in depth. The Catholic revival in England began with Romanticism and the idealism of a small number of Anglican clergy and intellectuals attached to the University of Oxford. The whole thing depended on Romanticism and Idealism like any attempt in Europe in the early nineteenth century to combat atheism and materialism and revive the ideals of transcendence and humanism. I see the points of comparison between the specifically religious movement in Oxford with similar movements in France that became known as Liberal (the desire for a separation of the Church from an atheistic, materialistic and hostile state). I then took a keen interest in German Idealism, whilst studying the differences between the diverse theories of metaphysics and knowledge as represented by men like Kant, Fichte, Schlegel, Schelling, Novalis, Schleiermacher and others. The thought was converging even if those groups never met or knew each other. Today, we have the Internet and the possibility of exchanging ideas and knowledge in spite of geographical distances – so that we don’t have to live in a single city or within walking or horse-riding distance.

I would like to promote this reflection on metaphysics and our possibilities of knowing something of transcendence. This contrasts with the pragmatic considerations of human institutions and making them sustainable by having human and financial resources. In my reckoning, the ideal must prevail over the “reality” of what is brought to our knowledge through the five senses. Pragmatism is necessary because we are incarnate and social beings, but this must be subordinated to the spiritual if we are a religious communion rather than a business or government / political agency.

Surely, it won’t be possible to reproduce the Oxford Movement or the little group of long-haired Germans. Such is not necessary, because we have no need to be concerned for appearances. Our context isn’t the same, and we lack the naivety and innocence of those eras. We have lived through modernity and are confronted by a paradigm that has no use for modernity or even the values of Idealism. We can draw from history, but we have to think and understand things for ourselves, and come up with something new. I am also convinced that history is not only linear but also circular, in cycles. I see parallels between 1790, 1890 and 1990 and the forty or so years that followed those symbolic dates. We belong to the third. Though things are analogies of each other, there is no metaphysical connection.

There is a lot of concern for setting achievable goals, and some have paid off. Some have followed ideals and not merely questions of buildings and money. There has to be a balance, because pure idealism will not necessarily achieve anything and will leave only disappointment and cynicism. Christianity itself is an ideal, and its adversaries and critics blow it away as an unrealistic system that penalises the strong and meritorious in favour of the weak. We have only to read Nietzsche! We dream of a single Communion with Rome, Constantinople and Moscow in mutual recognition and Vladimir Soloviev’s vision of the role of the Reformation churches in affirming human freedom. It hasn’t happened and I fail to see how it could happen in the future.

I will do my best with my little team (we are three committed members so far) to get the ideals out and have some influence on the movers and shakers of this world. There was an iconic slogan in France in the 1970’s – “Vous le voyez, en France, on n’a pas de pétrole mais on a des idées !” originally said by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Referring to the energy crisis, France lacked oil but had ideas. In a certain way, The Blue Flower will work like that, as useless as a monastery of monks, but may be able to offer something more precious than oil or gold! I hope so and entrust this to God in my prayers.

As we read in Nicholas Berdyaev (Freedom of the Spirit), the Churches have to be concerned for the masses, and for this reason the liturgical life as we knew it is mostly gone. It is more concerned with getting a simple message over and working with human social instincts. There also have to be a kind of “aristocracy” involving very few persons of vision and with a calling to delve into the hidden things of God and the human spirit. Berdyaev, though he was Orthodox and Russian, was largely inspired by the German Idealists, a century apart from them, and so I am encouraged in going to the well-spring to drink from the same water.

The books are arriving, both in my library and my smartphone with its Kindle function. I still have so much to learn before I can begin to be creative in a new paradigm and way ahead for the treasure of Christ and a culture based on Jesus’ ideas and actions. Pray God I may come up with ideas that can inspire our bishops to bring about a union of churches based on spiritual integrity and all that is transcendent and sublime.

