End Times

But as to the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need to have anything written to you.  For you yourselves know well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When people say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape.  But you are not in darkness, brethren, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all sons of light and sons of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness.  So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober.  For those who sleep sleep at night, and those who get drunk are drunk at night.  But, since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.  For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ,  who died for us so that whether we wake or sleep we might live with him.
1 Thessalonians 5 


Christians have always been fighting a battle against the world the flesh and the devil. This should not be a depressing bit of news , because it is central to the Gospel. Where the world teaches us to doubt, Christ teaches us to have faith, where the world teaches us to despair, Christ gives us hope, where the world teaches to love only self, Christ puts true charity into our hearts so we can love God and neighbour.

We put on the armour of Christ and take up the sword of the spirit and go out into battle. The enemy is both within and without, as Peter and Paul remind us: 

St Peter says "Therefore gird up your minds, be sober, set your hope fully upon the grace that is coming to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.  As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

And St Paul says: "Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect."

As to the method of the fight, it is important as St Paul says above that we 'pray unceasingly' that we do not fall asleep.

But we fight a new and seemingly more dread battle against an enemy who seems implacable in this modern age. One reason for this is that we are living at the end of Christian civilization, at least in Europe. We can no longer rely on the culture around us to share the values we have as Christians. Even the word 'values' itself reveals the relativism which has penetrated to the heart of our thinking. What I value is relative to me and thus cannot be relied on as a universal moral good.

 And as the culture goes, so do we. We who were born after the great revolution of the 1960s are more infected than ever with sensuality, pride, sloth, arrogance and so on, because the world itself has wholeheartedly embraced these things. Individuals can only do so much when the whole community is going in a different direction. It is then that we can learn from the early Church, facing incredible persecution amidst a heathen culture. The new heathenism is worse, as someone once said, because the old heathens had never known Christ, whereas the new ones have knowingly rejected him.

Just as we must carefully guard what we eat in an age when highly processed high-carb food is ubiquitous, so we must also guard what we consume in a spiritual sense from the culture around us. Many of us are rediscovering the importance, especially against the background of the coronavirus, of what Michael Pollen calls "Real food, mainly plants, in sensible portions". So we should also be rediscovering from the treasury of our Christian culture those real staples that nourished us for hundreds of years.

There are so many fronts on which to fight the battle. The enemy is many-headed like the hydra. Padre Pio, said of the demons of the air: "There are so many that if they were capable of assuming a form as tiny as a grain of sand, they would block out the sun. Be attentive – for when the enemy is silent it means he is preparing another plan.’”

Tempest

"Watch ye, and pray that ye enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh weak." Matt 26:41-43


"For it is written: As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God." Romans 14:11



Have we crowned the serpent rather than bent the knee to Christ the King? Indeed we have, and we are paying for it. The current events are so clearly a chastisement that to hear Catholics deny this is just astonishing. Has rationalism so penetrated the Faith, and blind technocratic optimism so taken the place of our awareness of sin and the need for our own personal reparation that we do not know how to read the signs of the times? Sin is not an individual thing which only affects individuals. It affects us as a body. We have forgotten this, or attempted to bury the knowledge of it. Part of the greatness of Fyodor Dostoevsky is his understanding of this. “In sinning,” Dostoevsky wrote in Demons, “each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilty for another’s sin. There is no isolated sin.”.

This corporate nature of sin is revealed in the paralysing effects it has on the goods of community. Without a doubt we are witnessing the echo of this paralysis in the closing down of our institutions and countries because of a silent and invisible enemy.

Catholic prophecy points quite decisively to certain events which must occur before the end times. Our Lady has come countless times to warn us of the chastisement that awaits if we persist in sin. Many many times over the last 200 years in many different places her message has been the same - repentance, reparation for our own and others' sins, and praying the rosary. At perhaps her most publicly significant apparition, Fatima, she showed a vision of hell to the three children and said that many souls go there because of sins of impurity. She said she wanted to establish in the world devotion to her Immaculate Heart, and for Russia to be consecrated to Her Immaculate Heart. She said that Russia would 'spread its errors throughout the world', and the consecration would be the antidote to the spread of this poison.

Well, the errors have spread, and our nations and societies become progressively more paralysed by sin. The tempest blows and the boat is tossed about and we cry out. We can do small things; consecrate ourselves and our families to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, and nations are also doing this, realising that Christ must reign, or we shall build a kingdom of darkness and thus condemn ourselves and our societies to a spiritual death.

How To Transform Catholic Education

Recommended reading for Catholic educators, this book is very much in the vein of Stratford Caldecott's excellent books such as Beauty in the Word. The emphasis is on *how* to transform Catholic education, so the books have suggestions on how to implement the Catholic vision. I think Peachey is especially strong here when he talks about work, using people like Josef Pieper and E. F. Schumacher to argue for the Catholic school as oasis of leisure in the middle of a desert of utilitarian and positivist ideology!

The Serpent Returns

“In the war of ideas, it's the crudest & most simplified ideology that wins. During our own lifetimes we have seen great & highly civilized countries becoming infected by epidemics of ideological insanity, & whole populations being destroyed for the sake of some irrational slogan.” Christopher Dawson


1500 years ago St Patrick drove the serpent out of Ireland. The country was the warm beating heart of Christendom. Its people generous and devout and kind. Many might wonder if the serpent has returned now that Ireland has voted to repeal the 8th amendment. In ‘Goodbye to Catholic Ireland’ Mary Kenny explains how the vote to protect the unborn in 1983 was seen as part of the natural pro-natalist character of the Irish people. If anyone wondered how you change the fundamental character of a people within a generation the answer is now obvious. You help the economy to enjoy all the benefits of full consumer capitalism a la the Celtic Tiger, and you flood the media with liberal globalist propaganda. It helps also to have a Church utterly bereft of moral authority both because of historical child sexual abuse by members of the priesthood, and because it has itself embraced a relativist pluralism that no longer has the courage to proclaim the truth of Christ.

Tempest Part One

“The Watchman he lay dreaming

Of all things that can be

He dreamed the Titanic was sinking

Into the deep blue sea”



I recently heard the new releases of Bob Dylan’s ‘Born-Again’ era output (roughly 79-83), and realised in what should perhaps be a bit of a ‘duh’ moment, that whilst the overtly confessional Christianity of those records has faded, his output certainly from the early 90s onwards, has been more or less informed in its more transcendent moments by the Christian mythos, which does not mean that every good thing he’s written since then shows signs of this, but a close listening to the best of it certainly confirms the thesis.

I realise this is actually against a lot of the received wisdom - a recent Guardian article about the film of the Born-again years ‘Trouble No More’ basically says he had 3 years of going weird then forgot about all that Christian stuff. That suits the Guardian narrative. It’s also nonsense.

I would argue that a work like ‘Tempest’ from the 2012 album of the same name is a powerful meditation on the last judgement, revelation, faith and the creative act which itself is entirely incomprehensible outside of the Biblical tradition which informs it through and through.


In this song Dylan references perhaps a key figure from his own song mythos, the Watchman. The song All Along the Watchtower, which Dylan plays at the end of every live show, is itself a Biblically inspired fragment whose sudden abrupt ending and haunting wordplay present us with an apocalyptic scenario. “The hour is getting late” reminds us that the end is approaching. The two riders approaching and the Lords on the Watchtower echo a passage from Isaiah 21:5-9:

“Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise, ye princes, and anoint the shield.
For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.
And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed:
And he cried, A lion: My lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower in the daytime, and I am set in my ward whole nights:
And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.”



But whilst the earlier work clearly uses Biblical imagery to create an imaginative environment which acts as a foil to the ‘false talk’ of the joker and the thief, the perspective is still very much a negative one - a rejection of the falsity of modernity in line with ‘Gates of Eden’, but unable to envision an alternative. ‘The wind began to howl’, and in the face of this approaching tempest they remain mute.



