Hannibal Dawkins?

Posted on Wednesday, 7 March, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Dawkins Wants to Eat Human ‘Meat’. We shouldn’t get carried away by our cinema-aided imagination and see him as a latter-day Hannibal Lecter or Albert Fish who ate children in the 1930’s and was dealt with by the law. At the same time, it is a matter of degree from the intention to the act.

To take the sensationalism out of what he actually said, he notes that manufactured meat (for want of a better term) from animal cells is already on the immediate horizon. He extrapolates from this and suggests using human genetic material. I could see a sarcastic reaction from his own revulsion in regard to “manufactured meat”, with a rhetorical question of whether we should start eating our own species to save the bother of breeding cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens, etc. A comparative approach with his writings and interviews would be necessary.

If we suppose he is arguing from a hypothetical vegan point of view that if we eat animal meat, we might as well overcome our taboo against cannibalism, it writes volumes about his extreme cynicism and denial of life and consciousness – not only the existence of God and metaphysics but also our own life.

He may not yet be kidnapping children or planning the first slaughterhouse production plants, but he is talking about the technology of breeding human cells outside the formation of an embryo. This technique was originally thought up for medical purposes, for example to graft genetically compatible skin onto someone who had been badly burned. I’m not well informed about the progress of these techniques, whether it is possible to “grow” a heart, liver or kidney for transplants. I think that this purpose could be justified if it is possible, rather than waiting for someone else to die and have their organs transplanted when our own fail.

But, from that to breeding flesh for food. Animals have been bred for food for millennia, and more species can be bred in captivity, including fish, marine invertebrates and edible insects. That moves on to intensive and inhumane breeding and then to genetic manipulation. That makes me very frightened – but the increasing world population has to be fed with something. The same is done to crops, and it is not impossible that plants may also be sentient beings and are aware of being killed and eaten. Where does all this go? It is simply a matter of us or them, us or what we have to eat to live. The food chain is a part of fallen nature, and we humans are not always at the top of it. Sometimes, a shark or a crocodile gets a tasty snack from someone who gets too near the water!

I surmise that had Dawkins talked of cultivating animal flesh, it would not agree with our culinary tastes and traditions, but it would not be so absolutely revolting as the idea of eating our own species, even if the meat was never a sentient human being. Taboos are necessary in our lives, because they are the outer limits of morality and humanity. In particular, we respect the dead and where they lie, and we don’t eat human flesh whatever the cause of death except in absolutely extreme circumstances like the football team in a plane crash. The furthest we go is dark humour like the above quip about sharks and crocodiles, or what we call in England gallows humour about executions. It is a way to relieve the taboo that prevents us from killing each other (unless we are criminals without a conscience).

We joke about cannibals, notably the theme of the missionary or explorer in the pots, and the native talking like a cook in a modern western kitchen about spices and cooking times. There is the old Irish joke about Paddy who goes to a TV quizz for 10 questions. “What do you call people who eat people?“. Paddy scratches his head, completely at sea, and shouts out “I canna! Balls!“. – “That’s right, Paddy, well done“. Back to serious things:

In the light of some of the ideas I have been reading about and expressing, the problem with Dawkins is his extreme materialism and “realism”. Like animals for Descartes, humans are no more than machines for Dawkins. Consciousness and life are a consequence of brute matter, taking billions of years to “evolve”. Independently of my Christian faith and penchant towards Romanticism and Idealism, I cannot give credibility to any idea so absurd that life came from randomness and chaos without the agency of the consciousness we believers call God and the Logos. Consciousness is seen in all matter, from crystals to tiny molecules of atoms and subatomic particles. Without consciousness, nothing would exist.

May Dawkins never get into a position of political power, preaching his diatribes in public houses and beer halls, befriending disillusioned Army officers, whipping up support for his party, writing a book of his “struggle” – – – and you know where this is going, even if he doesn’t grow a little moustache or start yelling in German that it is all the fault of the Jews! I joke about the Godwin’s Law bit, but human nature at its worst does not change. We have not learned from World War II – just to make the killing more clinical and justified by science. History will repeat itself, and God will die again…

I would have to read these outrageous ideas from Dawkins in their context. It would be very serious to accuse him of wanting to take Dr Mengele’s place, with modern technology but the same essential ideology. More than taboo, our fundamental instinct is empathy with other humans and also with animals, in such wise as that when we have to kill them (animals) for food, we do so using the least painful methods possible. We recognise in other humans the same degree of consciousness and life as ourselves. Without that consciousness, there is no reason to live at all. Every evil is committed in the world, from killing millions in the Holocaust to punching someone in the face (except in self-defence), is motivated by that refusal of the other’s humanity.

If Dawkins is advocating eating “dead” cultivated human flesh (to take the horror of slaughter out of the loop), it is either to be provocative in the extreme, or to say “Bugger you” to our entire Judeo-Christian culture. Either way, the slippery slope can go down a very long way. I cannot judge Dawkins without more objective information, but we all know about the Ideology!

Take this thing back to Baltimore!

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Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

Posted on Tuesday, 6 March, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.

My attention has just been drawn to We Have Never Been Medieval.

As I read though this piece, I find myself ever more confirmed in my adhesion to philosophical Idealism, even though the details are as hard to understand as are contemporary scientific theories like Biocentrism. The arrogant idea according to which man has evolved from medieval obscurantism and brought about a good and human world is discredited as unscientific ideology.

This approach of this article is ambiguous, though I have found these last few days that the terms idealism and realism have fluid meanings, even in terms of neo-platonic metaphysics and epistemology. Is modern man so enlightened as is made out? I have always had my doubts. Appearances change but the essence of man and fallen nature remain the same. Even our science lacks the objectivity it claims, for example, in the question of global warming. One lot of results shows temperatures going up and another attests that they are descending. Someone’s thermometer needs to be calibrated! I suggest more science and less ideology! No one has ever been able to control nature, even with the most cutting-edge technology.