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John Bruce’s “Discernment”

Posted on Tuesday, 20 March, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

This is an interesting little post – Discernment. I am inclined to try to take it up in positive and helpful terms. John Bruce has been banging a drum about the Ordinariates for a long time and how the various weaknesses and scandals might suggest that the Anglican project be discontinued and brushed off as “Protestant”. My own intuition is that he is flogging the wrong horse because the Church he embraced is in a state comparable to the eve of the French Revolution! The mainstream Churches have made mistakes in selecting and “screening” (that fingernail on the wire netting of the sieve!!!) their clergy. I don’t think that Pope Alexander VI or Bishop Talleyrand (la merde dans un bas de soie – as Napoleon called him) were very edifying gentlemen. They should have been scrrrreeeened out of the selection process and prevented from being ordained.

I don’t know John well enough to give some much of an idea about the future of his blog. I know what it’s like to arrive at the end of a line and take off in a new direction as thoughts become deeper and diversify. This comes through reading and resisting the temptation to be obsessed about a single issue. That’s me. He must function in a totally different way depending on his cultural references and capacity for thinking “outside the box”. So far, his writing suggests a strongly rational and Cartesian notion of the Church, a perfectly functioning machine that processes and produces the desired thing. Theology is more mysterious than a subject of logical demonstration.

John seems to be most concerned with the formation of the clergy, which is a legitimate concern. Myself, I have my views on this subject, and perhaps my ideal standards of cultural, philosophical and theological education would be higher than his – not in terms of regurgitating at examinations what they have been taught, but their capacity to think, to criticise pure reason – and to feel as human beings. I approach these matters as an Idealist and a Romantic, and certainly not in terms of modern corporate conformity. The present system in the “mainstream” Churches, the C of E as well as Rome, perhaps more so, is designed to screen out originality and difference (and I’m not talking about autism) and produce standard clones. This is more so in the religious orders like the Legionaries of Christ or the Jesuits, but also in dioceses. Perhaps someone who shows his capacity for original thought will be easier to trust with the priesthood than the one who has ticked all the right boxes in the standard form and not been noticed during his time in seminary.

I agree that “instant ordinations” would be most imprudent. The question is knowing whether anyone has truly been instantly ordained without at least having been known and trusted from his (Anglican) days. When I was at seminary, I saw men ordained very quickly because they were judged to be ready for it and needed. Others went through the full cycles of spirituality, philosophy and theology because they were raw laymen and were not known quantities. The full shebang is no guarantee of priests of integrity. Psychopaths and narcissists hide their games extremely well. I have seen model seminarians who were as priests arrested and tried for sexual abuse of children! You can keep them in the box for years, and the reality will not be seen until it is too late. On the other hand, trusted men pushed more quickly through the system can be very good. There is no hard and fast rule, and I have for a very long time been quite hostile to the seminary system. Men should go to university, and then be trained in a parish. That would be more of a test than the kind of gilded baroque seminary I went to.

I now consider his opposition to “Anglican Patrimony” in the Roman Catholic Church. From my days in the TAC, I did not return to the RC Church, because no good would have come out of it, neither for myself nor for anyone else. I joined the ACC, which adopted a very firm position early on about trying to form a kind of “Anglican uniate” movement in the Roman Catholic Church. As for the Ordinariate, I will form a more informed opinion when I go to the conference in Oxford next month, where I will listen to and meet clergy from the Ordinariate, the Church of England and some smaller bodies like the Nordic Catholic Church and the Free Church of England. Anglican Patrimony is hard to identify and define, but my study of idealist philosophy and Romanticism is very revealing in questions or plurality and diversity. The Church of England was in a hell of a mess in the late eighteenth century! That situation brought the rise of John Wesley and the Oxford Movement. What it boils down to is not so much what is Anglican but what is truly human and transcendent, contemplative. What is bad in the RC Church is its bureaucratic and corporate structure, its worldliness. No institutional Church, large or small, my own included, is perfect.

For John to be taking so much interest in priests and the method of their training and selection, I suspect he might be a former seminarian himself. So were Dzerzhinsky and Emile Combes, one of the most virulent anti-clericals of early twentieth-century France. If I were a layman, I would take much less interest in les histoires des curés and more in studying philosophy, theology and church history. I would also read about art and science, poetry and the humanities. You are never too old to learn, as I find with my Blue Flower work at some distance from my own priestly calling. Does John want a job with the Congregation for the Clergy or the Doctrine of the Faith, so that he can go witch-hunting for potential bad priests? There are better ways of being a good Catholic layman.

