New Year Resolution

Posted on Saturday, 7 January, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Some people have the custom of making New Year Resolutions, usually things for better health like giving up drinking alcohol or smoking. Others resolve to keep a tidy home, be better organised at work, many things. How long do such intentions last? Perhaps our resolutions can turn to our inward beliefs and values.

I was shaken by a conversation with a good friend who loves sailing and is an artist. He discussed the death of Pope Benedict XVI. For him, Josef Ratzinger was a reactionary and God’s Rottweiler, and did much harm by opposing and persecuting the proponents of Liberation Theology. The version put out by the media does not correspond with the image that came over to me as a Roman Catholic deacon and a Continuing Anglican priest. My friend denied the existence of any kind of afterlife and all that exists is this world in a dead universe representing our (lack of) existence before birth and after death. Perhaps I am putting words in his mouth, especially as he considers consciousness and energy to be creative of matter. We have remained friends and we seem to respect each other in spite of the gut-wrenching feeling of “What if he’s right“.

For him, Jesus existed, but his life and mission were purely moral and bringing about the kingdom (whatever that would have been) of this world. Jesus the political revolutionary, the proto-woke activist. I have seen elsewhere the kind of theory that suggests that he sought to promote liberation of the poor from the oppressor, he survived the crucifixion (no mention of the Centurion piercing his heart with a spear – which he would not survive if he were still alive), he was taken out of the tomb alive, he married Mary Magdalene and had children, he went to live in India since the south of France was still dominated by the Roman Empire. He might even have been a convert to Buddhism. I have read the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail of Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln , and the highly entertaining novel of Dan Brown on the same theme, the Da Vinci Code. We all love a good mystery and a conspiracy theory for dessert. But, the sober thought is depressing if that is true, that Jesus was no more than a political activist and that the atheists have won. Perhaps there is a form of theism that believes the same thing, whilst admitting something that gives some meaning to life and humanity.

Just today, in the midst of the for and against of Roman Catholics and others about Ratzinger, I read this article by Gavin Ashendon, What Pope Benedict can teach us about New Year resolutions. It is a thoughtful article, and it brings us to that fundamental question of whether it is all about revolutionary politics or a transcendent Kingdom, what we Romantics would call the Blue Flower, but which is none other than God and a mode of existence that is beyond the material laws of this world. We should not forget that Christians have often been in history the only ones to consider looking after the sick and the poor, and to campaign for their welfare with kings and other state authorities. The famous film Mission after the book by Robert Bolt also teaches us that thin dividing line between the Church’s service to the poor and oppressed – and bloody warfare against the oppressors. There is another line in the Scarlet and the Black, set in the darkest days of World War II in Rome. A priest expresses his desire to join the resistance and kill Nazis. Msgr O’Flaherty reminds him that they are there to help the victims of war, not to add to the killing. This is the essential difference between the teaching of the Gospel and revolutionary politics. It is too subtle for many, but I feel it profoundly.

During my time in Rome, I met several souls in the corridors of the Angelicum and the seminary where I was living. It was the Pontifical Nepomucene College, and the Czechs were still under Communism and persecution. I heard many heroic stories as well as tales of treachery, such as a seminarian sending radio messages to Communist agents with the names of the seminarians in the College. What a sad place to live, with the dourness of the American community I was with as a first-year seminarian and the spiritual refugees training for the priesthood to serve the Underground Church. It was only later, during my time at Fribourg, that the Iron Curtain came down.

What was that dreadful darkness in the eastern countries, other than replacing the spiritual Kingdom and eschatology by the imposition by force and violence of a caricature of that Kingdom on earth. Totalitarianism is expressed in both Fascism (and Nazism) and Communism, and I can only lament the similarity between the two. It is the kingdom of hell, the dystopia, what C.S. Lewis called the Abolition of Man. In those sad corridors of the Eternal City, which brought me anguish and stress, I heard among some almost a desire for death as expressed by Novalis, which I quoted in my eulogy to Benedict XVI:

In Tautropfen will ich hinuntersinken und mit der Asche mich vermischen. — Fernen der Erinnerung, Wünsche der Jugend, der Kindheit Träume, des ganzen langen Lebens kurze Freuden und vergebliche Hoffnungen kommen in grauen Kleidern, wie Abendnebel nach der Sonne Untergang. In andern Räumen schlug die lustigen Gezelte das Licht auf. Sollte es nie zu seinen Kindern wiederkommen, die mit der Unschuld Glauben seiner harren?

Two figures emerge from the mists of my memory. They had been seminarians with the Society of St Pius X and sought their vocation in the official Church. Their names were Jean-Michel Duport and François Crausaz. Both died at a young age from some form of cancer and are now in another world, so we hope and believe. I walked with both from the Via Concordia to university each morning, and we tried to understand the incomprehensible. How easy it would have been to reject and deny everything! And find oneself in a much worse predicament! Of the three convittori, Fr Alain Contat, who speaks his native French so beautifully and clearly, lives and teaches theology and philosophy in Rome to this day.

You must be optimistic! – they tell us. If there is nothing other than this world, we could concentrate on improving this world by means of politics and activism, working to help the poor. But that is an illusion. Human nature is geared towards aggression, competition and power – money being the means to these ends. Being obsessed with catastrophe and evil is also not the way. Where are we in all this? What direction will history take? A kingdom of peace? A dystopia much worse than Stalin, Hitler and Orwell’s imagination? Is our civilisation about to collapse? Many left-wing and environmental activists and Christians are fearful of this prospect. It has happened before in history, and there is no reason why it should not happen again.

I am very concerned about the denial and ridiculing of Christianity and the advent of a new puritanism: veganism, an exaggerated reaction to climate issues, the Great Reset. There is a kind of psychosis growing, even if these issues do need to be addressed. The archetypes of this transposition from eschatology to this material world were well understood by Josef Ratzinger. As I mentioned, I never met him. I once (1986) saw him cross St Peter’s Square dressed in a simple black cassock and a beret. In itself, that would tell me nothing. But, in Rome, people talk – and that’s an understatement. He has spoken many times, written articles and scholarly books. I share his ressourcement theological view, which is neither Scholastic, nor is it “Modernist” for want of a better term. He based his belief and knowledge on the Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church, especially St Augustine. His philosophy and metaphysics were Platonic rather than Aristotelian. I warmed to reading his writings.

When I read Gavin Ashendon’s “He compared the current era to that of Pope Pius VI who was abducted by troops of the French Republic and died in prison in 1799“, I came back to my own thought of a need for a new Romantic movement, a way of thinking that seeks to restore imagination to humanity and the Sehnsucht for the Transcendent. In the nineteenth century, Romanticism made the revival of Christianity possible. Romantics like Byron and Shelley were atheists but their views and poetry represented a break from the arid Rationalism of the eighteenth century.

Ratzinger’s prophetic view of the Church was perhaps something like our little Continuing Anglican Churches, isolated monasteries and parishes, an Underground Church like in Russia and the Warsaw Pact countries. The clericalism and the corruption would be stripped away and the beautiful churches and much of our Christian culture would be lost. It is happening. I am an isolated priest with absolutely no pastoral ministry, but I did make choices in my life that were not very wise.

Wherever politics tried to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic. (Truth & Tolerance: Belief and World Religions).

Everything is said in two brief sentences. These are not the words of a snarling guard dog! His philosophical knowledge made him understand the same things as Orwell, Huxley and so many of us since those far-off days when those two men died. Significantly for me, Gavin Ashendon mentions Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which my friend (mentioned above) and I watched. We saw the shortened version of the Fellowship of the Ring. I have since bought the DVDs of the long version, and I prepare myself for some very long sessions. Then, I will have to read the books to get Tolkien’s most profound philosophical insights. Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose is entertaining as a film, but the book is a complete education on medieval philosophy with some clear moral teachings. Tolkien will be that much more challenging for me. Perhaps the three books for Lent… Talk about New Year resolutions!

A long defeat? I once asked a priest what he thought of the idea that man was not progressing but rather regressing physically, intellectually and spiritually. As a traditionalist, he blamed it all on Original Sin and confirmed me in my question. I have many doubts about such a simplistic viewpoint, and I even suspect the Gnostic point of view that the Original Sin is not in creation, but in God himself. This will be blasphemy for many, but I do wonder as did Jakob Böhme and those who followed his thought and writings. Is this degeneration built into everything? Is there no final victory of Christ, consequence of the Resurrection and its eternal “validity”. That was another question I asked as a seminarian – Was the Redemption only of limited duration of effectiveness? The question is unthinkable to most Christians, and I am highly reserved about it myself. We are dealing with mystery, the unknown and a lack of evidence, either empirical or as a result of logical deduction.

Our feelings and thoughts go right the way back in history to the persecuted Christians in the Roman Empire, and throughout the earthquakes of the Reformation, the French Revolution, Communism and Nazism and the growing Beast among us right now. The sense of growing weakness is expressed in the Maranatha! – Come, Lord Jesus! of St John. We yearn not for death but the recapitulation of all things in Christ, an end to this degenerating world of sin. Even the more scientific among us there is an end to everything – unless history is cyclic as we find in eastern philosophies.

One thing I notice in our contemporaries is a waning of the use of reason. I am fortunate to have had an education, a real Bildung in the way of learning to reason and debate. I say this in all humility, thanking my late parents and teachers. Where do we see these things, even among educated politicians, like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, both of whom among others went to Eton. At a popular level, what is there other than small-talk about football? The ladies have other subjects, often just as boring to outsiders. I am astounded by the ignorance of journalists when they describe Benedict XVI as having been a Nazi (other than being conscripted in the Hitlerjugend on pain of severe sanctions) or having been a spiteful man. They did not research their subject but went by idées reçues. The same kind of intolerance as during the Kristallnacht is returning. The braying crowd shouts Cancel culture, unaware that they call for their very abolition as human beings. On the other side, multi-billionaires are preparing their new feudalism on almost the entire world population – if they get away with it.

Joseph Ratzinger also said (quoted from Gavin Ashendon):

To have Christian hope means to know about evil and yet to go to meet the future with confidence. The core of faith rests upon accepting being loved by God, and therefore to believe is to say Yes, not only to him, but to creation, to creatures, above all, to men, to try to see the image of God in each person and thereby to become a lover.

It is this faith and hope that confers a right reason on us, the capacity for love, kindness and tolerance. These are definitely my own values, which make me pass for a weak person, without will to be competitive.

If might is right, then love has no place in the world. It may be so, it may be so. But I don’t have the strength to live in a world like that. – Fr Gabriel in Mission.

Keep out of politics. Carry the Blessed Sacrament and let the bastards shoot you. It is the death of a martyr. The atheists and materialists would ask “What’s the use? There is nothing after death. You cease to exist”. Even that would be preferable to such anti-humanism and bestiality. Christ said many times in the Gospel that self-sacrifice is preferable to politics and violence. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.

I remain a Christian in spite of the temptations. Christianity, in spite of the sins and shortcomings of many of its clergy, remains a force for good. This is the purpose of my life, expressed in little things for which I will not become powerful or famous.

May you all go through your values and become aware of this inestimable gift to be called to be good, do good and encourage good in others. Happy New Year 2023!