If we have to shed our certitudes that we are so “modern” and enlightened, were people in the past so medieval in the meaning of being irrational and cruel? We are fascinated with those centuries before the sixteenth, with their cathedrals and art. It would seem to be that the answer is that we are not all globalist winner-take-all bankers or jihadist terrorists or football hooligans in England. Some of us are idealists and others are “realists”, pragmatists, philistines and cynics. So it was in 1890’s London when Oscar Wilde was the old queen about town, now in 2018 – and in the days when Friedrich von Hardenberg’s mother and servants were throwing bedsheets and shirts out of the windows on washing day!

We look at encroaching Islam like a steer contemplates the slaughterhouse. Are many of us in modern Europe more cultivated or courteous than the mobs of young men with beards and fanatical eyes entering our countries from the Middle-East? Are we as critical of ourselves as of them? That being said, I am not for opening all frontiers…

If we analyse present-day politics and economics, we will see quite clearly how we are regressing towards a kind of feudalism through the extreme power of private and state capitalism and collectivism. Our nature as humans is exactly the same as five hundred years ago: when we get technology, we use it as a weapon of war! We have regressed from the middle-ages, because we no longer have the Faith or the culture.

Then, what are the “middle ages”? Actually, it was a vast period between the fall of the Roman Empire to the Reformation, a thousand years. I remember my church history at university when our professor told us not to judge the Inquisition by the Declaration of Human Rights. People in those days didn’t call themselves “medieval” any more than Novalis would call himself a “German Idealist” or a “Romantic”. The label was attached to the poor fellow long after his death. We call ourselves “modern”, when we can’t accurately define the word. Labels are so dangerous and devoid of meaning. It is one thing I have discovered about autism – it is a word that encourages others from calling me a jerk or an arsehole, but it would also label me as something of interest to medicine and psychiatry, an Untermensch. I have to realise in my more reflective moments of the night that I am not modern or anything, just a human being in via.

The article is more sceptical of Idealism and Romanticism than I am. We will never know the reality, even of the period of our childhood like the 1950’s or 60’s. I have my memories, but I have certainly forgotten most of the “realities”, and I cannot do justice to them with my present experience. When I was 15 (in 1974), did I miss the laptop computer and the mobile phone? Of course not, but I used the word “modern” all the same! The article has a typically Roman Catholic misunderstanding of Hegel. I am sure his version of Idealism did not imagine what we call “progress” today. Again, it is the historian’s mortal sin of anachronism!

I was quite severely criticised for encouraging readers to examine Novalis’ Christenheit oder Europa and keep a straight face whilst reading a travesty of history. It is the same when the Rationalist of materialism singles out that period for condemnation or when Protestants look to a pristine primitive Christianity. We all need a myth to define a sense of identity and hope. That is the role of Romanticism and Idealism. But, the cruel reality is that we are always the same, oscillating between sublimity and depravity, all the way through history from Judas to ourselves in our potential treachery.

The article is quite lucid in its examination of things. Vatican II is no longer a golden calf of orthodoxy but another vicissitude of history that has produced both intuitions and failed promises. Renewal by embracing the Enlightenment never happened. One thing that has done me a lot of good is to realise that the Church has never been out of dark days and crisis. We will only find the Kingdom within, whilst we are incarnate and need the sacramental presence of Christ in our communion. This idea of exposing the programmed reform on the basis of bureaucracy and groupthink is central in this article and my own mind.

The time has come to return to the Word, the Idea which is Christ, the universal man and Son of God. Plato’s metaphysics will help us a lot more than Aristotle’s, and we see there the response of the Gentiles to the fulness of Revelation. The article finds it sad that neo-scholasticism has been discarded. I am not so sad, since it formed a part of what became the extreme Enlightenment of the seventeenth century. I would certainly prefer St Thomas Aquinas to Suarez! The article has some intuitions for which we can be grateful.

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Collectivism and Unity

Posted on Monday, 5 March, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

This is a subject I have been picking at for a while, and probably in various ways since my childhood. It is the political mantra proclaiming that mankind must be together and marching in lockstep in order to survive. Ideally, we human beings would love each other, exactly as Christ exhorts – to love and forgive our enemies. But, would we let our enemies into our house and tell them to help themselves? It is a wonderful dream to think of the abolition of differences of culture, religion, level of education, so that we would all walk around hand in hand like in Huxley’s Brave New World.

We churchmen also talk of the unity of the Church, reconciling different denominations and jurisdictions that have been in a state of schism from each other for centuries. Each party has to adopt the particular truth of the other(s) or come to some kind of compromise. That has been tried at various times. Ironically, the only ecclesial bodies that have some success with reconciliation efforts are those that have been alienated for only a short time and between which there are few differences other than personal issues. Such are usually moot when the persons in question die. It has worked between continuing Anglican Churches, but not between the Church of England and Methodism, the Roman Catholic Church and the Patriarchates of Moscow, Constantinople, Antioch and others. It is a good thing when reconciliations do happen and withstand the test of time, but at what cost?

What keeps human beings apart, whether they belong to churches, any other social group including the family or are affirmed as individual persons? It is invariably our condition of fallen humanity, sin and the tyranny we suffer under the strong and dominant of this world.

The two world wars, Nazism, Fascism and Soviet Communism marked mankind, either in the direction of affirming the person against the tyranny of collectivism, or devised new systems of collectivism to improve on the defects of the old ones. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley devised their novels respectively on the themes of the dystopia and the consumer utopia. The problem has not gone away, but the writing on the wall shows the progressive tightening of a system which will be that much more ruthless and efficient through the use of modern technology and communications.

Most human beings are conditioned to be social beings and to put “other people” before themselves. Who has not helped a person in danger without regard to one’s own safety? I have done it myself by rescuing a woman who attempted suicide by jumping into the Thames. I was praised for “bravery”, but in reality it was just my instinct and sense of duty. The woman was taken to hospital, as I was in the same ambulance. I received a shot of penicillin and a vaccination against tetanus, and the pieces of broken glass were carefully removed from my feet. She was kept in, and I never saw her again. She was probably humiliated and preached at, and she probably did the same thing again, except with no one to rescue her. Who knows?