On the other hand, in ‘Tempest’ 44 years later, Dylan fleshes out this skeletal narrative with straightforwardly Christian imagery and he does it masterfully. I believe it’s his best work of the last 20 years. I have to add a caveat here: he does reweave an older song to make this one - it is of course a traditional folk standard - The Titanic, a version was recorded by the Carter Family. But that version is more straightforwardly moralistic, less mysterious, than Bob’s, even though there is a moral core to Bob’s version.



Before we get to the repetition of the Watchman imagery, I want to mention a few key themes. First, we’ve already seen that All Along the Watchtower envisions an apocalyptic scenario. Here we are taken deeper into the meaning of apocalypse - a Greek word meaning ‘unveiling’. This is evident in the way the veils are lifted and truth is seen in all sorts of ways in this song. But most directly:



The veil was torn asunder

'Tween the hours of twelve and one

No change, no sudden wonder

Could undo what had been done



Or the Captain reading the Book of Revelation in the gloom, his cup filling with tears. Or take this passage:



Brother rose up 'gainst brother

In every circumstance

They fought and slaughtered each other

In a deadly dance



We can see from these passages why Dylan is interested in the Titanic story: it provides a narrative universe within which to explore the question of imminent doom, judgement and the meaning of one’s actions in the light of eternity. In Matthew 10 we find:



“The brother also shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the son: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and shall put them to death. And you shall be hated by all men for my name's sake: but he that shall persevere unto the end, he shall be saved.



And when they shall persecute you in this city, flee into another. Amen I say to you, you shall not finish all the cities of Israel, till the Son of man come.



Therefore fear them not. For nothing is covered that shall not be revealed: nor hid, that shall not be known. That which I tell you in the dark, speak ye in the light: and that which you hear in the ear, preach ye upon the housetops. “



Dylan alludes to the end times throughout the song, but those times are not considered from a distance but rather seem suddenly all about us - who can deny that part of the horror of the imagery of brother slaughtering brother derives from its familiarity to us from the events of the last century?



“Nothing is covered that shall not be revealed”



In Tempest, the Watchman is asleep. This is a delightfully comic image which helps to drive the tragedy. The Watchman had one job, and failed. But also the Watchman stands for all those who are appointed, either through their official position, or through their own work, guardians of culture, morality and reason, those whose job is to ‘stay awake and watch’:



(Matt 24:42: “Watch therefore: for ye know not on what day your Lord cometh. But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what watch the thief was coming, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken through. Therefore be ye also ready: for in an hour that ye think not the Son of man cometh.”).



They have succumbed to the forces of the unconscious. And as a result the people are also dragged down into the dark depths. What are the consequences for an age when those whose mission is to be guardians and prophets have failed in their duty? The agony of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane also contains warnings. Discovering his disciples asleep when he returns he says to them “Could you not stay awake and watch with me for even one hour?” The chief mark of the modern age is the choice to anaesthetise and to numb, to fall asleep rather than bear the burden of being awake in the spirit.



As Deacon Lawrence tells us in this post on 'Leaf by Niggle' "Throughout His ministry Jesus reminds us of the importance of preparing for the Kingdom that is to come." So, like Tolkien in Leaf by Niggle, Dylan also takes on this task - he becomes the Watchman, and in his dreamlike vision of the sinking Titanic he alerts us to the truth.



Which is partly the reason why the Watchman's dreams are telling him the truth - he dreams the Titanic is sinking! Normally our dreams are odd fantasies. This inversion of normality adds to the sense of doom and foreboding. The Watchman is trying to tell people in his dream but can’t get the message across.



Some of the most moving moments of the song derive from the actions of the people on the ship. In part 2 I will look at them in more detail.

Concern

“We’re all really worried about you” an old friend recently told me in a message. What had happened? Had I contracted a nasty disease? No. Had I developed mental health issues and become depressed? Not as far as I’m aware. Had I suddenly expressed a desire to give up everything and run off to Rio with some woman of easy virtue I’d met in Ipswich or somewhere? Definitely not.

What had happened was that since I’d become a father and returned to the Church I had started to try and live and witness to my faith in a more solid way. I had started to openly express the view on social media that abortion was wrong. For simply asking for arguments on Facebook to support the view that abortion was wrong, for an A Level revision guide I was writing, I was told by one old friend they were going to ‘stage an intervention’ (presumably akin to the drug addict ones where they gather round and confront you with your addiction) on me. Another person (not someone I’ve ever liked to be honest) called me a nasty bigot and said that my revision guide was probably shit. Others (Australians so we’ll cut them some slack) started commenting about the sex abuse scandal in the Church and essentially said I had no right to an opinion on such matters as I had never been pregnant. “Don’t like it, don’t do it” she said, like that was an argument. A lot of people got very inflamed.

Which is odd. If you have no right to an opinion about something unless you’ve actually undergone it, then most people have no right to an opinion on anything. Or perhaps they meant it in the soft sense that you are not allowed to have an opinion on something unless you can potentially experience it. Now it seems fair that I am very ill-qualified to talk about the experience of racism against black people in England. I would hesitate to pay much attention to something I said on that. But I could still extrapolate from that to make a general moral point about racism. Equally, I am never going to actually experience having a baby within me which I don’t want, but it is absurd to think that because of this I cannot discuss the morality of abortion. In fact, I would have even more claim than this anyway, as I someday may have contributed 50% of the genetic make up of the being whose life is in question.

I’m actually still smiling at the absurdity of “don’t like it, don’t do it” as an argument for anything other than not going on a scary rollercoaster, or eating a particularly hot chilli. It amply illustrates the emotivism which underlies most of what passes for moral discussion now. Either there are some things which we believe it is possible to say ‘you should do this’ or ‘you shouldn’t do this’, or we just cannot talk about what ‘should’ happen at all, in which case, my Australian friend needs to quit telling me I shouldn’t be allowed to have an opinion on abortion.

So if you say “we’re all really worried about you”, what you should really say is “we’re sorry you appear to have gone backward and rejected the only sane position on this issue - there is nothing to discuss until you fall back into line with our view - and until then I will express my arrogance and disdain for your bigotry as concern for you”. That would be much more honest.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The Philokalia

"If our intellect is inexperienced in the art of watchfulness it at once begins to entertain whatever impassioned fantasy appears in it, and plies it with illicit questions and responds to it illicitly. Then our own thoughts are conjoined to the demonic fantasy, which waxes and burgeons until it appears lovely and delectable to the welcoming and despoiled intellect. The intellect then is deceived in much the same way as lambs when a stray dog comes into the field in which they happen to be: in their innocence they often run towards the dog as though it were their mother, and their only profit in coming near it is that they pick up something of its stench and foulness. In the same way our thoughts run ignorantly after demonic fantasies that appear in our intellect and, as I said, the two join together and one can see them plotting to destroy the city of Troy like Agamemnon and Menelaus. For they plot together the course of action they must take in order to bring about, in practice and by means of the body, that purpose which the demons have persuaded them is sweet and delectable. In this Way sins are produced in the soul: and hence the need to bring out into the open what is in our hearts. "

Knowing What We Don't Know

There is a phrase often attributed to Socrates in which he says

"I know that I know nothing"

Usually this is interpreted as having the wisdom to realise one's own lack of knowledge. It is not necessarily a quality teachers are known for - after all, we are meant to be masters of our subject, but I want to argue that the best teachers exemplify this attitude in the practice of their craft.


Let's call the above-mentioned wisdom 'epistemic humility'. It is surely a very good quality for a teacher to cultivate. Keats called for the poet to be in a state of 'negative capability' - "that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”. I think the teacher can learn a bit from the poet.


Take for instance the way in which a little knowledge can bewitch you and stop you asking some fundamental questions which might impact on the learning in a lesson. You may then think 'all I have to do is impart this knowledge and the job is done'. This Gradgrindian approach can destroy and disenchant the learning process for the student. I have been astonished at how much teaching the EPQ has put me out of my comfort zone - I cannot 'spoon feed' the student the information they need; I cannot suggest or lead them at all - and yet I have seen the genuine excitement in them when they realise they really can explore their chosen topic how they like.