For a long time, his blog has been all about the problems at St Mary’s Hollywood (no one thought of making a movie about all this!!!) and trashing the Ordinariates. This is not what would make me or anyone I know want to become a Roman Catholic! My advice to him would be unorthodox but honest – drop religion altogether and take an interest in something else – arts and culture, sciences, technology, hobbies, humanitarianism. Perhaps he could discreetly go to worship services in Orthodox and Protestant churches, mosques, synagogues, Buddhist and Hindu temples. Go and discover – just for a time! Travel… Read loads of books of philosophy and literature, find out something about Neo-Platonism, Biocentrism, rise to a challenge of tackling transcendent materialism (whatever that means). What makes you believe you won’t finish up like a broken-down computer on the rubbish heap as Stephen Hawking believed? Screening priests won’t bring you to eternal life or hope beyond everything that “sucks” in your present life.

There has to be something higher and more elevated than cleaning gutters!

I don’t think my present piece will make any difference, but I do try to keep from banging the same drums and to diversify life for the sake of my mental and spiritual health. I seem to have a little bit of a break from my translating work. The weather has faired up a little bit – so away from my desk and let’s get my hands dirty in the garden!

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Completing the Reformation

Posted on Monday, 19 March, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I am not American and have no experience of the “second wave” of dissidence from the Canterbury Communion. All the same, I’m not surprised. My attention has been drawn to ACNA’s Anglo-Catholic Exodus. One of the ANCA dioceses is splitting away to join the PNCC. I wonder if all the parishes and people are following.

A bishop (which “side”?) is saying that the ACNA wants to “complete the Reformation” and have women’s ordination. If any didn’t agree with that, they could go over to Rome. Some clergy have contacted the Ordinariate and others the Russian Western Rite. The movement to join the PNCC doesn’t seem to be unanimous.

I don’t want to give simplistic opinions on this, but from the little I have read about the ACNA, it was only expected from a communion that is low-church, in favour of the ordination (and episcopal consecration) of women, and seemingly differing only on the issue of homosexuality. It seems that some of their bishops are Calvinists, understanding the 39 Articles in their “plain and literal sense”. What does “completing the Reformation” mean? It seems like a purge of Anglo-Catholicism.

Read the article from the above link if it interests you. We have to remember that the same words mean different things to different people, Catholic in particular. I have occasionally come across Spanish and Portuguese south American Anglicans, and ask myself what is Anglican about them. They are just independent churches more or less imitating modern Rome. In October 2004, I attended an attempt in Portugal to form a communion of Old Catholic Churches, opposed to the ordination of women and thus separate from Utrecht. It involved the bishops of the Igreja Católica Apostólica Brasileira founded by the dissident Roman Catholic bishop Carlos Duarte Costa. After a few days of this event, a bust-up happened between the Brazilian bishops, and I saw that the whole thing led by a certain Archbishop António José da Costa Raposo was in pieces and a totally pointless exercise. These men knew how to pull the crowds (and their money) in through mass hysteria more piously called Charismatic Renewal. This was not the ACNA, but shared a lot with several episcopi vagantes seeking to be legitimised and to belong to a Church that could afford to pay them and their families a living salary. That is about the top and bottom of it. It is an extremely extroverted kind of religion to which I absolutely don’t relate. Would Jesus relate to it either? I wonder…

About the Anglo-Catholics leaving the ACNA and joining the PNCC, I have met Bishop Flemestad of the Nordic Catholic Church who is a good pastoral bishop with a rich theological culture acquired through his having been a Lutheran. I am less sure about other PNCC bishops, some of whom are former modern Roman Catholics. That solution seems to be attracted because they have money and the possibility of giving priests full-time employment rather than their having to be “tent-makers” like us in the poor Continuing Churches.

When I see all that, I wouldn’t want to be an employee of such a church to be under threat of conforming to a new wave of convulsionaries of Saint-Médard or Bible-thumpers – or getting fired. The dream of sustainability is trickling away, even in the most mainstream Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, both cutting back on expenses, closing parish churches and leaving cultural treasures to rot. Decidedly, the Christianity of the future cannot be about propping up the dinosaur of clericalism and empty buildings, however beautiful they are. We are going back to the Catacombs, whether we are Catholics, Orthodox or Protestants.

