Redon

Posted on Sunday, 8 October, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

On my first day on the Vilaine, I took advantage of the Cran bridge opening at its scheduled time and motored towards Redon, a town in Brittany but inland. These are photos I took which give something of the Breton character. I enjoyed my visit.

It was a comfortable night with still water and electricity. The next day I took a walk, and my attention was drawn to things that do not generally attract tourists. The times I have spent in Douarnenez have shown me the radical political views of some Bretons in their reaction against metropolitan France since the Revolution. These are paintings on the walls of a disused industrial building. A relationship of solidarity between Brittany and Louisiana, with a women hanging doves to dry on a washing line.

This is an odd one with a kingfisher chasing some letters away, but I find it difficult to understand.

These clearly express left-wing rebellion movements, presumably against M. Macron’s policies.

Across this ugly side of the port, some splendid bourgeois houses.

The top end of the port with a lock.

A cargo barge on one of the upstream canals.

A nice little street with no cars.

The old Abbey.

The bell tower.

The cloister, which is open to the public. The former monastery is a school.

Lovely door from the cloister to the church – locked.

The church is closed for renovation work. Some photos were available with the description of the work.

A close up of the choir and sanctuary.

Another angle of the spire and bell tower.

The Hôtel de Ville.

The old railway bridge, disused and permanently open to boats.

A beautiful town house.

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Liminal Mariners

Posted on Sunday, 8 October, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have been sailing several times this year, living aboard for up to a week to ten days. There are three ways to go sailing: with a massive and extremely well organised and planned event like the Semaine du Golfe, with one or several friends in an informal gathering – planned to some extent but leaving the details to personal initiative and understanding of the conditions. The third is alone without any rigid plan other than having consulted the weather forecast and the tides (when at sea). It is during this option that I often meet people along the way, in ports or even on the water or in remote stopovers where you can dock to a pontoon, moor to a buoy or “drop the hook”. This posting is less about sailing or boats than a more human and spiritual dimension.

I have discovered that the sea, rivers and ports attract souls who are seeking something other than modern urban life, marriage, family, conventional social norms and “following the mainstream”. I believe that this is what makes or breaks each one of us. Two years ago, I wrote a little posting on Liminality. It seems to be a state of life involving spiritual seeking, not necessarily for a God or a religion, but one’s own inner meaning and Sehnsucht. It can take the form of a vocation to monastic or a hermit’s life, though monasteries often represent an institutional structure like the armed forces in which the individual person is annihilated for the sake of the community. I would like to study this notion of liminality in greater depth, comparing it with Romanticism and the “re-wild Christianity” movement. I do believe that this is the only way that Christianity will cease to be a sectarian and political ideology and rediscover its spiritual roots as given in the teachings of Christ.

Without this dimension, the life of priests will dry and burn out as priests encounter the realities of this world, whether in the city or among the marginal. In the quest for liminality, it is too easy to fall into loneliness, drugs and mental illness. I have found myself in a vocation resembling that of Fr Guy Gilbert, the prêtre des loubards.

Fr Gilbert came from an older generation, and is quite “progressive” in his style and is often interviewed on television. He wears his hair long (as I do) and dresses in motorcycling leather jackets and trousers. He ministers to young delinquents in cities, who are often in trouble with the police, take drugs and are quite devoid of vision or hope. One must be very strong to deal with such people, and Fr Gilbert is known to have an authentically spiritual life. I am too sensitive to embark on such a ministry, and some of those thugs in cities can be dangerous people. We are also fraught with personal struggles and humanity is flawed and wounded by our experience of family life, school, work, conflict, poverty, inability to fit in. So are they.

See my video Cruise on the Vilaine and the Sea.

As I sailed and motored away from Redon last weekend, I crossed two sailing boats of about 22 or 24 feet heading towards the Pont de Cran. This bridge has to be opened for any sailing boat to pass without taking the mast down (something I can do reasonably easily, but which is more complex on larger vessels). Until the end of September, the bridge opens about six times a day. From the beginning of October, it will be opened only at 9 o’clock each morning and on request the day before by telephone or VHF. I arrived at the waiting pontoon in the afternoon and the two boats arrived shortly afterwards. We all tied up and struck up a conversation. They were a young woman and a man in his 50’s, very emaciated and with a “man bun”. They are live-aboards and are unemployed apart from the seasonal work they do on farms to earn a little more. The boats are quite old (like my own) and depend on DIY abilities to fix the various problems that occur. The bigger the boat, the more expensive it is to maintain in seaworthy condition.

The young woman has found a spot to moor her boat free of charge, in the “middle of nowhere”. She has two young, healthy and affectionate dogs, and she has a large solar panel to give her electricity. I spent an evening with her, the man I mentioned (I will call him Jean) and two friends of his. We sat on the ground and shared some red wine. They smoked roll-ups, but I have ceased to smoke once and for all. Some of the ideas were quite radical, such as the tensions between Brittany and Parisian France since the Revolution. I sympathise with the Celtic way, but I feel concerned about some of the radical left-wing ideologies and pent-up anger against capitalism and globalism. I tried to understand their marginality which seems quite different from the thugs who burn and pillage in cities. I think the two friends have homes in or near Redon, and the two in their boats would be homeless without their boats.

As the evening Jean became quite incoherent in his conversation as he got a bit drunk on the wine, but it seemed that there was something more than alcohol. The word schizophrenia was mentioned, and this corresponded with the word salad and the extreme mood swing. Jean became very agitated and threatened to be violent. Eventually, his friend persuaded him to go back to his home in his car which was parked nearby.

As I returned to the Pont de Cran after spending two days on the sea and returning to the Vilaine, I moored to the little pontoon in the middle of the former marshes become farmland. Marie (fictitious name) was in her cabin and the dogs came out to greet me with sniffs and licks. She was alone, and offered me some wine. We talked about Jean. He had stolen a tender and an engine, I don’t know where. He doesn’t seem to be an accomplished thief because he returned both to where he took them. I expressed my disappointment in this man who was so mutilated spiritually and mentally. Marie told me how he seemed to “tip over” during the Covid lockdowns. He had been in psychiatric care at one time and had medication to take for his schizophrenia, which he had stopped. That led to the relapse. Marie advised him to move his boat back to Redon and spend the winter moored on the jetty outside the port in order not to be charged some €100 per month.

The Vilaine has a number of ports with electricity and facilities, but free mooring is possible in many places (within limits). I would generally spend one night in a port for two nights using my batteries in other places.

The lesson to me is that we have to have some strength of character to live the life of an individual person and not get sucked into the mainstream and the “machine” of urban society, work, competition for power and so forth. Living on a boat full-time must be very hard, especially during the winter with the condensation and the cold. During the Covid lockdowns, Marie had a spell of pneumonia and caught Covid in hospital. As is often the case of some women, they can be much more resilient than many men. I was careful to keep some distance from her to resist any tendency to form an intimate relationship. She is simply “not my type” and I am certainly not hers. We undertook to stay in correspondence. I will remain prudent, especially in view of what happened with Jean. That night, the space that had been occupied by his boat was free for my little cabin boat. I visited her the next morning and we had coffee together, and then I went my way back to the Pont de Cran and my waiting trailer.

My reflection as a priest is that talking religion with them would be highly offensive. I did not hide the fact that I had come to France in search of my vocation as a priest and related my times in Switzerland and Italy. They did not react in any way. My own experience of churches and zealots has led me to the idea of the “underground church”. The institutional churches have done too much harm and scandal through immorality of priests, toxic bureaucracy and hypocrisy. Most people just lump everything together. If Christianity is not to disappear from this world, it cannot be imposed in the style of Franco’s dictatorship or the ideas of Civitas. It has to come from the spiritual experience of souls who are ready by their general attitudes in life. Clearly the mainstream has failed, as have the loubards who have gone over the edge. I hope that I have left a positive impression, a seed that may one day germinate and become a healthy plant. Non nobis, Domine – Not unto us, O Lord, but unto thy name give glory.