We need to get some of this enchantment and wonder in the learning process back. A target-driven culture is not best suited to generating this kind of attitude towards learning.
Do targets act as that totalising force mentioned earlier? How might we cultivate an epistemic humility about students? Clearly, having expectations and goals for students is important, but what kind of goals, and how central to the education process do we make them? Some consider that target-setting in the way it is currently done is counter-productive - there are so many factors which influence these results that they are a blunt tool when it comes to measuring learning.


Abraham Maslow said "It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." Reductive philosophies generate reductive methods - and these in turn produce students unlikely to be fulfilling their true potential as human beings. If we ask the question of what is knowledge for, or what is learning for, then we find that there have been traditional answers much richer and fuller than we are currently used to seeing.


A Catholic perspective on education takes into account the spiritual realities and forces that come into play when the parent and other educators seek to help the student flourish in the best way possible. If this responsibility is taken seriously, it puts the Catholic school entirely at odds with most of the rest of modern schooling in the West. The thoroughgoing utilitarian and atomistic spirit of modern education needs to be viewed with suspicion by the Catholic school. In The Way of Beauty, Stratford Caldecott argues that Catholic institutions can draw on the Classical tradition of the Trivium, in which Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic were studied.


Caldecott argues that when the ultimate goal of the human being is to grow towards the True, the Beautiful and the Good,  this produces an educational vision rooted in a profound wonder and humility, a sense that we are on a journey together in which no-one has all the answers, but in which all are seekers after a common good, a pearl of great price. That sounds like wisdom to me.

Why I Am Not A Liberal (and why that does not necessarily mean I am a bigot)

In response to previous conversations both on and offline I've decided to write up what I see as some of the key problems with liberalism. As the dominant political and moral ideology of modernity, liberalism underlies most of the things we take for granted in the West, such as individualism, freedom of speech, the concept of rights and duties, and even colours the way we view such things as freedom itself. Therefore, in criticising liberalism I am not aligning myself with a viewpoint either left or right on the political spectrum: it should be obvious to even the most casual observer of modern politics that liberalism, and neo-liberal economics, has been the underlying assumption of parties across the political spectrum for the last 30 years.

By criticising liberalism it should be obvious some of the things I am not doing. Firstly, I am not making judgements on individuals - that should go without saying. We have to be able to evaluate and compare different world views and say what we think their shortcomings are without fear of hurting people's feelings. If you personally feel uncomfortable because your worldview is under scrutiny - and as a theist in a predominantly atheistic society, I am very familiar with this - then you need to find out what underpins your view and try to defend it rationally, or at least point out where you view the criticism of liberalism to fail.

As it turns out, in modern discourse we are used to having mutually clashing but ultimately unresolvable differences of opinions on political and ethical issues, and this is actually one of the ways in which the liberal assumption of relativism actually undermines such discourse.

Secondly, and again it should go without saying, I am not aligning myself with 'alt-right' or nationalist views - such views may share with mine a fundamental suspicion of modern liberalism, but in their obsessions with race and identity and their hope in demotic solutions to societal problems they are actually the mirror of the far left they claim to despise. As a Catholic Integralist (explanation later), I am as incapable of subscribing to such views as I would be to a Marxist philosophy.

Finally, in doing this critique I am well aware of the problems with talking about a general 'liberalism' without being more specific. There is of course a big difference between classical liberalism in the tradition of Locke, and more modern forms of liberalism. But here's the thing. When you take the starting point of the Enlightenment project out of which liberalism grew you are accepting a narrative whereby the older forms of religious and ethical decision-making were 'rolled back' to create a 'neutral' public space within which rational discourse was the sole arbiter. Religious and ethical issues are then relegated to the private sphere, and could make no public claim on others. Inevitably, earlier forms of liberalism which were still strongly grounded in Christian ethical frameworks had more robust defences of things like virtue etc., but as time went on these key elements eroded away - liberalism got 'thinner'. This development was inevitable in the light of the founding assumptions of the Enlightenment project. Today it leads to absurdities like Japanese sex robots.

So what are the key problems with modern liberalism? Three:
1. The key value of tolerance
2. The myth of Progress
3. The idea of freedom as 'freedom-from'

1. In conversation with liberals and in my own research I can find no higher liberal value than tolerance. I guess it goes with equality, but I would argue it is more fundamental than equality. If you are astute you will notice that tolerance is actually a key Christian principle. Jesus said 'judge not, lest ye be judged', the emphasis on forgiveness and reconciliation in parables like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son is clear. Whether Christians have always lived up to these principles in practice is a different matter. But tolerance here is tolerance of the person, not tolerance of sin. Christians have always recognised the importance of 'love the sinner, hate the sin'. In other words the Christian principle of tolerance only makes sense within the wider framework of Christian ethics in which humans are fundamentally flawed, and can do nothing without God's grace. In which God is a just but merciful judge.

What liberalism has done is strip away this framework and keep the bare principle of tolerance. 'Do what you will, as long as it harms no-one'. This is nowhere more keenly felt than in the area of sexual ethics. On this simple principle, the use of child sex robots is incapable of condemnation. Liberalism alone cannot tell you what to think about such cases, other than - 'hey man, what he does in the privacy of his own bedroom is up to him'.

So my main reason tolerance is a problematic value is that it is too negative to have any real moral force, and it relies on profoundly flawed utilitarian principles. What we need is a much more robust 'thicker' moral framework which doesn't view morality simply in terms of whether people have maximised pleasure and minimised pain.

Ok then, you might say, liberal traditions don't just go on bare principles of tolerance but also compassion, equality, etc. My problem here is that these are essentially imports from the religious background out of which liberalism grew, shorn of all their transcendent trappings. Why treat people compassionately? Because humans are fundamentally valuable. Why are humans fundamentally valuable? Because they're human. Hang on, you've just begged the question. That's not a reason, simply an assertion. It's not even wrong.

Ok, so there's a deeper problem going on here. Someone more eloquent than me will have to uncover it; here is a passage from a modern classic which explores this question called After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre:

"My own critique of liberalism derives from a judgement that the best type of human life, that in which the tradition of the virtues is most adequately embodied, is lived by those engaged in constructing and sustaining forms of community directed towards the shared achievement of those common goods without which the ultimate human good cannot be achieved. Liberal political societies are characteristically committed to denying any place for a determinate conception of the human good in their public discourse, let alone allowing that their common life should be grounded in such a conception. On the dominant liberal view, government is to be neutral as between rival conceptions of the human good, yet in fact what liberalism promotes is a kind of institutional order that is inimical to the construction and sustaining of the types of communal relationship required for the best kind of human life.

This critique of liberalism should not be interpreted as a sign of any sympathy on my part for contemporary conservatism. That conservatism is in too many ways a mirror image of the liberalism that it professedly opposes. Its commitment to a way of life structured by a free market economy is a commitment to an individualism as corrosive as that of liberalism. And where liberalism by permissive legal enactments has tried to use the power of the modern state to transform social relationships, conservatism by prohibitive legal enactments now tries to use that same power for its own coercive purposes."

2. I guess it might be possible to be a liberal without being a progressive, but I'm not quite sure how that would work. Modern liberalism is profoundly wedded to the ideal of progressivism. We are moving away from a dark, superstitious past, to a bright, rational future. Yes, we may have blips like Trump, but we will triumph in the end. This is the liberal myth of progress. It's not too hard to see how the Enlightenment project gave birth to this myth. In rejecting religious golden ages in the past, they projected their golden age into the future, thus modernity was born. I know of no better pin prick to the absurd balloon of this optimism than the words of Theodor Adorno: "Progress, seen clearly, is progress from the sling to the atom bomb."

3. The third problem with liberalism is perhaps the deepest. It is where it makes a decisive break from its Christian background. This is the view of freedom as 'freedom-from' things, as opposed to the traditional and Christian view of freedom as 'freedom to effortlessly choose the good'. On the liberal view freedom is merely the absence of external coercion - liberation from the chains of whatever happens to be the oppressor.

Reverend Jacques Philippe wrote in his phenomenal work Interior Freedom, “To achieve true interior freedom we must train ourselves to accept, peacefully and willingly, plenty of things that seem to contradict our freedom. This means consenting to our personal limitations, our weaknesses, our powerlessness, this or that situation that life imposes on us, and so on… the situations that really make us grow are precisely those that we do not control.”