There needs to be a new spirit (or even the promised new Spirit) and a new philosophy to give substance without which exterior appearances of bishops and church worship are only tinsel and glitter on a Christmas tree.

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Silver Jubilee of my Diaconate

Posted on Sunday, 18 March, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I was ordained a deacon twenty-five years ago (as of tomorrow 19th March) by Cardinal Pietro Palazzini in the seminary chapel of the Institute of Christ the King at Gricigliano. He was the same prelate who ordained the late Fr Frank Quoëx to the priesthood. Five years ago, I wrote all about it in Twenty Years of Diaconate. Fr Quoëx was the MC. Monsignor Gilles Wach acting as Archdeacon looked younger and fresher, as we all did. I was nearly thirty-four years old at the time.

It all drifts into the mists of time as does my original priestly ordination (somewhat less “regular”) almost twenty years ago. Why was I ordained? The Institute has developed a lot since 1990 and I only very occasionally look at their website. My time with them made a big impression on me in my life and I still have dreams about Gricigliano from time to time. We had a few “apostolates” in France and the USA, not yet in England and barely even in Germany. More priests were ordained than “benefices” could be found to support them. Some stayed at seminary, studied in Rome and had teaching functions. Others were hangers-on in our various chapels and parishes with a priest in charge of it all. I was no exception. The Institute was run on a shoestring in those days, and John Bruce would certainly have taken a dim view of ordaining priests without benefices!

Roman Catholicism took me from idealism to hopelessness and cynicism in a short time, and I was glad to have the courage to leave in 1995 even though the alternatives were so shaky. Should I have been ordained? With my Aspergers (which wasn’t known about then), I would have been wisely screened (I so hate that word) out and just told to go away. This word makes me think about running a fingernail over the fine wire netting of a kitchen sieve. In the end, a man has a vocation to the priesthood when he has the call of a Bishop, himself a member of a college of Bishops and a recognisable institutional Church. This is now the case for me, since Bishop Damien Mead had the kindness and pastoral concern to incardinate me into his Diocese which is a part of the Anglican Catholic Church, Original Province. I am grateful and do what I can like those priests who studied in Rome and taught seminarians. We now have the Internet and the possibility for many initiatives outside the traditional parochial / pastoral framework.

It took a long time to recover something of my earlier idealism, go through other harrowing experiences of life and begin to get things together in a single understanding. My notion of vocation has taken different turns, and has even taken a leaf from some of the post-war French ways of seeing things. The clerical image is so discredited in life that our best ministry is done without being recognisable as a priest! The reality is sad, but the institutional Church and clericalism only have themselves to blame.

Last Friday, I went to a little round table of people diagnosed with autism and parents of little children showing signs of it or having been diagnosed. The effect on a young mother is devastating, especially when sloppy psychiatrists take little care to see the right diagnosis is given. I was thanked for my testimony as someone who was able to learn to live in society, “play the game” and have a job (self-employed), a home and a sense of mission. It was not the time or place to talk about religion. Those people need more help from those who can express human empathy and concern than from professionals. There is a scientific approach but also a human and philosophical approach to “another experience of life”. Modern and post-modern society are truly absurd at times and show another’s weakness through its own human and moral turpitude. The relation between autism as a scientific discipline and philosophy is a new subject that we have to work on if those children and parents are to be helped. Perhaps this is my pastoral calling alongside my work to promote the kind of thought expressed by the Jena Circle (German Idealists and early Romantics) in the 1790’s against the “dark satanic mills” (whatever those were), the Terror in France and the road to 1984.

The priesthood is a service to the Church, a leaven and a light in the bleakness of this world, brought about by the Mystery of the Mass and a ministry of intercession through the Office. It is in the forefront when I am in chapel or with my brethren on my occasional visits to England – and always in the background as I go about life here in France. Far from rejecting my calling, it brings my life together in a single sense of purpose to serve my prophetic and humanist ministry.

Pray for me…

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British Left-Wing Press admits the Historical Evidence of Christ

Posted on Thursday, 15 March, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

This is quite impressive coming from the mainstream left-wing press in England: What is the historical evidence that Jesus Christ lived and died?

The article was written by Simon Gathercole, Reader in New Testament Studies at the University of Cambridge. One would presume that he would produce better-researched work than the average journalist!

