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.

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.