It is by training ourselves to accept these limitations, external and internal, that we achieve freedom - when we do this, our inner peace and calm cannot be affected by whatever situation we are in - we can freely choose to do the good. Mere absence of coercion is never going to be enough to guarantee that someone can do this.

An analogy for this is when we learn a skill such as riding a bike, or drawing, or playing a musical instrument. We don't just pick up the flute and start playing it like a maestro first lesson, we have to discipline ourselves over time, and subject ourselves to the authority of another to learn it. Then one day we pick it up, and we are truly free in our playing.

So, I hope to have shown why I cannot embrace liberalism. Not because I'm some nasty bigot or just like Donald Trump Jr (!), but because I find it philosophically incoherent and thin. A Catholic Integralist believes that ethical and political decisions cannot be based on an individualist, relativist world view, and that they must appeal to notions of virtue, robust definitions of the common good defended in the public square, and a view of the world that is sacramental, in which the inherent worth of the individual is down to their creation in the imago dei, the free and loving gift of a creator God.

Two excellent books which explore these questions are After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre and The Politics of Virtue by Adrian Pabst and John Milbank.

There and Back Again: My Journey from Cradle Catholic to New Age Wiccan and Back to Mother Church

This was originally going to be a talk on my reversion to the faith. I have been inspired by Roger Buck, whose book on the New Age can be found here:

http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2017/02/new-book-on-church-and-new-age.html

I am not a convert to the faith, I was baptised and brought up a Catholic, but I did spend a long time away from the Church, searching for things I thought Christianity did not have. This talk is not meant to be a complete rejection of any beliefs outside of Catholicism - after all the Church says we should reject 'nothing of what is true and good in other faiths'. One way of looking at this story is through the experience of someone like St Augustine. He tells of being brought up a Catholic by his mother Monica, his rejection of that faith and his embrace of dualist philosophies such as Manicheanism, and his final return to the Church in his book the Confessions. I might dare to say that my story is similar, but without the saintliness on my part! My reasons for embracing the Catholic faith are also like Augustine's.

So I stopped going to church shortly after my confirmation, at around the age of 15. This was inevitable for many reasons. The key one, one which I don't like to admit, was probably apathy. People may tell you they have left the Church because of dissent, because they disagree on principle with some of its teachings. This is usually a convenient cover story for the more basic truth - they can't be bothered to carry on going to Mass on Sunday. All around, people are getting on with their lives and enjoying themselves without ever thinking about church or God or any of that stuff. This is especially true for teenage boys and especially if their own dads don't go to church. Mine didn't go. I saw old women mainly at church, and unconsciously absorbed the message that church is, like flower-arranging and coffee mornings, something genteel old ladies do. The outside pressures are strong as well, the 'anglosphere' we live and breathe through media and upbringing strongly rejects the mystery, rejects the supernatural. I'll say more about that in a minute. Perhaps for me as well, friends were key - most of them had not been brought up as church-going Catholics, and they had non-religious parents. Through them I also started taking drugs at about the same age that I stopped going to church. Later on we would go to raves and places like Glastonbury, where I would whole-heartedly embrace a 'hippie' ideology, hedonistic and relativistic.

But at that stage I was still educating myself outside of my school education. I loved books and loved reading. I read anything I could get my hands on. Unfortunately, some of the things I read were very dangerous for someone of that age to read before their conscience and intellectual formation has properly happened. I was intellectually pretentious, and often had a sense that my school education was leaving important things out. I tried to substitute this lack with these morally dubious books.

 For me what seemed lacking in my Catholic education was twofold. First, the faith seemed as purged as it could be of any non-rational elements. There are many reasons for this. Some people, especially some leaders in the Church, think that if young people are going to embrace the faith, they must be 'approached on their own level'. Most of the teenagers I teach are put off by this patronising attitude. If something is difficult and mysterious, let it be presented like that - I know that as a young person I liked the challenge of difficult and mysterious things, and part of the reason I left the Church was because it had none of this challenge. It also seemed to me that if those who were meant to be teaching the faith had little more to say about it than what you would find in a humanitarian or humanist mission statement, I couldn't see why they bothered. Secular enthusiasm for humanity is not core Christianity, contrary to what some Church leaders would have you believe.

Secondly, what remained of the mystery of the faith was presented to me as a goal, but without any real presentation of the way you could reach that goal. So, we would find out about beliefs in heaven, hell and purgatory, and learn that heaven consists in the beatific vision of God which the saints enjoy, but there would be no discussion of types of prayer or meditation, things which no saint can do without; no practical instruction in what you might call the technology of the faith. The Catholic Church has developed some amazing tools but they are very little heard of. Even the most famous ones such as the rosary are more talked about than used. No one ever taught me to pray the rosary growing up in the faith. And yet this spiritual weapon is one that I could not be without now.

So here we are - an intellectually curious, slightly rebellious 15-year-old who is searching for meaningful world views, preferably ones different from those dull ones he was brought up with. I got my hands on some books, in fact I had been reading books like these for a few years by the time I was 15. We have:

Magick by Aleister Crowley
The White Goddess by Robert Graves
Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud
The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins
Psychology and Alchemy by Carl Jung
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
Allen Ginsberg poetry
William Blake poetry
Eastern Religious works: Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad Gita, Diamond Sutra

You can see here a selection of things my teenage self had found to read. Apart from the Nietzsche and the Freud, it is all grounded in some sense of the divine or supernatural, but even those two are about different ways of looking at religion. I clearly was searching around for a coherent religious worldview, just as long as it wasn't the Catholic one of my upbringing.

So what is wrong with these books? Well, the most clearly purely evil one is the Crowley one. If you know anything about him, he was an occultist and magician who describes in the book ways of summoning demons and spirits as well as describing in detail the paraphernalia required to cast a magic circle, do invocations, create spells and so on. The most dangerous thing you can do here is to dismiss this as nonsense. I am convinced of the reality of the spiritual world, partly because I and people I know have come into contact with the reality of the spiritual forces of evil. It is a very dangerous thing to mess about with occult realities, and as C S Lewis said, the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing people he didn't exist.

So that book comes with a special warning, but the other books are all dubious mainly because without rigorous Catholic intellectual formation, they could lead you into error regarding key truths such as the nature of grace, the personal reality of the Holy Trinity, the Catholic understanding of virtue and many other things. What had really happened was, to paraphrase G K Chesterton, when I stopped believing in something, I didn't believe in nothing; I believed in anything. My philosophy was a mish-mash of eastern religious thought, magical and divinatory techniques, and relativism. In other words, I very much subscribed to a philosophy known as the New Age.

I can see looking back on this that the main causes underlying this 'straying from home, being lost in a far country' were down to a faculty that many of us feel is rather mysterious, yet which plays a major role in everything we do: the imagination.

I am sure that the main reason I turned elsewhere for truth is that my imagination was not fed in my childhood faith. Cardinal Newman said that where belief falters it is above all because 'the imagination is against us'. I will say that in the New Age I found things to feed my imagination. It was seduced from its natural goal which is to be an aid to contemplation and moral virtue, and it went searching for forbidden fruit. The analogy which springs to mind is if you were to have a balanced, nutritious meal, say a roast dinner with lots of vegetables put in front of you, and instead you ignore it and go to the chicken shop for some spicy wings and fries. You know the other meal is bad for you, but that is part of the thrill of eating it!

So as I said before, the erosion of what is called the sacramental in the Church, that is those things which body forth the invisible divine gift of God's grace, such as adoration of the blessed sacrament and so on, the erosion of these opportunities for time with God both within the church and in the wider culture, leave the imagination seeking sustenance elsewhere. The imagination is like a stomach, it has to be fed. Take away the healthy balanced meal, and it will have to go and get the chicken wings.