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Benedict XVI (1927-2022)

Posted on Wednesday, 4 January, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Last New Year’s Eve, I read the news of Pope Benedict XVI’s death about two hours after it occurred. I was struck by the date being the very last day of the year 2022 in which Queen Elizabeth II died, as did my own father. I listened to an old recording in the car this morning of an interview with Dr Francis Jackson who was organist of York Minister from the day he succeeded Sir Edward Bairstow in 1946. He too died in 2022 at a very advanced age. These three men – Pope Benedict XVI, Dr Francis Jackson and my father who was a northern English veterinary surgeon – were first and foremost gentlemen. They were reserved in their speech and judgement of the things around them and were slow to judge and condemn. They were noble and highly competent in their respective fields, theology, English cathedral music and veterinary medicine.

Concerning Pope Benedict XVI, I followed the news of his Pontificate for the entire time since 2005, the year when I joined the Traditional Anglican Communion from being a more or less “retired” vagus cleric. I was already out of the Roman Catholic Church when John Paul II was still reigning. My problem was not the Pope but my immediate situation, my mental health, the fragility of my faith and inability to deal with some of the more narcissistic and toxic of the clergy I had to deal with.

I was familiar with Cardinal Ratzinger’s career and theological reflections. I never met him, but I always heard of him as a gentleman, a profound scholar, kind in his pastoral duties. However, he would have been no walk-over and there were theological positions that were unacceptable even with room for interpretation and dialogue. I wrote in a Facebook posting:

What will happen now in the RC Church is not my problem, though I have my fears. There will no longer be that “ghost” in the closet to resist the “onward” movement of secularism and nihilism. Now the “progressives” can have their way and the spirit of Synod will do the same thing as years ago in Lambeth Palace and that big building behind Westminster Abbey. The years go by without pity except for the blissfully ignorant youth. I have been inspired reading many of Ratzinger’s reflections and serious theological writings. He was a man of intellectual integrity and a true Romantic and Idealist in his discreet way as a Roman Catholic cleric, something unusual for Vatican functionaries and big bosses. May he rest in peace, and may his spiritual and intellectual legacy continue to inspire us all. Ruhe in Frieden, Eure Heiligkeit.

Benedict XVI and the present Pope came from different cultures and experiences of life. It is often assumed that all Germans who lived from that period between the wars were Nazis, authoritarians and “Rottweilers”, nasty snarling dogs defending their property. The very word “dog” implies “dogmatic”. Most people consider “being dogmatic” as bullying and unwilling to dialogue and interpret where things were not binary and either true or false. This image of the Nazi authoritarian was entirely the creation of the media and the disciples of “relativism”, cultural deconstruction and atheism.

Our dualist and binary contemporaries would see Ratzinger as a traditionalist or a so-called Modernist. Both views are wrong. This is something I can understand through having read theology at Fribourg University and in a very ressourcement kind of faculty rather than the strict Scholasticism of traditionalist seminaries. I had contact with Germanic culture and its piety of a very different kind from French, Spanish or Italian popular religion. I did not meet the man, but I had some contact with the kind of mould that made him. I visited Bavaria and Munich in 1999 and immediately felt at home, of course with the exception of the Dachau concentration camp which I also visited, that horrifying and heart-breaking monument of man’s inhumanity to man.

I went a little far calling Ratzinger an Idealist and a Romantic. In both notions, I refer to Germans like Goethe, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Hölderlin and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis). For these men, truth was the Blue Flower, the transcendent, for which we yearned but never entirely possessed. I detest the attitude that claims to possess the truth and to be the way every person must follow on pain of damnation! The Platonic foundation of philosophy and theological thought is far more profound than Aristotle’s seemingly heartless rationalism. Ratzinger was more of a Platonist through St Augustine than a Scholastic or Thomist. In Romanticism, it is the highest spiritual faculty of man that gives reality and truth rather than being simply an abstraction from some external being. It is almost quantum science from a period that predated our modern science. Things are what we make of them. Transcendence and mystery are higher than we are in our rationalism. The transcendentals of truth, beauty and goodness were far more important to Ratzinger the Platonist than to the presently triumphant Jesuits. Ratzinger was no Nazi snarling guard dog!

My main message in this posting is that neither the progressives nor the traditionalists have got it right. This struck me as I read some of the comments to my little epitaph of a posting.

I think your fears are unfounded. It’s important to remember that Ratzinger was an architect of the reforms, and while very systematic and cautious, he trusted the Holy Spirit enough to resign and for Pope Francis to be appointed. He was never a ghost to resist change, he was a faithful servant of God who prayed earnestly for Holy Mother Church. That’s it.

That’s it. What? The tin lid is slammed down and there is no appeal. My commenter upbraids me for my seemingly traditionalist view, and that Benedict XVI was simply a man of the institution, the mainstream. His outreach to the traditionalists was a failure, but the whole issue is unimportant to the mainstream majority. Perhaps… The commenter admitted having a personal issue with “Rottweiler”-style bullying by priests who apparently neglected their “true” pastoral duties. He represents the point of view shown by Andrea Grillo (he mentions Cardinal Arthur Roche), the well-known liturgy professor with what seems to me to be quite an arrogant attitude. I did make the point (or implied it) that the consequence of prohibition (alcohol, drugs, etc.) is the black market and murderous cartels. Does a country impose a ban on Muslims practicing their religion because terrorist acts and atrocities have been committed? Abusus non tollit usum. Some people misusing and abusing something that is not bad in itself does not warrant its complete abolition and repression. Such repression is a direct cause of radicalisation, what happened with the traditionalists under Paul VI. The present pogrom seems to be more sectarian than the measures implemented in the 1970’s by Paul VI.

After my criticism of arrogant bureaucrats of the mainstream, I have been quite shocked by some opinions expressed by traditionalists. This one in particular:

The hermeneutic of continuity has died with its author. The fact that continuity had to be constructed was itself proof that it did not exist. Ironically, traditionalists and progressives are now free to agree: Vatican II was an unprecedented rupture and revolution. The more radical phase of that revolution will presently be propelled forward more violently by Francis and the St. Gallen Mafia that put him into power. The death of Benedict XVI is a dark omen indeed.

Priggish Catholic commentators are insisting that no one say anything negative about Benedict, yet they themselves incongruously call for his immediate canonization and publish obsequious praises so disproportionate that they reek of self-adulation for discerning Benedict’s supposed saintliness. These commentators seem to have forgotten that this pope lived almost ten years after resigning–allegedly for lack of strength of mind and body–thereby leaving the faithful to be ravaged and devoured by the wolves that he himself, as shepherd, told us were there. Benedict, who abandoned his post to the detriment of the universal Church, needs our prayers, not our praises.

I have always understood Ratzinger’s hermeneutic of continuity as an expression to mean something similar to John Henry Newman’s development of doctrine. A book I recommend is Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, Cambridge 1957. It contrasts the attitude that made Protestantism: there should only be what was in the “Primitive Church” – and the idea that things that were unknown in the very early history of the Church can be legitimate today because they are are understood to have been implicit then. Ratzinger wanted to contrast the understanding of Vatican II continuing the Church in its prior history to the idea of destroying everything and building something new – the hermeneutic of rupture. Hermeneutics is a method or theory of interpretation, especially of biblical texts. All ideas are subject to interpretation, including what I am writing here. Do traditionalists generally accept interpretation of Vatican II? Not usually, because they would take the choice of cancelling it to restore the status quo of the Church under Pius XII. Ratzinger, as a theologian, archbishop and Pope was considered as a Modernist by the traditionalists.

Did Pope Benedict betray the Church by abdicating? The writer of this comment represents a very severe and judgemental opinion. Different reasons were given for this abdication. I suspect that he could not handle conflict, even though he did when in charge of the former Holy Office. He had become more of a public figure, and was a reluctant Pope from the beginning. I suspect. There are conspiracy theories. There are allegations that he mishandled child abuse in his archdiocese all those years ago. Did someone dig up enough dirt to make him abdicate on pain of the whole Papal office to be taken to the cleaners? On the other hand, I would not be encouraging people to ask for his canonisation. The Papacy is banalised as are canonisations, like the ringing coin in the coffer and the soul springing from Purgatory.

Is Christianity all bunk? I don’t think so, but I wonder if institutional Christianity has any credibility left. Christianity survives in individual persons. The social or community dimension is secondary. I would be unable to handle being Pope, but I’m not ever going to be elected! That is certain. Perhaps he should have stood and fought without regard to his own safety, but that might not have been the issue. We outsiders are too simplistic. What I saw in Ratzinger was a timid and introverted intellectual who wanted to keep to a via media position and allow traditionalists to remain in the official Church and be free from repression. He occasionally celebrated a Tridentine rite Mass for the Fraternity of St Peter in Germany, and did it very well and exactly. Again, he was a gentleman, not a militant, and did not even believe himself to be apt for the Papacy – but he was the one to be elected in April 2005. I too reject santo subito (make him a Saint quickly) but I would not accuse him of cowardice or betrayal.

There are things I have not understood well like his continuing to live in the Vatican or have himself styled as Pope Emeritus. In his place, I would have gone back to Germany in the style of a simple priest and found a monastery willing to let me retire there and protect me from the press, etc. As I have said, I was “through with” the Roman Catholic Church when John Paul II was still alive and my own life became very unstable until I found my tiny niche in Continuing Anglicanism. Marriage broke me, and I am slowly recovering because every aspect of my life was poisoned. Perhaps I should be silent now, but what good would that do?

When he abdicated, I wrote a few reflections at the time. Views on Benedict XVI. Like many others, I was confused and had mixed feelings. I tried to get some understanding from informed sources like Damian Thompson and Rod Dreher. As now, I lived remotely and no longer had anything to do with the bustling clerical world of the Institute of Christ the King. I too was “retired” but I had never been in charge of anything. I cast my mind back to April 2005 when a friend from my days at the Angelicum in Rome was with me in the Vendée. We all had become frustrated with the way things had become with the increasingly frail and infirm John Paul II. It made no difference to me personally, but I am concerned for others as a member of the human race and a priest. Benedict XVI represented a degree of hope for the traditionalists, those who needed hope for themselves but denied it to others as I found around the Ordinariates in 2009 to late 2012.

It is certainly the definitive end of an era of “two Popes”, but Francis will continue to be marked for a time until he in his turn dies and the Conclave rigmarole begins again with this or that new rule. Roman Catholicism in the future will follow the trajectory of the Anglican Communion, above all the stifling bureaucracy and suppression of individual creativity. It will be collective and corporate without the professionalism of business corporations. Inclusion of minorities will be a figure of speech to promote the ideology of something resembling Chinese Communism. It is no longer a church and is Christian only in name.

Some of the comments on this posting were quite toxic. I have the advantage of being more or less forgotten, though the blog statistics show a fairly constant level of traffic. There are traditionalists who would like to revive the Inquisition’s torture chamber and garrote vil. None will ever have the authority to do anything or stage a failed putsch like neo-Nazis in Germany. I remain  influenced by Dostoevsky‘s Grand Inquisitor and the message of human freedom at a spiritual and noble level. Like Churchill said:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

Secular government (like the French Republic) seems to offer the best balance between the tolerance of religions and a social contract. It isn’t perfect, but what is?

