Hypersonic Missiles and the millennial desire/inability to believe

My Anglophilia has been notably muted of late. I hope my reasons for this will not be taken as petty. On an external level, I simply find vanishingly little to admire about modern Britain: which still somehow allows Prince Andrew to walk around free, which persists under the political ‘leadership’ of Rishi Sunak, and which continues under the cultural sway of the likes of Piers Morgan and Jo Rowling (whose politics have become predictable, boring, and almost a sad self-caricature at this point). And on a personal level, I’m still struggling with some of my own psychosexual hang-ups, with which my early Anglophilia seems to have been very deeply entangled. My Anglophilia has been battered and bruised, certainly. It’s a lot quieter than it used to be. But it’s still there and runs quite deep.

And one Briton whom I am quite happy to celebrate for his artistic and cultural achievements is rock musician Sam Fender.

Maybe we were born and raised too cynical;
In the wake of a miracle, we’d never believe.
You impersonate the seasons—your gold autumnal haze,
But something dies inside you when winter rears its face.

Fender’s got two studio albums out now, Hypersonic Missiles and Seventeen Going Under—both of which are tremendous testaments to the enduring appeal and rejuvenation of rock ‘n’ roll music generally. But it’s Hypersonic Missiles in particular that I want to focus on here.

Hypersonic Missiles is deceptively simple in terms of its musical character. His music has a certain transatlantic appeal, with roots rock, blues rock and American heartland rock written deeply into its figurative DNA… not surprising when one considers that Sam Fender considers Born to Run- and ‘Dancing in the Dark’-era Bruce Springsteen to be one of his formative influences, along with soul legends Otis Ray Redding and Donny Hathaway. There’s nothing pretentious about Fender—no progressive time-signature shenanigans, no operatic frills. His music is proudly and defiantly a stylistic throwback, while at the same time retaining its own deeply British independent character.

With such a melodic character, one might expect the lyrics of his songs to follow a similarly straightforward direction: rebellion, outlaw ballads, life on the open road. No such matter. Fender’s lyrics are deeply introspective and even philosophical. My intention here, actually, is to provide Hypersonic Missiles as a poetic-lyrical companion piece to my friend Daniel Schwindt’s There Must Be More than This. These two works raise many of the same questions, raise many of the same cries of internal pain, struggle over many of the same social and even religious problems.

This may seem an odd pairing. Sam Fender is, like many Britons of his age, agnostic—when asked if he was religious, his simple and immediate answer was ‘no’, even though half of his family is religious. His experience of being at a religious camp ended in a sacrilegious prank he and a friend played on the camp wardens that got them expelled. By contrast, Daniel Schwindt has been a committed Catholic traditionalist for as long as I’ve known him. Politically, Fender has been a bog-standard British leftist for a long time, Corbyn supporter and so forth. ‘Play God’, the first single released from this album, was largely greeted as a dystopian anti-Trump anthem, for example—though recently he’s made some noises about being disenchanted with the left. Schwindt’s politics are deeply syncretic, though I would still classify them as conservative.

But Fender’s album and Schwindt’s book share a certain commonality of observation… even of spiritual aspiration. Both of them write out of a certain shared cultural alienation common to millennials in the Anglophone West. In both of their works there is a will, a strong thirst, to believe in something greater, something better… but that will is hampered by having grown up on a foundation of shifting sand.

Hypersonic Missiles is not a concept album, but the songs do hang together thematically. It’s an indifferent, even callous, world that is viewed through the eyes of the young and the vulnerable. The title song, which is also the opening track, is sung through the eyes of a narrator (loosely autobiographical in Fender’s case) whose fatalist attitude toward the modern world and its leaders—who say it’s ‘high time for hypersonic missiles’—gets him called a ‘nihilist’. Yet his attitude of powerlessness in the face of world realities that he has neither the power nor the knowledge to affect, is one which he has learned from his ‘elders’: ‘the silver-tongued suits and cartoons that rule my world’. This very much parallels Daniel Schwindt’s broad characterisation of the millennial predicament.

But there’s more to it than that. Fender’s narrator has difficulty really committing even to his own positions. He owns up to some degree of knowledge, but then disavows it in the same breath: ‘kids in Gaza are bombed and I’m just out of it’; ‘I’m not smart enough to change a thing’; ‘I’ve no answers, only questions, don’t you ask a thing’. It’s as though this narrator understands that there is something being asked of him that he can’t deliver… an understanding that gets spun out and explored in greater detail in ‘White Privilege’: this dovetails very closely with Schwindt’s characterisation of millennial ‘guilt’. The only thing he can own up to is a commitment to love the recipient of said song:

But I believe in what I’m feeling,
And I’m falling for you.
And though this world is gonna end, but till then,
I’ll give you everything I have—I’ll give you everything I am.

It’s not entirely blameless, that the thing that Fender’s narrator finds most ‘real’, the things he can ‘believe’, is a feeling. I think he understands quite well that this is not enough to base any kind of commitment on, yet at the same time, it’s all he has, and it’s the only thing he has control over.

This broad, what I will call attitudinal, agnosticism (rather than religious agnosticism) is what underwrites the entirety of the album. It isn’t an accident, therefore, that the spectre of suicide, of overdose, of death-by-despair, lingers over the whole album like a threatening cloud. In ‘The Borders’, Fender cites how his friend’s godmother ‘took those pills, and now she’s gone’. And of course ‘Dead Boys’ is all about the too-many deaths-by-despair of young men in the impoverished towns of the English north where Fender grew up. And the snarling, imprecatory ‘Use’ at the end of the album maintains a kind of strange ambiguity likening certain kinds of abusive interpersonal relationships to abusive drug habits.

This attitudinal agnosticism contrasts starkly with a certain degree of Scriptural literacy in Fender, which is most noticeable in ‘The Borders’. ‘The Borders’ is a loosely-autobiographical song of Fender in his younger days, who lost a friend who was like a brother to him in many ways. Yet the language he uses in it, and the character of the two boys, very closely recalls the Old Testament tales of estranged brothers: Esau and Jacob most notably, but there are also hints of Ishmael and Isaac, Joseph and Judah, even Abel and Cain, in the tale he spins… transposed into the contemporary key of Geordie poverty. The friendship / foster-brotherhood Fender describes rises out of shared experiences: growing up in houses of divorce, abuse, neglect, generational anger… but also the resentments of one against the other build up from the start: ‘and your dad took off when you were a baby, and you still hate me for my dad stuck around.’

There are these glimmers of hope, like when Fender’s friend’s godmother helps him deal with his anger issues. But then those glimmers of hope die. There is no turn in the story in ‘The Borders’. Not only is there no faith that can save the friends and foster-brothers from estrangement, but even the possibility of faith is occluded. The story ends with one brother’s hand at the other brother’s throat. Unlike Ishmael and Isaac, unlike Esau and Jacob, there is no reconciliation. But Fender is still alive and singing—even if it is as hebel, as a passing breath—suggesting that maybe there is hope somewhere… outside the song and its story.

This deeply underscores Daniel Schwindt’s assertion that it requires massive effort, often seeming insurmountable, for millennials to believe. The sort of faith required to effect a reconciliation like the one which ‘The Borders’ seems to yearn for but doesn’t happen—simply isn’t there. And we see certain intimations of the background of fundamental uncertainty (both economic and existential) that underlies this lack of belief.

