One of the themes that goes back to the start of this blog is that demotivation is a profound problem in modern Western civilization; and that this relates to our alienation - our lack of participation in the world outside of our-selves.
To this could be allied a feeling of lacking energy, which is partly a consequence of lacking strong motivation.
However, the methods by which a depleted and demotivated person can attain greater vitality and purpose have their hazards - because most of these either increase our dependence on external sources, rendering us open to manipulation; and/or they have a tendency to narrow and harden the whole person.
This trned has been culturally observable for many centuries or millennia, if one is open to the possibility; the conquering Roman and Normans discovered strong energy and purpose via a culture based on architecture and legalism.
But there were significant human costs, or rather de-humanizing, anti-spiritual costs; whereby religion became more concentrated and single-pointed - more like a magic system of achieving willed objectives, and thereby became more alienating and isolating from relationships with God, the world of spirit, and indeed relationships with other people at a profound level.
This is seen nowadays in the prevalent Careerism of the ruling classes, combined with intrinsically-invasive bureaucracy - and their consequent extreme hardness, narrowness, materialism, greed; and a dependence on external direction that is both habitual and ideological.
My point is that there are short-medium term and effective methods of achieving purpose and a kind of meaning in life; that are profoundly dehumanizing in the long term.
These amount to their adherents incrementally painting themselves into a corner of emptiness, desperation, and despair; from which they can only escape by annihilation of self-awareness, and ultimately willed self-destruction.
This extremely brittle form of adaptation to life then forms the basis for that de facto embrace of spitefulness and induced chaos as a crude and negative reaction against the narrowing and hardening which caused the situation in the first place.
My point here is that the "will-power"-driven careerism - narrowing and hardenening of personality and institutional policy; the linkage of energy, will and direction to external authority; are very powerful on their own ground.
Those who desire to resist and oppose the dehumanizing and alienating tendency of our civilization are therefore doomed to fail if they meet the Romans, Normans, or their successors on their own ground.
Their own ground includes the primacy of legalistic thinking, bureaucracy - including its assumptions of virtue as including obedience to external (invariably systemic) authority.
An ancient example of this fatal self-weakening is my interpretation of why the more creative and mystical Anglo-Saxon "Celtic" Christianity (from Ireland via Iona and Lindisfarne) was overcome by the later Roman mission initiated by St Augustine of Canterbury and St Wilfrid (variously Abbot of Ripon, Bishop of Hexham, Archbishop of Canterbury) - at the Synod of Whitby.
Celtic capacity for resistance to Roman takeover was fatally undermined and weakened because the Celtic church shared the fundamental bureaucratic and legalistic assumptions - the structured hierarchy rooted in obedience - of the Roman Church - and the Romans did bureaucracy much, much better than the Celts!
Apparently the debate was won by the gelaitstic argument of forcing the Celts to agree that the Pope of Rome was the ultimate Christian authority, and that "therefore" all Christians must obey everything that the Pope (via his representative Wilfred) told them to do.
I would link the Roman, and later Norman, triumphs to their architecture, to their stone temples/ monasteries, cathedrals, and churches - as well as their stone forts and castles.
The very structure of these stone buildings, plus the highly formal and single-pointed-purpose rituals enacted within them; was a cause as well as an effect of the narrower and more concentrated form of cosnciousness that began its long and to triumphant march to domination in The West.
Such combination of authority and obedience, systemic organization, buildings, and rituals; constitute a kind of magical activity (a method, a science indeed, for focusing conscious will power to affect people's consciousness, and shape the world) that continues, and it continues to be effective, even now.
This magical system of domination is not essentially Christian, and has indeed become anti-Christian. But its domination will continue - including among Christians - for as long as those who oppose it in their hearts, continue to share its assumptions in their heads, and by habit and expediency.
"We" cannot stop or defeat "Them" so long as we meet Them on their own ground of systemic discourse (politics, government, law, mass media, etc); and so long as We defer to Their core assumptions regarding the ultimate value and rightness of external authority.
Unless we rid ourselves of these ultimate assumptions as to what is proper and right, and replace them with other and more powerful, motivating assumptions; We shall succumb to Their will...
We shall continue to be overcome by Their narrow and concentrated spiritual-magic, as much or more than by their material power.
this came to mind: if Celtic christianity, which represents here the spontaneous original participation side of things, did resist the alienating systematic tendency of the Romans, wouldn't it have the same arresting influencing that operated elsewhere outside the West. (this is assuming that only the West broke out into alienation and allowed for the evolution of consciousness, whereas everywhere else, if left alone, was still in, pretty much an originally - or at least medievally - participated consciousness).
ReplyDeletei think this is more or less a given, personally. thus, in a way the bureaucratic tendency is a necessary half step (in which we have been resting for far too long).
we also of course have to decide if the evolution of consciousness is a good thing (that is a God desired thing for us). and then evaluate if the loss of certain things (like the Fall, or the loss of childhood innocence, etc) are perhaps necessary 'deaths', just like our own, here, is necessary, to achieve something larger, more profound. my answer is that, nostalgia for all gardens of Eden aside, indeed, it is.