We are conditioned from childhood to serve the community, think of others, do good, perform works of mercy. It is a part of the Gospel. What is not in the Gospel is subjecting the person to the collective. Most people we meet in life were born in their state of life and remain in it, and do all the expected things like getting a job, getting married and begetting children. Idealists are very rare persons indeed, and are frowned upon by the “realistic” collective, living as it is by the rules of reason, science and common sense. Politics is a human activity that is supposed to be conditioned by the common good. This is a constant principle of law. What is the common good? The problem is that it all too often becomes a euphemism for totalitarianism and tyranny. Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin justified their regimes through the notion of the common good. Take away freedom, and there will be no more sin or crime.

I am a convinced Germanophile, and have never known of a more cultured part of the world, even despite all the intestine problems leading to the unification of Germany from Luther to the aftermath of World War I. It was the country of Bach, Beethoven, the Jena Idealists, Göthe, Jakob Böhme, the Rhineland Mystics, so much holiness, depth of thought, art and culture. Yet, this was the country that followed Hitler almost to every last man, woman and child. Nietzsche’s rant against the “herd” proved right, and God died in that land. Ever since then, Germany has lived in shame, and the destruction of every last Nazi monument has done precious little to soothe the open wounds more than seventy years later. That people was enslaved by the idea of supremacy of the state over the person constituting the common good. From whence comes the absolute infallibility of the Führer and every person’s absolute and unquestioning duty of obedience. Until the concentration camps were known about and the war came, Hitler as seen as a kind benefactor of humanity who brought jobs and prosperity after the “treachery” of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. As with celebrities now, people disregarded his words and hung onto his image and symbolism. It is easy for us to judge in hindsight, but many did resist and gave their lives for it.

All the way through our society, we see the subtle signs of collectivism: corporate management, bureaucracy, groupthink, fear of being alienated. It is in the fabric of our civilisation, even in the Churches, in the way we are brought up and educated at school. Right the way through history, humanity has oscillated between idealism and realism, individualism (personalism) and collectivism, obedience and creative inspiration, aristocracy / nobility of the spirit and the commonplace role in the community, even “active” and “passive”. The idealist creates and stands out. He needs independence above all and does not seek power over others. He is self-employed rather than being an indentured servant of a boss in a company. The collective realist needs a Führer, a director, a manager, a set of stupid rules to motivate his work as an operative. He needs regulations and the kind of authority that takes away initiative as well as humanity. Society built for the needs of the “passive” and collectivist cog in the machine is run by the principles of socialism. More than robbing the rich to help the poor, the Welfare State saps humanity and lives like a vampire for its own sake. This is the reality of the USA, increasingly, and the European Union. The collective exists to destroy the person and all creativity. This happens in many ways, too many to be described here.

My whole ministry is geared towards extending a hand to the noble of spirit, the person who has understood something and has emerged from the “house of the blind”. This does not mean that I would not hear the confession of a man or woman in the street or minister as an ordinary priest is asked to do so. Simple and poor people can be noble of spirit and often are. It means that I have learned something from the demise of “mainstream” Christianity under the weight of its own collectivism, and that we have to be creative. My standing here in modern rural France is such that the collective person is deterred from going to some “odd” or “eccentric” church and would prefer to abstain from religious services altogether. There is no sign saying “Noble of spirit only”, but no “noble of spirit” seem to live in my neighbourhood. They are elsewhere and are reached with this technological marvel of the internet.

I am discovering a revival of philosophical Idealism, largely through quantum physics and biocentrism, and its being popularised and brought closer to some rational understanding. I am not a physicist and my knowledge of science is what I learned at school and on the internet. I am more interested in philosophy and the way man has reacted to the coldest and most godless systems of human rationalism and materialism, the very forces that led to Robespierre and the guillotine. Philosophical circles in universities are discovering the merits of Idealism from Kant to what some call Post-modernism, and that the tyranny of pragmatic realism is being challenged from its monopoly since the 1920’s. I am encouraged, but I have to spend hours reading and catching up, trying to learn things I neglected as a theological student at Fribourg. Reardon’s Religion in the Age of Romanticism is a great help as is The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy, edited by Dalia Nassar, Oxford 2014.

I am finding this book amazingly encouraging. I bought the e-book for about € 20 and it is quite challenging to read it on my mobile phone, because hard copies are exorbitantly expensive. A central theme is that Romanticism and Idealism are relevant to our present time and not discredited by developments like Existentialism, Post-structuralism and Post-modernism. I am confident that it will be a real eye-opener for me.

Idealism represents the few and pragmatic / realist / cynical collectivism pervades our society and its mass media communications. I don’t expect we will win, but probably be the first victims of a future purge by the likes of Kim Jong Un or whoever does a pact with the Devil to rule the world. Idealists generally care little for their own lives, fearful only of those who can break our spirit. Some countries are, or have been, more favourable to the idealist – the USA and England. The rights of the person are inscribed in the constitutional law of those countries, but in practice, things are now very different. In reality, there is nowhere in this world. Freedom is only within, as is the Kingdom of God.

My commitment to this worldview goes back to my childhood intuitions and even obsessions. My autism seems to present a predisposition and a potential from which I have the responsibility of bringing this vocation and calling to fruition, both through my priesthood in the Church and also as a human being on the periphery of society. There is only so much we can do for the world that is as indifferent, uncaring and mechanical as the materialistic notion of the black and forbidding rocks in the universe. This world portrays sensitivity as a weakness to be beaten out of us. Idealism is naïve and an easy catch for the con-man. Candour becomes a luxury we can dispense with. From such a point of view, the world is ready for the next Hitler or the Antichrist! On the other hand, God sanctifies the lower to raise it to himself. Idealism can all too easily become cynicism (in its modern meaning), as caricatured by Oscar Wilde: “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing”. We are faced with “realism” all the time and we are brainwashed into believing that it is the reality, that the weak are food for the strong. We become distrusting and ultimately end up mad like Nietzsche. Idealism is that child-like quality of which Christ spoke, making us apt for the Kingdom of God. We must keep it at all costs. Our salvation depends on it.