The most hopeful song on the album, actually, is ‘You’re Not the Only One’, quoted above. It’s a song in which Fender’s narrator is addressing a lover who feels alienated from the fake smiles around her, the pressure to conform, and the meaningless rituals of ‘night life’. The narrator assures her, tells her that she’s not alone, that he admires her composure but also shares her disillusionment. Yet even here there’s a strange ambiguity, a double meaning in the language which distances itself from certainty. (What lover wants to be told that they’re ‘not the only one’?) A similar disillusionment diffuses another not-really-love-song here, ‘Will We Talk?’, which distinctly un-romantically explores the mixed feelings and internal contradictions of the ‘age-old ritual’ of a one-night stand.

Other songs speak to conditions which are more universal and less grounded in specifically-millennial generational angst. ‘Saturday’ describes the age-old work-week grind and the longing for the release of the weekend; ‘That Sound’, the classic mentality of the rock musician for whom meaning and beauty in life is found in his music (and in precious few other places). Comparisons to Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger and John Mellencamp again assert themselves. ‘Two People’ is a distinctly non-millennial song: Fender is describing the travails of an older couple in an abusive, unhappy relationship. One is tempted to think of this song as something of a reply or a coda to ‘Jack and Diane’ or ‘The River’, though ‘Two People’ is much less specific than these—its protagonists are anonymous.

But there is also a kind of generational response to ‘Born to Run’ here, too, in ‘Leave Fast’. There’s a lot less hope that getting out of Dodge is an option in ‘Leave Fast’, which is in fact slow and elegiac in tone, but there’s also a lot more urgency:

Mass of filth and rubbish outside the houses,
And broken fridges and torn up sofas.
The boy racers tearing down the beehive road
Leading out to coastlines,
Where kids freeze their lungs
And run amongst the rolling dunes away from everyone.

The fact that this song takes the form of a conversation with an ‘old man’ who was apparently less fortunate in getting out of his situation than Springsteen was in getting out of Jersey (as a culture writ large), makes this song a suitable close to the album.

Hypersonic Missiles is, at first glance, a fairly bleak album. But because it speaks to the reality of a world where faith (and still less certainty) are hard to come by, and because it speaks to that reality with empathy and understanding, even the bleak moments are characterised by a sense that Fender suffers with us through them. Beneath the unbelief which is so prominent, there is a deep unmet desire to believe. And the album as a whole is shot through with these painfully-bright incomplete slivers of hope, these fragments of promises that things might get better. Honestly, Hypersonic Missiles is one of the best expressions of millennial spirituality that I’ve yet heard, particularly in light of Schwindt’s work.

The Skidelskys: toward a theory of satiety

My latest Lenten reading—and to be sure, it very much is Lenten reading—comes from two non-religious Britons: Robert Jacob Alexander, Baron Skidelsky, and his son Dr Edward Skidelsky: How Much Is Enough? Robert Skidelsky is an economist, and his son Edward is a philosopher, but between them Skidelsky père et fils here have given us a remarkable piece of writing that sits directly at the crux between the two disciplines.

It is also not entirely devoid of religious interest. The Lenten advice of the Holy Fathers is to ‘eat not to satiety’, but the Skidelskys point out with some degree of alarm that the very concept of satiety has been all but demolished in modern consumer culture. The wants of even the most wealthy and productive societies seem to be bottomless, creating ever newer and more ingenious ways of satisfying them—and yet our median quality of life has not improved accordingly. To the Skidelskys, this is not so much an economic problem in itself, as it is a humanities problem—one might go so far as to call it a philosophical or even religious problem.

The starting point for Robert Skidelsky, of course, is Keynes: in particular, a forward-looking utopian essay he delivered in 1928 entitled ‘Economic Possibilities’. He predicted that with greater means and capacities, the dynamo of capitalism would putter out, ushering an era of more humane and human-sized values:

I see us free to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take the least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field, who toil not neither do they spin.

Keynes’s prediction, according to all of the empirical data available to hand in the OECD countries as of 2012 (when this book was written), went very badly awry. The rich nations are wealthier and more technologically-advanced than ever, but working hours, far from having decreased, have gone up. Wages have stayed stagnant. Life satisfaction has not improved with increased productivity. The consumer culture is characterised by unfulfilling conspicuous consumption among the rich and increasing desperation among the poor. The utopia of plenty and ease that the capitalist dynamo promised has grown further and further from view, while the dynamo keeps churning away under the banner of the elusive concept of ‘utility’.

The Skidelskys take note that the idea, let alone possibility, of unlimited growth without purpose is something very recent and unprecedented in human experience—and would have been an object of horror to the best and brightest minds of the classical civilisations. Aristotle, Confucius, the Dharmasutras, and later the Christian Gospels and the epistles of Saint Paul, all take a very dubious view of the whole enterprise of wealth acquisition—and although each of these classical sources held that the mercantile profession had its place and was necessary to the flourishing of any society, it was in no case the most virtuous of pursuits, and presented unique dangers to the holistic well-being of the one engaged in it. The Skidelskys sketch out a brief—but accurate and engaging—treatment of each of these three world philosophical traditions and their attitudes toward wealth, showing in each case that wealth is not considered an end in itself but always a means to some greater end. The Skidelskys, returning to Keynes’s essay and his hearkening to those who ‘pluck the day virtuously and well’, call the object of this Aristotelian-Confucian-Christian-Dharmic striving ‘the good life’.

They take observance, as well, of two of the major challenges to the growth-at-all-costs model of late capitalism. The first challenge to the late-capitalist model is the idea of the ‘gross national happiness’. The second challenge is that posed by the green movement, by environmental economics and both ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’ ecology.

The Skidelskys raise two objections to the ‘happiness economics’ approach. The first one is empirical. How do we know that the ‘happiness’ which people self-report on surveys of life satisfaction, for example, is actually reflective of their circumstances and overall well-being? Ultimately, despite the good intentions of said surveys and the people making use of them, what they’re doing is swapping out one black box (that of ‘utility’) for another (that of ‘happiness’). We don’t get to look inside that black box to see what makes it tick, and ultimately we are called on to accept the tautological reasoning of such surveys if we are to make use of that data.

The other objection the Skidelskys raise is moral. What if someone were to invent a wonder drug like the soma from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or what if someone were to invent a mechanical method of stimulating the pleasure centres of the brain (like BTL chips in Shadowrun, or Garak’s Obsidian Order endorphin implant in the DS9 episode ‘The Wire’)? What if a cheap and easy way were found to fool the brain into thinking it’s happy, even if the actual conditions of the user’s life were miserable? The Skidelskys assert that happiness economics, despite happiness economists’ protestations to the legal and rights-based limits of their focus, provides no real answer to this. If such ‘quick fixes’ made their way onto the market, it wouldn’t take a jaded cynical cyberpunk to understand that an innumerable, and intolerable, number of people would be tempted by them. Ultimately, the Skidelskys assert, with Solzhenitsyn, that it simply isn’t a good enough solution to replace the idol of growth with the idol of happiness.