The Vilaine is full of boats from the most luxurious to sunken wrecks. I am about to do an edited video to give a glimpse of this little world. Many of those boats are 30 to 40 foot vessels that will sail anywhere, including the oceans. They are stored for the winter for more modest charges than in the prestigious ports, and they are more protected from foul weather. A few of those boats are live-aboards. I crossed one and greeted its skipper. It looked like a complete eccentric’s mess, like the study and library of a university don. I was amused to have this comparison come into my mind. Sailing is not always about stuffy yacht clubs, but represents a whole diversity of human life, experience and aspiration.

Another skipper I met doing some work on his beautiful classical boat came up with the idea that some have sailed the Capes on little more than a windsurf board and others have foundered on the rocks just outside the port in beautiful yachts because of a lack of essential skills. How right he is! I replied with two rules of my own: learn to sail in dinghies and “The sea teaches us modesty“. Never underestimate the sea who can kill us with the indifference of swatting a fly.

I was tempted to live in a boat when I was desiring an end to my marriage. I was strongly advised against it by my family with some very practical considerations. The first is a boat big enough to live in but small enough to handle single-handed, which would mean a 28-footer – too cramped to live in without sacrificing my library, my music and much more. Most boats spend more time moored than under way, and my old house is almost a kind of boat. Another problem is getting old, sick or disabled – which put an end to boat life and sailing. There are solutions for keeping warm in winter. Precautions have to be taken against carbon monoxide from heaters! My own compromise is to live in a house in a little village and take the boat to different places to live aboard for a week to ten days at a time. In season, it is slightly more cramped than a small caravan. The important thing for me is this life as a “wild” Romantic.

My Sunday morning with the Celtic Orthodox so near to Saint-Dolay and the Pont de Cran was illuminating. I must have surprised Bishop Marc that I was not there to ask for anything other than a time of prayer and a pleasant time with his clergy and people. I give you a few photos I took of this impressive wooden church being gradually improved.

That was last Sunday when the Liturgy was of St Francis of Assisi. Bishop Marc was most cordial with me and interested to hear about the Anglican Catholic Church and my sailing exploits on the nearby Vilaine river. The history of this community is interesting, beginning with Bishop Tugdal, an episcopus vagans harshly criticised by Peter Anson, who was given some marshy land where he lived a very hard life of a hermit. The seeds he planted were healthy enough to create the present community which is part of the Communion des Eglises Orthodoxes Occidentales. Article in English. I would never join them, but I felt God’s presence in that church, the Liturgy and the devotion of the congregation.

In the afternoon, I returned to my boat.

I keep Jean in my thoughts and prayers. Something is missing in that soul which cannot be supplied by other people. He has his own work to do. It would be good for him to find God and Christ, do some reading. If he wants to live in a boat and be a nomad, then he has to live with solitude and self-reliance. I fear he will end up a loubard and finish up as a homeless derelict in the streets of some town. Perhaps there is something within him and a guardian angel to light the flame.

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Metamodernism?

Posted on Friday, 18 August, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Whatever next? We had modernism, not only theological but also cultural and philosophical. Next we had post-modernism, a phase of relativism, nihilism and cynicism (the cost of everything but the value of nothing, to quote Oscar Wilde).

Here is a talk on this difficult subject. The word is quite ugly and superficially conveys the impression of a variation of post-modernism. Unfortunately some word is necessary to give some notion about what several human beings are thinking in common, especially if there is an inkling of hope in our polarised and conflicted world.

Metamodernism sur Wikipedia

Metamodernist Manifesto which seems to be a cynical joke, but it is interesting to read with a critical mind.

The first things that strikes me is Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis, which was one of the tenets of German Idealism. The metamodernist sees a way out of the two-party system of modernism (scientific rationalism) and cynical nihilism.

Is there an analogy with Romanticism?

We propose a pragmatic romanticism unhindered by ideological anchorage. Thus, metamodernism shall be defined as the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons.

The word is used, and the objective seems to be the famous in medio stat virtus of Thomas Aquinas or the via media of Anglicanism. Moderation and a desire for harmony and reasonableness seem to be desirable in this ugly modern / postmodern world.

There is a lot of difficult philosophical language. Here is another video I intend to watch:

I suspect some of my readers and I could help each other in this exploration. Is it the new Romantic movement that could revive Christian spirituality, a new Christian humanism and a new quest from truth, beauty and goodness.

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Dark Satanic Mills Revisited

Posted on Wednesday, 16 August, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

William Blake (1757 – 1827) was someone very enigmatic as I have already mentioned in my earlier article Dark Satanic Mills which is a quote from the famous poem Jerusalem set to music by Sir Hubert Parry.

Parry seems to make a piece of patriotic jingoism of it, the identification between the all-powerful British Empire of his time and the celestial Jerusalem. That is certainly the impression I had as a boy at Holme Park Preparatory School near Kendal in 1972 where the music teacher taught us to sing it and learn the poem by heart. The expression dark satanic mills jarred in my mind as we sang this paean to our erstwhile Empire. Naturally, we thought of the factories of the Industrial Revolution which employed people driven to the towns from the country by abject poverty. Was this not an early expression of Socialism? It seems hardly likely.

The 1790’s were a time when a new movement of thought began to take hold. It would later be called Romanticism, marking the reaction from the collective orthodoxy of scientific rationalism and the institutional churches. Perhaps Blake was a post-modernist long before our own post-modernist rejection of all institutions weighed down by bureaucracy and corruption. These institutions were all churches, formal school and university education, politics and all attempts to mould minds into orthodoxy and conventions. Far from targeting factories employing children and adults for low wages and in dangerous conditions, Blake seemed to target the universities and the churches above all.

This kind of radical thought has made a comeback from the 1960’s, and places devout Christians and priests into an uncomfortable position. Something recently arose on Facebook, the establishment of a new group on the Use of Sarum from an orthodox Roman Catholic point of view. Its point of view is finding a way to get this local medieval rite approved by Rome for converts from Anglicanism. The Ordinariates seem to have considered the possibility but rejected it. I remember the violent controversies over the Ordinariates in c. 2011 – 2012. Many of us grew sick of the toxic morass of canon-legal positivism and bigotry (from both Anglican and RC points of view). I suggested the approach of old French priests in the 1970’s and 80’s like Fr Pecha at Bouloire, but those men are all dead now. They simply resisted and disobeyed. It was a more spontaneous kind of resistance than the organised traditionalist societies founded by Archbishop Lefebvre and others.

Perhaps they could organise groups of laity to sing the Office and wait for the next Pope who might be unlike the boring Jesuit philistinism of Francis. My own thought is that this is the problem of Roman Catholics bound to that system of orthodoxy and canon law. It is not my problem, but my empathy for others prevents me from sealing myself into a sanctimonious attitude as a priest living in north-west France without any ministry or hope of building a parish-like community. An answer came with the reasoning according to which one is better off as a Roman Catholic in spite of the appalling state of the Papacy and ecclesiastical institutions. Honestly, one is better off as spiritual but not religious like most of our contemporaries. Perhaps that title could be refined to spiritual but not institutional, leaving the re-ligare aspect intact. Words and titles have their limit.

In the end, this is less about a redundant and disused rite but institutions and law pushing us towards a hyper-rationalistic and ultimately materialistic political ideology. Cuius rex eius religio. Frankly I see little sense in this Roman Catholic group that can only ever go round and round in circles like the mythical Oozlum Bird. The group I founded was designed to discuss the liturgical rite without getting into these circular arguments about which institutional church would allow it. I know that there is no solution, just like in the Victorian era when Anglican intellectuals in the wake of the Oxford and Ritualist movements would study it knowing that they would be severely sanctioned for using anything other than the Book of Common Prayer. I am a priest in a small institutional church that tolerates the use of this rite by individual priests. A positive response is only possible by being non-denominational.