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

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Logos Option

Posted on Wednesday, 28 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

My e-mail address is on the list of Dr Robert Moynihan, and sometimes there are some lovely spiritual reflections. Most recently, he has sent out a letter with the title The Logos Option. It might seem somewhat corny after Benedict Option, and how many other Options. Slogans can be misleading and unnecessary. What provoked me to react was not the slogan but some of the context, which I will reproduce below. The text in question comes after the various considerations of interest to Roman Catholics.

I am impressed by a section which not only stresses our need to adore God and the Mystery of Christ, but to find the Kingdom for which we long and yearn. Dr Moynihan rightly affirms that:

The power of meaning (logos) and unselfish love (agape) and expiatory suffering will transform the very atomic structure of our reality, as it were, and sanctify it in a “new age” to come.

However, there is the dimension of eros which is present in Sehnsucht (as experienced by probably few of us) that motivates us towards the purity of disinterested love and adoration.

Human language is so limited when discussing the mysteries of God. We find ourselves today with the Greek word λόγος. It has many meanings in the history of philosophy. It cannot be limited to “word” or “reason”. If we go into all these historical meanings of the word, we might find a “logos option” becoming very complex indeed. The real meaning seems to be quite beyond us and only describable by analogy and allegory.

I find these bare bones interesting, but they need to be fleshed out and developed.

* * *

I feel I must try to shift the conversation toward the Logos, the center and summit of our hope.

What is important is not the individual controversy so much as whether we learn of the “Good News” of the existence and sacrifice of the Incarnate Logos.

Again as always before, we need to return to the Logos, to Christ, and not be distracted by anything else.

And it seems to me that now is an appropriate time.

So, how to turn toward the Logos, amid the turmoil and confusion of this world, and of the Church in our time?

By returning to Christ, by coming into His presence, wherever we are, whether in a chapel, in the Gospels, in prayer, whether in speaking or in silence.

By simply remaining in a posture of listening and implicit reverence.

But perhaps this is precisely the problem.

The human person, it seems, most often seeks to receive praise and glory, not to give it, to receive honor and genuflections, not to honor or genuflect (literally, “bend the knee”) before anyone else.

We regard such “submission” as unworthy of a man, or a woman.

We wish to have no “god” but… ourselves…

However, the truth is, if the highest reverence we give is to ourselves(!), we are giving reverence to a person… not truly worthy of reverence.

The sole being to whom a man or woman ought to give reverence is one worthy of such reverence.

The secular humanists may be quite correct when they argue that honoring or giving reverence to an imperfect human being — a king, a president, a general, a leader — is unworthy of true men and women.

But what if… what if the person were worthy, entirely worthy of honor and reverence?

Leaving aside the question of where we might encounter such a being, of how we might run into such a person in the vastness of space and time and our changing and passing world, we still could postulate, perhaps, that if we were to encounter such a being, then that being would elicit from us an ontological response, a response rooted in the understanding of our being and of the being before us who is worthy — a response rooted in the realization, the understanding, the recognition… that this other person, this being, is worthy.

And in this way we come to… the holy.

Holiness is the ontological characteristic which elicits this response, as in the Hollywood films where a light appears and the music rises in a crescendo to illustrate the presence of what is awesome, transcendent, numinous, divine…

The response to the holy is always a response of awe and adoration, because our souls were made to love and reverence and long for the holy.

The encounter with the holy naturally prompts our genuflection, our bowing of the head, but it is not an abasement of ourselves, per se, but an acknowledgment of a fact — that we are in contact with, in the presence of, what is holy.

I take it as axiomatic that we long for the holy, as a sunflower longs for the rays of the sun.

Perhaps this needs proving, but I take it as a given, as a point of departure.

We seek for the holy throughout our lives, and we always wonder if we will ever find even a trace of it, in this fallen world…

What affirms that the world is not meaningless (logos-less) is… meaning.

What affirms that world is not total chaos, senseless and cruel is… a person who is rational, reasonable, and kind.

To meet such a person, such a being, offers the prospect of true freedom — because the person is worthy.

This is why Moses took off his sandals on Mt. Sinai.

It was not his self-abasement, it was his recognition of the nature of the presence before him, who had come to him to enter into a relationship with him.

This is the point: the mind, the soul (with a certain imprecision, I use both terms, and apologize for that) of a human being was not made for frustration and deception, but for fulfillment and truth.

Christ, the Logos of God, the Word of God, God’s self-expression, His very nature and self, his Son, is the supreme object of the mind, or soul.

Furthermore, as St. Paul has taught us so well, once this “object” (actually a subject, a person, a “Thou”) is encountered, and contemplated — once we have removed our sandals before Him… He starts to transform us, our minds, our souls.

We ourselves, our minds, our souls — are changed.

This is why we can rejoice — because we are not “stuck” with this wretched, limited, selfish, inward-focused soul, or mind, which deceives, continually, our very selves.

Rather, we can be “perfected,” indeed, “replaced,” through and by the Logos, which penetrates and heals, cleanses and renews, the soul, the mind, and orients the soul, the mind, toward truth, toward faith, toward hope, toward love.

This is the blessing.

This is blessedness.

Thus is the liturgy, in the Byzantine rite of St. John Chrysostom, we pray: “You made us worthy to partake of Your holy, divine, immortal and life-giving Mysteries. Preserve us in Your holiness that we may meditate all the day upon Your justice.”

And no blandishment of our oligarchs, whether in Europe or America, Russia or China, no proposal of money, or power, or authority, or even magic or technological “miracle-making,” can be more attractive than this self-transcendence accomplished by the Logos.

Nothing can draw us away in temptation from the Logos, once we have encountered Him, for He is the true lover of our souls, that is, of our selves.

Suffering, in this context, is not to be feared or fled from. Rather, it is in some mysterious way the necessary and even beneficial — that is, “good-causing” — means which leads us home.

The resurrection of Christ reveals that this earthly existence we experience so briefly, this realm, is not the final word.

Rather, all of it is to be transformed.

The power of meaning (logos) and unselfish love (agape) and expiatory suffering will transform the very atomic structure of our reality, as it were, and sanctify it in a “new age” to come.

This is the eschaton, the kingdom of God’s reign.