They then turn to the ‘green’ approach. Of the Skidelskys’ three critiques, this one is the mildest and most sympathetic, although they do take intense issue both with some of the more-moderate and some of the more-radical environmentalist postures. Against the moderates, the Skidelskys assert that the logic they deploy is ultimately the same utilitarian cost-benefit logic deployed by mainstream neoclassical economists, only extended to a longer term. The moderates treat nature as something instrumental to a black-box ideal of human utility. Against the radicals, they assert that the totally-ascetic deontology of the ‘deep ecologists’ is a kind of frenzied Puritanism in the style of Cromwell and Savonarola. They detect—and in some cases they don’t have to dig very far to find made explicit—a fire-and-brimstone sermonising and warnings of all humankind as sinners in the hands of an angry goddess (said goddess being, naturally, Gaia).

The Skidelskys do want us to take a ‘deep’ consideration of nature, however. They are actually not too far in their actual understanding of ecology from writers like EF Schumacher or Wendell Berry. Unlike the moderates who approach nature with the detached attitude of dilettantes, and radicals for whom all human activity which exerts a force of change on nature is by that very fact ‘sinful’, the Skidelskys issue a call for active human engagement with and investment in nature—by farming, by fishing and by gardening, for example. Appreciation for nature on a local and personal scale is both salutary for ecosystems and healthy for the human soul.

After having launched a full broadside against the broken promises of capitalism and the growth ideology, a strong critique against the ‘happiness’ economists, and a milder and friendlier critique against the ecological economists, the Skidelskys lay their cards on the table. They articulate, over-against the liberal advocates (such as Rawls and Nussbaum) of the value-neutral state, a need for a positive doctrine of the ‘good life’ supported by public policy. This concept contains the basic goods of: health, security, respect, leisure, friendship (including family both nuclear and extended), personality and harmony with nature.

This is precisely the point at which How Much Is Enough? becomes something of a Tory radical altar call—and a remarkably effective and stirring one at that, one which made me want to dust off the old Cavalier regalia (figuratively speaking). It is not accidental that, despite the Skidelskys’ clear and insistent intellectual debt to Keynes, they deliberately make mention and use of a rather older, venerable but neglected strain of English economic thought in John Ruskin and William Morris. They anticipate, and to a certain extent welcome, the objection that they are advocating paternalism. Yes, say Robert and Edward Skidelsky, we are paternalists, but our paternalism is of a non-coercive sort which is compatible with life in a democratic society. What’s more: in making our choices about what the state should value explicit (rather than the implicit values which get smuggled in with the pursuit of growth or happiness), at least we’re being honest paternalists rather than ‘backdoor paternalists’.

Honestly, I find the Skidelskys’ modest and understated, but at the same time heartfelt, embrace of what winds up as a ‘crunchy conservative’ or a ‘red Tory’ position a bit more palatable than the recent offerings from, say, Milbank and Blond. The Skidelskys affirm their admiration for and inspiration from Catholic social theory, and they are at the very least willing to articulate a positive concept of the good life while allowing for alternative models elsewhere. They certainly aren’t advocating for cultural (or any other kind of) imperialism aimed at Africa, India, China or Russia—they in fact welcome alternative positive conceptions of the ‘good life’ which are applicable to different cultural contexts. (In fact, I was pleasantly tickled by their approving quote of Met. Anthony Bloom when discussing the paucity of black-box accounts of ‘happiness’.) On the other hand, the very same modesty of their approach to policy manifests in a similar modesty when it comes to policy recommendations.

The spread of policy fixes that Robert and Edward Skidelsky put forward are, as one might expect, a mixture of social-democratic supports to family life and leisure on the one hand, and social-conservative disincentives to conspicuous consumption on the other. They advocate for legislation enforcing a maximum work week for most businesses (with SMEs and family-run shops being possibly exempt), and also for a universal basic income, though their preference—in line with Keynes’s preference for the socialisation of investment—is for that basic income to be in the form of a capital dividend rather than a monthly cheque. They advocate for a range of taxation schemes meant to incentivise various aspects of the good life and disincentivise threats to it: including Tobin taxes on financial instrument transactions (whose proceeds would fund an endowment furnishing the capital dividend for all citizens) and a progressive consumption tax, as well as the elimination of tax policies which allow businesses to write off expenditures on advertising. Although they don’t object to immigration on principle, as well, they see the wisdom of taking certain legal precautions against mass immigration—they (quite rightly) don’t want to see their society bifurcate into another Dubai, with a permanent underclass of migrant helots.

If there’s a weak spot in How Much Is Enough?, I find it’s this last chapter. The sheer mildness with which these policy proposals at the end are put forward seems quite frankly quaint (eleven years out from its date of publication, when all the problems they observe in the capitalist dynamo have worsened dramatically). Personally (and this is me being more ‘red’ than ‘Tory’ again) I’d have liked to see them stump for some good old rabble-rousing schemes like Social Credit, the Safety Fund, the Subtreasury Plan, postal savings banks or nationalisation of rail and telecom. But perhaps that isn’t the point. This book sets out to raise the valid philosophical questions which should lie at the very heart of the economic discipline—what is our wealth for? What is our time for? This book is at its most powerful and thought-provoking when it is not only raising these questions but exploring their implications.

Book review: John Maynard Keynes by Hyman Minsky

The following is my review (a rather glowing one) of Dr Hyman Philip Minsky’s book on John Maynard Keynes, from Goodreads. I had posted an excerpt from this book, a quote from some of its source material, and another from one of its present-day heterodox disciples yesterday. I hope the following review may go some way toward explaining and perhaps even excusing some of my recent enthusiasm.

This book is simply, utterly, devastatingly hands-down brilliant.

Hyman Minsky, in undertaking this overview of the thought and intellectual legacy of John Maynard, Baron Keynes, asks us no less than to consider the following. He asks us to consider that the shape of the modern economy—with its treadmill of conspicuous consumption, environmental destruction, runaway military-industrial spending and intensifying bubbles of speculation disconnected from any real source of value—essentially takes Keynes’s name in vain. Although Keynes is in many respects considered the author of this economic order via the so-called ‘neoclassical synthesis’, Minsky argues persuasively that, given the direction of his theorising toward the end of his life, Keynes would have regarded our present economy with horror and alarm.

Minsky argues that the several attempts by various of Keynes’s disciples in the postwar Anglo-American sphere to reconcile his thinking with the ‘classical’ view of economy that prevailed among the liberal circles of his day, have the effect of watering down or even obviating the observations that Keynes was attempting to make about the operation of capitalism in his General Theory of Employment. The attempts to synthesise Keynes’s insights with the classicalist objects of his critiques have resulted in a ‘Keynesianism’ which undertheorises investment, removes his central thesis about the uncertainty of the future, and obscures his concerns about the foundations of financial markets being based on processes and moods (the infamous ‘animal spirits’) which are essentially irrational.

Minsky attempts to retrieve from the General Theory, a view--one imperfectly realised by Baron Keynes within his own corpus—of Keynes’s key concerns and the direction of his theory toward the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’. Minsky presents us with a Keynes who, for genuinely humane and altruistic reasons against the interests of his class, truly desired an economy where the working class could enjoy some degree of leisure and higher culture; and one in which the incomes earned from rents or quasi-rents would be gradually starved off.

Unfortunately, the usage of the tools of regulation and government intervention in the economy which were undertaken in his name had the exact opposite effect of the one he seems to have intended to bring about. The modern ‘Keynesian’ economy is one in which inequality has ballooned, the working class is burdened with greater stress and lower pay and harsher workloads, and the capital gains of the wealthy are protected and even subsidised in law (through, among other things, the military-industrial complex).