Pope Benedict XVI is abdicating was another one of my articles from 2013. We were all sedevacantists!!! We had no idea who would be elected to replace Benedict XVI. This “end of an era” seems to reflect that of 2013. Normally the death of the Pope precedes the Conclave to elect his successor. If Benedict XVI was wrong to abdicate, he suffered his Karma by watching his work undone and being “cancelled”. I don’t really believe that, but realise that the real explanation is above my pay-grade.

Between the positions of the traditionalists and men like Grillo and Roche, something like what I encountered at Fribourg in the 1980’s, I see no sense in Roman Catholicism. People will continue to throw money at it, but decreasingly. I am anxious about the future, some kind of Orwellian dystopia, darkness that will continue longer than the time we have left to live. Maybe Benedict XVI shared this foreboding and became aware that he could do nothing about it, even in that extremely influential position and office. What I don’t know, I can imagine and conjecture, compare with my own experience. He has died and has either ceased to exist or is experiencing something that was beyond his wildest imagination. I prefer to believe the latter without any evidence I can directly experience.

I end this reflection with a quote from Novalis (Hymnen an die Nacht 1):

Abwärts wend’ ich mich zu der heiligen, unaussprechlichen, geheimnisvollen Nacht. Fernab liegt die Welt — in eine tiefe Gruft versenkt — wüst und einsam ist ihre Stelle. In den Saiten der Brust weht tiefe Wehmut. In Tautropfen will ich hinuntersinken und mit der Asche mich vermischen. — Fernen der Erinnerung, Wünsche der Jugend, der Kindheit Träume, des ganzen langen Lebens kurze Freuden und vergebliche Hoffnungen kommen in grauen Kleidern, wie Abendnebel nach der Sonne Untergang. In andern Räumen schlug die lustigen Gezelte das Licht auf. Sollte es nie zu seinen Kindern wiederkommen, die mit der Unschuld Glauben seiner harren?

Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world — sunk in a deep grave — waste and lonely is its place. In the chords of the bosom blows a deep sadness. I am ready to sink away in drops of dew, and mingle with the ashes. — The distances of memory, the wishes of youth, the dreams of childhood, the brief joys and vain hopes of a whole long life, arise in grey garments, like an evening vapour after the sunset. In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents. What if it should never return to its children, who wait for it with the faith of innocence?

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On this Christmas Eve

Posted on Saturday, 24 December, 2022 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

As I wish my readers a happy Christmas, whether they are with their families or alone with the Mystery we contemplate, I have been corresponding with Edward Jarvis who has written two books on the more illusory aspects of independent Catholic ministry in its various forms. Both he and I share a critical point of view about the “true” (institutional) Churches in this world. It is very difficult to see clearly

He and I hope to work together on a book in a constructive spirit.

Should we write something that aims to help those who explore their calling outside of the big ecclesiastical structures, or something aimed at removing some blinkers and debunking some myths about independent churches – or both? Or maybe something focusing on the sacramental aspects, the clerical state, and the old valid-licit confusion?

I keep an open mind. Who would be our audience? Who are we writing to? I have the same hesitations as when discussing details of the Use of Sarum. We have to see the forest in spite of the multiplicity of trees. I am unclear. In a message back to Edward, I wrote:

* * *

There has always been a link between religion and culture, like Buddhism fitting into Chinese civilisation and Confucianism. Christianity, at least in the early days was an odd man out. It had to graft itself onto existing cultures and even take them over like a cuckoo takes over the nest of another bird, getting rid of its eggs before laying its own. Christianity was easy corrupted from its noble ideals and became a kind of “parasite” and then took advantage of the decadent Roman Empire to build the prestige of the Papacy and its power over national kings and princes.

The Church has always existed as this über-political power and the isolated missions, monasteries and communities.

I have been interested in the “intentional community” idea, but they are extremely diverse in their ideas and ideologies. I fear that many are climate fanatics, woke and “cancel culture”. Many are obsessed with one issue like permaculture, so you spend you life farming and gardening, nothing else, giving up personal transport and the greater world view. This will give you an idea https://diggersanddreamers.org.uk/ You either have to buy in at more than the price of a house in the UK, or join what amounts to a cult with a guru who simply needs guys to work for their feudal lord. The serpent eats its own tail. Alternatively, The Oozlum Bird flies around in ever-decreasing circles until it disappears up its own arsehole. In that safe but insanitary situation, it showers shit and sarcasm over its pursuer.

In brief, I don’t know which community I could relate to, perhaps none in existence. At the same time, it would provide the cultural context in which Christianity could prevail. That’s how monasteries work, but they are by definition totalitarian. You leave your personality behind at the door and you obey Big Brother! There is a genuinely spiritual notion behind that idea – as long as the Abbot is a gentleman, with a noble intention. However, if he has a toxic personality… You’re stuck with him. Like in a marriage to the kind of woman I have had to deal with. They gaslight and are never satisfied. Human evil is an insidious poison.

One intuition that came out of some of the independent clergy was the “niche ministry”. The niche can be anything from music, art, sports, sailing, charitable work, anything. The outward expression of Christianity, priesthood and liturgy, takes second place. It is a bit like the post-war Worker Priest movement in France, the Abbé Pierre and Emmaüs and many others who sought to bring Christ into the rough and tumble. Some got too far into political activism, and again, the ideal gets corrupted. I have crewed for Fr Claude Barbarit, a diocesan priest in the Vendée, who has dedicated his life to taking young people to sea and lifting them out of their nihilism. Rather than creating an artificial society in an “intentional community” you relate to people as they are without expecting them to convert to anything. Eventually some ask questions about the goodness and kindness of the person who has dedicated his life, and if that goodness is attributed to Christ, the message can pass credibly.

Obviously, such a notion is going to have little to do with church buildings and beautiful liturgy – or ugly liturgy for that matter. Much of the inspiration comes from 1930’s Existentialism and Dietrich Bonhöffer’s outrage at “official” Christianity supporting the Nazi regime in the hope of its share of some of the spoils. We begin to arrive at Christianity that is much further stripped away than even the woke bureaucracy of the Church of England and the RC institution. We arrive perhaps at the only thing that makes us continue as Christians rather than go away as cynical materialist nihilists – the Person of Christ. That leaves us in the Underground Church, something like bishops and priests behind the Iron Curtain (a new one is being run up on the infernal sewing machine as I write).

My thoughts are not entirely clear but they are forming in this direction. It isn’t a universal solution for all, but it is an attempt to be truthful. Christianity needs to graft itself onto expressions of truth, beauty and goodness, in whatever form they take. The narcissistic self-proclaimed prince-archbishop has no place in all this. The camel has to go through the eye of the needle!

I would like you to reflect about all this and try to bring something concrete out of it, something “visible” and “tangible” without being a caricature of itself. The book we could work on can be in the spirit of understanding why some (myself included) go into independent ministry or attached to small churches like continuing Anglicanism. You have a man with a strong ideal and a will to get out of the money-noise-nihilism world, and then is beaten down because he is not participating in the competitive rat-race of money and power. What does he do when he finds himself stricken with a “perpetual canonical irregularity”? The theme is inseparable from the feasibility of Christianity in this world and our ability to discern the “points of entry”, man’s receptiveness to the life of spirit. Christianity cannot be political activism, but a spiritual leaven and the “sign of contradiction”. My mind joins that of Pope John Paul II in many ways, with his experience of both Nazism and Communism in his native Poland.

We should do something to give courage and positivity to the shipwrecked sailors rather than beat them down for the sake of Church institutions that have thrown away their own credibility. I have lived outside the UK for a long time, and I experience the Angst of seeing the way things are going, to the point of restricting people’s right to travel. Our resistance has to be interior, our spiritual lives turned towards martyrdom in the Greek etymological meaning of that word.

Please let me know what you think of all this, to encourage me to be clearer. Read Thomas Mann and Rob Riemen, the latter influenced by the former. Mann went into exile. Bonhöffer gave his life. The book and the film The Mission seemed to show a lot of understanding. In the words of Cardinal Altamirando:

So, your Holiness, now your priests are dead, and I am left alive. But in truth it is I who am dead, and they who live. For as always, your Holiness, the spirit of the dead will survive in the memory of the living.

The noble souls of these Indians incline towards music. Indeed, many a violin played in the academies of Rome itself has been made by their nimble and gifted hands. It was from these missions the Jesuit fathers carried the word of God to the high and undiscovered plateau to those Indians still existing in their natural state and received in return, martyrdom.

The priests in question were not martyred by the Guarani but by the Portuguese colonising armies (the king of Portugal at the time was anti-clerical and a Freemason, just interested in power and money).

Fr Gabriel concluded:

If might is right, then love has no place in the world. It may be so, it may be so. But I don’t have the strength to live in a world like that.

Nor do I.

I’m sure we could concoct something out of all that. Watch this space….

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Call for a New Christianity

Posted on Tuesday, 13 December, 2022 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I regularly receive e-mails from Dr William Tighe giving links to various bits of news and views about the Church and the moral state of the modern world. I was particularly struck by this title of an article Pope Francis allies claim Western Christianity ‘no longer works’. In a certain way, most of us living in towns, villages or remote places among ordinary people, not enthusiasts of closed associations, only relate to the Church through our inner life and set of beliefs and values.

What occurs to me is that those boring Jesuit cardinals, Pope and conniving groups are concerned first and foremost for their jobs. They are men of the institution and its bureaucracy and channels of command. My own experience is one of being a priest but unconnected with my Church except in a more interior way. I am subject to a Bishop, an Archbishop, and I maintain my canonical link through doing the right things, avoiding the wrong things and holding to a human relationship like in a family. Our Church (the ACC) has secretaries and people who manage churches and their finances, but the bureaucracy is far from stifling as it is in the big “mainstream” Church institutions like the Vatican, Lambeth Palace and your average diocese.

For the Jesuit Cardinal to call for decentralisation is quite remarkable because he is sawing off the very branch he is sitting on. Is he really calling for the bureaucracy to be folded up and local Christian communities to carry on quietly with as little Roman interference as possible? Very often, these agendas are other agendas in disguise, and motivated by political ideologies like Marxist critical theories. The Jesuits are specialised in “taking a knee” to the Chinese Communist Party!

Should Christianity be based in Beijing rather than Rome, Buenos Aires or somewhere in Africa? It is much easier to transform Christianity into a Marxist ideology than stamp it out. This is hardly news, and tongues have been wagging for decades about Liberation Theology and the use of Christian terms and vocabulary to promote the Revolution and empty all spiritual content from the message of Christ.

There is the problem of the relationship between a religion and culture. Village Christianity is crude and mixed with superstition, as it was in Renaissance England and suppressed by the Reformers. Christianity cannot breathe in a world of nihilism and materialism any more than a fish in air or a human under water without breathing apparatus. Perhaps this thought is in his mind. Alternatively, we can make Christianity express nihilism and materialism. For what?