A lesson is emerging from all this. The Roman Catholic Church since the Council of Trent became totalitarian and rigid, a machine, a dark satanic mill. The same rigidity continues in the name of modernism and renewal as is in vogue since the 1960’s. Asking for anything original in this machine is no different from dealing with the asphyxiating bureaucracy of Soviet Communism! It is clear to me that the Christ of the Gospels did not intend such a caricature as the church he intended, aedificabo ecclesiam meam. Otherwise it makes of Christ just another evil worldly Archon of history. That is an idea I cannot accept.

I have reason to believe that these institutions are just rotting away like our village parish churches left to the decrepitude of neglected buildings. There is also a movement away from materialistic atheism, generally through a slow return to paganism of one kind or another. This can happen in healthy or very unhealthy ways.

One person of our own times I greatly admire is Dr Michael Martin who has written many books on the Wisdom tradition and the divine Sophia. I find that I am not alone in seeing an analogy between the end of the Age of Reason and our own technocratic and bureaucratic times. Hence we see and experience an analogy of Romanticism.

Christian Romanticism – Where is the divine radiance?

In a certain way, we need to “fast” from institutional and bureaucratic religion! It is an idea I have come up with jokingly, at the risk of being accused of some kind of blasphemy, but the intuition revealed something more real and serious.

We will find many clues in that era of Blake’s Jerusalem in relation to our own time. Others in the 1790’s included Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) and Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg). These men and others saw darkness in the world. Fast forward to another dreadful era of history, the Nazi regime and World War II. My God, my God, look upon me! Why hast thou forsaken me? We continue to live in the night, a period of which Berdyaev and every philosopher worth his salt wrote. Our ancestors lived through the technocratic and totalitarian state and the tacit assent of the churches. Where was God in all this?

Romanticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries challenged the encroaching technical and industrial revolutions. As I write this, I am listening to Julius Reubke’s Organ Sonata on the Ninety-Fourth Psalm.

O LORD God, to whom vengeance belongeth: thou God, to whom vengeance belongeth, shew thyself.

Arise, thou Judge of the world: and reward the proud after their deserving.

Lord, how long shall the ungodly: how long shall the ungodly triumph?

How long shall all wicked doers speak so disdainfully: and make such proud boasting?

They smite down thy people, O Lord: and trouble thine heritage.

They murder the widow and the stranger: and put the fatherless to death.

And yet they say, Tush, the Lord shall not see: neither shall the God of Jacob regard it.

Take heed, ye unwise among the people: O ye fools, when will ye understand?

He that planted the ear, shall he not hear: or he that made the eye, shall he not see?

Or he that nurtureth the heathen: it is he that teacheth man knowledge, shall not he punish?

The Lord knoweth the thoughts of man: that they are but vain.

Blessed is the man whom thou chastenest, O Lord: and teachest him in thy law;

That thou mayest give him patience in time of adversity: until the pit be digged up for the ungodly.

For the Lord will not fail his people: neither will he forsake his inheritance;

Until righteousness turn again unto judgement: all such as are true in heart shall follow it.

Who will rise up with me against the wicked: or who will take my part against the evil-doers?

If the Lord had not helped me: it had not failed but my soul had been put to silence.

But when I said, My foot hath slipt: thy mercy, O Lord, held me up.

In the multitude of the sorrows that I had in my heart: thy comforts have refreshed my soul.

Wilt thou have any thing to do with the stool of wickedness: which imagineth mischief as a law?

They gather them together against the soul of the righteous: and condemn the innocent blood.

But the Lord is my refuge: and my God is the strength of my confidence.

He shall recompense them their wickedness, and destroy them in their own malice: yea, the Lord our God shall destroy them.

The tone of the Psalm as of the organ piece is one of anger. Why is God not judging the evil in this world? Where is justice? We are not looking at a cruel God, but one who seems ineffective. The dark and angry mood of some Romantics like Percy Byssh Shelley and his wife Mary (who wrote Frankenstein) reflect this seething in an evil world. We find the same in Göthe’s Faust, Novalis’ Hymnen an die Nacht. Those of us who sometimes feel the same way are seeking to recover Christianity in the great Wisdom tradition.

In Romanticism, we find another Christianity, not that of churches and vicars. We have Jakob Böhme, Rudolphe Steiner and Owen Barfield, indeed our own Inklings. The differences between Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Anglican and Lutheranism fade into irrelevance. Romantics and Perennialist traditionalists sought to know the primitive revelation that unites all religions and philosophies, indeed all of humanity. Sectarianism between Christian denominations made the light dim. Tradition was important to Novalis as he wrote Christenheit oder Europa in 1799 beginning “Once there were fine, resplendent times when Europe was a Christian land, when one Christendom occupied this humanly constituted continent”. This seemed to be a piece of cheap traditionalist nostalgia, and for this reason, we should read Pauline Kleingeld’s Romantic Cosmopolitanism: Novalis’s “Christianity or Europe”. Indeed, you should print it out and read it on real paper! This cosmopolitanism is so different from the globalism of our corrupt politicians. A Christianity split into a thousand pieces is wrong, as is the canon-legal positivism of our neo-Tridentine conservatives.

I belong to a small Anglican church body mostly based in the USA, but I appreciate those who have kept “wildness” and have remained apart from institutionalism and bureaucracy. As a continuing Anglican, I refuse tribalism and talk of “conversion” to describe changing one’s institutional church.

Dr Martin quotes Novalis:

Christendom must come alive again and be effective, and, without regard to national boundaries, again form a visible Church which will take into its bosom all souls athirst for the supernatural, and willingly become the mediatrix between the old world and the new.

Our present hyper-rationalism, bureaucracy and political corruption are grotesque, a sign of our darkness and the rotting away of our country churches. However the remnants of Christendom have survived, often in the most unexpected places.

I am trying to study the links between Romanticism, Perennial Traditionalism, the Inklings and our own intuitions into a “wild” Christianity that can escape institutional manipulation. I observe the emergence of a whole and single movement, not that we necessarily know each other or found an association. Simply we are sensitive persons converging onto a Christianity with a future.

Berdyaev (in particular in Freedom and the Spirit, English translation London 1935) wrote about the relation between priesthood and prophecy, especially when priesthood carries the burden of clericalism. I suspect that the Church of the future might lose the priesthood or much of it. That does not need to mean the end of the world or the closing of channels of grace and salvation. With it would go the institutionalism, bureaucracy and clericalism. The liturgy may also disappear, except for prayer offices that can be recited or sung by lay people. In the place of priesthood would have to come mysticism and nobility of spirit of which Berdyaev and many others wrote, including Novalis. Perhaps our Sarum Roman Catholics are right in emphasising the prayer life of lay groups rather than engage the priesthood which is subjected to laws and episcopal approval. I sense, as a priest, that my ministry is possible in a “lay” way, without being known to be a priest. That might seem very odd, but I have noticed this in others. Here in France, we had the Worker Priest movement and Fr Guy Gilbert. I do not find the secularised aspect to be appealing, nor the show and media counter-glitz, but rather this core intuition of esoteric Christianity.

I would like to help in whatever way I can towards this movement of clearing new ground, the notion described by the pen name Novalis. We wish to do this not by assimilating religion to politics and entertainment but by finding what Christ really means.

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The Inkling – Beyond Romanticism

Posted on Friday, 28 July, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

My spiritual life has been in quite a chaotic phase for some years, in particular after my separation a little over two years ago. That was a part of a vast overhaul of my own consciousness and Christian belief. Already, in my teens, I latched onto an immature understanding of Romanticism, those poets who yearned for some excitement outside the humdrum of “ordinary” life and material concerns.