The entire book is excellent. My one nit-pick is that the middle chapters do get pretty far into the weeds with their explorations of the various mathematical models which comprise both the neoclassical synthesis and Minsky’s heterodox interpretation of Keynes. For patient readers who are not econometricians or economic specialists, however, the conclusions of each chapter do a satisfactory job of recapitulating the core concerns in plain language. This book is more than worth your time to read.

Baron Keynes drops the mic

Following up from the astute observations of his present-day eastern disciple, here is another money quote from the teacher, in The End of Laissez-Faire:

It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive ‘natural liberty’ in their economic activities.

There is no ‘compact’ conferring perpetual rights on those who have or on those who acquire.

The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide.

It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide.

It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest.

Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened, more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to obtain even these.

On Jo Rowling’s cultural and gender politics

I still consider myself a Harry Potter fan, though nowhere close to as obsessive a one as I once was. My daughter is only now getting into the books, which she dearly loves, and small blame to her. They do immerse and fire the imagination of a nine-year-old in ways that few other books can. And having grown up reading the books myself I can still see their intrinsic merit. Who doesn’t love a good story about an orphaned underdog experiencing the pain of growing up ‘weird’, and finally entering a community of similarly-‘weird’ people where he can make friends, discover his roots, risk his life, fall in love and start his own family? There is a great deal in the Harry Potter books still to love, and I disagree strongly with the detractors who are now, belatedly, saying otherwise. I’m not going to deny my daughter a much-needed degree of literary escapism on account of any real-world political disagreement I might have with the author.

Having said that, looking back on them as an adult, it is a lot easier to spot their flaws. The series certainly isn’t written in high prose. And upon re-reading the series after having come back from my study abroad year in college, I found I had developed a keen and heartfelt detestation for certain aspects of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in particular. Not only was said book a trend-setter in terms of being a turgid doorstop, but I also discovered (again, only with the perspective afforded to me by travel and hindsight) that it featured some truly patronising and retrograde cultural politics.

Although the villains of the set piece themselves are essentially the equivalents of ultranationalist soccer hooligans, the entire Quidditch World Cup was an extended exercise in a certain Little Englander nationalism on Rowling’s part. The ‘international’ backdrop serving largely to point out how backwards and funny-looking all those foreign-looking types are. (Arab wizards use magic carpets and cheat people! African wizards do voodoo! American witches are from Salem!) And unfortunately, even after the QWC is over, the Triwizard Tournament doesn’t give us a break from the cultural politics either. The textual treatment of the French characters from Beauxbatons is pure cringe, as kids say these days. They all seemingly speak with John Cleese’s faux-French ‘outrageous accent’ from Holy Grail. The Beauxbatons young women (and occasionally young men) all act like coquettes when they aren’t behaving like snoots – as though all people from France behave like the worst stereotypes of parisiens. And the treatment the Eastern European characters from Durmstrang get is seemingly worse. Again, they all speak in thick, exaggerated Rocky & Bullwinkle accents. But those of them who aren’t greasy, chauvinistic, thick-headed or displaying wretched table manners are dark and sinister, and certainly not to be trusted.

Despite her oft-stated internationalism, Rowling’s cultural politics as expressed in Goblet of Fire essentially seem to boil down to: England is best because England is normal. An odd sentiment indeed from an author with a clear sympathy for the underdog and the outsider. (Speaking as a fan, the thing that most drew me to the books in the first place was the portrayal of a Britain that was idiosyncratic and countercultural.) To be sure, she does redeem this in later books. Fleur Delacœur is shown to be both passionate and principled in Half-Blood Prince, and Viktor Krum shows himself to be a man of character in Deathly Hallows. Personally, I tend to credit this to Jo’s greater exposure to an international fandom.

However, even after the later books were published, Rowling’s internationalism still had hard and fast limits. Her comments about Palestinians and BDS in the wake of Palestinian-Scottish actress Mia Oudeh’s fan letter were more than just condescending; they were thoughtless and insensitive to the point of cruelty. And then there was her voluble public excoriation of Jeremy Corbyn on Twitter because he dared to talk to Iranians, of all people. Rowling has continued to have a serious blind spot when it comes to any sort of ‘internationalism’ outside the comfortable zone of the OECD nations, and unfortunately that blind spot has shown itself consistently.

But note that Jo Rowling was never ‘cancelled’ from polite society for any of her stances on international politics, whether right or wrong, well-informed or (more often) ill-informed. She was never disinvited from fan events. There were no calls to burn her books from Scottish independence types or ‘Leave’ supporters. She never received mass hate mail of any sort, that I could tell, from Palestinian activists or comrades of the Palestinian cause. (Mia Oudeh was, throughout her entire exchange with Rowling, unfailingly polite and diplomatic while still standing up for her position – and she herself rejected the ‘cancellation’ of Rowling explicitly in her second fan letter.) In general, those of us who paid attention to what she was saying at the time largely attributed her stances to a kind of studied ignorance. She was speaking about things she didn’t understand.

Contrast that to the reactions now, to when Jo Rowling speaks about things that she does understand on a personal level. To wit: the abusive treatment of women by men.

These days she is called ‘hateful’, ‘bigoted’ and ‘transphobic’, and deluged with hate mail, sexist abuse, rape threats and death threats, because she offers her support and considerable cultural clout to such evident irredeemables as Maya Forstater, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Julie Bindel, Rosa Freedman, Kathleen Stock and Marion Millar. What is the difference here?

Well, the first difference I can see is that here, Rowling actually knows what she’s talking about. That makes her dangerous. Rowling has never (to my knowledge) been to Palestine or Iran. Therefore she poses no threat to the prevailing mainstream logic on those topics, in anywhere close to the same way that Mia Oudeh or, say, Abby Martin or Rania Khalek do. But when she speaks about the physical and material vulnerability of women, and when she speaks up on behalf of working women like Forstater who are in danger of losing their jobs over free speech issues, she is speaking from experience as a formerly working-class single mother and as a victim of abuse.

The other difference is that Rowling is here taking a stand that runs counter to the neoliberal shibboleth that the person in all her aspects is fungible, interchangeable and marketable. Rowling is in trouble for essentially saying that there are certain aspects to being a woman that cannot be bought or sold – that there is a depth to the adult female human that goes beyond the performative (and therefore marketable) aspects of ‘gender identity’, and that goes beyond the synthetic means available to men to Polyjuice-potion themselves into women. Women having bodies, having natural bodily functions, having families, having communities or having any other kind of social networks not mediated by market forces—these are all things which the current capitalist order cannot abide and is working to erode.

Now, Jo Rowling has taken some truly admirable stands on other issues. Like Dolly Parton, she has donated herself out of the billionaire class, largely by giving back to people in need in places like Haiti. So please understand that I say the following out of respectful disagreement and not out of rancour.

I will note that Rowling did not take this stance regarding snooty French, sinister Bulgarians, shifty Middle Easterners and all those other funny-talking non-Britons in Goblet of Fire (though, again, to her credit, she bought a lot of this back in her later books). Note that she did not take this stance over Dumbledore’s ad hoc Korrasami sexuality, or over Hermione’s ambiguous blackness. Note that she did not take this stance regarding Palestinians over BDS, or Iranians over nuclear peace talks. Note that she did not take this stance regarding the support Corbyn organically enjoyed among economically-disaffected young people in Britain. But further: note that in all of these cases where Rowling sided with (or at least did not side against) the neoliberal capitalist order and its contempt for personhood, economic dignity, organic community, indigenous cultures and so on, she did not get into any serious trouble with the broader culture and its gatekeepers.