Christopher Dawson wrote, “Every human culture must possess some spiritual dynamic, which provides the energy necessary for civilization. It is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and a culture. A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture”. Perhaps this view is outdated because Christianity has to be fitted into other cultures. And if Christianity is “over” and we need a “new Christianity”? That seems quite illogical, because something that is “over” is simply dead, a goner, deceased. Call it what you will.

Replace it with what? The neo-feudal dystopia? The “great reset” of the conspiracy theorists? Islamic totalitarianism? Perhaps even the repeat performance now going on in Germany?

If Christianity is over, then you simply close it down, sell its assets and apologise to the world that it ever existed! Then the Pope has to go into an old folks’ home and lots of bishops and cardinals are going to become job seekers and look for overpriced bedsits in cities! As it is, churches are bought by those who could make use of them in one way or another, not an easy thing, especially for homes and business premises.

So we have to give Christianity a new image? Nihilism and materialism? Political activism for all those issues calling themselves new? Bureaucracy like in modern business or government? The Idiotocracy of “groupthink”?

Fr. Tomáš Halík praised Pope Francis and the “synodal process” for seeing the crises as “not a failure of some individuals” but as “just a symptom” of “a sickness in the whole system.” Halík called for a reshaping of the whole system [sic] of Christianity in order to move forward.

OK, well just shut it all down and disperse all assets. Get honest jobs! Just tell the world that Christianity was only ever a fairy tale for children! Slam the lid on it. It just goes on and on.

What would I propose? Do away with the bureaucracy and “groupthink”. Let everyone go the way he wants, including traditionalists, monastics and those with a more spiritual view of Christanity. Tell the world that Leviathan is dead and that priests and lay people have to assume their independence. In our day, it means an Underground Church like in Soviet Russia, Eastern Europe and China. What does it all mean for each of us? It has to be something within each of us, and expressed to others through beauty, witness of life, symbolism and art. I keep banging the drum about a new Romantic Movement, but even that is deluded. We live in a world of advertising and propaganda. I always tell cold callers that I only buy what I need and actively look for, and not as a result of advertising. It is the same with Christian ideas and beliefs – commercial advertising just won’t cut it.

The contemplative approach needs to be encouraged, and each of us can choose among the diversity of monastic rules and writings from the Fathers and the Saints. In post-revolutionary France, monasticism had a tremendous influence on parish life. I saw some of the last remnants in the 1980’s and 90’s. Most of the old priests of Opus Sacerdotale are no longer with us, but they provided much of the inspiration behind the founding of the Institute of Christ the King in the old Villa Martelli at Gricigliano near Florence. Many of them had been country parish priests.

“Pastoral” does not mean bureaucracy and political activism, but celebrating beautiful Masses and the Office, visiting the sick, catechising the children, encouraging vocations and family life, getting round the parish and people’s homes, taking part in village life. It all sound so idyllic and simple. But, the priest had to be appointed by the diocesan Bishop, and that now means the bureaucracy and management. The tension and clash of opposites are engaged, and the parish suffers.

Christianity is now like a man with water in his cupped hands. As he opens his hands, the water flows away and cannot be recovered. I have written much on esoteric and inner Christianity, the disciplina arcana like in the early days when Caesar persecuted Christians for their “infidelity” to the pagan gods. Our communities need to assume their marginality and hide behind closed doors if necessary. We will see more churches and cathedrals neglected and left to rot, demolished or transformed into other uses. We can do nothing about it unless some of us have the money to buy a church – and then maintain it – and not be surprised if no one wants to come to services. Some of us priests are on our own and try to be faithful to our Mass, Office and a worthy life. Our Church, the inner and spiritual Church, the sacramental and liturgical Church, is not over. That is the Church that is indefectible. As for the Jesuit cardinals, it is of no concern to me what they do. Qu’ils mangent de la brioche! – Let them eat cake! May they assume their ideologies or return to Christ, the true Bread of life.

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

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Go Forth and Multiply

Posted on Sunday, 20 November, 2022 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I find it quite ironic that we are informed that the world is being suffocated under the weight of eight to ten billion humans in this world. The biggest populations seem to be in China, India and the African continent, most of those people being desperately poor. If we listened to the Climate Crisis Fanatics, we would be tempted to recommend re-opening Auschwitz and the gas chambers! The idea is absolutely unacceptable and repugnant to a Christian in the same way that we oppose abortion and euthanasia.

Those of us who are of a national-populist bent are worried about some “great replacement”. We are talking about mass immigration of refugees, mostly from Islamic countries and escaping tyranny. It is possible that terrorists find a way into the western world by this means. At least that is what the media tells us. I read this article by someone I esteem for his Romantic worldview – The Children of Men. Its author, Michael Martin, evokes the film that appeared in 2006. The full film is not available on YouTube, so you will need to buy the DVD or find it on something like Netflix. The theme is the sudden onset of total human infertility and the consequences, until a miracle happens at the end of the film with a woman becoming pregnant and having a child. In the meantime, there is the harrowing view of women hankering after children to such an extent that they would treat dolls as their babies!

Unlike the film, it seems to be happening gradually, either because couples don’t want children or are medically infertile. The biggest barrier to large families of six to eight children is economic with current financial expectations. Whatever, retirements and deaths exceed the birth rates in the west. Who will support the retired majority as we baby-boomers arrive at that age and there are fewer people working and paying into state and private pension funds?

Many things are to blame, like the banalising of sex and the high failure rate of marriages (including my own!). We have consumerism in the place of hard work and thrift. My 95-year old neighbour, a farm girl, was still washing her clothes in the lavoir in the 1980’s! Fortunately, she has a washing machine at home now. Who would like to go back to the life of peasants and factory workers in Victorian times? Perhaps it is a wet dream to oligarchs like Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates… I write with a high degree of sarcasm as I enjoy food to eat, a clean house to live in, heat and electricity and things like my car and computers both for work and leisure. We don’t have the right to virtue-signal and be hypocrites.

Pope John Paul II called our ways a Culture of Death. As I see signs of the encroaching dystopia of AI, trans-humanism and what would amount to an ideological revival of Nazism, I wonder if it would not be preferable to live in an Islamic world – like Christians living in Algeria and Morocco. We have many nationalists and traditionalists expressing their fear about the Great Replacement. Perhaps an Islamic culture could flourish out of the ashes of our secularised Christian culture. I have always been inspired by Fr Charles de Foucault, the solitary monk in the desert who was martyred by Islamic zealots. Perhaps this is our future and vocation as Christians of an Underground Church, perhaps preferable to the dystopias portrayed in fiction by Orwell and Huxley. Perhaps…

People become very angry with this present polarising of the world between Russia and China on one side and the USA, the UK and Europe on the other. That makes for radical politics and terrorism. Radical Muslims like cutting throats too! It leaves little optimism for humanity and the idea of living and dying to leave a legacy (financial, cultural, anything) to future generations.

We don’t have the right to give up. My own marriage was childless, probably because of some medical condition of infertility, unless I was being lied to. That is entirely possible, but now irrelevant. The response is nihilism and despair or seeing things in a new and different way. I often mention the book Nobility of Spirit by the Dutch philosopher Rob Riemen. He emphasises the quality of culture, not merely civilisation. I quote a brief review of this book:

In the pages of this slim, powerful book Rob Riemen argues with passion that “nobility of spirit” is the quintessence of a civilized world. It is, as Thomas Mann believed, the sole corrective for human history. Without nobility of spirit, culture vanishes. Yet in the early twenty-first century, a time when human dignity and freedom are imperiled, the concept of nobility of spirit is scarcely considered.

Riemen insists that if we hope to move beyond the war on terror and create a life-affirming culture, we must address timeless but neglected questions: What is a good society? Why art? Why culture? What is the responsibility of intellectuals? Why anti-Americanism? Why nihilism? Why the cult of death of fundamentalists? In a series of three essays, the author identifies nobility of spirit in the life and work of Baruch Spinoza and of Thomas Mann; explores the quest for the good society in our own time; and addresses the pursuit of truth and freedom that engaged figures as disparate as Socrates and Leone Ginzburg, a Jewish Italian intellectual murdered by Nazis.

“The forces now aligned against humanistic values are manifold,” observes George Steiner in the foreword to the book. In this imaginative and compelling volume, Riemen addresses these forces and speaks to every reader who believes in the power of classical ideas to restore Western civilization’s highest values.

If I can do something to contribute towards a new Renaissance, a new Christian Humanism, then perhaps my vocation to be a Catholic (generic meaning of the word) priest will have been fulfilled. There are going to be momentous changes in our world and our civilisational claims will be challenged. As our populations diminish, masses of people from the more populated parts of the world will come and replace us. Sometimes, their intent will be hostile, sometimes benevolent. Most will go to the cities where they will find housing and work (or social benefits). We can speculate as much as we want, but the sheer complexity of everything will make anticipation very difficult. Will they colonise us and reduce us to slavery in revenge for the way British and French imperialism treated them?

For those of my generation, the best is to find a way of earning a living remotely, especially by computer and internet (for as long as those last). Live in the country. Learn farming and permaculture. Prepare for that return to a former age where populations were also sparse because of infant mortality and disease. If we are priests, parish life is over. There is no longer that rooting in village life. People in villages are nice and friendly enough, but they are generally uncultured and, for them, the Church is finished. Mass, whether traditional or modern, would be as alien to them as classical music or the far side of the moon!

I am both pessimistic and optimistic. People will once again be attracted by beauty, truth and goodness – and to the God who is the source of these transcendentals. Christ’s message of love and kindness will once again shine above tyrannical ideologies, cruelty, hatred and evil.

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A Third Way

Posted on Saturday, 12 November, 2022 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

It proves very difficult to make any sense of the world, at least as it seems on the media and other internet sources. I live in the country and feel increasingly anxious faced with the prospect of travelling to a city or through “systems” like air travel. The “paying” unit goes into the system and loses all personality or autonomy until he emerges from the destination point. This impression goes beyond travel and into every aspect of life.

I follow on from my last posting on the Archons, whether they are purely spiritual or incarnate entities. There is an amusing slogan Make Orwell Fiction Again based on Donald Trump’s saying Make America Great Again. Orwell’s major novels, Animal Farm and 1984, were supposed to be warnings in the form of fiction. Orwell, a socialist himself, finally found the reductio ad absurdam of socialism and communism, so he wrote those books to warn future generations off the idea. The Nazis and Fascists were also collectivists, putting the state or the nation above the human person.

We are now faced with a “progressive Left” which appears to oppose the oligarchy of obscene wealth, greed and extreme inequality, the beginning of a new system based on medieval feudalism. In reality, it is a closed circle where the ends meet and amount to the same thing. The difference is that in the Middle Ages, the Church assumed a social role from helping the sick and the poor.

The onset of the Covid pandemic brought a barrage of cognitive dissonance around mismanagement and the exploitation of the pandemic for pharmaceutical companies to make massive profits. The same is happening today with oil and gas companies, as the current crisis caused by Putin’s war in Ukraine and our rigid zero-carbon policies reflects the pandemic almost as an analogy.

The next stage seems to be a “Great Reset” vision of a fourth industrial revolution, transhumanism, and a new social class structure. To what extent is this a conspiracy theory without serious credibility or something real overshadowing our future?