So what is the New Age? It would be easier to characterise it in terms of some beliefs it involves. Here is a by no means exhaustive list:

Nature worship/pantheism, Wicca, Paganism
Earth mysteries/ley lines
Divination - astrology/tarot/ouija boards
Grail mysteries - Arthurian romance/Celtic mythology
Occult groups - Masonry/Rosicrucians/Theosophy
Dualist beliefs - Gnosticism/Eastern religions/Taoism
Alchemy/Magic
Yoga/Meditation
Angels/Faeries/Devas
'Alternative' stories of Christ - Gnostic Gospels/Mary Magdalene theories (Dan Brown territory)
Pre-Christian Britain - Stonehenge/Avebury/Glastonbury as centres of learning
Goddess worship - as a religion more in balance with nature and thus superior to patriarchal dominator religions which do violence to nature

So what's wrong with all this stuff?
Well, it's by no means all entirely devoid of merit. If it had no truth or value at all in it, people would not seek out and believe it. It is actually the mixture of truth and falsity that is so dangerous in it.

Some positives are:

• It is about questions of truth and meaning - these systems do give meaning to people's lives
• People like myself who sincerely search for truth in these areas should not be mocked, but asked to examine in more depth the assumptions of their beliefs
• As Catholics we can see that if Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life, then he is in some sense present in some of these beliefs in a similar way that belief in the one true God is present in Plato's Form of the Good.

Take for instance the New Age fascination with Angels. The Church has a highly developed angelology in which there are nine different hierarchies of angels and a long tradition of belief in and prayer to them. Angels are depicted throughout Christian art, and it is unusual indeed for medieval churches to be without statues of them. Catholics even believe in a personal guardian angel unique to each human. New-agers love all this. It appeals to the desire for direct experience unmediated by institutions which is at the heart of so much of their worldview.

In fact, I think this one fact is the key to those who follow the New Age - they are not happy with second-hand experience - they want to see and feel the divine reality for themselves. This is understandable. But it also makes them like doubting Thomas - unable to believe until he puts his hands in Christ's wounds. Christ said happy are those who are unable to do this and yet still believe and this is the reality of faith - assent to the reality of things unseen. For that you need a Church.

Unfortunately, the New Age Thomases can fall into serious error regarding the spiritual world. By their insistence on personal experience they actually attempt to substitute the reality of grace with human effort of the will. They acknowledge spiritual realities but instead of placing themselves in right relation to these realities through prayer and works of charity, they attempt to get those realities to work for them. Attempting to manipulate the spiritual world for your own benefit is called magic. It the oldest evil, given to us by the serpent in the garden of Eden.

Such evil takes place when the sin of pride works on us. It can happen to New Agers and it can happen to those in the Church. You can tell the prideful nothing they do not already know. They are so concerned with their own personal quest for truth, that they forget about everyone else. What is great about the Church is that no-one can go on for very long being a Catholic before they see the wrongness of this position. We have two great antidotes to the sin of pride - Jesus and Mary.

Mary's humility was the very thing which enabled her to be the 'handmaiden of the Lord', Jesus 'humbled himself, even unto death'. At the heart of the Catholic faith is the cross, the Way of all believers, dying to self. Even our sacraments are there to promote this humility. Think of the self-discernment and humility you need to have to go and confess your sins to another human being. You would have to be a master of self-deception to go on sincerely studying and trying to follow the Catholic faith and at the same time being full of pride.

The New Age does not have this protection. In fact, the New Age studiously avoids these parts of the faith, even though it talks a lot about Jesus. Jesus, lover of Mary Magdalene; Jesus speaker of wisdom from the East (Gnostic Gospels); Jesus, founder of a royal bloodline; even Jesus the Buddhist, or Jesus the Zen Master, or Jesus the mythical Corn-God, but never Jesus the Messiah, True God and True Man, Jesus who died a criminal's death and rose again for our salvation.

Why not? Pride. The promise of the New Age is essentially the promise of the serpent ; "ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil". It is salvation without the cross, what Bonhoeffer calls cheap grace.

The serpent, then, that ancient and cunning creature, does much of his work through glamour. We mistake apparent goods for real goods, apparent goods are much more 'right here and now' whereas real goods require patience, sacrifice and effort to accomplish and attain. Why bother going to church and praying and doing everyday tasks humbly and charitably when we can gain 'enlightenment' by being 'who we really are' contemplating ourselves. So the serpent tends to affirm us in our own laziness and short-sightedness. Much easier to be a Goddess-worshipper and criticise organised religion or patriarchy for the hang-ups and problems of the modern world, than it is try and love the dejected and degraded products of the modern world.

The promise of the serpent contrasts with the promise of the Blessed Virgin. This is sometimes known as the Proto-Evangelion, or the Good News before the Gospel, in Genesis 3:15 God speaks to Satan:

“I will put enmities between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. She shall crush your head, and you shall lie in wait for her heel.”

The woman is the New Eve, Mary who is often depicted with the serpent under her feet, for in Revelation 12 it describes the ‘Woman clothed with the sun’ and the great red dragon at her feet waiting to devour her son when she gives birth to him. The triumph of Mary – she shall crush the serpent’s head – was repeated by Our Lady herself when she appeared to the children at Fatima in Portugal 100 years ago next month.

Have no doubt, the modern world is doing everything it can to forestall this triumph, the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Pray the rosary. Our Lady specifically asked at Fatima that we pray the rosary. It has great power against evil.

I could have floundered around in the New Age a lot longer - who knows I might still be there now. A few things happened though which you might call providential. I like to see it as evidence of God's grace, gently calling me away from error.

First, those books I mentioned I had read as a teenager weren't the only ones I read. I loved fantasy books, and at about 8 or 9 I read the Chronicles of Narnia by C S Lewis, starting with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Famously, those books presented a world absolutely steeped in the Christian vision, with Aslan the lion representing Christ, sacrificed by the white witch.

These were quickly followed by the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, by J R R Tolkien, a friend of Lewis. The Christianity in these books was less evident but in some ways far more powerful. They are not straightforward allegories but through their narrative they convey themes of death and afterlife, virtue, humility and sacrifice, all central Christian themes.

These works as it were, 'baptised my imagination', they were doing their work at a level beyond my normal awareness, acting like spiritual enzymes on my imagination to stimulate certain connections and reactions. I believe that in spite of the rather large amount of dubious material I read, and my overall lack of formation in the faith, alongside a depleted sacramental life, and a larger culture that tended to value only the rational and the material, that God used these books to help bring me back to the faith eventually.

For instance, one of the key elements of LotR is the humility of the hobbits, esp Sam, Frodo's companion. Tolkien uses Sam's humility and Frodo's compassion to ultimately bring about the destruction of the Ring, but they do not accomplish this by their own efforts, in fact, the moment of destruction of the ring is actually the moment in which it seems the greatest darkness has come to the world of Middle Earth, when Frodo gives up his quest and Gollum seizes the Ring. By a fateful turn, this leads to its destruction, but it doesn't happen by Frodo's hand. This illustrates the saving reality of grace, working above human effort.

This episode at the heart of LotR is also an example of what Tolkien called 'eucatastrophe' the sudden turn to joy at the darkest of hours. It is no accident that Tolkien, in his calendar of Middle Earth, had this event occur on March 25th - a date in our world which used to be known as Lady Day, or the Feast of the Annunciation. Here is Mary's Yes to God upon which our salvation depends.

But it would take me a long time to realise that there was any effect on me from these books, and they could not have worked all alone. Other things happened, in which I more consciously formulated an intellectual position on Catholicism. At first I held it at arm's length because I believed that the Church was outdated and had misrepresented who the real Jesus was. In other words, I absorbed all those ancient prejudices that have been doing the rounds since the Reformation. It took me a while to educate myself out of them. If you are one of those people who has seen a few YouTube videos on atheism or watched Stephen Fry or Richard Dawkins talking about religion and now think you know that the Church and all organised religion is a load of nonsense, I beg you to seek out other things. Look up the Magis Centre on YouTube for instance - Robert Spitzer - I can guarantee it will give you some serious things to think about.

Anyway, one of the things which happened is I read a book called Meditations on the Tarot when I was at university studying theology. The book seemed to be another New Age book on divination, but instead it turned out to be the single most powerful defence of Catholic tradition and orthodoxy that I have ever found outside of the magisterium of the Church itself. I had got a certain way down the road of Christianity but stayed outside the Church, my main inspiration was Carl Jung, who seemed to do justice to spiritual realities, but who himself was never an orthodox believer in God.