It is important to defend Rowling now precisely because, like Dave Chappelle in The Closer, on this issue she is putting skin in the game, she is speaking from experience, she is not being hateful but instead speaking out of genuine compassion. But it’s also necessary to keep reading her books and discussing both their strengths and their flaws honestly with younger readers.

Blog name change

So, over the past several months, I have had the fortune (whether for good or ill, or simply funny) to be mistaken for a British person based on the title of my blog. This being in spite of the explanation I have had linked in the sidebar for the past several years. I am not, in fact, British and have no intention of being so. I do have British ancestry. I also have been a member of the Episcopal Church in the past and still feel a sense of fondness and warmth toward that faith and toward English culture generally. Yet, it still seems a bit misleading, even sinful, to encourage my readers or visitors to persist in a misconception about who I am and where I come from, especially given the importance I place on doyikayt. As such, I am renaming the blog The Heavy Anglophile Orthodox, which should hopefully place me in the minds of my readers on the correct side of the pond. In the meantime, I can only apologise for the confusion I have already caused!

Our father among the saints Grēgorios III, Pope of Rome

Saint Grēgorios of Rome

The twenty-eighth of November is the feast-day in the Orthodox Church of Saint Grēgorios of Rome, also known as Pope Gregory III. I have already presented on this blog a hagiography of Pope Gregory I, or Grēgorios o Dialogos, who did so much to promote the spread of Christianity in England. Like the first Gregory, the third Gregory in the Roman See did much to help spread the light of Christ into the northern reaches of Europe. A native of Syria, the third Gregory was instrumental in the fight against iconoclasm from the West.

Saint Grēgorios [Gk. Γρηγόριος, L. Gregorius, Syr. Grigorios ܓܪܝܓܘܪܝܘܣ, Ar. Ġrîġûriyûs غريغوريوس] was born in Syria around the year 669 to a father named Yûhannâ. He spent much of his early life there, though historians are not aware of many of the details of his early life. We know that he became a priest, and we also know that he had lived in Rome for some time before his election to the Papacy. It is likely that, like his predecessor Saint Sergios, he and his family were refugees from the Islâmic conquests and persecutions of Christians in the Levant, though we cannot be sure based on the sources we have.

We do know, however, that he had a high reputation as a priest in Rome for virtuous conduct and diligent pastoral care. He loved the people of Rome, and in turn he was beloved by them. Upon the repose of his illustrious Italian prædecessor, Pope Gregory II, Grēgorios was proclaimed Pope by popular acclaim in the city of Rome. Even so, Grēgorios waited for about a month to receive consecration, which indicates that he sought the confirmation and blessing of the Byzantine exarch of Ravenna, Eutychios, before taking office. Grēgorios did indeed love the people, but he had no desire to owe his office to a mob, and we can see that he sought the legitimacy of Constantinople as well as of the people of Rome.

But once in his office, Grēgorios did not bow to Constantinople – only to God. Though he had previously been involved in the arguments over the veneration of icons, and had appealed to the Emperor Lēon III the Isaurian to exercise moderation in his religious policies. But once he became Pope, Saint Grēgorios came forth at once with blunt condemnations of iconoclasm, sending legates and letters to Lēon urging him to desist from the destruction of holy images. Lēon responded with brute force, sending forces across the Mediterranean and seizing Papal properties which were under his jurisdiction, in Calabria and Sicily. However, the Emperor lost many of his men at sea and proved unable to control the Papacy directly, and Grēgorios was not cowed, but continued speaking out in favour of the veneration of icons. Most regional rulers ended up siding with the Pope over the Emperor in this case.

Similarly to his prædecessors of the same name, Grēgorios took a close and paternal interest in the well-being and good order of the Church in the northern reaches of Europe, among the Germanic tribes. In faithful England, Grēgorios affirmed the rights of the Bishopric of York in the election of Ecgberht to the office. He also blessed Saints Tatwine and Nóðhelm, in succession, as primates of Canterbury. He continued the support of Gregory II for the mission of Saint Boniface among the heathen in Frisia and northern Germany, naming him an archbishop and blessing him to establish two Benedictine cloisters – one in Fritzlar and one in Amöneburg. He met with Boniface in person at least once, in 738, having received him with great hospitality in Rome and conversed with him for a long time on spiritual topics. Saint Boniface asked the holy Pope of Rome to send with him back to Germany a helper, in the person of his nephew Willibald. At once Grēgorios sent for the monk and was at once impressed with him. In particular, we may imagine, Pope Grēgorios was happy to discuss with Willibald his travels as a pilgrim in Syria and the Holy Land. Saint Grēgorios sent Willibald with his uncle back into Germany to serve as an aid and support in his missionary efforts. Later Willibald himself would be made a bishop at Saint Boniface’s hands in Eichstätt.

Saint Grēgorios’s relations with other Teutonic nations were not nearly as cordial as those he enjoyed with the English. Much of his ten-year papacy was spent in power struggles with the Lombardic king Liutprant – who, although he was a pious Christian, generous and hospitable to the likes of Saint Boniface, was nonetheless politically ambitious and had territorial designs on the Italian Peninsula. Grēgorios managed to fortify the ancient walls of Rome in the hopes that it would ward off a Lombard attack, and in addition met in person with Liutprant to attempt to use moral suasion to ward him away from Rome. This worked for awhile, but with Liutprant continuing to make violent manœuvres on the frontier – and capturing four cities in the Duchy of Rome – he was compelled to seek aid from the Frankish king Charles Martel. Long story short: Martel promised help, but that help never came. It was in the midst of these political troubles that Saint Grēgorios reposed in the Lord, on the twenty-eighth of November, 741. A few days later, the cardinals of Rome chose Saint Zacharias, a Greek, as Grēgorios’s successor in office.

I have remarked on several occasions about the special link which præ-Schismatic Old England seems to have enjoyed with Antioch, and with the Christian East in general. Though this link was often (but not always) mediated, gæographically and administratively, by Rome, it still arguably goes back to the Princes of the Apostles themselves. The most prominent and most profound impact of Antiochian spirituality upon the English nation comes through the literal tutelage England enjoyed under the rule of Saint Theodore of Tarsos. Saint Theodore’s contemporary Saint Sergios provides another link between Syria and England. The cultus of Saint Ia in Cornwall, which shares some intriguing parallels with the Mesopotamian martyress under the Persians of the same name, provides another possible link, as does the patronage of that great Levantine Saint George of Lydda and the mediæval body of legend surrounding Saint Joseph of Arimathæa. To all these we must add the relationship that our Saint Grēgorios enjoyed with Saint Willibald, who had sojourned in that land for a significant portion of his life, and with his uncle Saint Boniface.

It is to their great credit that Syrians like Saint Grēgorios III did not take advantage of the old Anglo-Saxon talent for civilisational humility, borne perhaps in part out of a realisation that they lived at the ‘bottom’ of the world, but instead took the opportunity to guide, to nurture, to foster an Old English spirituality. That spirituality today exists as merely a shadow, an echo. The overbearing arrogance of the Normans, the expropriation of Church lands, the misguided zeal of centralising church ‘reformers’, the sustained repression of the English peasantry and the shift toward an œconomy of greed all contributed to the suppression of this native spirituality. Mercantilism, colonialism, capitalism, industrialisation and high finance have all taken a great toll upon the English people. The massive death toll and material deprivation that the British ruling class has unleashed upon the world – including upon Syria and the Arab world, a deprivation which continues to this day – often overshadows the much quieter impoverishment of English spiritual life by that same class.