In expectation of this, the Church’s work is not “hocus pocus” (words derived, in mockery, from the words of the consecration of the bread, “hoc est enim corpus meum” = “for this is my body”) but precisely the preparation for the transformation of this world into something implicit here already (because creation is good)… a process we can in faith perceive, be aware of, but never grasp, due to our limitations of mind, to our occasional frustration and sorrow.

Our best choice, given these facts, is to prepare to be transformed by the One who comes to meet us… always comes to meet us… especially in the very darkest hour.

Our best choice to save our society, our world, in as much as it can be saved, is therefore “The Logos Option.”

What is the meaning of “The Logos Option”?

That we put not our faith in princes, in any human leaders, or human parties or movements, but only in the Word, the Logos, the Meaning of the universe, who has been incarnate, and continues to be in a certain real sense incarnate, present in the world, in his Church.

That is, to put our faith in Christ alone.

And therefore, we must not flee. We must stand where we are, and live where we are, and if required, die where we are, in our living and in our dying bearing witness to the one truth which is above all truths: that God is, that He is holy, that he is above all and within all, and that he is good, and loves mankind.

Father van Zeller wrote in his The Mystery of Suffering: “The Christian ideal is shown to us in the garden of Gethsemane: our Lord asking that the suffering might pass from him, while at the same time being ready to bear it if this is the Father’s will… The saints flinch as instinctively as others when the cross comes along, but they do not allow their flinching to upset their perspectives… All I can say is that had I been healthy all my life I would not have prayed [so well] or put myself in God’s hands.”

So let us choose the Logos option, and proceed forward in His hands, to the end.

What is the glory of God?

“The glory of God is man alive; but the life of man is the vision of God.” —St. Irenaeus of Lyons, in the territory of France, in his great work Against All Heresies, written c. 180 A.D.

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No more Ads

Posted on Monday, 26 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have been meaning to do this for a long time, upgrading to a paid plan with WordPress, $48 per year.

No more ads, which looked absolutely terrible on my mobile phone! There are one or two bits and pieces I will need to experiment with.

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Dark Satanic Mills

Posted on Sunday, 25 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

What has become a cliché has its origins in a piece of verse by William Blake. In my ignorance too, I understood the Dark Satanic Mills as the textile factories of the Industrial Revolution where children and poor people worked inhuman hours in dangerous conditions for a pittance. Certainly those factories were as much a stain on our fair English countryside as our own modern world with its gigantic office buildings and advertisements reaching as far as our computers and homes via telephone. I have noticed how new buildings in London tend to be built from black metal and glass. But Blake seems to have had another meaning in mind.

A dear friend who studied Blake at university sees the poem Jerusalem in a deeper context, of Blake’s own writing. These mills would not have been factories,  not even churches, “but the universities of Oxford and Cambridge which were pumping out pure rationalism, killing the human spirit, and further expressed the deism of so much of the Church“. Of course we are referring to the eighteenth century, not our own time or from periods when these Universities changed with their times and assimilated aspects of changing culture.

Why describe those universities in such terms? Perhaps they were spiritually dark, devoid of God and they mass-produced like factories? I find the idea perplexing but not beyond the bounds of possibility. Perhaps the term could apply all the way across the board to the entire British Establishment of the time. A century later, Oscar Wilde wrote:

To me one of the things in history the most to be regretted is that the Christ’s own renaissance, which has produced the Cathedral at Chartres, the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St. Francis of Assisi, the art of Giotto, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, was not allowed to develop on its own lines, but was interrupted and spoiled by the dreary classical Renaissance that gave us Petrarch, and Raphael’s frescoes, and Palladian architecture, and formal French tragedy, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Pope’s poetry, and everything that is made from without and by dead rules, and does not spring from within through some spirit informing it. But wherever there is a romantic movement in art there somehow, and under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ.

Returning to Blake, few have read the paragraphs immediately preceding Jerusalem, the hymn set to music by Parry and conventionally sung in the spirit of British patriotism. I remember learning this poem by heart at Prep School. We understood it not so much as the freedom of our spirit but our response to the exhortations of our teachers to excel in all things and become winners in competition. Blake also expresses this contrast brought out by Wilde and others between Christianity and classical rationalism. It is difficult to imagine the Zeitgeist of those days and that stiffened human spirit and that corpse of the Renaissance that did not escape the attention of thinkers like Berdyaev.

The stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible; but when the New Age is at leisure to pronounce, all will be set right, and those grand works of the more ancient, and consciously and professedly Inspired men will hold their proper rank, and the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration. Shakespeare and Milton were both curb’d by the general malady and infection from the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the sword.

Rouse up, O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in the Camp, the Court, and the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress mental, and prolong corporeal war. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works, or the expensive advertising boasts that they make of such works: believe Christ and His Apostles that there is a class of men whose whole delight is in destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever, in Jesus our Lord.

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

There is a Wikipedia article And did those feet in ancient time that gives us more context and explanation of the various biblical allegories Blake uses. Blake did have much to say about the industrial factories of his time and how workers were effectively enslaved by unscrupulous businessmen. The view that the term referred to churches has been in vogue, but stands up to literary criticism with more difficulty. Perhaps, the meaning is much more interior and secret in Blake’s thought.

The article contains much more, and should be studied for context. There are many references and outside links should you wish to study this subject.

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Replacing Christianity?

Posted on Saturday, 24 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Some brief correspondence with my sister who is a convinced Baptist indirectly brought my mind to a website I discovered independently a day or two ago, The Spiritual Basis of Romanticism. Before any attempt to make intelligent observations, I tried to sound out the credentials of the author and the Chalcedon site. I suspect they are Bible thumpers, but a little more concerned than most Evangelicals to present a better intellectual defence of Christian faith.

Forrest W. Schultz is the author of this article, someone I had never heard of. The site links to a number of articles he has written. His choice of subjects is quite impressive, but the man behind them is only known as having a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Drexel University. I find that disappointing.