Then I read this book and I knew I had to confront some of the most uncomfortable things about the Catholic faith. Christ had really died and really risen again in a physical body? Christ was really present in the Blessed Sacrament? Mary had been immaculately conceived? We were going to be judged at the end of time and given resurrection bodies? There was no salvation outside the Church? These were very uncomfortable questions. Modern liberal churches avoid them, and secular humanists openly mock them. The book presents all these teachings amongst a vast variety of wisdom from different traditions and does the amazing task of baptising all that is good in the 'New Age', bringing it into the Church and at the same time not compromising one iota of scripture or tradition.

Some other reasons, far more pragmatic for my return to the faith were getting married and having children. Although I returned to the church about 11-12 years ago, it was only when my daughter was born three years ago that I really understood the beauty of God's gift of life to us - everything is gift - we can earn none of it, and it is all the result of God's overflowing generosity and love.

I want to talk now about the main 'reasons' why I believe. By reasons, I don't really mean dry rational arguments for God. I am talking about how Catholicism seems to me the only coherent option for a person as combination of body, soul and spirit to hold. Intellectual coherence is one important part of that, the end goal of desire is another.

The first reason I have already touched on, and that is the unsatisfactory or partial nature of truth in all other belief systems. As we have looked at this partial truth of the New Age, I want to look at the other major modern worldview which has perhaps an even slimmer slice of the truth, that of secular humanism or atheism.

At a very basic level, one of the key things which helped me go back across more easily to the faith was when I realised the superior coherence of the theistic worldview (belief in a personal God) compared with the atheistic worldview.

Modern atheistic or secular humanism is built on two major tenets or assumptions; materialism and atomism/individualism.

The first belief - materialism is impossible to hold without self-contradiction. Materialists believe humans and indeed everything else are just more or less complex arrangements of matter. It is agreed upon by almost every materialist that free will is essentially an illusion, and consciousness is just a 'neat bunch of tricks' (Daniel Dennett's phrase). This means that although I feel myself to be a thinking, choosing being, with an inner life, this is just the result of being on the receiving end of the complex set of neural activities in my brain. I am a meat machine. But if that is the case, why should I believe you when you tell me this? After all, you are also a meat machine, no freer to hold the belief in materialism than I am to hold a belief in God. Your belief in materialism is just the by-product of the neural activity in your brain. Materialism is self-defeating because it cannot account for this intentionality and purposiveness of human beings.

Therefore, one of the key assumptions of secular humanists can be dispensed with. What they normally claim in defence is the unfeasibly powerful predictive ability of the natural sciences, which function by eliminating any non-material element from the equation, and the undoubted advances in medicine and technology which have arisen from this predictive ability of science. These should, they say, offset any purely philosophical problems with materialism, and anyway, philosophy is just word play really, science is the real deal. This belief that science can justify itself is called scientism. It is also indefensible on the very simple grounds that even the most basic version of the scientific method is founded on certain philosophical assumptions or principles which are not themselves capable of scientific proof or testing.

The other principle behind secular humanism is the principle behind liberalism - that of individualism. The individual should be free to decide for themselves to do whatever they want, there are no bonds of tradition or duty or family and freedom is simply the absence of obstacles in the path of this individual self-expression. In more classical versions of liberal humanism reason would play a large role in providing constraints on this, but in modern times it seems even reason gets pushed to one side.

It seems to me if you combine people's general tendency to weakness of will and blindness to their own faults with these principles you get a system of atomistic particles in which the masses of humanity are absolutely vulnerable to manipulation by powerful and amoral corporations and governments.

I have tried to show that no-one can do without a belief system, and that no belief system is neutral in value. The only thing we can do is to differentiate superior or inferior belief systems. Why is the theistic worldview superior to the atheistic one? For the reasons I have just shown, which are negative, but also for two positive reasons.
Firstly, the arguments which are often called natural theology are intellectually defensible. Things such as the design argument or the argument from beauty. I have no time to go into these here. Richard Swinburne has a 'cumulative case' argument in which theism becomes statistically higher than chance and is argued as an inference to the best explanation to the current state of the universe. Keith Ward and John Lennox, Oxford professors of philosophy and mathematics are worth seeking out - you can find them proposing such arguments on YouTube. So theism for me is rational. But no-one ever just believes in God on purely rational grounds. For me, my faith is something in which I am called to give and go beyond my own comfort zone certainly, but it is also something which nourishes the soul life within me. And for this you need more than a rational argument.

I spoke before about the importance of feeding one's imagination on good things. It is interesting to note S T Coleridge's definition of imagination at this point:

Imagination - 'a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM'

By the infinite I Am he means something like the 'mind of God'. Coleridge also said 'never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been sunlike'. We can see here that our imagination's true task is to enable us to conform ourselves to the divine reality. We can become 'sub-creators' in everything we do. There is thus an inbuilt capacity within human nature to relate to God. But, and this is really where I want to come back to Augustine, because of fallen human nature, that potential is frustrated. Now there is a tendency in us to try and make other things fulfill this need. Created things become a substitute for God, but do not satisfy. And the more we pursue them, the deeper in sin we mire ourselves, but Augustine tells us this sin is the loss of God - it is not guilt but grief, it is a yearning for home. He says:

"You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."

Humanity is destined to remain incomplete in its present existence. Its hopes and longings will remain just that. Augustine talks of this sense of longing and how it should lead us to God throughout the Confessions:

"[I am] groaning with inexpressible groanings on my wanderer's path, and remembering Jerusalem with my heart lifted up toward it - Jerusalem my home land, Jerusalem my mother."

The thing that keeps me in the Church is its acknowledgment of our brokenness as human beings, our incompleteness and vulnerability, and it is this interpretation that it puts on longing that for me provides absolute confirmation of its truth. I know that whenever I begin to place created things in the place where God should be, I distance myself from my true home. It is only when I can practice 'poverty of spirit' through prayer and worship, that I can begin to get a glimpse of that far country that is my home land, and then that longing begins again, both sweet and painful.

One final thing - the glimpses of that other country that I am offered in the liturgy and the sacraments of the Church are there not just to remind me of my own fallen state. They are there to make me part of Christ's body. My salvation can never be an individual thing - it has to be part of a corporate action. This was never possible whilst I dabbled in the New Age. It lacks this corporal element, this use of the physical - bread, wine, oil, water. But these things are not arbitrary signs - they embody in a special way the saving action of Christ. If I were to be cut off from them I would diminish as a human being, and I would fall back into error.

LMS Chairman: New book on the Faith and the New Age

An excellent article by Joseph Shaw which examines the New Age and Catholic faith, whilst also pointing to the way the Catholic faith could heal the modern obsession with the sensual and hedonistic:

"Dorian Gray was fascinated by what he saw, and in real life many of Wilde’s ‘decadent’ friends, and eventually Wilde himself, converted to Catholicism, which could give them what their sensuality could not give them. The explanation is that in their sensuality they were not seeking just pleasure, they were seeking meaning, and furthermore they were seeking spiritual realities manifested in created things. This is what they found in the Mass and in the Church."

LMS Chairman: New book on the Faith and the New Age#more

Freedom and the Death of God

Pope Benedict:

"I remain in the Church because only the Church's faith saves man. That sounds very traditional, dogmatic and unreal, but it is meant quite soberly and realistically. In our world of compulsions and frustrations the longing for salvation has awakened with hurricane force. The efforts of Freud and Jung are just attempts to give redemption to the unredeemed. Marcuse, Adorno and Habermas continue in their own way, from different starting points, to seek and proclaim salvation. In the background stands Marx, and his question too, is the question of salvation. The more liberated, powerful and enlightened man becomes, the more the longing for salvation gnaws at him, the less free he finds himself. The common element in the efforts of Marx, Freud and Marcuse is that they look for salvation by striving for a world that is delivered from suffering, sickness and need.