A big step in my life was my year in Rome and my life with a very narrow and rigid form of Catholicism, scholasticism at its most caricaturistic and the Deus ex machina. At the same time, the superior of the community was an American prelate, working in the Congregation of Oriental Churches, showed a great interest in the Wisdom tradition of biblical interpretation and spiritual life. A year later, I went to Fribourg without being in a diocese or religious community. My anxiety and discouragement led me to consult a psychologist in Lausanne. He had no thought about autism or Aspergers, but rather the basis of my religious life. He suggested contact with other cultures, and in particular reading authors like Vladimir Soloviev and Nicholas Berdyaev. I found or borrowed the books and read – and have not stopped reading ever since. These two Russian philosophers did not give me a real desire to become Orthodox, but rather to see God and spiritual life in a different way. I also became attracted to German Idealism and philosophers like Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis). My notion of truth and existence would be forever changed.

I had approached traditionalist Roman Catholicism as an Anglican, seeking beauty and love more than dogmatism and politics. It took a long time to come to terms with these differences before I returned to Anglicanism via the Continuum. I have continued to be fascinated by this “alternative Christianity” because I could see no real future in intégriste Catholicism or in the kind of thing being promoted by the current Papacy, a moral and political vision without a real concern for the most intimate interior life of man. The Church is more than the various institutions that claim to embody a sacramental reality of Christ’s Incarnation.

As a sign of contradiction in regard to the current trend of using words in their etymological or ideological meanings to appropriate an identity, I am aware of the danger of the word Romanticism – “I am a Romantic”. I am aware too of a risk even of saying that I am a Christian or any other noun or adjective. Our inner consciousness has to be much deeper than justifying ourselves to others. I think that was most of the problem I took to the psychologist in Lausanne in something like 1989.

Properly speaking, Romanticism emerged from the tiredness of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and extended to about the first third of the nineteenth century. It was the affair of individuals, but there were groups like the Shelleys, Keats, Lord Byron and others. Ideas ranged from medievalism, dark and macabre thoughts about death and the end of the world, to more “conventional” ideas of restoring the role of man’s creative imagination alongside his rational faculties. This creativity would be the source of art, music and poetry, the manifestation of beauty and a divine consciousness. I have noticed analogies of this kind of consciousness in the Pre-Raphaelites, the Arts & Crafts Movement and a whole fascination in the early twentieth century for esotericism, the occult and alternative spiritual views more or less based on oriental spiritual traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism. Thus we had characters like Rudolph Steiner, Theosophy and Liberal Catholicism as devised by Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854-1934). Others had fingers in different pies, between the fascination with esotericism, orthodox Roman Catholicism, Modernism à la Tyrrell and the struggle with materialistic atheism. Modernism in the thought of Tyrrell was not about liberal Protestantism, but rather about a more credible answer to atheism and unbelief than “true church” apologetics and scholasticism.

A few English gentlemen of that early part of the twentieth century distinguish themselves: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield and others. They inherited much from the old Romantic movement, but brought about a developed understanding of many aspects. They met over a pint of beer in an Oxford pub in the 1930’s and 40’s, and discussed and criticised each others’ work. They became known as The Inklings. They towered intellectually, and I am profoundly humbled as a learner. I like the name inklings. The word inkling derives from Middle English yngkiling, meaning “whisper or mention,” and perhaps further from the verb inclen, meaning “to hint at”. There is also the Old English noun inca, meaning “suspicion”. The meaning that emerges is one of an extremely subtle idea or piece of information or knowledge. I suspect that what is implied is that these thoughts and ideas would be heard by those who are ready for them, and then they would germinate and grow like the famous mustard seed of the Gospel.

In my own pilgrimage, I find that idea attractive, one of seeking the Kingdom within. I see such an informal movement as a future for Christianity when political and social interests have lost their relevance in their search for relevance. As one who is discovering and learning rather than trying to teach, I leave my readers with a few YouTube videos to encourage them to buy a few books.

I particularly recommend this fascinating discussion:

In the following video, we are far from meetings, meeting and meetings about meetings!

These are just a few. The really important thing is books. Yes, real books made of paper, cardboard and printing ink. I am finding Mark Vernon fascinating. He has written a whole series of books. I have recently begun to read A Secret History of Christianity, Jesus, the Last Inkling, and the Evolution of Consciousness, Winchester 2019. I found in my letterbox this morning Pietro Archiati’s From Christianity to Christ, Christianity as the Essence of Humanity in Rudoph Steiner’s Science of the Spirit, English translation from German London 1996. Steiner seemed to have some cranky ideas, but not without some real wisdom that Owen Barfield seized onto.

For me this is a whole new education as I evolve beyond Romanticism and even beyond other movements before my time. The important thing is to find ourselves, not only in the thoughts of others, but by finding that consciousness that links us all with God and what Christ really means and meant. Maybe the sea will bring me inklings as I sail along the coast of north Brittany.

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What is the Church?

Posted on Saturday, 22 July, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

From my isolation as an Anglican Catholic priest here in north-western France, I am discovering a different notion of Christianity. It is plain that if I stick up a sign outside my house saying “Anglican Catholic Church” and advertising a time of Mass, the first question is who I am trying to attract. Local French people? The local English diaspora? All the people I meet here are atheists, one exception being someone’s wife who is secretly a Buddhist. A place open to the public has to have facilities for the disabled including special toilets. My non-standard staircase would be considered as unsafe – and I am very careful with it myself. It is either very old or a complete botch-job. My tiny chapel is upstairs, so it is fine as a private chapel. If anyone comes to me asking for a public Mass (this hasn’t happened), then I would have to ask him or her to come up with the money to rent or buy a building that would be suitable as a public place of worship. This situation brings me to reflect whether the Christian Church means something other than numbers of people who don’t know each other, and what being a priest means in a situation in which Christianity has reached the end of its life – or has to continue in a different way.

What if I re-converted to Roman Catholicism? Well, it would be the end of my priesthood, since I was ordained a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, and incurred a “perpetual irregularity” for the delict of schism. That is what canon law says. We went into all this when I was in the Traditional Anglican Communion and Archbishop Hepworth, in more or less the same canonical irregularity thought that Pope Benedict’s project of Anglican ordinariates was about him and his “500,000 faithful”. There were some violent arguments on the internet, and I had to come to terms with the reality. Well, how about being a humble Roman Catholic layman? Maybe, if I were to go and live in a town… With the traditionalists or the local parish? For me, there is nothing positive about submitting to the Archons of this world, whether in politics or the institutional clergy.

I discover that many laymen without canonical irregularities are expressing their tiredness with the institutional churches and congregations of people who are strangers to each other. Without having formed any formal movement, there are minds like Rupert Sheldrake, Mark Vernon who for some reason left the Anglican priesthood, the old Oxford Inklings like C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield, Paul Kingsnorth who became Orthodox, David Bentley Hart (brother of one of our priests in the US) who also became Orthodox, and last but not least – Michael Martin. I have read articles and listened to interviews on YouTube, and a pattern is emerging. We might occasionally experience beauty and inspiration at an Orthodox Liturgy, Choral Evensong in an English cathedral, sailing along the north Brittany coast, doing one’s own garden, going for a walk in the country in fine weather, watching birds and wild animals, the possibilities are endless. These are individual experiences, and seem to contradict the social and collective notion of the Church which is inculcated into our minds. I have lived this contradiction for many years. Should I give up Christianity as something impossible and ultimately irrational, become a “none” or join another religion. There aren’t too many of those in the French countryside?