The sources given are what I was given in my Christology course at Fribourg: the Pauline Epistles, Flavius Joseph, Pliny and Tacitus who attest that Jesus was executed under Pontius Pilate. The non-Christian evidence fits the Gospel narrative and time frame. Both Pliny and Tacitus were hostile to Christianity.

It is a refreshing change from the spurious stuff being written saying that Jesus never existed and was only an idea.

These abundant historical references leave us with little reasonable doubt that Jesus lived and died. The more interesting question – which goes beyond history and objective fact – is whether Jesus died and lived.

Good point…

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More on Godless Progress

Posted on Thursday, 15 March, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

My brother in the priesthood Fr Jonathan Munn has summed things up rather well in The Lie of Progress. I posted a comment there, which I quote here (with a couple of slight tweaks):

Ideas are converging because you and I are getting to the bottom of the excesses of the Enlightenment and so-called “realist” materialism.

I have been finding some of the worst examples of the “Utopia” of which you speak. Stephen Hawking died yesterday. I can’t judge what happened to him, but what is sure is that it is not what he expected. He discovered consciousness and eternal life without machines, without human pride.

Take technology out of the picture, we are back in those chilling days of the 1790’s, the Terror and the emergence of Napoleon. Reason is good, but it must work with the heart and the imagination, with faith and love. We are conscious and spiritual human beings, and evidence suggests that all nature is endowed with these gifts of God’s Logos. We arrive at another end of the Enlightenment, and I am doing all I can to contribute to a new Idealist and Romantic movement to bring culture and humanity to Christ and the Kingdom within.

That “Enlightenment” is the one that takes every technological invention and makes it into a weapon of war! The world of Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins is no more than that of Reichsführer Himmler and Dr Mengele. Hawking is now dead, and Dawkins will also be when his time is up, as for you and I. Supposing they did find a way to prolong bodily life indefinitely, it would be available only to the stinking rich and most other people would have to be killed to make place (Lebensraum) for the new Ubermensch. Thank God for death, because each of us can only take so much! If this world has to be run according to such principles, not only do I not fear death, but I yearn for it – that I may do God’s will here and move on to a better world.

Hawking’s idea of finding another planet to live on is a complete illusion. If there is one, and it were possible to get there, the chances are that human “refugees” wouldn’t be welcome. It’s all academic and pseudo quack science. It’s all speculation and belief. If man did live on another planet, what happened to Earth would happen to it too. Anyway, the distances for beings existing in time and space make such an idea impossible. It would take thousands of years assuming that near light speed became possible.

We have to be ourselves, human, in order to relate to God and the natural world we live in and are called to preserve as best we can. We can’t roll back science and technology, but we can set reason in its human context of beings with hearts, imagination and emotions. We don’t need a planet millions of light years away – if it exists – but the Kingdom within ourselves. There’s no need to go anywhere in a rocket! We need a new Christian humanism, a new Idealist movement and “new hearts for old” as in one of the prophetic lessons of yesterday’s Lenten Mass. Then there will be hope.

That a number of us are converging brings me considerable joy and hope. Christian Idealism and Romanticism have been around for a long time and have not converted the world, but the message like Christianity itself remains. Each of us is born and dies at the time God appoints for us. This alone makes us stand out from those who maintain the illusion of earthly immortality and “post-humanism”. I feel sorry for those who cannot accept the inevitable that is common to us all.

Those of us who follow the liturgy of Lent will be in tune with these notions and our Sehnsucht for God, the Transitus Domini and the land flowing with milk and honey.

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They call this science?

Posted on Wednesday, 14 March, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

 

What would you say if someone told you they could kill you, embalm your brain and upload its memories to a computer?

A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”. Nectome will preserve your brain, but you have to be euthanized first.

You can find any number of articles on this subject. I’ll refer to this one. They propose killing you, embalming your brain and promise to upload its memories to a computer sometime in the future. I suppose you have to pay for this before you get turned into a stiff!

This next bit is straight out of Frankenstein, though I am also reminded of Dr Phibes as he lies in the tomb next to his beloved Victoria and has a machine suck out his blood and pump in embalming chemicals – and then he rises from the dead for the sequel of Dr Phibes Rises Again.