Yet this echo of spiritual Old English reverence for the Eastern end of the Mediterranean can still be heard in English literature and art: in figures like the Syriac-versant Lancelot Andrewes, for example. Our good Dr Samuel Johnson, who wrote Rasselas, may be counted here with distinction; John Ruskin and William Morris, also. To this we may also add the more contemporary travel literature and journalistic work of Patrick Seale, of William Dalrymple, of the late, lamented Robert Fisk and the blessedly very much alive Jonathan Cook. For these things we must still thank our saints like the holy Pope Grēgorios III. Holy hierarch Grēgorios, beloved archpastor and gentle tutor of the Christian north, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Holy Father Sergios I, Pope of Rome

Saint Sergios of Rome

Today, the eighth of September, is the feast-day of the great eighth-century Syrian Pope of the Roman Church during its ‘Byzantine’ period, Saint Sergios. His family was Antiochian and sources universally acknowledge him as Syrian. He was known in particular for his vigorous interest in the English mission, and thus along with his somewhat elder contemporary Saint Theodore of Tarsos he may be considered one of the vibrant historical threads connecting the churches of Antioch and Old England. Saint Sergios is unsurprisingly venerated by both the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church.

Saint Sergios [L. Sergius, Gk. Σέργιος, Ar. Sarjiyûs سرجيوس] was the son of Antiochian parents – his father is named as Tiberios in the Latin sources. His family may have been fleeing the Râšidah conquests of the Levant, but they landed in Palermo in Sicily, in which city he was born in the year 650. He was educated in Sicily, moved to Rome in the 670s under Pope Adeodatus II, and ordained as a priest by the friend of the poor Pope Saint Leon II (who is also venerated by Orthodox Christians). He was appointed to a position as the cardinal-priest of the Chiesa di Santa Susanna at the Baths of Diocletian in Rome.

In 687, following the repose of Pope Conon, there was a succession crisis in the Papacy which led to two popes being elected in rapid succession: an archdeacon named Paschal and a priest named Theodoros, who were leaders of competing factions. In the wake of this competition, which threatened to blow up into an outright feud, the priests and cardinals of Rome – in order to broker a peace – chose the cardinal-priest Sergios as a neutral candidate to the Papacy, and he was accordingly elected Pope on the fifteenth of December in that year. Following this, the archdeacon Paschal went to Johannes Platinus, the agent of the Byzantine Emperor in Italy and also the Exarch of Ravenna, with a large sum of money demanding to be reinstated as Pope. Platinus thereafter did what he could to sabotage the pontificate of Saint Sergios – including trying to extort gold from the new Pope, and when that failed, stealing the holy vessels for the Eucharist and claiming they were possessed. (The common people of Rome very nearly revolted against Platinus for this abuse, but he restored the vessels after some more-or-less peaceable bartering.)

In his early years as Pope, Saint Sergios took an active interest in the English mission which had been begun by his predecessor in office Saint Gregory the Dialogist. He defended the reputation of Saint Wilfrið of York and ordered Ealdferð to restore him to his former bishopric in 691. In particular, he enjoyed significant contact with the West Saxon clergy including, likely, Saint Hædde of Winchester. It was at the latter’s behest that Cædwalla King was brought to Rome. Saint Sergios met him there and personally baptised him on the tenth of April; Cædwalla died ten days later of an old battle wound, and he was buried in St Peter’s Basilica. The Syrian pope also, meeting him with great warmth of brotherly affection, anointed and blessed the Northumbrian monk Saint Willibrord, who would carry the light of the Gospel among the Frisians.

Saint Sergios had gotten off on something of a wrong foot with the Exarch of Ravenna, which meant that politically speaking he had to toe a fairly fine line. Emperor Justinian convoked a synod in Trullo which addressed certain disciplinary and ecclesiastical issues – this council is considered a follow-up to the Fifth Œcumenical Council and is thus sometimes referred to as the Quinisext Council. No doctrinal matters were decided at this council, and the Roman pontiffs have generally taken an ambivalent stance on the canons produced. This goes back to Saint Sergios himself.

When the legate of Saint Sergios at Trullo, Basil of Gortyna in Crete, brought back the canons of the council at Trullo for Saint Sergios to sign, he refused to do so on the grounds that they were ‘lacking authority’ and that they introduced ‘novel errors’ in Church. However, later Roman bishops (such as Popes Constantine and John VIII) would later claim that Saint Sergios in fact did accept some of the canons of Trullo and cited them as authoritative. What appears likely is that Saint Sergios accepted the first fifty apostolic canons of the Quinisext Council, but not the latter canons that established Byzantine ecclesiastical disciplines as universally normative.

However, even though he was not willing to give up the local disciplines of the Western Rite, Saint Sergios was keen on maintaining both ecclesiastical and political unity with Constantinople. When Emperor Justinian II moved to arrest Saint Sergios’s legates, John of Portus and Bonifatius Consiliarius – and later ordered the bodyguard of Saint Sergios, a man named Zakarias, to arrest the Pope and deliver him to Constantinople. However, this attempt failed. Zakarias was thwarted by the efforts of both the Exarch of Ravenna and the local populace, and Zakarias very nearly lost his life. However, Saint Sergios himself forgave the Emperor and Zakarias, and did his level best to preserve the peace and good relations with New Rome.

Saint Sergios was not merely a political actor or a particularly active missionary, however. He was a noted lover of Liturgical forms and Church singing. He did much to enrich the life of the Church of Rome and even brought some usages of the Byzantine Rite into the Western Church, acting in the realm of sacred art and music as a bridge between Old Rome and New. He renovated a number of cathedrals in Rome during his Papacy. He was the first Western hierarch to celebrate the Eastern feast of the Elevation of the True Cross in the wake of the discovery of a piece of the True Cross in the Basilica of Saint Peter. He reposed in the Lord on the eighth of September, 701. Holy hierarch Sergios, peacemaker, friend of the poor and of the English Church, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

A calendar of the Pre-Schismatic Saints of Britain

THE MOST HOLY THEOTOKOS AND EVER-VIRGIN MARY
☩ Our Lady of Walsingham ☩ (15 Oct)

THE HOLY, GLORIOUS AND ALL-LAUDABLE LEADERS OF THE APOSTLES
☩ Apostle Peter (29 Jun)
☩ Apostle Paul (29 Jun)

THE FOUR PATRONS OF BRITAIN
☩ Holy and All-Laudable First-Called Apostle Andrew (30 Nov)
☩ Holy Hierarch Dewi of Mynyw, Bishop of Wales (1 Mar)
☩ Holy Hierarch Padrig of Armagh, Enlightener of Ireland (17 Mar)
☩ Greatmartyr, Victory-Bearer and Wonderworker George of Lydda (23 Apr)