Should we see Romanticism as some distraction from true Christianity, perhaps even a form of idolatry, or even a new religion to replace the religion of the New Testament? Schultz’s article seems to be restricted to historical Romanticism, mentioning only Kant and Rousseau by name. He bases his article on Allan Bloom‘s Love and Friendship. Unlike Schultz, Bloom was a known American philosopher of the Platonic tradition with some conservative tendencies. I see little evidence that Bloom gave conservative Christianity any preference over “dogmatic” liberalism. I would be tempted to read Bloom’s book to give a better evaluation of this criticism of Romanticism by Schultz.

Perhaps Rousseau rejected Christianity. Other Romantics did too. Byron, Keats and Shelley were hardly pillars of any church, and their disregard for Christian morality was flagrant for their time. However, other Romantics were Christians and sought to defend their faith and to live it in their times. Abusus non tollit usum. Non-Christian Romantics would no more discredit this philosophy of life than bad Popes or corrupt TV evangelists would refute Christianity as a whole. Perhaps, for some of the Romantics, Christianity had become a part of that Enlightenment that had deprived culture of its soul.

The section of sublimation is quite interesting, where Schulz blames Rousseau for the theories of Freud. That would be a good subject of study, but I have no opinion to express there. If man has ceased to believe in eternity and transcendence, perhaps he can be brought to experience it. Bible thumpers only work through the sense of hearing and deprive their adepts of the others senses or imagination. It’s not a religion that attracts me, but perhaps I’m too selfish to repent of my sins and be “saved”, whatever that means in this context.

Perhaps the fact that some Romantics were immoral, fornicated and committed adultery is evidence of the movement not even pretending to be a new religion or conspiring against Christianity. Under the section Romanticism as a Religion to Replace Christianity, the claims seem to be quite wild. Again, some poets, artists and philosophers were not Christians and others were. Novalis belonged to the Moravians and allegedly became a Roman Catholic shortly before his death. I would surmise that most of the German Idealists were believers even if not always very orthodox.

Schultz then preaches the objectivity of God as opposed to Romantic subjectivism. My realistic metaphysics is currently being subjected to my reading of Robert Lanza’s Biocentrism. It would seem that modern quantum physics offers evidence that nothing exists without having been observed by consciousness. I see some connection between this view and a form of panentheism (as distinct from pantheism). The Bible thumpers (and conservative Catholics too) maintain the absolute separation of the Creator and the created, and the possibility to deduce the radical autonomy of matter from God. Frankly, I find this view little better than materialism that denies all spirit.

I would have to read more about and by Rousseau to give an intelligent response. Kant was not the only German Idealist, and not everything can be judged only on his work. If a relationship with God is purely subjective, there seems to be a problem. Personality is constituted by relationship, and many orthodox theologians have made an analogy between the communion of the Church and the three Persons of the Trinity. This relationship is one of love, but the Other is not totally another when the consciousness of God is identical to the consciousness of us all. There is both subjectivity and objectivity in this relationship. Thus, St Augustine fell in love with love, but this love was God. The Bible thumper’s god is something more like the Demiurge of Gnosticism or the Allah of Islam, the pure will that dominates an enslaved creation.

I see many parallels between Enlightenment rationalism in the eighteenth century with realism in the early twentieth as experienced by C.S. Lewis and the transhumanism, technology and bureaucracy of our own time. Admittedly, Romanticism is a fragile response and only a stage towards the love of God from über-rationalism and atheism. It is an aspect of human culture that comes and goes as sensitive souls react to the evils of their times. The Sehnsucht of Romanticism can lead as much to sin as to the love of God in mystical union. Any leap out of the humdrum ordinary is a risk. I am reminded of the quote from the autistic personality and author Temple Grandin: If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave. Replace the word autism with inspiration, yearning, you name it.

Did Romanticism fail? I don’t think so. Its heyday was from the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth. It experienced several revivals in different accidental forms. It was expressed in philosophy, poetry, painting and sculpture, music and architecture. Today it is found in fragmented form in some popular subcultures, also in some forms of Existentialism. I identify with it as a reaction to the “Enlightenment” of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but only so far as it can motivate and guide us to truth, transcendence and universal love. I believe in the truth of Christ, and that our philosophy plays the role of an analogy of the Gospel in its deepest meaning. C.S. Lewis is a valuable guide in his transition through several stages of his philosophy leading to his conversion, but our experience is different from person to person. I am making my own journey.

Like every movement, it had its newness and freshness, and then it became institutionalised or banalised, or became the “in thing”, and then the salt lost its savour. It would come back much later in a different form with other images and new words. In itself and for its own sake, it might seem to be little more than illusion and a flash in the pan. You don’t eat icing without the cake!

There is the problem of post-modernism which some might see as a final evolution of Romanticism. Perhaps there is some truth in that. I believe that the higher can sanctify the lower and raise what is imperfect to sublimity. Is that not the central notion of the Redemption itself through the Incarnation of God in the person of Christ?

Schultz’s tone is horribly patronising and shows what may be a fundamental pessimism in regard to humanity. In some respects, I sympathise and recall Calvin’s notion of total depravity and radical separation from God. We have a considerable amount of work to do in theology as well as our understanding of ourselves and consciousness in general.

I am thankful for this criticism so that philosophy and art can advance and avoid many of the mistakes of the past.

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Conference in Oxford

Posted on Friday, 23 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have just successfully applied for the possibility to attend a conference to be held at St Stephen’s House, Oxford, on 25th and 26th April this year. It will be just a few days after our Diocesan Synod in London (21st April) and I will just need to see what I will have time for between those dates. I just need to send my £10 cheque for registration.

The conference will be called The Gospel and the Catholic Church, A conference discussing Anglican Patrimony today. The introduction to the conference informs us that this title came from the book written (and still in print and available) by Archbishop Michael Ramsey, so the word Catholic means much more than simply the institutions in canonical communion with the Pope. This is encouraging in symbolic terms.

I won’t be there to beat any drum of my own or even represent the ACC (except perhaps to show that its priests can be quiet, have a listening and learning attitude and be open-minded). It will make me feel quite nervous because most of the people involved are from the Ordinariate, which I will certainly perceive as less frightening than a few years ago. However, there will be Bishop Gavin Ashenden, a former Church of England cleric but now a bishop of a continuing Church. There will be a number of serving Church of England clerics and the Principal of the establishment hosting us. There will also be Bishop Fenwick of the Free Church of England.