A world free of dominion, suffering and injustice has become the great slogan of our generation; the stormy protests of the young are aimed at this promise, and the resentments of the old rage against the fact that is has not been fulfilled, that there is still dominion, injustice and suffering. To fight against suffering and injustice in the world is indeed a thoroughly Christian impulse. But the notion that one can produce a world without suffering through social reform, through the abolition of government and the legal order, and the desire to achieve that here and now are symptoms of false doctrine, of a profound misunderstanding of human nature.

Inequality of ownership and power, to tell the truth, are not the only causes of suffering in this world. And suffering is not just the burden that man should throw off: someone who tries to do that must flee into the illusory world of drugs so as to destroy himself in earnest and arrive at reality through the conflict.

A human being always sees only as much as he loves...there is also the clear-sightedness of denial and hatred. But they can only see what is suited to them: the negative...without a certain measure of love, one finds nothing....One thing ought to be clear: Real love is neither static nor uncritical. If there is any possibility at all of changing another human being for the better, then it is only be loving him and slowly helping him change from what he is into what he can be.

Prayer is hope in action...true reason is contained in prayer, which is why it is possible to hope: we can come into contact with the Lord of the world, He listens to us and we can listen to Him...the truly great thing in Christianity, which does not dispense one from small daily things, but must not be concealed by them either, is this ability to come into contact with God."

Nietzsche:

THE MADMAN
-Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us---for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars---and yet they have done it themselves.


It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

Ratzinger on politics and praxis

Reading Pope emeritus Benedict XVI on Europe and politics is like breathing fresh clear mountain air after living in a smoggy city.

Finding Happiness

Watching this great talk from Fr. Robert J Spitzer on finding happiness is worth thousands of self-help books!

Lenten Reflection Part 1: Introduction to Praying The Sorrowful Mysteries

I hope here to draw out some of the ways in which the first three of the sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary can be fruitful in drawing you into a closer relationship with Christ. These mysteries are profound sources of healing and refreshment if entered into in the right spirit.

My method will be to use the mystical tradition of the Church to draw out the depth of the three sets of mysteries. Traditionally the mystical path has three stages; first the Illuminative, then the Purgative, and finally the Unitive stage. These three stages correspond with the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary. This ascent to God proceeds firstly through the natural graces by which the soul is initially fed by God when it begins on the spiritual path. These correspond to the earthly events of the incarnation and birth of Christ. Secondly, however, the soul begins to experience a certain dryness in prayer, and God seems to be withdrawing his graces. The enthusiasm which accompanied the beginner on the path has gone, and the soul has entered its 'dark night' of which St. John of the Cross speaks so eloquently. But this is a necessary path, because by withdrawing the more 'sensual' spiritual delights of prayer, God trains the seeker in pure faith, purging the will so that it may attain to the things of the spirit with more surety. This corresponds to the Sorrowful mysteries, and my aim here is to show how the events of Jesus' suffering and death can be a guide to our own path of salvation. Finally, when we have passed through the 'narrow gate', we are given some 'glory'. The Glorious Mysteries are stages of the Unitive path of the mystics, by which we ourselves can become 'Christ-for-others' in the world. In reality, these stages are perhaps not so linear - we are working on different aspects of them at different times. But one thing is clear - we will certainly not able to 'get some glory' (as Father Lazarus El-Antony puts it) until we have begun a life of prayer and entered with our whole being on the Way of Purgation represented by the Sorrowful mysteries. After all, didn't Christ say

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it."

Introduction: Memory, Will and Imagination

The soul of every human being could be said to be a composite of memory, will and imagination. These three faculties need to be present if man is made in the image and likeness of God. The memory is our connection to the image, the will and imagination are the ways in which we can restore the likeness of God in our souls. Irenaeus said when we fell we lost the likeness but retained the image.

So memory, will and imagination are the keys to our theosis (participation in the life of God), but like all things in this fallen world, they can be misused. For example, an imagination darkened by worldliness, made impure by luxury and lust, sullied with self-indulgence, cannot attain the chastity necessary to be a light of joy to others. When we seek to privately take pleasure or use another as a tool to that pleasure we begin to destroy our natural capacity to freely participate selflessly in the joys around us. We bend our perception to our desire, and we make the world in our own image. Soon we tire of this image, and so we create more and more exotic images to substitute for the Real, but this is a fruitless quest, ending only in despair. No-one illustrates this better than Dante in the Inferno, as Charles Williams shows here:

[Talking of the lovers Paolo and Francesca]...each of the lovers had delight in the image of the other, and both of them had a mutual delight in their love. Their mutual lussuria indulged this. But lussuria cannot in fast stop there; the mutual indulgence is bound too soon to become two separate single indulgences....; they set up in the human organism a hunger for them which , from being mutual, becomes single. An appetite for the use of this Image prevails; this is Gluttony and this is the next circle of hell (VI).

The true end of imagination is beauty, which is Being as rejoiced in. The true end of memory is truth, which is Being as the unity known by the intellect, and the true end of will is goodness, which is Being as loved.

The Sorrowful Mysteries: Taking up your cross

The Sorrowful mysteries represent a way of purgation, by which we may learn to die to ourselves. If we don't die to ourselves before the separation of actual death occurs, the 'sting of death' will not be avoided. The separation of death will only be a thing to be feared if we have not made this ecstasis, this journey out of ourselves, first.

Stratford Caldecott puts it like this:

"It seems to me that death is not merely an absence of life, but its essence lies in a process of separation. Soul is separated from body, and the parts of the soul and the body from each other. It is the dissolution of wholeness and unity that we face when we face our own death. As for life, it is that which unites, binding many parts into a single whole. As such, it is memory, understanding and love to which we must look for the secret of life. When Christians speak of immortality, we are referring to the existence we receive when God remembers, understands, and loves us. And in our own love for others is revealed that interior dimension through which we ourselves are renewed and resurrected. In fact all experience, when carefully attended to, arouses this sense of an interior."

St. Paul says, "For then we shall know, even as we are known", which means that God's knowledge of us becomes our knowledge of Him, and it is in this knowing (or sharing in the divine life which is really the trinitarian mutual gift-relation of God) that we are immortal, or rather it is in this remembrance, this understanding and this love, that we exist eternally. And clearly no false or sinful part of ourselves will be taken up in this knowing, which is why we begin the rosary now, and we make it a constant weapon in the spiritual battle against the tendencies of vice which we find within and around us.

The Sorrowful mysteries, as realities which have the effect of being like 'spiritual enzymes' in our souls - promoting the fermentation by which everyday 'water' can be turned into 'spiritual wine', provide the necessary bitterness or astringency to temper our sensual natures. To turn our memory, will and understanding from the world of sense into the dark night by which it may find itself finally loosed from slavery.

The first Sorrowful Mystery: The Agony in the Garden.
The spiritual fruit is the aligning of the will with that of the Father. So this mystery concerns the will. Our will is very underdeveloped when we can do whatever we want. Most people know this from experience - as soon as we get some time where we have the freedom from work to begin all those projects we always said we would, we fritter it, and end up frustrated. This is why the vow of obedience is so important. Obedience is almost completely reviled in the modern age, when the misuse of power is so widespread. But obedience, the handing over of one's autonomy to a higher centre, ie the basis of hierarchy, is an integral part of the universe. Without it we have no basis by which to value anything. Why do seekers after truth in the East search for a guru? To find someone to be obedient to. We have one Master, the Lord, and we do not need to search for Him far and wide.

 In this mystery Christ retires to a secluded olive grove outside Jerusalem. It is night and he brings only Peter, James and John. That they cannot stay awake and pray with him tells us something about the will. The faculties such as the intellect and understanding, the reasoning faculties, can only help us so much. At some point we have to relinquish them, and go into the darkness with pure intention alone. We must constantly make our intention pure through prayer, fasting and confession, and the purity and one-pointedness of our intention will bring us through the night of agony.

When you pray this mystery try to imagine the great intensity of Jesus' prayer that night in the garden. Try to feel the great struggle by which we stay awake to the spirit, by which we pray and mean 'Thy will be done'. If we truly pray this what earthly kingdom can prevail against it?

The Glorious mystery that corresponds to this is the Resurrection - the will's purification through obedience results in faith.