Yesterday evening, I went to join the people at the Café Associatif in my village. Most of us were English, but not forming a “ghetto” against the French. I am quite fascinated by what motivates people to come and buy a house and earn a living in rural France. The accents are clearly “working class” Yorkshire and West Country. They came in search of freedom and individual expression. I have been on the European continent, between France, Switzerland and Italy, for more than forty years. Some of those other men and married couples have been here for a while and make great efforts to learn French and integrate. I bring up this subject because I heard the opinions of the Yorkshireman and the one from Bristol that we were living in the last times before we would all become extinct from overheat. I recognised the climate-apocalyptic ideology as it has influenced nearly all of us, except that the temperatures in Spain last week were not 60°C but more like 40°C or high thirties. I know that if I asked these people whether they believed in God, we would only start discussing the scandals of the institutional Church and its hypocrisy. What we dealing with is a profound nihilism and conviction that we are all evil and deserve to die. Hope is abolished, cancelled with the last remnants of culture. I try to be nice with these people, but I live on another planet. I still live in the ideas of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Romanticism!

As a priest, I was unaffected by the Covid lockdowns, since I was celebrating Mass at home in a private chapel. Over the past few years, I have read about the scandals of cardinals, bishops and priests abusing children and young mean and women. There just seems to be a lack of proportion about being canonically irregular for “schism” and these enormous crimes of those who make the laws – and enforce them. After the downfall of Archbishop Hepworth and his eventual death, I joined the Anglican Catholic Church in the hands of Bishop Damien Mead in England. It was decided that I and a priest living in the Netherlands should be transferred to the Patrimony of the Metropolitan, under the direct jurisdiction of Archbishop Mark Haverland. I remain so to this day, in good standing, and with no tensions. The reality on the ground is living in this place in the world that is spiritually arid, a dry and infertile desert, but with a legitimate canonical status as a priest. For that I am grateful and remain loyal.

So the Church is above all a spiritual and mystical communion in experience, faith, balancing individuality and relationships with superiors and brethren. It can seem fragile but at the same time stable and strong. It is a framework, like the skeleton of bones in a human body. It gives form and structure, but calls us to adult self-reliance and the capacity to be a Novalis – “one who clears new ground”. I am not willing to throw away this link with the Church, but at the same time, I am unable to minister in the same way as a priest in the USA in a small town and neighbourhood “planting a church”. The Church has a social structure, but as such is compromised with this world. Michael Martin quoted the French Jewish mystic and philosopher Simone Weil:

I am well aware that the Church must inevitably be a social structure; otherwise it would not exist. But in so far as it is a social structure, it belongs to the Prince of this World. It is because it is an organ for the preservation and transmission of truth that there is an extreme danger for those who, like me, are excessively open to social influences. For in this way what is purest and what is most defiling look very much the same, and confused under the same words, make an almost undecomposable mixture.

It is interesting to consider the old Celtic Church far away from the Empire. It wove the Christian message and mystery into the paganism of the country. It lived in the wilds and the countryside. Does that not sound familiar to me? I quote again from the Michael Martin article:

As H.J. Massingham observed, the early Celtic and British churches were relics left from the time before “Christendom began to depart from Christianity.”

Unlike Michael Martin, I have no family, no captive congregation of wife and children. Is this a good thing? Maybe, maybe not. It is tempting to want to found something like a community of “new Christians”, but such an act would contain the seed of its destruction. I forget to mention the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhöffer who advocated a “religionless Christianity” because he was utterly devastated by the collaboration of his institutional church with something as evil as Hitler’s Nazism. He faced the gallows in a concentration camp and found peace and freedom in death. “Religionless Christianity” can be dangerous, simple secularism and denial of the spiritual in the name of humanism. However, something spiritual remains in this asceticism. I was brought to think of men in post-war French Catholicism like the Abbé Pierre who dedicated his life to the homeless and Guy Gilbert, the prêtre des loubards, long-haired and dressed in motorcycling attire, helping young men get off drugs. They were judged for being original, but they are remembered when men of the establishment were  forgotten.

We live in an extremely polarised world between political opinions and religious beliefs. One of the severest scourges is “identity politics” to group answers to “Who am I and what is the purpose of my life?” and their opposition to other points of view. For example, there are clashes between radical feminists and LGBT-XYZ groups. It is heart rending.

Can we not simply be ourselves. Sometimes we have to be private and secretive, like the Christians in the early Church with the disciplina arcani. We have above all to read and add our own writings to the treasure house of arcane Christianity or simply the spirit that Christ left us and that no church could destroy. We need a wisdom tradition with what the mystics, philosophers, poets, artists and musicians left us. These are all things that came from the souls of individual persons, not from collectivities. We have to read and study instead of burning books, discovering Thomas Traherne, the American Transcendentalists, the Cambridge Platonists and so many more. We in the Anglican tradition need to refer to the medieval Church, yet with the mystical traditions intended by the first Reformers before evangelical zeal turned to bitter hatred.

Our understanding of the word tradition should be deeper and separate from corruption, bigotry, rigidity, “true church” ideology, identity – but rather with the spiritual and the arcane. I would welcome a return to the disciplina arcani, reserving what is most holy and symbolic to the initiated, and offering something like Quaker worship to newcomers and who would effectively be catechumens. That would be assuming a congregation. For those of us in France, we can only be good and kind human beings. Allow people to express their worries (possibly secret desires for death) of the end of the world, and perhaps throw out a word that might cause them to think.

A part of Romanticism was Weltschmerz, expressing “a deep sadness about the insufficiency of the world (“tiefe Traurigkeit über die Unzulänglichkeit der Welt”)”. I feel deeply for the climate-apocalyptic people, but in regard to the most selfish and greedy of this world rather than simple weather conditions. Perhaps this inconsolable desire can be an instrument for suggesting a spiritual solution rather than a political one. It is a part of our maturing and becoming adults having put aside childish things.

Can the Church live without a priesthood and the Sacramental life that flows from it? My personal experience is that I am a priest and can celebrate Mass that is as valid as the Church I belong to. Lay Christians without access to a priest will often say the Office and the Mass of the Catechumens, the first part up to the Gospel and the Creed, and will unite themselves with a Mass being celebrated by a priest in some other place. I am brought to think of the Petite Eglise in France and the беспоповцы Old Believers in Russia. They became sects and victims of the worst of human nature, but somehow survived for centuries. There are priestless sedevacantist Roman Catholics, especially in America, called “home-aloners“. They show the reductio ad absurdam of canonical legalism in refusing the ministrations of irregular clergy in a world where the canonical Church is extinct. We really have to learn to let some things go, in order that we may again find what Christ really intended all that time ago. Each of these groups or tendencies has some incomplete inkling of Christianity’s future.

What is the Church? It is not an empire, a political party, a humanitarian organisation, a bureaucracy. I break with the post-Tridentine theologians who affirmed the visibility of the Church. The Church is not visible, though it can become incarnate in some visible signs – the principle of the sacramental mystery. The reality is simply divine, meaning the universal consciousness in which we all participate by our very being. It may seem to be a Protestant idea, but not all Protestant ideas are wrong!

We just have to read, read many books and articles, study, think and write. The written word is something that can remain long after our bodily deaths. What we write might be read by those who follow us, and they in turn might write and give ideas. The communion of the Church is there. It is not for us to negotiate or make it. Bureaucratic ecumenism is futile and has never done anything concrete. I have no conclusion to offer, but rather that this road of discovery continues.

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Out of the Ashes

Posted on Tuesday, 11 July, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I am gathering my thoughts in regard to seeing the modern western world as something akin to France in the wake of the Terror. The guillotine did its grisly task and the bodies of the dead are buried in the little cemetery of Picpus. Napoleon wreaked war and terror over the whole of Europe and even attempted to invade Russia.

I am getting my ideas together for another book on the theme of Christianity being more noble and beautiful than the dying hulks of institutional churches and their hyper-rational bureaucracies. I have the impression of joining a movement of like minds like Michael Martin, Paul Kingsnorth and others who like myself were children of the 1960’s in what may be an analogy of what emerged from the period of the French Revolution.