This story has a grisly twist, though. For Nectome’s procedure to work, it’s essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though under general anesthesia).

There’s even a waiting list for this procedure!

This “Frankenstein’s laboratory in the mountains of wherever” is getting Federal grants in America for doing this thing to a – – – pig. If your computer starts going “oink” and talking about troughs and all those lovely mud baths, and having nightmares about sausages and bacon, you’ll know where the virus has come from!

The trouble is that these people are going to have to prove that they can get memories from a dead brain onto a computer. Convincing? The deposit is $10,000, which is refundable if you change your mind. That’s nice to know…

This whole idea goes from the assumption that consciousness comes from the brain rather than using the brain as an “interface” with the body as we know it in this life. A dead brain is exactly that – dead. This whole idea is based on materialism and the mechanistic and deterministic nature of things as taught by men like Stephen Hawking. “Realist” materialism is a dinosaur! For an Idealist, this “experiment” is a fraud, and not only is it unnecessary but it is also impossible – just like bringing cadavers back to “life” using electricity. Mary Shelley knew that in 1816! It is also no less an abomination against human life and the spiritual soul.

We are all concerned as human beings to leave something to posterity, for the simple reason that we have no knowledge or experience of what lies on the “other side”. It is the old Pascal’s Wager. If consciousness precedes matter, then there is life / consciousness after death. There are medically attested cases of human beings with extremely damaged brains whose consciousness and life functions are completely normal. How can this be? There are many things we can do, like writing books, composing music, being remembered for our goodness, being creative, doing great things for other people.

The trouble with writing horror stories and making horror films nowadays is that “reality” is even more terrifying. To end on a light note:

 

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Stephen Hawking RIP

Posted on Wednesday, 14 March, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have never really had much interest in Stephen Hawking, who has just died. He was an atheist and a materialist. For a scientist, I have often been surprised at his idea that humanity would find another planet to live on. I suppose that if this were to happen, there would have to be a kind of “Noah’s Ark” city in space that would arrive at light speed in several thousands (millions?) of years time. The remote descendents of those who left Earth would presumably arrive at the planet. The big question would be knowing whether the humans in question would be welcome on a planet already inhabited by the living beings already there.

There is also the question of artificial intelligence. I have to admit that this is quite frightening, giving rise to a scenario like in the Terminator movies. Obviously, such a scenario is unlikely with today’s technology, but things could develop…

What is of greater concern is a quote in Hawking’s book The Grand Design saying that human beings are merely “biological machines” “with no consciousness, no souls, no spirit, no mind and nothing but a collection of organised chemicals that run physical brains in a deterministic machine-like way”.

If this is so, there is no moral objection to what monstrous quacks like Dr Mengele were doing at Auschwitz during World War II: experimenting on human beings. If there is no life, consciousness or free will, then human beings are worth nothing. The Nazis were not the last to experiment of humans. There are indications that such practices have occurred in the USA and other countries since World War II. If we are machines, as Descartes said of non-human animals, then there is no reason for any empathy. Life can just be exploited for profit of the strongest.

I have no connection with scientific circles, and have no knowledge about whether such “Enlightenment” materialism still prevails in the scientific world, or whether theories like Dr Robert Lanza’s biocentrism are beginning to catch on, offering a pre-existing consciousness that would create matter, time and space and give it life.

I find Lanza difficult to follow, but biocentrism does offer an explanation for life, order, value and everything that flows from living consciousness. All our Enlightenment scientific education we got at school is overturned, and we have the impression of having to re-learn everything and accept what seems to be nonsense. What really is nonsense is the idea of brute matter evolving into order and life over trillions of “years” and becoming human “machines”. Then, we are just going to have to re-learn and take a page from philosophical Idealism and Romanticism.

However, only about a month ago, according to Stephen Hawking admits intelligent design is ‘highly probable’, he surmised that “some form of intelligence” was actually behind the creation of the Universe. He even went as far as speaking of a God factor, whatever that means. His brother had a near-death experience in October 2017 after a heart attack, and that seemed to bring consciousness into the picture. That did not please the scientific community in Cambridge that one little bit!