@Laeth - I agree with your probable long term prediction in general terms, but I don't think that makes a difference to my belief that the Synod of Whitby was a wrong step at the time.
ReplyDeleteI would say that the decision to adopt Roman Christianity - at that time and place - was made for the wrong reasons, i.e. non-Christian and anti-spiritual reasons.
And the consequence was that English Christianity began (but not immediately, the process was gradual) to decline into a very long period of careerism, and also European links that weakened the coherence of England, especially France. This was considerably accentuated and accelerated by the Norman invasion - itself I think somewhat caused by the same phenomenon (e.g. the Pope seems to have supported the claim of William the Conquerer, and certainly did not oppose him or support Harold).
It is impossible to know what would have happened if things had worked out otherwise, but my general assumptions is that wrong decisions made for the wrong reasons almost invariably have suboptimal consequences.
Conversely; the right decision for the right reasons would be expected to have significantly better outcomes, in some significant way - although of course all this depends on the choices and decisions of later people.
yes, i suppose the important thing now is to learn what to do and how to deal with what we have.
ReplyDeletei used to be of the mind, say four years or so ago, as i was leaving the oneness trap, that it was not only beneficial but vital to recover much of that 'celticity' (at least where that was the original participatory baseline). 'RETVRN' as the kids say. but then i started to have doubts that it was possible. and now i confess i even have doubts if it's healthy at all.
certainly that naturality can come, in moments and specific settings (like say, playing music with people), but it doesn't seem possible to recover it in that sustained, civilizational way.
(i wanted to comment on an earlier post about this, but it ties here too: it seems like, for the alienated consciousness of today, the polis cannot exist, which is why political goals are, by definition now, evil; for a modern person to engage in politics is almost a performative contradiction, it goes against the constitution of our consciousness, such as it is now).
My own view is that more "mystical" and fluid branches of Christianity can only ever exist because the Catholic Church is doing the dull, hard work of having dogmas, hierarchy, councils, the apostolic succession, and so forth-- therefore standing as a perpetual touchstone of Christian orthodoxy and organisation, from which other forms might depart in this or that regard. Mystical forms of Christianity tend to dissipate in a few generations; as Newman once quipped, they start in mist and end in schism.
ReplyDeleteThis article reminds me of my time with the Catholic Worker movement. They are a Catholic anarchist /personalist movement that lives in cities with the formerly homeless in houses of hospitality and sometimes in farming communities, but specifically refuse to register in any way with the state or accept tax-exempt status. Peter Maurin might be a thinker you would find interesting of you've never encountered him before. I think groups like this show the way Christians will have to relate to the modern state-- anarchist in relation to the government, pacifist when it comes to modern warfare. In my experience, something like the Catholic Worker movement can and does happen within the Catholic Church, in relationship with the hierarchy from whom they receive sacraments and teaching, but made up of lay people. There was a wonderful vitality to this community that I was a part of that came from completely rejecting the worldly sense of value and argumentation and living in a community around the Eucharist. Their meetings for 'clarification of thought' remind me of some of your essays.
ReplyDeleteBruce,
ReplyDeleteThis reminds of Tolkien's "long defeat" comment.
In recent years, I have told fellow ministers that we cannot think to use the systems of the enemy and win. Even if the systems seem to be neutral, we are not ambassadors of this world, we are ambassadors of Jesus Christ, with citizenship that belongs to him and not this world.
The revolt of the Blues and the Greens during the time of Justinian are a constant reminder to me, that the god of this world will always present to us two sides (Blues or Greens), and like those who came to Constantinople (late to the revolt) were asked, "Blue or Green", nothing has changed in our day.
@Mal - There is some truth in what you say - and what Newman says - but it leaves out a great deal of the most important stuff, as well as ignoring much of what actually happens (and has happened). After all the actually-existing RCC is deeply riven by decades of accelerating schism; to the point that there is no consensus about which is the schism and which is orthodoxy.
ReplyDelete@HI - That sounds rather different from what I am arguing here.
@L3 - I liked your Blues and Greens remark - I first came across that phenomenon in the (deeply cynical and ant-Christian) novel by Robert Graves Count Belisarius; but it does illustrate how theological disagreement can (even in a Very religious society) become attached to politics And Sport (!) in an extreme and indeed ludicrous way.
> the Pope seems to have supported the claim of William the Conquerer, and certainly did not oppose him or support Harold
ReplyDeleteAs a seasoned Norman hater, Dr Charlton, you may well be aware the Normans took Pope Leo IX hostage in 1054, releasing him only on terms of their own choosing. We can suppose reasonably that both Pope Leo and the papacy itself became puppets of the Normans from that time forward.
This warns us not only against the Normans, but against the risks of blind obedience to worldly hierarchies, because control over worldly hierarchies can be seized by worldly means.
@Crosbie - I didn't know that, but it does not surprise me!
ReplyDeleteMy problem, as a "seasoned Norman hater" is that I love their architecture above all other! I even visited a (rare) Victorian *Neo*-Norman church the other day - and I liked that too...
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