There have been other catastrophes between-times in the form of World War I, the rise of totalitarianism and another European war. We are today witnesses of absurd political ideas and the legacy of nihilism in gratuitous violence and vandalism. All the way through, from the end of the eighteenth century, we have invented machines and electronic devices that serve us, but can also bring man to question his spiritual being. What if we are all nothing but machines, and that the machines we make would dominate and rule us? The example is artificial intelligence, anything that carries the adjective smart. With the rise of materialism, atheism, nihilism, absolute anger against all institutions, we ask the question: Is this the end of civilisation? Did not this civilisation end in 1793 with Robespierre’s Terror, 1914 with the war, 1917 with the Russian Revolution.

What about institutional Churches: Rome, Canterbury, Orthodoxy, American Evangelicalism, Lutheranism? Insofar as they follow political institutions and ideologies, they are Christian only in name. The notion of culture is nebulous. In a society, very few persons produce art and beauty, like few are recognised as saints in the Church.

Presently, in my village, a team of men is digging up the road to lay a gas pipeline. The men who operate the mechanical diggers remind me of virtuoso pianists, moving the machine with extreme precision by means of joysticks either side of the seat. They dig the trench following marks made on the road surface by a surveyor, showing the positions of electrical, water, and waste water connections to each house. They lay the pipe sections and join them together. After that the pipes are buried in sand and then a thick layer of concrete is poured in. As someone who is fascinated by machines, this operation seen from the windows of my home was an education in itself. Surely the use of machines and technology is a part of human culture and civilisation. A small boy from one of the neighbouring houses would go out and watch the work, sitting in a toy digger on caterpillar tracks. He might have been dreaming of a romanticised idea of his future life as a grown man. In the same way, many little boys dream of being train drivers or engineers.

I have always been inspired by Walt Whitman’s poetry from the Leaves of Grass, especially what was used by Vaughan Williams in his Sea Symphony:

After the seas are all cross’d, (as they seem already cross’d,)
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d their work,
After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,
The true son of God shall come singing his songs.

Technology and science are as much a part of the human dream as art, music and literature. However, there came a notion of The Machine, an anti-human tyrant that would obliterate man’s humanity and life of the spirit. Orwell called it Big Brother. We already see analogies of The Machine in our own day. It is the combat between Reason and Imagination. The Machine is not a car, a train, a computer, a Kit Kat wrapping machine in Rowntree’s factory, any device invented by man to help him in his work. It is a force of dehumanisation, setting the inanimate over life, subjecting the human being to suffocating bureaucracy. William Blake expressed it:

The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels…

He called the contemporary (late eighteenth century) mentality a “single vision & Newton’s sleep”, as contrasted with the “fourfold vision” as the higher state of the “imagination” or free consciousness. In Blake’s thought, this is Man’s true or fully self-realised state. This is the aspect of man that could never be conquered by artificial intelligence – machines that can do amazing things, but will never reach our level of consciousness. The way many people have to work is in the fashion of a machine. Charlie Chaplin produced his legendary film Modern Times with the opening scene of working in a factory tightening pairs of bolts on a conveyor belt. His thought was dominated by this theme as he spoke as the Jewish barber taking the place of Hynkel, the imprisoned dictator of Tomania:

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world – millions of despairing men, women, and little children – victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

This is the very core of Romanticism. We need machines and science, the use of reason. But, we need freedom and beauty, the ability to make others happy and realise our true vocation. For these things, we need creative imagination. One terrifying aspect of modern politics is the exclusion of morality from economics and money. All that matters is efficiency and productivity, whether someone is a paid killer or a medical doctor! True freedom is the possibility of rising above oneself, of being creative. In the machine mind of the eighteenth century and our our own times, we the οἱ πολλοί are not creators and innovators – but consumers and paying customers.

Many of us are familiar with the “infantilisation” of human beings, one example being the exaggerated health and safety culture. From making people work in dangerous conditions, we see men having to wear safety helmets where there is absolutely no risk of head injury in a particular situation. We are brought to dependency and our spiritual soul is denied as we are shepherded to illusions of freedom.

We talk of a culture war, but there is generally no culture where we are living. We become increasingly polarised between two apparent opposites fighting for the same thing. The “woke” tribe, supported and paid for by capital and elite progressive opinion posing as an uprising from below, seeks to invert everything we have known. Then you get the right-wing conservatives purporting to defend the West without ever really defining what it is about the West that needs to be defended. We hear about such notions as the Nation, a religion, so-called values, money and property, whatever… It is tempting to listen to the speeches of Marine Le Pen or Eric Zemmour. Has not the stable door found to be open after the horse has bolted? Is the culture we want already rotten away like our village churches that no one attends and no one can afford to maintain?

I have the impression that the right-wing populists and the Just Stop Oil protesters are fighting for the same thing. They want to stop the Machine that runs on oil, have black people oppress whites, turn sexism around so that women oppress men. Conspiracy theorists want to avoid being imprisoned in fifteen-minute cities or prevented from driving their cars in ULEZ zones. They all seem to be protesting against a hyper-rational, bureaucratic, inhuman and profiteering future that threatens to close in on us all and create an Orwellian dystopia.

The West has contained the seeds of its own destruction. Men like Blake saw the rot more than two hundred years ago. Dostoevsky saw the Russian Revolution in the nihilism of the Demons decades before it formally happened in 1917. What we complain about in the Church was already implicit in the middle ages and throughout the Renaissance and the Enlightenment era. Most Romantics rejected the Church, but not necessarily Christianity.

Maybe our world has come to an end, not necessarily the death of us all as in a comet strike or a nuclear war, but in cultural terms. Christianity will only ever be a leaven in the bread if presented as something new, not an imitation of popular entertainment culture governed by an ecclesiastical bureaucracy, but an interior aspiration that most of us are unable to express in words.

I think we will see a lot more Muslim immigration in coming years, unless the extreme-right takes over like in the 1930’s. There will be many more riots with killing and pillaging, provoking an increasing response from the armed and security forces, including the use of live ammunition. All we can do is stay out of cities and take refuge in our homes if we have bought somewhere in the countryside. Perhaps Islam would provide a check against the Globalist Machine and the mechanical dystopia. I have not the slightest attraction to Islam, not even its more peaceful and mystical elements like Sufism, but I do have the experience of walking around the Arabic districts of Marseille in a cassock and buying food and spices in their shops. I found them respectful of a man in traditional dress and going about life peacefully. There are fanatics, just like right-wing and collectivist politics, but there are people seeking something higher in life. In the days of the French empire in Northern Africa, Christians lived with Muslims in countries like Morocco and Tunisia.

The future is in God’s hands, not ours. We hear much about the World Economic Forum, the Great Reset and the German leader Klaus Schwab who appears to be a real-life Blofeld out of a James Bond film. “You will possess nothing and you will be happy“. Is our future in a future version of Hitler’s concentration camps? There are probably ways to find out, but the essential is not to become anxious and fanatical about it. Would they favour Islam as their way of controlling people, like the late Roman Empire using the Church, or are the two things poles apart? Whatever, there is nothing we can do, not even by going on demonstrations and getting arrested by the police.

I began to read Nikolai Berdyaev during my seminary days, finding the books in a bookshop in Fulham when I was in London and on holiday from seminary. He recognised that nothing in our modern fears is without historical roots and precedent. He recognised that our end of the Renaissance and Age of Reason paralleled the end of the Roman Empire. We face a new epoch: “the new middle ages”, a time of darkness and night. This theme of the Night is strongly expressed by Jakob Böhme and by Berdyaev, Saint-Martin and Novalis who found their inspiration. This night is a good thing: in this darkness, which is a return to the mysterious life of the spirit, the destruction inflicted by the previous period of “light” will be healed: “Night is not less wonderful than day; it is equally the work of God; it is lit by the splendour of the stars and it reveals to us things that the day does not know. Night is closer than day to the mystery of all beginning“.