THE FIRST MARTYRS AND ENLIGHTENERS OF BRITAIN
☩ Holy Apostle Aristobulus of the Seventy, Bishop of Britain (16 Mar)
☩ Alban, Protomartyr of Britain (22 Jun)
☩ Holy Priestmartyr Amphibalus of Verulamium (25 Jun)
☩ Martyrs Aaron and Julius of Caerleon (1 Jul)
☩ Righteous Joseph of Arimathæa (31 Jul)

THE HOLY SAINTS OF BRITAIN
☩ Dryhthelm of Melrose (1 Sep)
☩ Heiu of Tadcaster (2 Sep)
☩ Ealhmund of Hexham (7 Sep)
☩ Wulfþrýð of Wilton (9 Sep)
☩ Wulfhild of Barking (9 Sep)
☩ Ciarán ‘the Younger’ of Clonmacnoise (9 Sep)
☩ Deiniol of Bangor (11 Sep)
☩ Ailbe of Emly (12 Sep)
☩ Éanswíþ of Folkestone (12 Sep)
☩ Éadgýð of Wilton (16 Sep)
☩ Theodore of Tarsos (19 Sep)
☩ Adamnán of Iona (23 Sep)
☩ Ceolfrið of Jarrow (25 Sep)
☩ Barrwg of Ynys Barri (27 Sep)
☩ Leoba of Schornsheim (28 Sep)
☩ Tetta of Wimbourne (28 Sep)
☩ Sadwrn ‘the Knight’ of Llansadwrn (29 Sep)
☩ Honorius of Canterbury (30 Sep)
☩ Máel Dub of Malmesbury (2 Oct)
☩ Fragan of Armorica (3 Oct)
☩ Ósg‎ýð of Chich (7 Oct)
☩ Cynog of Powys (7 Oct)
☩ Tanwg of Harlech (10 Oct)
☩ Iestyn of Anglesey (10 Oct)
☩ Paulinus of York (10 Oct)
☩ James the Deacon (11 Oct)
☩ Æþelburg of Barking (11 Oct)
☩ Éadwine of Northumbria (12 Oct)
☩ Wilfrið of Ripon (12 Oct)
☩ Harold of England (14 Oct)
☩ Nóðhelm of Canterbury (17 Oct)
☩ Gwen of Talgarth (18 Oct)
☩ Friðuswíþ of Oxford (19 Oct)
☩ Acca of Hexham (20 Oct)
☩ Mellon of Rouen (22 Oct)
☩ Maelor of Sark (24 Oct)
☩ Gwynnog of Llanwonno (26 Oct)
☩ Eata of Hexham (26 Oct)
☩ Ælfrǽd ‘the Great’ of Wessex (26 Oct)
☩ Éadsige of Canterbury (28 Oct)
☩ Sigeberht of East Anglia (29 Oct)
☩ Æþelnóð of Canterbury (30 Oct)
☩ Cadfan of Bardsey (1 Nov)
☩ Erc of Slane (2 Nov)
☩ Gwyddfarch of Meifod (3 Nov)
☩ Gwenffrewi of Gwytherin (3 Nov)
☩ Byrnstán of Winchester (4 Nov)
☩ Kea of Devon and Cornwall (5 Nov)
☩ Fili of Cornwall (5 Nov)
☩ Illtud ‘the Knight’ of Llanilltud Fawr (6 Nov)
☩ Cyngar of Congresbury (7 Nov)
☩ Gwyddnog of Padstow (7 Nov)
☩ Cybi ‘the Tawny’ of Caer Gybi (8 Nov)
☩ Tysilio of Brittany (8 Nov)
☩ Pabo the ‘Pillar of Britain’ (9 Nov)
☩ Justus of Canterbury (10 Nov)
☩ Elaeth of Anglesey (11 Nov)
☩ Lebuin of Deventer (12 Nov)
☩ Dyfrig of Wales (14 Nov)
☩ Malo of Aleth (15 Nov)
☩ Hild of Whitby (17 Nov)
☩ Juðwara of Dorset (18 Nov)
☩ Maodez of Brittany (18 Nov)
☩ Æbbe of Minster (19 Nov)
☩ Bernward of Hildesheim (20 Nov)
☩ Éadmund of East Anglia (20 Nov)
☩ Columbán of Luxeuil (21 Nov)
☩ Éanflæd of Whitby (24 Nov)
☩ Cyngar of Congresbury (27 Nov)
☩ Ælfríc of Abingdon (28 Nov)
☩ Tudwal of Tréguier (30 Nov)
☩ Berin of Dorchester (3 Dec)
☩ Stinan of Ramsey Island (5 Dec)
☩ Beuzeg of Dol (8 Dec)
☩ Éadburg of Thanet (12 Dec)
☩ Fionnán of Clonard (12 Dec)
☩ Corentin of Quimper (12 Dec)
☩ Hygebald of Hibaldstow (14 Dec)
☩ Drostan of Deer (15 Dec)
☩ Judicaël of Brittany (17 Dec)
☩ Sturm of Fulda (17 Dec)
☩ Wynnebald of Heidenheim (18 Dec)
☩ Hildalíþ of Barking (22 Dec)
☩ Ecgwine of Worcester (30 Dec)
☩ Mael Rhys of Bardsey (1 Jan)
☩ Tyfrydog of Anglesey (1 Jan)
☩ Peter of Canterbury (6 Jan)
☩ Cedd of Lastingham (7 Jan)
☩ Cwyllog of Anglesey (7 Jan)
☩ Hadrian of Canterbury (9 Jan)
☩ Beorhtwald of Canterbury (9 Jan)
☩ Sǽþrýð of Faremoutiers (10 Jan)
☩ Benedict Biscop of Wearmouth (12 Jan)
☩ Eilian of Cornwall (13 Jan)
☩ Cyndeyrn ‘Mungo’ of Glasgow (14 Jan)
☩ Íte of Killeedy (15 Jan)
☩ Ceolwulf of Lindisfarne (15 Jan)
☩ Fursa of Burgh (16 Jan)
☩ Mildgýð of Minster (17 Jan)
☩ Theodosius ‘the Great’ of Rome (17 Jan)
☩ Ninnidh ‘the One-Eyed’ of Inishmacsaint (18 Jan)
☩ Cadog ‘the Wise’ of Llancarfan (24 Jan)
☩ Dwynwen of Llanddwyn (25 Jan)
☩ Torhtgýð of Barking (26 Jan)
☩ Gildas ‘the Historian’ of Rhuys (29 Jan)
☩ Bealdhild of Ascania (30 Jan)
☩ Brigid of Kildare (1 Feb)
☩ Seiriol ‘the Fair’ of Penmon (1 Feb)
☩ Euny of Lelant (2 Feb)
☩ Ia of St Ives (3 Feb)
☩ Laurence of Canterbury (3 Feb)
☩ Wærburg of Ely (3 Feb)
☩ Ansgar of Bremen (3 Feb)
☩ Rimbert of Bremen (4 Feb)
☩ Eborius of York (6 Feb)
☩ Restitutus of London (6 Feb)
☩ Adelphius the Bishop (6 Feb)
☩ Richard of Wessex (7 Feb)
☩ Iago of Saint-Jacut (8 Feb)
☩ Ælfflæd of Whitby (8 Feb)
☩ Teilo of Llandeilo Fawr and Llandaff (9 Feb)
☩ Cædmon of Whitby (11 Feb)
☩ Æþelwold of Lindisfarne (12 Feb)
☩ Eormenhild of Ely (13 Feb)
☩ Æþelgár of Canterbury (13 Feb)