Part Two coming soon: The second Sorrowful Mystery: The Scourging at the Pillar. The spiritual fruit is the purification of the imagination.

Worry

I heard someone say recently that they were going to try and give up worry for Lent. I think that's admirable but doubt it's possible. If you are by nature a worrier like myself then you will know how insidious worry can be, how it can creep up on you at 4am, how it's always really there. I'm sure I'm not alone in developing certain techniques as a worrier to try and minimise it, such as making sure I get physical outdoor exercise everyday, having a daily prayer routine (eg. saying the rosary), having creative work to throw yourself into, trying to avoid spending time on any absorbing media which might add to the worry (eg. reading certain newspapers), trying to be organised and developing a pragmatic attitude - get on with the things you can do, and forget about the things you have no control over.

I think that last one is really key, and that is where faith comes in and can make a difference to worry. Really, many worries boil down to an experience of complete helplessness in the face of events or life-situations over which we have no control. Worry is like a kind of superstition - we think if we worry about something we can exert some kind of indirect influence over it. But as Christ said:

"Which of you, by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?"

In fact the whole passage in the Sermon on the Mount on worry is one of the most beautiful passages in scripture in my opinion. We cannot help worrying I think, but we can minimise it by being open to receiving the grace of God's help in prayer, by being open to sharing in others' good fortune even if our own lives seem dark and full of trouble.

Do Not Worry
25 “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?

28 “So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; 29 and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

31 “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

Paolo and Francesca

I'm posting here a fairly lengthy section of Charles Williams book on Dante, The Figure of Beatrice. It is an extremely perceptive account of how the soul first begins the downward steps to sin, based on the first circles of hell from Dante's Inferno.

The Year of Mercy called by the Pope which began on 8th Dec 2015 has the admirable aim of bringing more of us back into the loving embrace of God's forgiveness. There has been much talk of 'journeying' with the sinner, of pastoral outreach, and penitential pathways. I think we are also invited this year to take a clear look at the circumstances of sin, for it is sin that ultimately can put the supreme obstacle between us and God's mercy. If this were not the case there would be no need for Christ's salvific action, for the Sacraments, or the Church.

Here we are introduced to the first choice that the soul makes in hell, which is a choice of the imagination. We are invited to see how gradual and excusable the path to sin seems, how innocently and blamelessly we might be tempted to see ourselves as we start on a path that will lead to our damnation. How important it is to be awake in the spirit, understanding that we are constantly making choices between good and evil, even just in small lazinesses and through the thoughts and desires that we entertain, and those we reject. A solid education in the human condition, in how flawed and wretched we are or can be, is not something the Church should flinch from, knowing how little the modern world likes to hear such things. It is the supremely merciful thing to do to confront the soul with the reality of its choices, and where those choices will lead.

If anyone is qualified to talk about the way Dante describes the dalliance of the soul with 'lussuria' or indulgence, sexual infidelity etc, it is Charles Williams. By all accounts an odd, charismatic man, he was a fine theologian, and his understanding of Dante impressed many, including Dorothy Sayers, who translated and annotated the Inferno. But his personal life was highly unusual to say the least, and whilst married, he carried on many romantic liaisons with women. I won't go into that here, but I believe the passage I have reproduced is evidence of the way in which:

Williams, as his interest in Dante grew and as he began to publish on the great poet, began to present him as he had “very seldom” been understood before: “as a poet among poets, creating . . . ‘an accurate image of actual experience.’” (from this excellent blog post)

From the Figure of Beatrice, by Charles Williams:

"they come to the circle where the lecherous are tossed on a storm. This is the place of what is probably the most famous episode in the whole Commedia, the episode of Paolo and Francesca - which is always quoted as an example of Dante's tenderness. So, no doubt, it is, but it is not here for that reason, nor even for the more important reason of poetically lightening the monotonous gloom of hell. It has a much more important place; it presents the first tender, passionate, and half-excusable consent of the soul to sin.

Up to this point (Inf. V) the Imagination has been in suspense; it has not chosen- whether from a shameful shrinking from choice into a spiritual cosiness, or from its not being confronted with this religious choice. It is now shown as choosing, and the choice is made as plausible as it possibly can be, Francesca's description of how she and Paolo read together, how in that reading their eyes sometimes met and their colour changed, how they came to the moment when Lancelot kissed Guinevere; how

questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

la bocca mi bacio tutto tremante-

'he who shall never be divided from me kissed my mouth all trembling; the book was a pander, and he who wrote it; that day we read no more': Francesca's description of Love itself, with a certain reminiscence of Dante's own poem, 'Love and the gentle heart', for she says : 'Love, which quickly knows itself in the gentle heart....Love which excuses no loved one from loving....Love does not yet abandon me'- all this heightens comprehension until Dante himself sighs to think 'how many sweet thoughts, how great a desire, brought them to this dolorous state'. 

What indeed was the sin? It was a forbidden love? yes, but Dante (in the place he gives it in the Commedia) does not leave it at that. He so manages the very description, he so heightens the excuse, that the excuse reveals itself precisely as the sin. [italics mine]. The old name for lechery was luxuria; lussuria is the word Virgil uses of this circle, and it is lussuria, luxury, indulgence, self-yielding, which is the sin, and the opening out of hell. The persistent parleying with the occasion of sin, the sweet prolonged laziness of love, is the first surrender of the soul to hell - small but certain. The formal sin here is the adultery of the two lovers; the poetic sin is their shrinking from the adult love demanded of them, and their refusal of the opportunity of glory. Hell, in Dante, is in the shape of a funnel, and a funnel is exactly what hell is; and this moment of the lovers' yielding is the imagination swept around the inner edge of the funnel. Here all is still good except the very good itself; all is still valuable except value itself; 'il ben dell' intelletto' quivers and a little disintegrates. 

The adultery here is only the outer mark; the sin is a sin possible to all lovers, married or unmarried, adulterous or marital. It is a sin especially dangerous to Romantics, so much so that its essence has often been taken to be a mark of Romanticism. But this, if we allow Dante and Wordsworth to be true Romantics, it hardly is; it is much more the sign of the pseudo-Romantic- in life even more than in letters. At the Francescan moment the delay and the deceit have only begun; therefore their punishment- say their choice- has in it all the good they chose as well as all the evil. Their love is as changeless as the storm. A consolation lingers with them through the infinite 'forever'. So in the poem; and could the soft delaying indulgence of the soul so delay perpetually, the imagination and the will might also be content to lose heaven for that.

It cannot; it has entered hell. It has, as the two poets, following their own way of discovery, so well see, to lose gradually what good was still left to it. In the Francescan moment each of the lovers had delight in the image of the other, and both of them had a mutual delight in their love. Their mutual lussuria indulged this. But lussuria cannot in fast stop there; the mutual indulgence is bound too soon to become two separate single indulgences. It is true that lussuria is to be distinguished from the sollagia of the Convivio. Sollagia, with all the rest of Pleasantness, is a moral duty - to oneself as to the other; eros itself is in that sense not only permissible but must be enjoined. It is part of our 'honourable estate' - of nobility - to amuse and be amused; the Convivio is in that sense a commentary on the words used in the marriage rite according to the use of the Church of England. But when the sollagia dominate, they become lussuria; they set up in the human organism a hunger for them which , from being mutual, becomes single. An appetite for the use of this Image prevails; this is Gluttony and this is the next circle of hell (VI).

 The souls lie there under a foul and heavy rain, and below the claws of an Organism of hell, Cerberus, who deafeningly barks and sharply tears them for ever. They lie turning restlessly from side to side to shield themselves as they may. The stinking earth is more difficult lying than Francesca's bed, though if anyone were to discern a sexual interpretation in this circle, I do not know that he need be contradicted. Dante was writing about sex as well as all the rest. This is the result of prolonged incontinence, incontinence of mind as well as body; gluttony of delicacies as of vulgarities, of quality as well as quantity. The fatal development of sin in the soul might all be read in terms of gluttony as well as lechery. Over-indulgence, culpable delay, the beginning of perversion, is the same with whatever kind of flesh. Or mind or spirit.