The darkness is no darkness with thee, but the night is as clear as the day; * the darkness and light to thee are both alike (Psalm 139).

The coming time is one of danger, of courage, of entering the world as something young and new. Christianity is presently burdened by its own institutional sins and the weight of its institutions. We thus face our judgement in this world. I think frequently about Bonhöffer as he faced the gallows in a concentration camp and proposed a redemption of Christianity at the cost of its institutions that had compromised themselves with Hitler. Is this the ultimate Christian martyrdom? It was doubtlessly in the mind of George Fox as he founded the Quakers. How can I say such things as a priest? How can I envisage the disappearance of churches, liturgies, music, sacraments, social and charitable work? I do not seek to destroy anything, but I live in a place (rural France) where “witnessing” and “evangelisation” would cause more harm than good. My words would have no credibility. Nothing in the French Roman Catholic Church attracts me. The monasteries have something more than the parishes, but they too are rigid and mechanical institutions. Do I sin by pride? I live in the desert – or on the sea…

I can write and publish, try to be a beautiful and peaceful person in the presence of others, be kind and open, be slow to affirm opinion as truth. I see the darkness coming over this life, either in the form of my own death or a period of life during which my treasure is other people’s trash to be rejected and trodden underfoot. Yes, out of the ashes will come something new, the authentic life and teachings of Christ. We can only plant the seeds in the midst of death and destruction.

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A Monty Python Sketch?

Posted on Monday, 8 May, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Today, I watched an interview with John Cleese who is most known for his role in the Monty Python shows and as Q in the later James Bond films.

‘I couldn’t stop laughing… All these people in these silly costumes, all taking things so seriously. I thought it was a Python sketch.’

Making fun of the absurd is the very definition of humour and laughter. This reminds me of the discussion around humour in Aristotle’s book on poetics in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. The point of the murders in the abbey and the irrational work of the Inquisition was that someone was hiding a book of great moral authority to preserve an ideology, the sinfulness of humour and laughter.

William of Baskerville approached dogma and truth as a sceptic, seeing truth as fundamentally unknowable and mysterious: there is much in the world and in God’s word that Christians do not understand. In the view of the librarian Jorge all truth is known and all laughter is subversive of that truth, because it “foments doubt. Laughter can be a weapon against liars and those who deny the truth of God because it allows us “to undermine the false authority of an absurd proposition that offends reason”. The very basis of Monty Python is grotesque absurdity, which provokes our emotion of laughter. Aristotle would turn comedy into an appropriate object of philosophical inquiry. Laughter and comedy would be elevated from base entertainment to a form of art. We all find that laughter is good for us. However, there is a limit, where the rhetoric of conviction is replaced by the rhetoric of mockery. Nothing is taken seriously, even that which is most sacred. Jorge’s fanatical hatred of humour destroys the entire library and the abbey with it. This fanatical notion of dogmatic truth reminds us of Hitler’s Götterdämmerung and the epidemic of suicides when Nazi Germany was defeated. For the Romantic sceptic, “the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth”. Doubt and questioning are essential to advance in knowledge and our growth as human beings.

The ultimate expression of scepticism is atheism and materialism, but everything turns full circle. Atheism, or at least hard atheism, becomes another dogmatic religion with its orthodoxy and foundational truth.

What I most observed about this Coronation is that the rite and ceremony made no sense to most of the people watching it, precisely because of the yawning gap between rite and liturgy, and their secular lives without judging their morality or ethics. Even among practicing Christians, the notion of liturgy and sacramental mystery are alien to them. What is important is the word in human language designed to appeal to the rational faculties of the mind. Many people need noise and entertainment, interaction with other people and the community to foster the Christian ideal. Even myself, I watched the ceremony, and it struck me as a caricature, something like the ceremonies of any number of fake princes and vagante bishops. Then, as the most solemn gestures of the ancient rite came around, there was an extraordinary collusion of the humanity of King Charles, the Royal family, the Archbishop and bishops, the invited guests from other religious traditions. I noticed a deeply moved face in the King, a movement of conversion and humility. This is perhaps something John Cleese missed. It is something that passed underneath the radar of the masses.

The more intellectual atheists would try to come out with an apologia of their fanatical dogma or at least what they see as most probable and plausible. For them, get rid of religion, and man’s energy can be turned to improving this world. Christianity itself can be debunked as a spiritual philosophy and reused as a form of Marxist Socialism through Liberation Theology and versions of critical theory. For such people, belief in a god that intervenes in human life, fear of death and solitude are calmed and soothed, and priests can enter the competition against the socialist paradigm and gain control. The atheist is held up as someone who is fair, objective and sincere. The more cynical mind would compare heaven as a condition of afterlife with the notion of modern mass holiday-making and tourism. The atheist accepts annihilation at death with “humility” and thus better serves humanity here and now.

Our atheist will take advantage of the mystery of evil which cannot be avoided in Christian, Jewish and Islamic monotheism. There is no moral merit in being a good human being though fear of punishment or the enticement of reward. Religion is compared with modern business and commercial advertising, and the level drops even lower. So if there is no solution for the mystery of evil (why God allows evil), then the very notion of God is debunked. There is only a material universe and no reason for life.

A good argument against branding religion (re-ligare), faith and spirituality as absurd, is its enduring presence in human culture. It supports collective thought and a motivation for a person to care about another and see a transcendent dignity to be treated as sacred. Atheists are often as fanatical as religious fundamentalists with their dogma and foundational truth. Worse than Nazism, Marxist Communism killed millions of people in the twentieth century, all in the name of opposing the opiate of the people. It does not help the atheist cause to call believers idiots, sheep, gullible people, etc. André Gide said “J’aime les gens qui cherchent la vérité, je me méfie de ceux qui l’ont trouvée” – I like people who search for truth, but I am wary of those who have [or claim to have] found it).

Probably what has done Christianity (and other religions) the most harm is that fanatical and “we have the truth” mindset of the monastic librarian Jorge. The same attitude will make us reject atheism. It is not anti-rational to base everything on spirit and energy from which matter derives its existence. Many modern scientists are sceptical about Newtonian physics and the materialistic assumption.

What is needed is a new basis of our relating to Christ, to truth and our entire spiritual existence. That may seem to be a very modern thought. It is. German Romanticism in the closing years of the eighteenth century had a remarkable insight in this relationship between truth, reason and the human imagination. Friedrich von Hardenberg took the pen name Novalis meaning “the one who clears new ground”. This is not novelty for its own sake but a process of maturity and self-understanding. Philosophy (as in love of wisdom) is not passively accepted but as something to provoke our thought and human reaction. Like the fictional William of Baskerville, Novalis saw the value of irony and humour. We are called to raise ourselves to a state of critical self-understanding. Individuality is only developed in interaction with other individuals, but is not to be confused with collectivism.

The Romantic acts and thinks in the spirit of the Enlightenment, in that we challenge and criticise prejudices handed down from tradition. Unlike what the enlightenment philosophers believed, history and tradition have much to offer for a critical discussion of the present time. We cannot cancel culture – or history.

The Coronation didn’t make me laugh, but it seemed surrealistic until we were brought into contact with the human dimension of people of our time following this very ancient tradition. I was thus able to understand John Cleese and all those for whom traditional rites, history and culture are absurd. We are confronted with the equally absurd slogan cancel culture.

There is a very frightening phenomenon of cultural nihilism. It is important for us to seek to understand both sides. By my year of birth, I am a Baby Boomer, but fifty years ago, we reacted from the conservatism of our parents and grandparents born in the 1920’s and the 1890’s. Now, the new generations of young people are reacting the same way against the “conservatism” of the Baby Boomers! Perhaps their children twenty years down the line will react against them for the same reasons!