Is there an alternative to the capitalism / communism paradigm? I am not an expert in political philosophy, but I am painfully aware of the need for a new paradigm, no less than a new Renaissance to follow the worst of neo-medievalism. I have often dreamed of ideas like Chesterton’s Distributism, favouring small independent craftsmen and producers or cooperatives. We need a world that favours small businesses. Actually, I do better as a self-employed translator under the present Macron administration in France than under the more Socialist policies. It is fashionable to talk of La Macronie in negative terms as the national populists and the communist dinosaurs do. He is no saint or idol – who is? – but he does have positive things to say and do. Distributism came out of the influence of Romanticism and the Arts & Crafts movement of William Morris. We need a new form of Romanticism that will appeal to our time that is analogous with the tumultuous times of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The dialectic is almost the same between our time and 1780 to about the mid nineteenth century.

The dark vision of the fourth industrial revolution, transhumanism, the dark satanic mill of a fusion of man and machine, and total centralised control by a small group of unelected elite Davos overlords is presented as inevitable, but we can follow Orwell’s advice – Don’t let it happen. It depends on you. I am not a politician or an activist, but I write things like this blog which is of interest to a few like-minded people. Sometimes, an idea gets through even if I will never get the credit for it. I throw out a few ideas and things that matter to me, just messages in bottles thrown into the sea from a desert island.

The resistance will not necessarily be neo-Romantic (or a better term) but is already out there. We don’t have everything to work out from scratch, but we can look around and discern wisdom coming from a diversity of ideas and ambitions. The amazing thing is that I see the same dialectics and conflicts of ideas in the Church as in society as a whole. The big difference with the Church is becoming increasingly irrelevant as time goes by.

We can be grateful that there is a consensus against centralised authority and a need for a new kind of democracy. The fundamental choice we have is the dystopian and totalitarian ant-hill, a two-class system of overlords and obedient serfs – or the possibility of distributing not only money and wealth, but also responsibility and decision-making power. This second possibility involves critical thought and being able to think for ourselves, to think and act outside the box. Too many people follow the crowd and fashions, repeating slogans and mantras without the least critical thought. Freedom is indeed painful.

We should read Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, or at least see the excellent dramatisation played by John Gielgud. Already, Russia was lurching into nihilism, communism and totalitarianism in the nineteenth century. Putin is nothing new!

It is by depth of thought and suffering that we will hope to arrive at the degree of independence we need to resist. There are not only the human qualities, but also our spiritual life and values. I suppose I express very little that is new since discussing my reading of Berdyaev (at least what was translated into English or French) and the contemporary author Rob Riemen on Nobility of Spirit and other subjects close to the resistance against modern forms of Fascist and national socialist ideologies. It is a matter of intelligence, responsibility, human maturity and a spiritual life of some kind.

In the temporal world of the judiciary, the administrative and the legislative, the three powers of the State that are (or should be) separate and distinct, those who are called to these responsibilities need to have a sound understanding of human nature and the nature of reality. They have to understand their identity as human beings, coherence and an ability to relate to reality. Vital questions for any statesman or legal authority revolve around the understanding of the human individual in society, and of the individual and society in reality at large. This understanding has to repose on a solid philosophical basis in terms of metaphysics and epistemology. You won’t find very much of that in most politicians whose ideology is little more than self-interest. From metaphysics comes a basis of spirituality in the individual and the community in the form of the Church. Chesterton once said “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything“. “Nature abhors a vacuum” is a postulate attributed to Aristotle. In a benign form, religion provides man with self-understanding and a sense of community.

A spiritual model of humanity links the individual or person to ultimate reality, even if that truth is mysterious and unattainable by the simple use of reason. There are issues to be faced between German Idealism and various forms of Realism. What is Truth? I have already written a few articles in my open-minded scepticism. Post-Truth. Novalis has always been a great favourite of mine. He offers a refreshing alternative view on Truth than something that powerful people possess. I quote from the encyclopaedia article:

The challenge of romantic philosophy consists in the attempt to think systematically but without allowing thought to stagnate in a final set of truths or dogma. Philosophy ought to be open-ended; it should develop in close interaction with the natural sciences as well as the humanities. In short, philosophy should take the shape of a sustained intellectual experiment; it should be forever on its way and thoroughly inductively minded.

The idea of “ultimate reality” is a partial description of God. the archetype of the reality to which we aspire. Totalitarianism, with its roots in history, understands the human being as a mechanistic automaton driven by individual self-interest and governed by impersonal laws of nature. We are governed by self-interest, a function of the pleasure and happiness, freedom from want, pain, and sadness, and standards of biological fitness including survival and reproduction. These are governed by the use of money. In its excess, man is viewed as an economic unit subject to monetary control, through centralisation and mechanical determinism. This is a negation of human dignity and sovereignty, reducing the human race to cattle. Such a dystopia is incompatible with any kind of religion other than what Marx called the “opiate of the masses“.

I see so many parallels between the early nineteenth century and our own time. There were authors like Dostoevsky and Charles Dickens who gave us a highly realistic portrait of their time, the sufferings of the poor and the weak. From the late eighteenth century, we have the prophetic personality of William Blake (1757-1827) who wrote the famous hymn Jerusalem containing the enigmatic words satanic mills, which probably did not mean cotton factories in Lancashire, but atheistic universities and governments. We live in a time of abundance, with more comfort, food and technology than we would ever need. Poverty is still as real as it ever was, but in most of the western world, the Welfare State will generally offer basic accommodation and a minimum income. What was implicit in the era of the Industrial Revolution becomes that much more radical in our dialectic between the time of abundance and the negation of the human person.

What we need now is a new Renaissance, a new humanism and a new Romantic movement. We need to be Christians but Christian Humanists. I may be accused of “going along with” Vatican II and Pope John Paul II. The latter was introducing a form of Romantic philosophy in his “existential personalism”. There were many fine intuitions in reaction to the old scholasticism and totalitarianism of the central Papal authority. In reality, a century or so ago, European Catholicism was less centralised than many think. Dioceses had little bureaucracy and the Bishops ministered like parish priests – just as today in the small Continuing Anglican Churches. The Synod truly had a meaning in the convergence of independently-thinking responsible members of the institution. “Synodality” is something else, and nothing more than the introduction of technocratic and Woke totalitarianism into the Church.

We first have to work on ourselves. It isn’t easy. Jung called it individuation, which comes from suffering and self-knowledge. Few of us ever dare to break out of the mould and leave the Matrix! Hope in the future will be brought by those who have learned à se démerder (manage on your own, find the solution by your own means to the problem and not depend on others). Fontaine said in his fable Le Chartier – “Aide–toi, le ciel t’aidera“. It means, loosely, God helps those who help themselves. It applies as much to humanity as to the individual person.

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For we wrestle not against flesh and blood…

Posted on Sunday, 6 November, 2022 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

It is some time since I last wrote on this blog. Events in the world have had a profound effect on me, like the two world wars had on those who lived in those soul-destroying days. The horrors of the trenches destroyed the faith of Vaughan Williams and Elgar. The latter stopped composing until shortly before his death in 1934. On the other hand, the American pilot who released a nuclear bomb on Japan entered the monastic life with the Trappists. It all depends on how we take the mystery of evil! This morning at Mass, I read the words of St Paul’s Epistle (Ephesians vi. 10) in Latin and understood them clearly. I broke down in tears as the mendacious world of politics was made so clear:

My brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; And your feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace; Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints; And for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the Gospel, For which I am an ambassador in bonds: that therein I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.

We are not faced with horrible human beings lusting for power and money through lies and deceit, but against a vast and ancient conspiracy of evil spirits, whether we call them demons or Archons, or indeed other names in different spiritual traditions around the world. A human representation of that world of evil would be called a psychopath, showing what we are up against in the spiritual world beyond our time and space.

What is a psychopath? It is essentially a being who is devoid of empathy or moral conscience, who has no care faced with the sufferings of his (her) victims. We are not only considering the worst serial murderers who justly died on America’s electric chairs and hanging ropes, but a minority of humanity who are as if infected by a “virus” that takes away their humanity. They operate in unison, even if not consciously, in sowing terror and disruption in the world. Psychopaths are not only serial killers like Ted Bundy or Jack the Ripper. They are not always killers and most have never been held to account by the law. We become increasingly aware that many psychopaths hold positions in government, politics, big business, the medical and pharmaceutical professions. When we find them in science, they are developing biological and other weapons, trans-humanism, great resets, a replay of Nazism, “playing God”. Some want to replace humans through genetic manipulation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nano-technology. They view humans as inferior, fit for slavery or slaughter. It is difficult to typify psychopathy in empirical scientific terms, but the key comes in the form of a supernatural category and concept.

I once walked past a man with a woman in the street, very ordinary people it would seem. I was deeply struck by the impression – That man is dead. This thought or feeling is perhaps a root of the popular mythology of zombies, the living dead. A zombie is a mythological un-dead human body created through the reanimation of a corpse, something like Frankenstein’s monster revived through the use of electricity or through black magic like voodoo. This man was certainly a human being, born of a mother and father, perhaps someone charming if only I knew him. But I don’t and all I could see in his face was nothingness. Most people I cross in the street don’t leave me with such an impression.

Gnosticism had a more developed notion of demonology than classical Christianity. We read all over the place about great conspiracies of powerful people associating in secret societies like the alleged Illuminati or Freemasonry. The Nazi empire was truly a criminal conspiracy of some of the most horrible and evil people who ever lived. However, most conspiracy theories contain the seeds of their own lack of credibility. Humans are not intelligent enough to keep something like that going for centuries, in secret, and get away with it. Some popular figures like David Icke tell us that the British Royal Family are shape-shifting alien reptiles! That alone takes his credibility away, which is unfortunate, since he has many profound intuitions in other subjects.

Yet there is a monstrous conspiracy, but it is not human. Are the Archons shape-shifting alien reptiles. Can they be experienced by humans through our normal five senses? We incarnate humans have invented technical means to go to the moon, which took some three weeks. If I remember something I read, a space vehicle takes some seven weeks to go to Mars. To travel light years, even with the future invention of Star Trek technology and warp speed, would take longer than a human’s lifetime. Now, there is strong evidence that this world has been visited by creatures who are represented in ancient Egypt and South America. When did any of us see a giant human body with something like a dog’s head? It is too easy for us to say that they were just figments of an artist’s imagination. The Old Testament is full of myths that are shared with other traditions, the most obvious being the great Flood. Who were the Nephilim? The big guys with animal heads? Shape-shifting reptiles? How can we explain the absence of fossils or other remains except for allegations of very large human giants found here and there? These questions have gone into the making of science fiction films like Stargate, and our imagination find it difficult to discern anything until we dismiss it all as bunk. A popular theory is that they don’t travel through space but between parallel universes – like different frequencies of electro-magnetism than can be picked up by a radio, one at a time. Stephen Hawking took the idea of parallel universes seriously and worked on it. Unfortunately there is no empirical proof of any of this, but nor is there any for God and the Angels. The true sceptic keeps an open mind.

