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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Benedict Option

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

The idea has been around for some time. I will read Rod Dreher’s book, but it seems from what I have read on the Internet to be closely tied to Roman Catholic constraints and the situation in America. Some Europeans have looked into the possibility of taking at least the general idea and adapting it for the situation here.

Setting up some kind of community in England or Europe with a priest who is not Roman Catholic or at least not bound to the system and its bureaucracy and regulations would depend on a number of things in the practical order. That seems to be the general idea.

For the theory, the Romantic world view paints a picture of pessimism in regard to the modern world, the continuation of the Enlightenment and The Struggle, and the need to make a commitment to alternative living. I have discussed the notion of alternative “intentional” communities: some are more “romantic” than I am in their advocacy of hard-line environmentalism and veganism, and others seem little different from the modern world in their new forms of the old class system of those with money and power and those without. Here is the Diggers and Dreamers site about communities in England. They exist, and need to be discovered to find out what they are like. There are some Christian communities, but perhaps following some idea other than what attracts me.

This site might help to give some idea of what is involved in practical terms. Perhaps it is possible to take over an old Air Force airfield and grow crops and take a crash course in farming! Otherwise we have to go into the real-estate business, which in England is prohibitively expensive. It’s a bit cheaper over here in France, but there are many official regulations that make autonomy from the modern world difficult.

What I could imagine is some small remote farm with the possibility of modern communications like internet and 4G mobile phone coverage. That allows modern work like translation and computer programming from a distance – the advantage of being in town whilst being out of town. For as long as the system works… Some people can do small crafts, but they don’t make much money. The whole thing depends on money. to buy the buildings and land, do the necessary work of renovations and adaptation, eat and pay the utility bills, land tax and so forth. That would leave the persons interested in such a project with a “plant” already in someone’s ownership. My own house would house 3 persons at most, but someone would have to “buy out” my wife so that she could go and live in town. A tiny amount of development would be possible, but there isn’t much land. Farming would be out of the question. I have a small translating business, but the two others would have to have a means of income. Yeah….

A building or group of buildings with a lot of land permits farming, so less dependence on cashflow. But are any of us competent in farming? It’s a highly skilled job – and full time, and very hard work. I can’t imagine this with cosmopolitan intellectuals who haven’t held anything more than a bar of soap in their hands. There is the compromise of earning a living with modern technology and leading some kind of common life.

What would we want to do together? I assume that most of us appreciate privacy and some alone time, of which I got plenty in seminary, but precious little in marriage, which has improved somewhat in recent times with reorganisation of living space upstairs. There can be daily Mass and some Offices – assuming that we are not too taken up with work and working to client’s needs and timetables. There would be meals, cooking, cleaning and maintenance and some kind of interface with the outside world. The community would need a central theme, say, Romantic Christianity, but that needs to be expressed outside through writings and lectures. Otherwise we would be self-absorbed, narcissistic and would break up as a result of the first dispute. How would steam be let off? Monasteries have the Chapter of Faults which is more or less psychologically healthy.

For earning the community’s living, is there any kind of common business activity that can be envisaged? Publishing for example? That would be a part of the ministry of teaching and the written word. Who could put up the capital and get together some mechanism so that no one is the boss and no one is the underdog? There would have to be some kind of democratic system to rule the community and deal with conflict between persons. The principles could certainly be found in Diggers & Dreamers communities.

Future members would be initiated by some kind of “trial period”, but the real deal is that of the founders. I have had a bit of correspondence here and there, and I would have to meet these people and see if they and I get on in terms of building friendships. Friendship is the only way to build trust, and it’s twice the haul for someone like me who is “socially challenged” by needing people to be clear and straight when communicating what they want me to understand. I’m no leader and detest alpha dogs (I love canine dogs, not human ones).

I would love to share the things I have like my library, chapel and workshop. Different members would have assets to share. Would we be single people, married people without children, or married people with children? If the latter, it’s really going to be difficult and expensive. Homeschooling is a lot more complicated here than in America, so there is the link with the system. Medicine too from the moment someone has an accident or a health problem. I see little more than a compromise solution where the system is held at arm’s length but used to answer these issues.

The basic “ideology” has to be agreed, the Romantic world view, love of culture, the Catholic faith and liturgical life, the intellectual life, dialogue and writing. Very few will be interested and able to attempt such a thing. The vegan environmentalists have other priorities and are likely to prefer another style of music and reject any kind of structured religion or spirituality. What compromises are possible?

In my own experience, I spent about four years alone in a ropey old house in the Vendée countryside, and it taught me many things. It wasn’t always rosy, especially in winter! The money problems are always there. I married a woman from Rouen and moved up to Normandy. We live in a village and she works in town, and has no driving licence. So I have to take her to the station every day and go and fetch her each evening. Her philosophy of life isn’t quite modern, but not quite mine either. But, we live in the country and escape many of the less pleasant aspects of modern civilisation. It is still there all the same, and we can’t pretend to have only known what Novalis experienced in his family home in eighteenth-century Saxony! We can’t “un-experience” what we have experienced, and that is the limit of the community. Novalis died at 29 from TB. I’m vaccinated against it and can get hospital treatment and be cured if ever I catch it. Our world is different, both more difficult and easier.