In the article, we read:

Stephen Hawking has since published a rebuttal to his critics, insisting that “Intelligent design” doesn’t in any way prove that God exists, but only that a “God-like force” played a role in the creation of our Universe, approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

Perhaps God created the universe and conveniently died early on so that everything could evolve according to the dogmas of materialism. It doesn’t sound very scientific to me!

The man has now passed on and has certainly been very surprised to find himself conscious and freed from his crippled body. We should pray for him and learn from these scientific discussions.

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Owen Barfield

Posted on Friday, 9 March, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Some recent comments encouraged me to look up Owen Barfield, a long-standing friend of C.S. Lewis and partly behind Lewis’ conversion from atheism to Christianity. I draw my readers’ attention to Owen Barfield (1898 – 1997).

My swallowing reflex comes into play as Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy are mentioned. I have not studied Steiner very much, but my attitude in regard to esotericism and New Age ideas as an Anglican Catholic is reserved. However, we should not stop there but rather see the important aspects of Barfield’s thought. I have just ordered Poetic Diction, and will probably then read Saving the Appearances and Romanticism Comes of Age. I will not be an unconditional fan of everyone I read, but this fellow seems to be of high importance in the school of thought I am working on.

On the very first page of this website, we read:

Barfield’s immediate relevance is profound; it is to solve the core problem of modern times – which is ‘alienation’: i.e. the deep sense of meaninglessness, purposelessness, and isolation from people and things.

This would depend on being able to explain theories of knowledge and consciousness in an accessible way. Many try to promote “being connected” and put over the idea that we function only as social beings. Many people need the corporate structure that gives motivation to an individual person’s work. I personally am quite the opposite. I do my best and most creative work alone, but that may be due in part to my Aspergers / autism. Alienation is a serious issue for us all, but we cannot eliminate it by forcing the person to be social and corporate, but rather to give meaning to that alienation. The Romantic’s alienation is such that meaning and purpose are found in the objects of Sehnsucht. In short, the meaning of our alienation from the “world” is found in God. If this meaning is found, then our hearts and minds begin to open up in empathy and mindfulness of other people and their thoughts, feelings and needs.

Post-modern isolation and nihilism go much further, and I find that many I meet just don’t care – Je m’en fous, as they say here in France. At least you can discuss with someone who is against you, engage debate and make progress. With the profoundly indifferent, nothing is possible. They cannot be evangelised or anything.

Back to Barfield, I need to go through this site and read the three books I mentioned. I would like to see the influence of both English and German Romantics on his thought and how he explains his theory of knowledge. I am extremely encouraged by these comments and the discoveries I am making.

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Postmodernist Bilgewater Generator

Posted on Thursday, 8 March, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have just discovered this hilarious computer programme, the Postmodern Essay Generator that generates anything a post-modernist student could ever want if he is late handing in an essay. Every time you renew this page, you get a completely different essay.

The language and jargon are meaningless, what the French call langue de bois. A friend of mine and fellow undergraduate at Fribourg called this stuff, even when written by humans, intellectual masturbation! It is tempting to react with Enlightenment rationalism and Yorkshire grit, but the response has to be a lot more subtle.

I am presently trying to get my mind around the theory of knowledge in German Idealism and Romanticism. Fortunately, these notions are largely based on Plato and Aristotle, and can be approached by traditional means with enough work. Until I get much clearer in this domain, I would not dream of trying to write anything new on that subject. I am attracted by the late eighteenth-century reaction against materialism and determinism, the human being treated as a machine. God and consciousness precede matter, not the other way round. The fundamental intuitions of Idealism have attracted me, but the more I discover, the more study I have to do. That is quite different from post-modernism, because for me language has its limits, but it’s the only way we have to communicate with each other, to relate, to negotiate and learn from each other. Take the validity away from language and the world will become a shit-hole, literally!

I did wonder if there was a remote link between Romanticism and Post-modernism, a kind of Devil’s Advocate argument that I was treading in dangerous waters. I find no sign of it. The philosophical (if you want to abuse that noble word) roots of post-modernism come from post World War II Paris, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan in particular. This is an interesting article on Post-modernism, giving a humorous criticism of matters like identity politics and Islamic theocracies, which really amount to little more like the ideology of Chinese and North Korean Communism – and of Big Brother.

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