Something influences or even takes possession of a proportion of humanity we call psychopaths, takes away their humanity, and makes those beings into enemies of humanity. Psychiatrists look for a difference in the brain, but the issue is spiritual. It is beyond science. Yet there are some of the most perverted sadists out there who mete out inhumane treatment to their victims. They are often politicians, successful businessmen, military officers and commanders, lawyers, doctors – and even bishops and priests, ministers and clergy of other religions too. History keeps repeating itself, and so does the infernal litany of war, starvation, genocide and murder. We face dire times. What can we do?

I briefly mentioned Gnosticism which had several forms in history. Its most Christian side was represented by the Alexandrian Fathers like Origen and St Clement of Alexandria. Little was known about Gnosticism until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts as recently as 1945. Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) stated that “Gnosticism is the acute Hellenization of Christianity“. It is a narrow point of view when dealing with such a vast and diverse phenomenon that escapes narrow labelling. A study of Gnosticism does raise some difficulties about God himself and the mystery of evil. Who committed the original sin? I will not attempt to give any answer to that question here. In briefly discussing Gnosticism, the question being asked is who or what were the Archons?

In Gnosticism, creation was not the work of the “God above God” but the Demiurge, this word coming from the Greek δημιουργός, meaning “public or skilled worker”. This figure is also called “Yaldabaoth”, Samael (Aramaic: sæmʻa-ʼel, “blind god”), or “Saklas” (Syriac: sækla, “the foolish one”). The Demiurge is sometimes ignorant of the superior god, and sometimes opposed, in which case he is malevolent. Other names or identifications are Ahriman, El, Satan, and Yahweh. Taken literally, this is blasphemy to the orthodox Christian or Jew. The Gnostics would answer that this divinity is not the God of love and light, but another being. Orthodox (with a small “o”) Christianity lumps God and the Demiurge together and adds the fallen angel called the Devil, Satan or Lucifer among other names. God would have created matter, not the Devil. The origin of Dualism is this attribution of both material creation and evil to the Demiurge. Thus the physical universe and incarnate humanity are compromised or “infected” from the very beginning, without any human sin being involved as related in the Book of Genesis. Christian asceticism is to some extent influenced by this dualism when materiality, including the human body, is perceived as evil and constrictive, a deliberate prison for its inhabitants.

Some variants of Gnosticism used the term archon to refer to several servants of the demiurge. According to Origen’s Contra Celsum, a sect called the Ophites posited the existence of seven archons, beginning with Iadabaoth or Ialdabaoth, who created the six following: Iao, Sabaoth, Adonaios, Elaios, Astaphanos, and Horaios. Two of these names are given to God in the Old Testament, though the meaning of Adonai is extremely confused. What do we make of “Lord God of Sabaoth”? Sabaoth was seem to be a being who is subordinate to Yahweh, also a word similar to Sabbath – the seventh day on which no work is done and everyone goes to the Synagogue. Christ found the meaning of the Sabbath being distorted when the Pharisees took him to task for healing a sick person on this day. This twisting of meaning is often a root of evil.

All this has certainly been studied in great depth, and my own biblical and theological knowledge finds itself at its limit. When Christ exorcises a demon in Luke’s Gospel, he exhorts the person to prudence, saying that the expelled spirit finds seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they all enter the person and live there. And so that person is worse off than before. Numbers have always been important in exegesis. Orthodox Christianity was not something monolithic for a very long time, and nor was Gnosticism. I discuss the question because we need to think and learn, to discover a deeper truth through comparison.

Whether humanity has been assailed by demons or archons, obsessed by fear and jealousy, we consider the long history of the suffering and trauma the world has suffered. These beings are bent on destroying mankind. They are vampires and parasites. They possess and use humanity with advanced technological secrets, power and wealth.

I was recently talking with a priest here in France about the current crisis in the world. How could I be against Putin? Surely he proclaims a message of Christian civilisation? I am perhaps a little more familiar with Russian philosophy than many: Dostoievsky, Berdyaev, Soloviev, etc. The Grand Inquisitor in the Karamazov Brothers proclaims a Christian Empire but is essentially an atheist! Would Christ do to Ukrainians what Putin and his army have done? If so, I need to start looking for a new religion or settle for materialism as a philosophy of life! Which god is God and which god is the Demiurge?

Another appealing concept, also present in the Old Testament and Christianity, is Sophia. She is often perceived as a feminine emanation from God, the “mother” of the Demiurge. There are many parallels between Sophia and Mary the Mother of Jesus, and one of the titles of Mary in the Litany of Our Lady is Sedes Sapientiae. Many of the Old Testament reading in Mass of Our Lady expand on wisdom – Σοφία in Greek. Is there confusion between two distinct beings, or is Mary as Mother of Jesus an image of Sophia? Who is bad and who is good? Already, we express ourselves as dualists, and the whole combat is being fought within each one of us.

A number of Russian Orthodox theologians showed a particular interest in Sophia, Sergei Bulgakov in particular. In the west, Louis Bouyer studied and wrote on Sophia in seeking to find the deepest roots of Catholic devotion to Mary. He wrote the monumental Sophia et le Monde en Dieu. Wisdom brings us to know God through the Mystery. Bouyer attempted to tease out an “orthodox” version of Gnosticism to distinguish it from heresy. I recommend these books either in French or English translations that are certainly available.

I return to my theme of today. Our combat is not a material one or an attempt to bring back a Christian empire, especially is it is through atrocities, war crimes and destruction. It is a temptation to look for a material Christian kingdom when we are challenged by the New World Order, Great Reset 2030, Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, post-humanism and all the other terrors of our nightmares, but it is a temptation. We can only fight spirit by spirit, essentially by prayer and fasting, by retreating from the cities and the noise to challenge the enemy within our own souls. St Paul described the world of 2022 as in all other ages of our history – principalities, powers, rulers of the darkness of this world, spiritual wickedness in high places. The rot is established in the institutional Church too, and that is no longer a refuge. What do we do? Just go through this short text. Our defence is God, being in his grace, standing up to evil with truth. Lying is one of the worst sins because of its ability to distort and annihilate. We have to be truthful and strong in ourselves, being virtuous and refusing the temptation to lie and deceive. The Gospel of Peace is not Putin’s “Russian Orthodox Empire”, nor is it our hegemony of power and obscene wealth, our Woke “cancel culture”, gender ideology and all the other stuff from the black box of dirty tricks. Our shield is our faith and our weapon is God’s word. We pray with perseverance with the Saints, both those who are still living as well as those we commemorate at the altar. Our combat does not kill or commit atrocities but is concentrated on filling the evil darkness with light and love.

Lord grant me the courage and bravery to be worthy of such a combat!

* * *

Fr Michael Wood, an Orthodox priest and monk, has published this on Facebook and has given me permission to reproduce it here.

DEALING WITH THE MODERN CULTURE OF THE WEST

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

That was a traditional translation of an excerpt from Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians 6:12.

A literal translation, having regard to the linguistic usage of the period:

“Because we are wrestling not against blood and flesh, but against the Archons, against the Powers, against the Cosmic rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the celestial places.”

An Archon is a Greek term for a worldly lesser ruler, Powers are satanic angels (demons), the Cosmic rulers of the darkness of this world are rulers who are satanically controlled and their controllers, and the spiritual forces of wickedness are the corruptibility and wicked intent of the highest rulers.

Saint Paul is drawing our attention to a fact, which is alarmingly evident today: That we are literally fighting for our spiritual lives against pretty well all earthly secular governments and against the very powerful legions of satan himself, who are sensing victory.

We are fighting against the whole secular, morally depraved satanically induced culture of the surrounding society and their governments.

Unlike the typical modern conception, “demon” had a much broader application in the ancient usage, where, originating from the Greek word “δαίμων” (daímōn), it was a generic term for “a spirit” with no connotation as to whether it was good or evil.

With the translation into Greek of the Old Testament, known today as the Septuagint, the word “demon” acquired a negative connotation, and has since come to mean and “evil or unclean spirit”.

In the Early Church, a “demon” can refer to pagan gods which were in fact fallen angels which were in rebellion against God as satan’s legion. These are the beings Saint Paul refers to as “powers” (Ephesians 6:12).

Saint John of Damascus tells us the following about the archangel Lucifer (satan):

“Lucifer was not made wicked in nature but was good, and made for good ends, and received from his Creator no trace whatever of evil in himself. But he did not sustain the brightness and the honour which the Creator had bestowed upon him. Of his free choice, he was changed from what was in harmony to what was at variance with his nature, and became roused against God; thus, he was the first to depart from good and become evil. For evil is nothing else that absence of goodness, just as darkness also is the absence of light. For goodness is the light of the mind, and, similarly, evil is the darkness of the mind….Now along with him an innumerable host of angels, subject to him, were torn away, followed him, and shared in his fall. Therefore, being of the same nature as the angels, they became wicked, turning away at their own free choice from good to evil.”

Lucifer was filled with pride and boasted that he would establish his throne on the clouds of heaven and become equal to God. Isaiah writes, “How has Lucifer, that rose in the morning, fallen from heaven! He that sent orders to all the nations is crushed to the earth. But thou saidst in thy heart, ‘I will go up to heaven, I will set my throne above the stars of heaven; I will sit on a lofty mount, on the lofty mountains toward the north.’ But no thou shalt go down to Hades, even to the foundations of the earth (Is 14:12-15).” Lucifer fell from glory as the Lord reminds us in the Gospel, “I was beholding Satan as lightning having fallen out of the heaven (Lk 10:18).” All the angels that were subject to him also rebelled against God and followed their leader Lucifer. They then assumed a black and dismal appearance instead of their previous radiance and became demons.
And so we are beset with powerful enemies on all sides but one, on that side stands Christ the Anointed, our Saviour, if we will but turn to Him.

Ancient Rome, for all its cruelty and harshness, ancient Greece for its relative licentiousness, the notorious Canaanites were nowhere near as totally morally depraved as is modern western society.

Think about the pornography industry, the LGBTQ agenda, the overt moves towards the legitimising of paedophilia, the introduction of euthanasia, the massive abortion industry, the totally pervasive drug industry through all classes of society, the virtually non-existent sexual morality standards anywhere, the prevalence of divorce, the ongoing wars fomented purely by corporate greed, the repetitive discovery of elected representatives’ sexual deviancy, the acceptance by society of homosexuality and homosexual “marriage” and transgenderism. The “normalisation “ of transgender, homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual exotic sex and ubiquitous permissiveness, the clearly visible corporate production of known dangerous/useless medications, the fairly obvious corruption of elected and non-elected officials.

Nothing is sacred save LGBTQ – it is now a required belief – required to keep your job, and required by law.

All this moral revolution has been coming for a long time, but it only actually broke the surface in the sixties and has grown into a huge, world-consuming monster today.
We are now wading around in a morass of sewage.

The only real way of dealing with this is involving oneself with ones’ Orthodox Church congregation (no other church will do because they are all involved in the modern culture of immorality), attending services, throwing out the TV set and newspapers, restricting use of social media to proclaiming God, trying to find a way of earning a living away from the secular corporate world or large educational institutions.

“Because we are wrestling not against blood and flesh, but against the Archons, against the Powers, against the Cosmic rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the celestial places.”