☩ Sigefrið of Växjö (15 Feb)
☩ Finan of Lindisfarne (17 Feb)
☩ Colmán of Lindisfarne (18 Feb)
☩ Mildburg of Much Wenlock (23 Feb)
☩ Boisil of Melrose (23 Feb)
☩ Æþelberht of Kent (24 Feb)
☩ Wealdburg of Heidenheim (25 Feb)
☩ Ósweald of Worcester (28 Feb)
☩ Swiðberht of Kaiserswerth (1 Mar)
☩ Ceadda of Lichfield (2 Mar)
☩ Non of Dirinon (2 Mar)
☩ Gwenolau of Landévennec (3 Mar)
☩ Piran of Perranzabuloe (5 Mar)
☩ Billfrið of Lindisfarne (6 Mar)
☩ Balthere of Lindisfarne (6 Mar)
☩ Cyneburg of Peterborough (6 Mar)
☩ Cyneswíþ of Peterborough (6 Mar)
☩ Tibba of Peterborough (6 Mar)
☩ Eosterwine of Wearmouth (7 Mar)
☩ Felix of Dunwich (8 Mar)
☩ Bosa of York (9 Mar)
☩ Custennin of Cornwall (9 Mar)
☩ Óswine of Deira (11 Mar)
☩ Custennin of Strathclyde (11 Mar)
☩ Óengus ‘the Culdee’ of Tallaght (11 Mar)
☩ Gregory ‘the Dialogist’, Pope of Rome (12 Mar)
☩ Peulin ‘the Old’ of Léon (12 Mar)
☩ Ælfhéah ‘the Bald’ of Winchester (12 Mar)
☩ Benedict of Nursia (14 Mar)
☩ Éadweard of England (18 Mar)
☩ Cuðberht of Lindisfarne (20 Mar)
☩ Hereberht of Derwentwater (20 Mar)
☩ Liudgar of Billerbeck (26 Mar)
☩ Hǽlcelde of Middleham (28 Mar)
☩ Gwynllyw of Newport (29 Mar)
☩ Gwladys of Newport (29 Mar)
☩ Æþelburg of Lyminge (5 Apr)
☩ Brychan Brycheiniog (6 Apr)
☩ Ælfstán of Abingdon (6 Apr)
☩ Brynach of Nevern (7 Apr)
☩ Madryn of Boscastle (9 Apr)
☩ Beocca of Chertsey (10 Apr)
☩ Eðor of Chertsey (10 Apr)
☩ Gúðlác of Crowland (11 Apr)
☩ Padern of Vannes (15 Apr)
☩ Donnán of Eigg (17 Apr)
☩ Ælfhéah of Canterbury (19 Apr)
☩ Cædwalla of Wessex (20 Apr)
☩ Beuno of Clynnog (21 Apr)
☩ Máel Ruba of Applecross (21 Apr)
☩ Mellitus of Canterbury (24 Apr)
☩ Endelyn of Trentinney (29 Apr)
☩ Eorcenwald of London (30 Apr)
☩ Berhte of Kent (1 May)
☩ Asaph of Llanelwy (1 May)
☩ Brieg of Saint-Brieuc (1 May)
☩ Æþelræd of Bardney (4 May)
☩ Ósþrýð of Bardney (4 May)
☩ Éadberht of Lindisfarne (6 May)
☩ John of Beverley (7 May)
☩ Comgall of Bangor (10 May)
☩ Æþelheard of Canterbury (12 May)
☩ Damhnait of Geel (15 May)
☩ Breandán ‘the Navigator’ of Clonfert (16 May)
☩ Dúnstán of Canterbury (19 May)
☩ Helena of Constantinople (21 May)
☩ Elen ‘of the Hosts’ of Caernarfon (22 May)
☩ Aldhelm of Sherborne (25 May)
☩ Augustine of Canterbury (26 May)
☩ Bede of Jarrow (27 May)
☩ Melangell of Llangynog (27 May)
☩ Walstan of Bawburgh (30 May)
☩ Lul of Hersfeld (1 Jun)
☩ Oda of Canterbury (2 Jun)
☩ Cóemgen of Glendalough (3 Jun)
☩ Éadfrið of Lindisfarne (4 Jun)
☩ Pedrog of Padstow (4 Jun)
☩ Boniface of Crediton (5 Jun)
☩ Branwaladr of Milton Abbas (6 Jun)
☩ Willibald of Eichstätt (7 Jun)
☩ Willibrord of Frisia (7 Jun)
☩ Colum Cille of Iona (9 Jun)
☩ Iþamar of Rochester (10 Jun)
☩ Eskil of Tuna (11 Jun)
☩ Ternan of Culross (12 Jun)
☩ Eleri of Gwytherin (13 Jun)
☩ Éadburg of Winchester (15 Jun)
☩ Botwulf of Icanho (17 Jun)
☩ Nectan of Hartland (17 Jun)
☩ Hildegrim of Châlons (19 Jun)
☩ Mewan of Brittany (21 Jun)
☩ Æþelþrýð of Ely (23 Jun)
☩ Twrog of Maentwrog (26 Jun)
☩ Austell of Brittany (28 Jun)
☩ Euddogwy of Llandaff (2 Jul)
☩ Cenydd of Gower (5 Jul)
☩ Seaxburg of Ely (6 Jul)
☩ Erfyl of Llanerfyl (6 Jul)
☩ Modwen of Burton (6 Jul)
☩ Palladius of Ireland and Scotland (6 Jul)
☩ Hædde of Winchester (7 Jul)
☩ Æþelburg of Faremoutiers (7 Jul)
☩ Éadgár of England (8 Jul)
☩ Sunngifu of Selja (8 Jul)
☩ Iwerydd of Chittlehampton (8 Jul)
☩ Mwynen of Morwenstow (8 Jul)
☩ Wihtburg of Dereham (8 Jul)
☩ Eoforhild of Everingham (9 Jul)
☩ Mildþrýð of Thanet (13 Jul)
☩ Willehad of Bremen (13 Jul)
☩ Deusdedit of Canterbury (14 Jul)
☩ Swíþhún of Winchester (15 Jul)
☩ Helier of Jersey (16 Jul)
☩ Cynehelm of Winchcombe (17 Jul)
☩ Gwen ‘the Three-Breasted’ of Dorset (18 Jul)
☩ Frideric of Utrecht (18 Jul)
☩ Teneu of Glasgow (18 Jul)
☩ Samson of Dol (28 Jul)
☩ Óláfr of Norway (29 Jul)
☩ Germain of Auxerre (31 Jul)
☩ Neot of Cornwall (31 Jul)
☩ Sidwell of Exeter (1 Aug)
☩ Óswald of Northumbria (5 Aug)
☩ Beorhthelm of Ilam (10 Aug)
☩ Athracht of Lough Gara (11 Aug)
☩ Jænberht of Canterbury (12 Aug)
☩ Wihtberht of Fritzlar (13 Aug)
☩ Tydfil of Penydarren (23 Aug)
☩ Æbbe ‘the Elder’ of Coldingham (25 Aug)
☩ Gregory of Utrecht (25 Aug)
☩ Bregowine of Canterbury (26 Aug)
☩ Ninian of Whithorn (26 Aug)
☩ Degymen of Watchet (27 Aug)
☩ Aidan of Lindisfarne (31 Aug)