If anyone would like to comment, they would be most welcome, or they can write to me privately (send a comment to get my e-mail address). Also, if you own a massive property and would like to donate it to a worthy cause, this might be it – if the little group can agree and get together. I’m not exactly holding my breath, but my Bishop received a hefty legacy to help buy his new pro-cathedral in Kent. Miracles do happen…

So, a few reflections on Benedict Options from a very un-romantic point of view, but still with the Sehnsucht and hope that I might reach something worthwhile in this life before passing on to greater pastures.

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Fr Tony Fry

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

In the annals of my memory, I recall Fr Tony Fry who was ordained in 1996 by Bishop Hamlett. I was present at the ceremony at the church in Madeley Heath. I have just been informed of his death and asked for my prayers.

Fr Tony was a professional journalist and lived in or near Derby if I remember rightly. He produced our diocesan journal called The Clarion. It was nicely presented in columns using a desktop publishing programme. This photo is far from clear, but he was functioning as deacon for the Holy Week ceremonies at Madeley Heath in 1996. I was the subdeacon on the Bishop’s left.

At some point, he joined the Traditional Anglican Church (UK member of the TAC) and served as a priest. I never had any contact with him during my time in the TAC and he was not at either of the two Diocesan Synods I attended in Portsmouth, presumably due to illness and distance.

For many years, Fr Tony suffered from having had his vocal cords removed (and the condition that made this operation necessary), and speaking was a big effort for him.

I ask your prayers for him and his family.

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Cosmopolitanism

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

Pauline Kleingeld’s article about Novalis’ cosmopolitanism has struck a note with me. It left me a little frustrated in asking myself the question – What’s the use? Will philosophy change anything? Will our personal world views change anything? Does it make any difference whether we have travelled the world, gone into space or never left the town or village where we were born?

Globalism, the “global village” and “citizenship of the world” are hot button subjects and as relevant to us today as in the 1790’s. We have technology, aeroplanes, internet, faster and faster communication of ever-increasing amounts of information. We are even presented with the possibility of doing away with human communication and all being linked to a central computer that would combine all our memories into a single artificial “person”. Naturally, this idea would be relevant to a tiny proportion of very rich individuals. Billions would have to die, if we believe some of the conspiracy theories – if they are theories.

What we face today is the full development of ideas that were produced by reactions against the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and fuelled the revolutionary fervour of France and other parts of Europe. Present-day globalism looks like bringing about the dystopian visions of Orwell or Huxley. In the 1960’s, philosophers like Ivan Illich were identifying the means through which humanity was being assimilated into one vast anonymous machine and deterministic existence, through modern education, technology and medicine. To what degree Illich’s ideas are scientifically valid is anyone’s guess, but the idea seems cogent.

As a small boy, I felt suffocated in family life and the routine of daily school. I too was a product of the 1960’s and felt degraded by attitudes of the older people who had lived through the hardship of the Depression and World War II. We children and youngsters should have nothing to expect without suffering for it as “they” did. Should we have an economic depression and a world war every generation so that we learn to stay in our “place”? I yearned to get away from my lovely little Lakeland town which was Kendal, and be with people with more open attitudes. My father, an educated man from a distinguished Yorkshire family, sympathised and did what he could to encourage interests, hobbies and a more suitable education. I am grateful to him. At 17, I believed that my “vocation” was to be an organ builder. I joined the Durham firm of Harrison & Harrison and found some of the most bigoted and narrow parochialism among the brave men who worked there as craftsmen. After a couple of years, I went to London to do a course in harpsichord making. I would have preferred organ building in a less bigoted and narrow “working class” environment, but that was not available outside the various firms of organ builders in England. I got it all wrong.

I was alienating myself from my roots, but I needed a more open and universal word view. I certainly got it over the years as I finished the course in London. Instead of settling down and setting up a workshop, I got involved in a process of converting to Roman Catholicism and decided to go for the priesthood – through the traditionalists. Again, I was caught between the Scylla of parochialism and the Charybdis of yearning for something unattainable. On arriving in France in 1982 with a few belongings on a bicycle, I headed for my first address on my list, the parish of Fr Montgomery Wright at le Chamblac. I stopped off in the villages on the way and visited the rare unlocked churches – “pre-reformation” churches just across the Channel. They all smelled of damp and had altars facing the people. I wondered if just one diocese in the Massif Central had “survived”, like Ray Winch’s canonry. There was none. There was the possibility of monastic life, but that was another kind of closed parochialism. I tried to stick it out with a stint in one of the Society of St Pius X’s schools to learn enough French to go to Ecône. I think that it was my Aspergers (I didn’t know about it then) that prevented me from understanding people as they are in their zones of comfort, their certitudes and way of life. Who was I to expect anything else?