So how to wrestle? We have the instructions of the Anointed to pray:

“Prayer needs no teacher. It requires diligence, effort and personal ardour, and then God will be its teacher.” – St. Meletius the Confessor

What is prayer? It is the mutual and personal encounter with God. It is through prayer that we open ourselves to the invisible, imperceptible power of God. To pray is to stand before God with our mind in our heart.

First of all, Christ tells us in the Gospel of Luke, “How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him” (Luke 11:13). We pray so that God can help us to become more like Him in our actions. We pray for our renewal and the growth of our soul. We pray to give thanks to God for all He provides for us. We pray to seek forgiveness for our sinfulness. We can also pray to seek help for others as well as ourselves. But we must not forget to pray for His help in our own spiritual growth. This is not selfish, but essential for us to better love and serve others and carry out God’s commandments. We ask also for His help in supporting us in the various ascetic practices we choose to undertake to help purify our inner being.

Begin praying by focusing your consciousness and forcibly gathering all the powers of the soul and body. Take the time at the beginning to quiet your mind and body and to concentrate your energies in your heart. Christ says, “Enter into thy closet and … shut thy door” (Matt 6:6). Remove all activities that could disrupt your inner descent. Set aside, to the best of your ability, all of your problems of the day and your worries for tomorrow. This is not a time for thinking or worrying.

We are asked to pray constantly. Here are the Scripture references to this idea:

Pray without ceasing (1Thess 5:17)

Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit (Eph 6:158)

He spoke a parable to them, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart. (Luke 18:1)

Our life is to become one of a constant prayer where we are continually in a relationship with God. This is our main task, to draw nearer to God. Saint Isaac of Syria says that it is impossible to draw near to God by any means other than unceasing prayer.

Your time in prayer will grow as your relationship with God grows.

Fast for a reason, fast if you want God to take you really seriously, fast and pray.

This is the means of our resisting the infernally toxic “culture” of secular society that is infecting everything, even, in places, the Church itself. This will help us determine what actions we must take in response to the culture’s destructive course against Christianity. Our prayer is our secret weapon, unknown to our earthly adversaries, and hated by the satanic angels.

* * *

Just a comment of my own: We seem to be in an eschatological mood. The history of the Church has oscillated between the eschatological Sehnsucht and the settled periods of the institutional Church and civil authorities in the form of kingdoms and empires.

Indeed, we have to fast and pray, do something about ourselves and not try to change other people. This is easier said and done – not merely a stoical moral effort but a pilgrimage in knowing ourselves and realising our God-given vocation.

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Rewilding Christianity

Posted on Saturday, 8 October, 2022 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

We sometimes hear about “rewilding” areas of land that have been used for agriculture. Their owners, for good or bad, decide that it would be best to plant some trees and let nature do what it wants. There are two sides to this one, and this is not the subject of this posting. The term rewilding is used in an analogical way to describe Christianity in its “natural” state as is found in Eastern Orthodoxy in remote places and seemingly in medieval western Catholicism before the Reformation. It is an interesting concept, reflected to some extent in Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, and in some of my own experience in French country parishes where the priest adopted a traditionalist position but as having been the curé of the parish for so many years since something like the 1950’s.

One thing that had always grated with me was what happened to Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, since the Reformation. It had to be reformed on both sides, rationalised, systems of apologetics and catechesis constructed to justify the position being defended. Rationalism arrived to an extreme with Descartes and the supernatural was utterly separated from the natural. This system of Deism, the notion that God pressed the start button and disappeared from the natural world including humanity. Only a step further lay atheism and materialism in science and human life. Only now, in the thought of men like Rupert Sheldrake and others, is materialism being challenged in science as consciousness becomes a credible concept as preceding matter.

We have been aware for a long time that institutional religion is nearing the end of its shelf-life. Go back a hundred years to the poignant story of a young priest in a spiritually barren part of the world in the Journal d’un Curé de Campagne by Georges Bernanos. If I were not a priest belonging to some kind of Church, I ask myself what would attract me to attend services at my local church. The building is something like 11th century, but spiritually dead, and for a very long time. I find the same thing with the traditionalists, mostly political reactionaries and monasteries are largely like the Army: you leave your personality behind you to become a part of the collective. Is that true asceticism? An abbot even admitted to me that monastic life is Communism! Is Christianity so ill that it was never true in the first place? It is a temptation to ask that question, until we consider the alternatives! We are indeed confronted with the cheap grace criticised by Bonhöffer as he considered the state church in Germany blithely going along with Hitler.

I discovered the notion of Romantic Christianity (or Christian Romanticism) through asking myself what revived the corpse to some extent in the nineteenth century. English Romantic poets like Keats and Shelley were quite hostile to Christianity, influenced as they were by the Enlightenment all in claiming human imagination and a profound meaning of death. Not so with Germans like Göthe, Hölderlin and Novalis. There was a line of thought and spiritual aspiration from Jacob Böhme and others in early Lutheranism. Russians like Nicholas Berdyaev latched onto this early Idealism and Romanticism. I went this way while I still a student at Fribourg, unable to cope with the secularism of the institutional Church or with the aggressive apologetics of the traditionalists and conservatives. At a time when I was very ill at ease, I consulted a psychotherapist in Lausanne. His remedy was not a course of drugs, but simply reading Jung, Soloviev and Berdyaev. I found the books at the University Library or buying them from bookshops in England, and I still have and read them. I came to appreciate the Ressourcement of some of my professors at the university and to understand things in a new light. The good psychotherapist saw that I had no money, and he didn’t charge for his consultation. I was lucky to go to the right one! I found stability through getting rid of cognitive dissonance. I kept my mouth shut when I went to Gricigliano, though my “Modernism” didn’t go entirely unnoticed! I had books by Tyrrell on my bookshelf…

I discovered this dialogue between Rupert Sheldrake and Dr Mark Vernon, a writer, psychotherapist and former Anglican priest.

Dr Vernon has his own website and a course on Romantic philosophy. This is the first time I have encountered this person. After watching the video, I went to his site and, lo and behold, he shows his interest in Romanticism. What I call Romantic Christianity or “Romantia Christiana” is only a part of a wider vision. Romanticism in its strictest historical meaning is expanded onto a much wider base than simply the reaction against the excesses of the eighteenth century. The concept comes up again and again in history as an analogy of a whole Weltanschauung beyond the cultural vacuum at a popular level and resulting barbarianism, on one side, and materialism or Deism on the other.

These two academic gentlemen speak of “full strength” Christianity as opposed to the watered-down caricatures asking for inclusion in the secular and “woke” sphere. It is not the “hyper-masculine” political ideology of some Christians, but a more profound and mystical approach, a rediscovery of medieval values as expressed in the beauty of our churches and cathedrals, the continuation and perfection of music and choral services. We should not be afraid to take inspiration from esoteric Christianity, from René Guénon and others I have encountered here in France. There is a form of Gnosticism which is compatible with Christianity, especially the Alexandrian Fathers. Jung developed some of those ideas into ways to heal the wounded human soul, through self-knowledge and integration.

We should indeed discover the world of Radical Orthodoxy, C.S Lewis, Owen Barfield and Christian Romanticism. As institutional Christianity withers and dies, a new wave of spirituality might bring about a revival of liturgical beauty and experience of the Divine. It has certainly given me a new meaning of my priestly vocation, even when I am sailing along the dark cliffs of northern Brittany, like Nietzsche in the Alpine mountains or forests. A very interesting intuition is that of panentheism (as opposed to pantheism). The word comes from the Greek πᾶν – all, ἐν – in, Θεός – God. The divine intersects every part of the universe and also extends beyond space and time. Unlike pantheism, which holds that the divine and the universe are identical (all is God), panentheism maintains an ontological distinction between the divine and the created. God is present everywhere and in the time in which we live. This is an important notion that detaches us from the dry absolute distinction between nature and the supernatural that we find in the Scholastics and Nominalists.

Another vital characteristic is the love of music and beauty. Modern secular institutional Christianity is based on the anti-aesthetics of post-modernity and post-humanism. As early as 1912, Arnold Schönberg abolished the rules of mode and harmony and began a movement of chaos and ugliness. He would write on the basis of the chromatic scale, and so the notes seemed to be completely random and dissonant to the ear. Artists like Picasso (yes, I know that collectors pay a fortune for his works) destroyed form, and some works in art galleries were even created by a person with a known name throwing a tin of paint at the canvas. Is it cynical, anti-culture (Cancel Culture) or what? It brought Impressionism to its final reductio ad absurdam. I live in a time when what we used to call pop music in the 1960’s has driven the final nail. It is overbearing and intolerable, yet dominates entertainment and the experience of going into town.

Cardinal Ratzinger once wrote:

Plato contemplates the encounter with beauty as the salutary emotional shock that makes man leave his shell and sparks his “enthusiasm” by attracting him to what is other than himself. Man, says Plato, has lost the original perfection that was conceived for him. He is now perennially searching for the healing primitive form. Nostalgia and longing impel him to pursue the quest; beauty prevents him from being content with just daily life. It causes him to suffer.

These are the words of a Romantic, one who seeks the divine through the visible and audible icon of beauty and musical harmony. One of his better-known quotes is:

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.

Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendour of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history.

If the Church is to continue to transform and humanise the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection?

No. Christians must not be too easily satisfied. They must make their Church into a place where beauty—and hence truth—is at home. Without this the world will become the first circle of hell.

There is no doubt that the world is becoming the first circle of hell, a state of anxiety in which nuclear Armageddon is not excluded, where our own “side” is as immoral and dark as that of Putin. The light is there for all to see, just asking us to walk towards it and become transfigured.

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A Mini Semaine du Golfe

Posted on Saturday, 24 September, 2022 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have just returned home from this wonderful and peaceful week in the Golfe du Morbihan, including a passage out to the island of Hoëdic (insert on the map below). We were three boats, not always the same three, as a friend of my friend Frédéric has a collection of some seventeen boats!

I have already been to the famous event held every two years, La Semaine du Golfe, in 2015, 2017 and 2019. 2021 was cancelled because of the Covid pandemic. I am registered to join Flotilla 3b next May. See the official website. In 2019 there were about 1,200 vessels from three-masted ships to tiny dinghies like my Sarum. Next year, I will go with Novalis.

I left the video with my running commentary unlike my trip to northern Brittany. This is the “low end” of amateur sailing, when I think of the ongoing Golden Globe race in which several boats have come to grief or the skippers have abandoned the attempt. I just like the small and simple.

I hope you enjoy the video and the natural beauty I have lived with.

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Medieval Dystopia?

Posted on Saturday, 27 August, 2022 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

We are being bombarded by the media about the “climate emergency” and the consequences of Putin invading Ukraine and of the availability of affordable energy in the form of natural gas. We howl in the agony of worry and anxiety faced with massive changes in our lives. For many, it will take the form of no longer having the money to continue living in the world as it is. Someone living in the street no longer has access to technology or communication or even to a place to live or food to eat. He must either end his life or find temporary respite through the rare generosity of others who still have money, homes and food. A person in such a precarious situation is already living in a world without culture or technology, what we might be tempted to call a medieval hovel or simply the pre-death of destitution.