As I mentioned to a friend, I am not looking for anything, and I should be too small to be threatening. I trust there will be conversations like I had with Msgr Andrew Burnham before the Ordinariate went ahead. I wouldn’t be surprised to find Fr Hunwicke (whom I have never met) and Msgr John Broadhurst whom I met in Portsmouth in 2007 and found very cordial.

There has been a lot of discussion on the internet about Anglican Patrimony and what different people think it is. I look forward to being “in the flesh” with some of those people and getting a feeling of what they are about. People always say more than what they are prepared to write! I look forward to learning how they think Anglican things like scholarship, pastoral leadership and liturgical aesthetics will work in the modern world to advance Christianity. I would also be interested in knowing about study groups, serious academic periodicals and other inspirations for my own work for The Blue Flower. The Catholic movement in the Church of England began with a small group of clerics in Oxford University, largely fuelled by the new ideas of Romanticism – the Oxford Movement.

As always, there will be the talks and question-answer sessions, but there will also be informal socialising. I think the experience will be very valuable for me and a possibility to verify (or otherwise) the soundness of my own analysis of certain questions. Solitude can be a good thing, but it can also distort judgement very badly. The Americans call it reality-check. I am also aware that I am not completely unknown with my presence on the Blogosphere since about 2009 and involvement in Christian Campbell’s The Anglo-Catholic. I will certainly find some final answers to my confusion about Archbishop Hepworth’s narrative of Anglicanorum coetibus and what actually came into reality in England and elsewhere. However, the important thing now is the present and the future.

The essential is to be simple, quiet and humble. I have nothing to prove, and everything to learn. Maybe some of my English readers might be interested in going.

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The Legacy of the Enlightenment

Posted on Thursday, 22 February, 2018 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have a look at Signs of the Times most days. It is one of those alternative news sites to take with a pinch of salt. It doesn’t go to the extremes of David Icke or Alex Jones, but is prepared to be as critical of Mr Trump as of his adversaries. Today, I found How the Enlightenment separated us from nature. SOTT took the article from elsewhere and shoved in a few notes.

The reflection expressed shows many of the patterns of thought of the Romantics of c. 1790 to 1830. The French Revolution destroyed reason in the name of Reason, and we see this reflected in our own times with the mutations now occurring in the west – from mass Islamic immigration to the culture of total control via the use of high technology. The current of Romantic thought is distinctly expressed in the environmentalist movement, though its intellectual basis is not always coherent. Human greed and arrogance have been around us for a very long time.

The Enlightenment movement was a reaction against some of the excesses of religion and superstition. We still have flat-earth movement and stories of shape-shifting reptiles, and only a small proportion of humanity makes the effort to find truth rather than go with the mob and the mass movement, whatever form that might take at a given time. The Enlightenment came out of the Renaissance with the first advances in the natural sciences. One big discrepancy in this movement was the separation between the study of humanity and that of nature. We live with the consequences of the Industrial Revolution, which are no longer Dark Satanic Mills around places like Manchester and London’s East End, but the whole world.

From controlling and killing nature for profit, the Rationalist has now turned to re-creating the human being. Frankenstein remained a nightmare fancy in the stormy imagination of Mary Shelley, but the reality today is that much more frightening. Ideology now states that there will be no difference between men and women, or that people can change gender on a whim. I have always maintained a certain degree of “fluidity” in this question at a spiritual and psychological level, and that we are not bound to gender stereotypes – if we accept our bodies the way God made us through all the biological processes of human procreation. The Rationalist seeks to control everything, to be the master of all, and not to take place in the natural order.

Descartes really began this movement in the seventeenth century by separating human self-consciousness from the blind forces of nature that can be measured, counted and subdued. Descartes was a believing Christian, but very soon, his empiricism would push soul and spirit away from the picture. One thing I notice in France is the legacy of the Cartesian mind, the French garden in which nothing is left to nature. Even trees in forests have to be planted in straight lines in both the x and y axes, so that they line up when you look at them perpendicularly or from 45°. I suppose that is practical if the trees are going to be harvested for timber and processed by machine. I suspect the arrangement is more fundamental than that. That is only an example. There is little room for the Idealist mind here!

I leave the reader to judge on the credibility of this criticism of men like Francis Bacon and Descartes. Our present time with its technology is much more worrying. We face the spectres of artificial intelligence and transhumanism. The first atomic bombs were exploded more than seventy years ago, and we can only imagine how much they have been refined and made more destructive since then. Genetic manipulation and cloning are two other aspects of this manipulation of nature and human beings as belonging to that nature.

Big cities are also a part of that movement to engineer human nature. I work at home, but I have to take my wife to the railway station each day for her commute into Rouen. It erodes the reason why we don’t go and live in a rabbit hutch in the high-rise blocks of flats. We also have the very internet I am using to write this. It can be a tool when subjected to constant criticism, but I read too many accounts of how lives have been ruined by ideological disputes on Facebook and other social media. Perhaps being a Romantic Idealist enables me to keep that necessary distance from the tools of my work. “We are in the world but not of it” – goes the usual Christian cliché.

Many of us fear that payback or blowback time has come. Nature will in different ways wreak revenge. There are apocalyptic fears of asteroids, Yellowstone super volcano, possibilities of prehistoric viruses presently trapped in melting ice. The list is endless, and we humans still think we will get away with it: go to another planet, buy New Zealand and create a billionnaire enclave, whatever. We simply forget that we all die at some point. Transhumanism talks of halting ageing and making incarnate humans immortal. Of course this only applies to the stinking rich, because the little people would have to die to make room for their feudal lords. All of a sudden, Nazi-style genocide becomes acceptable in the name of progress.

Perhaps I am becoming hysterical, but none of this is impossible. It might not come tomorrow but the next day, or in fifty years time. It is plain that the resources of this earth are limited and the oil will one day run out. I read two sides of the climate change and global warming paradigm, and I don’t know which is the most convincing. The ice caps are either freezing over more or melting, not both. I have never been there to see for myself! What is for sure is that mankind is using this planet as if there is no tomorrow.