Normally, in life, someone is born into a given family in a given social class. His or her life is planned and determined from the beginning and you go along with it without thinking. You go to school, learn a trade or do a university course, get a job, get married and make sure your kids do the same thing. Life has no purpose other than our social life and conversations. These certitudes were broken by the two world wars and the cultural changes of the 1960’s. Up north, it took a little longer. My upbringing in the 1960’s was like the 1950’s down south.

I lived through an alternation of fresh air and closed parochialism. University was perhaps my best experience, though the Swiss leave a lot to be desired. I was best with my German friends whose faultless English compensated for my lack of German. Seminary life left me mostly in peace, just as long as I did all the things I was supposed to do. Sometimes the various prefects had a wider attitude, mellowed by their military experience, and others were butt-heads. Humans are humans – and I am one of them.

I have lived this dilemma for years: belonging somewhere yet being free to soar and experience. The only way was and is inwards, because we cannot change the world. Romanticism has helped to understand these notions better, and my old philosophical education in Rome and in my books at Fribourg stood me in good stead. Some of the things of this life utterly repelled me: competition, struggle against others for the highest places of status and power, bureaucracy, legalism, determinism, rational management, all the hallmarks of the modern workplace. English Public School was designed for this, for the Kampf and bitter struggle of being the best and the most powerful – the British Empire and the stiff upper lip. I came a little after that time, but the attitudes were still there among some of the creepy characters around me in the dorm and common room at St Peter’s. What was civic religion in all this, the pious cant of the parish vicar or school chaplain? It was just words. How can one wonder why so many lose all trace of faith and adopted materialism and nihilism?

Novalis suggested trying to build a society on Romantic and spiritual values, but it has never happened in this world. The only that did happen was that a few individual persons were prophets in a way, through philosophy and art. They tried to fly the flag even if it would be shot down by the mob.

What of the little community? What about the idea that has been coined as a “Benedict Option”, not the monastic life but a community of a priest and a few lay people inspired by that general idea? There are “intentional” communities that life according to a diversity of theme from Christianity, Tolstoy-style anarchism, hard-core environmentalism and veganism. Others exist in large houses with other buildings for the core community and paying guests, and are more or less restrictive as institutions. For each to choose his poison! What of a little community living according to Romantic ideas? There would have to be some ground rules to make it work, otherwise it would be all over from the first dispute! There has to be a point of balance somewhere. I am open to the idea.

Romanticism isn’t realistic! Nor is religion except as a moralising and controlling political ideology. Yet, the Church canonises saints all through history, and many of them were far from respectable like the beggar St Benoît Joseph Labre or “air-head” nuns like St Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus. Romanticism isn’t on the same plane as the “world”, and that is why any effect on the world is only a long shot, a little like killing a gigantic monster with thousands of pea shooters. Perhaps world leaders can be influenced by such ideas in such wise as they seek truth, beauty, the common good, justice, humility. There are sainted kings in history and inspired statesmen. If a sufficient number of persons with Romantic ideas can contribute to a common cause, then some change can come about and a little bit of heaven can be seen on earth. It might have been like this in America for the first years under the founding Fathers in the 1790’s. Even until World War II, anyone could make a good life for himself and his family in America. That being said, there was the great Depression and massive unemployment. It was the New World. This influence comes from imagination, creative writing, opposition to the “machine”, prophecy in its biblical meaning. There are no more new worlds, only beyond this earthly life beyond the grave.

I have no faith in politics or competitive struggle. If might is right, then we are no better than a pack of dogs fighting over a scrap of meat! Such humanity should not survive, and any number of things could bring it to an end: an asteroid from space, a really big volcano, a pandemic of a disease like Spanish Flu or something manufactured in an underground laboratory, a nuclear war, any number of things. I consider the planets around earth. Not one can support life from earth, and we are not sure that there is any life of any form on them. Other solar systems are too far away, and our present technology couldn’t get a human being anywhere near them in a single lifetime. The material universe is as bleak as those planets and bits of rock flying about around the sun. Only the earth, a tiny speck in the emptiness, shows any sign of life, and mankind is ungrateful.

Perhaps in parallel universes, Mars is the planet with life and Earth is a blackened waste. The Romantic looks to other worlds that are inaccessible to us in this universe. Do they really exist? There are elements of evidence or the ability of the human spirit to have some experience of another world. Perhaps, I am the pilgrim who has to go on through the unknown, recklessly and without knowing or belonging. Just pressing on…

Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating,
Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them,
Wandering, yearning, curious, with restless explorations,
With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish, with never-happy hearts,
With that sad incessant refrain, Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and
Whither O mocking life?

Ah who shall soothe these feverish children?
Who justify these restless explorations?
Who speak the secret of impassive earth?
Who bind it to us? what is this separate Nature so unnatural?
What is this earth to our affections? (unloving earth, without a throb to answer ours,
Cold earth, the place of graves.)

Yet soul be sure the first intent remains, and shall be carried out,
Perhaps even now the time has arrived.

Walt Whitman

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