There is a deep mistrust of all institutions. I notice the people going to demonstrations against President Macron’s pension reforms, a simple measure to finance the ailing pension system for a little longer. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left politician in France, has created another scandal by defending the hoodlums, vandals and hooligans burning cars and even buildings in the cities. What do those people want? Anachism? But, history has taught us that anarchism and nihilism brought about the evils of the Russian Revolution. They are truly the Demons of Dostoevsky! They will oppose the Monarchy as much as all mainstream institutions.

The Coronation has drawn the hostility of those who would turn the UK into North Korea complete with re-eduction camps and cultural death. It has also drawn the ire of fundamentalist Christians who found that the ceremony was not exclusively Christian by condemning everything else. I have read some shocking things in Facebook entries, including people I know or have met.

Like the Enlightenment and Romanticism, King Charles has manifested his wish for freedom for all, including those who do not believe in any God or spiritual life. What better can he do for the entire people who have been entrusted to his moral and spiritual leadership. The nature of this freedom is difficult to understand and follow, and it needs a lot of work. We’re not there yet!

The late Sir Roger Scruton had a sober view of contemporary culture or the lack of it. I quote from the article to which I linked:

We in Britain are entering a dangerous social condition in which the direct expression of opinions that conflict—or merely seem to conflict—with a narrow set of orthodoxies is instantly punished by a band of self-appointed vigilantes. We are being cowed into abject conformity around a dubious set of official doctrines and told to adopt a world view that we cannot examine for fear of being publicly humiliated by the censors. This world view might lead to a new and liberated social order; or it might lead to the social and spiritual destruction of our country. How shall we know, if we are too afraid to discuss it?

I have precious little idea of what is going through the King’s mind, other than getting his act together and getting his family into order as a force for good and true nobility.

The other reflection I had was also my own question “Is this real?“. I am a priest and had the experience of a series of ordinations and initiations from the Minor Orders, the Subdiaconate, the Deaconate and the Priesthood. I have never hidden the fact that I was consecrated a bishop, though I have ceased to exercise it since 2005 for the reasons of being accepted into an institutional Church as a simple priest under the jurisdiction of a bishop, presently Archbishop Mark Haverland, Metropolitan of the Anglican Catholic Church. I have been dressed in an alb, anointed, given vestments and symbols of the gift and Sacrament I was receiving and acclaimed to those present that something had changed in my life. The Coronation of a King has many parallels with the consecration of a bishop. I have seen the most sublime and the most absurd in churches and chapels. I was thankful that I connected with the reality of this Coronation and was genuinely moved.

Most people do not have the experience I have of being a man of the cloth. Their world is one of family life, work and entertainment – nothing wrong with that, but there is something more. Money and the “status” money brings is not the purpose of our lives. Even if someone is inclined to seek a spiritual philosophy, they are afraid to get sucked into a totalitarian cult and exposed to what is perceived as corruption and perversion in the clergy, the pornocracy. Those people have no idea of liturgical rites or what they mean. They will just pass them off as mumbo-jumbo and something irrelevant. This ancient rite of Coronation of a King will be as irrelevant to them as Mass or Evensong in the local church in their street. Some daring innovations were allowed without destroying the whole. A lady would bring a sword, and some African-Americans sang a piece of Gospel music. At the same time, the Coronation was explicitly and unashamedly Christian.

As Oscar Wilde said: A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

I do not want to live in a world where only money talks!

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Defender of the Faith

Posted on Friday, 5 May, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I’m sorry to have been away from the blog for so long, but my thoughts keep turning. I need to do an update on my house which is radically transformed since when my electrician started work and I was putting in the concrete floor and hauling stuff from my old rented house. More of that in tempore opportuno.

A talk by Dr Gavin Ashenden was brought to my attention today.

This is an interesting reflection bringing out the paradox between an institutional Christianity in which people believe at an almost lower level than their faith in political parties. We remember that this is how Macron got in through populism and the complete flop of conservatives, liberals and radical socialists. My own intuition is hiding away in this little French village.

Anyway, the subject is the UK, a country that gives the impression of being almost as colonised by Indian and Pakistani people as our forebears colonised them in the great Empire. According to some sources I have seen, the only Christians who are growing their churches are American-style evangelicals with a shrill ideology. The churches that have lost out the most are the United Reformed and the Methodists. Even the Baptists are just holding their heads above water. The Church of England is more concerned with keeping good terms with political correct and “woke” ideology. In the midst of all that, King Charles, concerned as he is to take his responsibility for all his citizens, is reluctant to claim that his Kingdom is a Christian one. It is a bit like being an Anglican vicar in a heavily Muslim area and with less than ten people in his large Victorian edifice each Sunday.

During the Coronation, the King will take the Oath and solemnly swear to uphold and defend the Protestant establishment. Dr Ashenden makes the point of King Charles being a defender of faiths, all faiths except Roman Catholicism. Perhaps my readers could give their views on this point in their comments. He criticises King Charles for being too Jungian in his ideas of individuation and human life and spirituality. I too subscribe to a certain orthodox gnosticism like that of St Clement of Alexandria and Origen. I cannot relate to the literalism of evangelistic fundamentalism and monotheism. Dr Ashenden is a kind and mature person, and obviously devout in his commitment to the Roman Catholic Church. He does make the point that the future of Christianity seems to be something like the underground Church, struggling for existence like in the old Soviet Union, China or North Korea, or at least the Benedict Option as coined by Rod Dreher.

I suspect that the King wants at the same time to serve his country and its citizens, and to be a Christian by example of life. That seems all that any of us can do, giving transcendentals like beauty, truth and goodness to keep the candle alight in the darkness of our age. Perhaps as he works within the parameters of British institutions, a spark of divinity might shine through and inspire us in its humility and silence. Perhaps it is wishful thinking on my part.

The confused hubbub of the internet mob would chop his head off and declare a Republic as France did in 1793. Let them have Jean-Luc Mélenchon, North Korea with Kim-Jong-Un, Big Brother and social credit scoring! Add to that the Gulag, the KGB and the re-education camps…

The least we can do is to keep a time of quiet, pray for this King and the sick society he is called to rule through Parliament, the Government and all the political and legal institutions. Even though I live in France, I still hold a British passport which describes me as a British citizen. I name the King in the Canon of the Mass pro Rege nostro Carolo and offer the Holy Mystery for him, that he may be given strength to inspire and lead.

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Hiatus

Posted on Sunday, 5 March, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have had a comment asking me why nothing was happening on this blog. Simply I bought a house, with money inherited from my late father. It is in a village between Mayenne and Le Mans, and the house has needed a certain amount of preliminary work before progressively moving in from my rented house near Ambrières les Vallées.

Those of you who frequent Facebook can find photos and commentaries. I have named the house Rievaulx after the great Cistercian abbey in the Rye Valley in Yorkshire. My home is not a monastery and I am not a monk, but I feel inspired by the spirit of the Rule of St Benedict. I am also a fan of St Aelred, the Abbot of that community in the twelfth century, and his writings on friendship. Please ignore the claims of certain contemporary identity agenda groups on St Aelred. Rievaulx was also a place where I was taken by my grandparents who lived at the time in Pickering. This Abbey has figured many times in my dreams.

My immediate objective is to clear my rented house and get everything here by the end of March, and then deal with the house progressively. This is not a modern house, but an old building, possibly medieval in origin and renovated in the 1920’s. Never rip anything out unless you have an immediate solution to replace it! Too many owners demolish things in a spirit of contempt, and then become discouraged. We need to be realistic. Also, I am something of a “hard bastard” and have less need for modern comforts. I am writing this in  10°C!

I beg of my readers a little patience before getting back to philosophical and theological subjects. Already, I have my office (scriptorium) fully operational and my library is taking form. I need to transport my pipe organ as I have done before. It’s all happening.

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