A while ago, I posted Byron’s Darkness on this blog. In Byron’s mind, did this cataclysm occur though the doings of man or through something like the asteroid hitting the earth or the super volcano blowing? I suspect the latter. The image is (at least for me) more terrifying than the many films like 2012 made with technological special effects.

Finally in the article comes the question of whether we should abandon technology, medicine and the undoubted progress that has been made in modern times? Should we return to a time when children and young people died from tuberculosis because no doctor knew how to cure it? The problem is the way we use our technology. Without it, I wouldn’t be publishing my writings on the internet for you to read. Even the printing press is an element of technology.

The Enlightenment already destroyed itself in the 1790’s and swallowed its own tail. It is now happening again worldwide and not only in France. Perhaps the future is Byron’s Darkness. Perhaps there will be someone to whom I can leave my thoughts and my meagre contribution. I cannot forecast the future. There are too many conflicting speculations and snake-oil prophecies.

Yes, I do believe in environmentalism and doing what we can to limit the damage we are doing to our planet. We can all do little things, but the real damage is caused by big industry and the various Frankenstein sciences going on at this moment. We can become hard-core ecologists and vegans, and look the part! I don’t think that is necessary. We can live according to our means in normal houses, eat the food we can buy preferably directly from farms to cut out the middle man. We can spend time in nature walking, climbing, cycling, boating or whatever, and harmonise our own souls with its beauty and what has survived human greed.

I appeal also to the balance between reason, imagination and emotion. I appreciate science and its rigour appeals to my mind. I like to know why things happen and how things work, both human technology and nature. As with the use of the internet, anything can be used as a tool for good or a weapon for killing and maiming.

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Idealism

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

I have just finished reading C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, and feel a little perplexed about many things, doubtless because I was reading pages with less than the attention and concentration they deserve. I will have to read it a second time after a rest.

The first thing that strikes me in this autobiographical work is that he begins, not with abstract philosophy, but with his own experience. I have an eerie sense of familiarity with some of his school experiences at prep school and public school. The system I lived in was dramatically reformed since Lewis’ time before World War I. My junior-school (the one in Ambleside) teacher, Charles Hales, was only eight years younger than Lewis and believed in the old-fashioned methods (Thwack! Ouch!). He also taught me to write in proper English and reason logically. My own experience at St Peter’s was that fagging was reduced to a set number of tasks for senior boys and not taking more than half an hour in the morning. However, there was still a spirit of struggle for the highest status and competition reinforced by compulsory games like rugby. I am in occasional contact with our old alumni association, and it is a joy to see a different school based on individual achievement and character-building through positive teaching methods. The fagging and the old monitor-inflicted punishments of singular stupidity are gone, and I am impressed on seeing my School as it is now.

Nevertheless, Lewis lived in another world from mine, and finished up in the trenches in 1917, and luckily was only wounded by a shell that killed another soldier. His way of describing experience of life is definitely in Romantic terms, and he links this movement away from abstract Enlightenment philosophy and metaphysics to German Idealism, notably the school of Jena in the 1790’s in which Novalis had his part. The early twentieth century, like our own time, was overshadowed by materialism and “realism” in terms of thinkers in those days. The keynote was progress and the power of man to shape his own destiny and world. Really, I see little difference in the old arrogance of the British in India (and other parts of the old Empire) and the present-day intervention of the United States in Syria and other middle-eastern countries (Petro-dollar). Two world wars took the stuffing out of much of the positivist arrogance, but it returned in another form.

Lewis’ academic speciality was English literature, which of course implied knowledge of philosophy, and this was his angle of learning a new world view. We need feelings as well as empirical knowledge in our experience. Aesthetic experience would give us other values. He observed that Christians and Romantics wrote in a different way from materialists and realists.

The only non-Christians who seemed to me to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity.

His analysis of his own mind brings me to a new idea of defending Christianity, not through logical or factual proofs, but from the progress of realism to idealism and finally to the acceptance of the Christian revelation. There is much in human experience that we cannot express in words, something of which I have been aware as a child accompanying each sensation of smell and touch, sight and sound. And that feeling of longing and loving without knowing what we yearn for or love…

I was struck in no uncertain way as I read:

What I learned from the Idealist (and still most strongly holds) is the maxim: ‘it is more important that heaven should exist than that of any of us should reach it.’

All of a sudden, our approach to God is not in terms of our own life after death and all the concern about “being saved”, but a gratuitous knowledge and love of the Absolute. No longer to we look to the Church to negotiate between our sins, merits and indulgences! Lewis was at the same time concerned to retain his use of reason. Wisdom has always dictated that the truth is found between two opposing extremes – the in medio stat virtus of St Thomas Aquinas. There is realism and “realism”.

Perhaps Idealism is only one step on the journey to Faith, but our capacity for faith is marred by our experience of evil and the materialism and “reality” of our world. It is the ἔρως that motivates ἀγάπη, the experience that calls the soul to holiness. Both Lewis and I have experienced Sehnsucht very intensely, and surely we wouldn’t experience such longing if its object were futile, that the result would only be bitter disappointment. The idealist tends to believe the fairy-tale narrative of the happy ending. But, are not the Gospels also “good news” rather than the gloom of human wickedness and nihilism? Our world is fallen, but we long for a “new heaven and a new earth”.

Lewis wrote:

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

The longing of the Romantic Idealist is directed to what he knows not to be attainable on earth. It seems to me that Idealism is only an intermediate stage towards our knowledge of God and the object of desire and yearning. The same theme runs through St Augustine’s Confessions:

I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love…I sought what I might love, in love with loving.

To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.

It would be a mistake to pursue Romantic Idealism for its own sake and remain at that stage of our lives. It would also be an error to go the way of materialism and demythologising to re-interpret Christianity in that perspective. I will be continuing with a study of German Idealism because I see a potential for re-lighting a flame that has guttered and smouldered for centuries, and without which Christianity loses the savour of its salt. I think that another perusal of Reardon is going to prepare me for tackling some of the original works, or at least their translations into English.

C.S. Lewis is a remarkable milestone of the twentieth century in our Anglican tradition. Let us press on…

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