What were the Middle Ages? Historians debate the difference of values and cultural markers between, say, the late fifteenth century and the time of the French Revolution three centuries later. The demise of rationalism provided the growth medium for Romanticism and a yearning for another era, one that was responsible for the most beautiful cultural achievements – like our cathedrals. The notion of that long period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Reformation holds a different meaning for the historian and the Romantic, one like Novalis who wrote Die Christenheit oder Europa. This work is generally understood to be a parable, an analogy, to describe a state of mind and yearning rather than a historical truth.

We have not to forget that the Middle Ages was not a time when more “advanced” people retreated into a less rational and more primitive era, like the destitute person I mentioned above. The rationalist will generally consider the Middle Ages by their obscurantism and inhumanity, the barbaric way by which condemned criminals were executed for the entertainment of the crowds gathered around the gallows and the quartering block. I feel very intensely that we are returning to a fascination for darkness, the night, castles, witches and wizards, pre or post rationalism – and all the themes of many computer games.

The media carries much of the responsibility for this fear and anxiety. The eschatology associated with global warming is a part of this post-rational mindset. The ideologies of crowds are nothing new, and we have only to think of the rise of Fascism and Nazism a hundred years ago. We stand in awe in the monuments of the Middle Ages, yet we totter between the wake of the Enlightenment and the darkness of many applications of science. Frankenstein was written more than two hundred years ago in response to the consequences of a catastrophic volcanic eruption on the world’s climate – in 1816. We are in a way entering a new Romantic era. The era from 1790 to roughly 1820 marked the inspiration of poets and dreamers, but also the wildest spiritual prophecies and religious revivals in America and Europe.

I am not convinced that humanity follows trends uniformly, but rather that different values become manifest during a same historical era. There were rationalists in the fourteenth century, and there were massive witch-hunts in the era of Descartes. Nazism was defeated only fourteen years before my birth and left its black mark in the culture of Germany, Europe and the entire modern world of science and technology! Winston Churchill made a speech in 1940 in which he described the world into which Europe and the United States would be plunged if Hitler prevailed:— “the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of perverted science”.

The Catholicism of the Middle Ages is still with us. It suffices to visit a place of pilgrimage like Lourdes or Fatima to see the naivety of people each with their special needs, but also their absolute faith. It suffices to visit a monastery like the Benedictines of Fontgombault or Le Barroux to witness medieval liturgical life at first-hand. Their life is not a theatrical reconstruction but the life they have chosen (or which chose them). Our problem is that we have also known something else. Léon Bloy once wrote Souffrir passe, avoir souffert ne passe jamais, meaning that our life experience leaves a permanent mark on us. We yearn for the monism of medieval life and thought, but we have to realise that it was no more united than our current fragmentation. Our reflections of faith and reason are full of fallacies and traps for the unwary. Religious belief and thought were more diverse than we would like to imagine, and Islam perhaps had more influence than Christianity in the world of philosophy and science. That period was less hostile to science and rationalism than many of us would imagine. Novalis certainly sought a meaning in Christian Europe that he would never find otherwise than by analogy.

The amazing ting about the Middle Ages is that they represent a period in the past, studied by historians, but also, in the future by analogy. This is probably what was in the back of the mind of that young man between Jena university and his father’s salt mines. In thirty years’ time, when global warming has forced us all to live in northern Canada or Siberia, we won’t be building cathedrals or singing Gregorian chant, but learning to live without electricity or gas! We already find it hard to find a family doctor in the countryside. My own is Romanian and speaks English slightly better than the French in which she should be fluent to practice medicine in this country! We might be back to quacks, faith-healing and bleeding quicker than we think. We are divided between the idea of the shitty hovel and the cathedral, as today between an oligarch billionaire’s super yacht and a group of tramps dossing under a railway bridge. One author for whom I have great esteem is Umberto Eco (1932-2016), not only for that entertaining story about the monastery in Italy and the whodunnit mysteries, but also for his philosophy and analysis of human thought and language. His work is quite mysterious and very technical in its analysis. I have to confess that I am more familiar with his fiction than his more academic works.

There are certain characteristics by which we identify that age of Aristotelian and Thomist reasoning, already a forerunner of Enlightenment rationalism. What we come to call medievalism becomes an interpretive tool to examine our contemporary age and its hermeneutic, ideological distortions and fears. Umberto Eco spoke of ways to “dream” the Middle Ages – Dieci modi di sognare il Medioevo. We have in particular Millenarianism, the doom-mongering and eschatological expression and the orthodoxy of Christendom. This notion of “dreaming” the era again reminds us of Novalis’ most celebrated fragment of 1799.

We find that the Middle Ages is not a threat of the future, like the rants of Greta Thunberg and other cheap demagogues, but a reality that is already with us. Uncertainty is our companion and stability is found to be an illusion. We try to keep everything under control by classifying and labelling everything and every identity. The “new” Middle Age will be seen as a nightmare, a utopia or an epiphany. Our ideology describes us as rational, but perhaps we are rational because we are ideological. Perhaps it is in this light of our own medieval era that we would form a more objective opinion on the sixth to the sixteenth centuries. I think of the quaint harbourmaster’s office in Dinan and the superimposition of black oaken beams over modern toilets and showers. Medieval man adapted Roman ruins and Romanesque churches and modified their style and use.

Perhaps we are more ready for change than we imagine. Our uncertainty and fear bring us to a sense of determinism. We are scared of losing the identity we claim. The temptation to nationalism is still there as are other expressions of resentment.

What do I imagine happening now? Firstly, the incessant pressure from the media, politicians and demagogues is no more than vacuous claptrap. I hope that my own reflections are more based on my acquired knowledge and experience of life. My scepticism (keeping an open mind for as long as I am not convinced of something) is a great asset. My big question is whether medieval man knew he was medieval, in the way we call ourselves modern. Did he try to define and constitute life as we have done since about the time of Descartes. Did they have a notion of progress and growth that we are now losing for our very survival? I was very impressed at school on studying William Golding’s Lord of the Flies portraying a particularly pessimistic and nihilistic view of human nature. Strip away the veneer of culture and mankind becomes something worthy of death and destruction! Fortunately, humanity is also capable of love, truth, beauty, art and music, literature and discovery of nature. As a Christian humanist, I believe that good outweighs and beats evil.

I have no idea about what is going to happen with Russia and Ukraine. The “post-truth machine” has obscured everything and we cannot trust any narrative. I find it tragic, because Russia at its most noble has produced a sublime contribution to human culture. There may be no winner or loser, since it is in the interests of the West to negotiate. Germany in the early 1930’s was ruined economically, and what came out of that? Hitler. Putin chose his moment as his stroke of genius: call the West’s bluff as we started to engage the process of energy transition to solve the “climate emergency” (as if man could do anything about it). Like in the past, we can do nothing against the weather or the fury of the sea. We take ourselves for gods, but we are not. In the end, we either come to terms with Putin or we learn to go without energy (gas and electricity) and all the technology those two resources make possible.

The last time I took my little boat to sea, I had a few books with me, including Nicholas Berdyaev’s The End of our Time. It contains a chapter on the New Middle Ages as well as some reflections on Soviet Communism. His thesis begins with his observation that Renaissance humanism is exhausted and over and done with. He sees history in cycles. I begin to doubt that view, given that all cultures and all humanities exist simultaneously in all periods of time. For example, I have nothing to do with “post-modern” culture and its destruction of humanist aesthetics (musical harmony, clear language, realism in art, etc.). Perhaps history can “live” because there are survivals in a world where most of what we cherish is mercilessly trashed. Anyway, back to Berdyaev… He was describing his time – 1933, but he could have been talking to us in 2022. What has changed? What made it possible to build cathedrals, vandalise and deface them in Reformation times, guillotine the French nobility and send millions of Jews and other minorities to the gas chambers? The answer is humanity, what we all have within ourselves, our capacity for beauty, goodness – and evil.

Berdyaev tried to understand things in terms of philosophy (love of wisdom) and what I would call “proto-Romantic” mysticism, especially from German Lutheran roots. Berdyaev constantly refers to Jacob Böhme and the Ungrund, that primaeval state of darkness and indetermination that preceded even God the Creator and the Λόγος. Each day, we live a period of night when the part of the earth where we live is facing away from the sun. Shapes lose their clarity and the world becomes silent (at least out here in the countryside). Movement ceases and we are taken by sleep. It is a time of wordless longing. uncertainty and nostalgia. We are like the Israelites in exile:

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept: when we remembered thee, O Sion.
As for our harps, we hanged them up: upon the trees that are therein.
For they that led us away captive required of us then a song, and melody in our heaviness:
Sing us one of the songs of Sion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song: in a strange land?

It is the spirit of Romanticism and the increasing darkness of our own existence. The light of day, the Enlightenment or Aufklärung, can deceive us and keep us on the surface, superficial. We long for depth of spirit, a new symbolism. The beginning of this new middle age is marked by barbarism, cruelty and violence. Berdyaev wrote in 1933, but he was aware of a world that died in the trenches of World War I. Our woes of 2022 are nothing more than a continuation. We seek to return to a comfort zone, some measure of certitude, but it is not there. We wallow in darkness.

We hope that the vacuum left by man’s pride will be filled by a true discovery of freedom of the spirit. It could be that we are at the brink of a new soviet revolution using different language, or even a new form of Nazism with a completely different appearance but the same ideology. We read everything Berdyaev says about Socialism, and we recognise it in the Great Reset and the climate fanatics in their uncontrolled braying for a deconstruction without any positive plan. Christianity, like the sun before dawn, is waiting to fill our despair and nihilism with spirit and faith. It will not be the caricature of Christianity in the institutional Churches that have become forces of secularism and socialism, but something new and within each of us. The malaise is no different in 2022 than in 1933. It is the same Kali Yuga.

Without a doubt, most of us who are still alive in thirty years’ time will not be driving cars, living in a house, having access to electricity or the technology we now use. Would we even have a postal service or a telephone, or even a horse? No doubt, the oligarchs and billionaires would still have these things, plus medical and trans-humanist technology to make them able to live for centuries. The imagination is fired by any number of science fiction films. Would the new feudal lords be happy without God? Most of us, if the predictions are accurate, would die of pogroms and exterminations, pandemics, starvation and inability to adapt to a post-technical world.

What I think is more likely is that much less would change than we fear. We will adapt to extremes of climate and temperature. We will eat what is available. We will find somewhere to live if we lose our homes. Above all, we will return to God and spiritual values. What would a new Middle Age look like? More than material things, individualism and liberalism would have to go. We will have to re-learn the meaning of the Church, the mystical body of Christ, the universal communion. Art, literature and music would have to be re-invented or re-discovered. This Church can only draw us in through our freedom of spirit and our desire, not through coercion. We cannot tolerate a clerical totalitarianism, nor one of the State. God will be at the centre of our lives and desires. It won’t come about by magic, but this could take decades or centuries. Those of us alive today would be dead by then and experiencing a whole new existence. There would be a whole new attitude to work, money, class, law, justice, energy, natural resources including renewables like wind, solar and tides. This is our hope and prayer for those who will come after those of us who will be dead and probably forgotten.

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