Truth be bought?

Warning: blog-rant ahead.

Binding snobbery be damned. There, I said it.

Look, I’m as much a fan of a physical book as anyone else, and I do understand – and to some extent share – the æsthetic, the psychological and the normative arguments for connecting with a real book in binding as opposed to words in a text file flashed on the screen of a mobile or an e-book. But my liking for physical paper and binding is conditioned by my three-year economic exile in China where English-language books were a rarity and where my old outdated third-generation Kindle device was a godsend.

More to the point, though, I am an avowed fan of Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive and other free public-domain classics – the Jowett translations of Plato, for example, the poems of Robert Southey, the Canterbury Tales, Ivanhoe – which provide an immense store of knowledge, and indeed the better part of it, free of charge. These websites, which do not place a price on ancient wisdom but instead transfer it to anyone who wishes to seek it without asking so much as a penny, are an invaluable service to humankind. And the people who turn up their noses at such things are, indeed, snobs. And snobs of the worst sort, since they prefer the luxury of shelling out anywhere between $10 and $100 – at the least, in the case of some academic works, but my ire on that score will have to wait for another post – to e-books which can be found available for free, to anyone who has internet access and a mobile (which is most people these days).

If one has the inclination, one can immerse oneself in the great works ancient and modern philosophy both, classic literature, history, theology, all for less than the cost of a cup of tea. That is a very powerful thing – something which none of the ancients, or even Johannes Gutenberg himself, would dared have imagine in their wildest of ‘winged visions’.

But – here’s the thing. It’s often contended, more often by people who have no sense of ancient principles and people who actively abuse and contort ancient knowledge to serve ideological ends, that people will only value what they can pay for, and that education (a ‘product’ and ‘service’ in their view, commensurate with all other products and services available on ‘the market’) is no exception. And here’s the thing: they do have a point. Apart from weird ex-expats like me – who depend on Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive Classics for their sanity in places where bookstores were prohibitively out-of-reach, where Amazon was more expensive than it was worth, and where English language books in general were overpriced and of low quality – who really does use these services? And who uses them to expand their horizons and acquire the elements of a liberal education in a day and age where liberal education is itself prohibitively-overpriced for many people?

These are not rhetorical questions – I really would be interested to know. But in my own rather limited experience these are a rather slim minority of people (and, like I said, weirdos). Rather than this showing the virtue, however, of the ‘market’ system the aforesaid Actonites and Pragerites advocate, this shows rather its desolation. The ‘market’ they advocate floods us with cheap – cheap, that is, but not free – entertainment, which is readily and greedily consumed (including by weirdos like me, let me be clear. God forgive me, I’m no less guilty of self-medicating with ‘light’ entertainment, movies and music than anyone else), whilst the wells of wisdom ladling out their medicines for free go nigh untouched.

Capitalists, and indeed the defenders of the capitalist system, understand this perfectly well. They depend on it, in fact. The Mammon-worshipping roaders and running-dogs of the Acton Institute want people to think in brutish, consequentialist terms – the terms of the belly, the terms of comfort and ease and happiness, the terms of ‘utility’. Their sordid sophistries and calculating manipulations of the ancients and of other noble philosophers are aimed at a single goal. They want to convince the everyday American that they have the only ideological system that ‘works’ (and that furthermore is blessed by God), and that any other course would lead them to disaster. And of course that system is sustained by convincing people that the only value there is, is that which can be rendered in terms of economic ‘utility’, and which can be converted into other forms of ‘happiness’ by means of money.

People only value what they pay for, because they are told to value it by a culture which measures success solely in terms of monetary earnings. We are told not to value what has been tested as true, what inspires with beauty, or what persuades with goodness. There is much in our present time that has intrinsic value, which can be simply picked up with a wireless connexion. It’s time we learn to cherish it. And furthermore, it’s time we learn to distinguish wisdom not by the acquisition of costly degrees and titles, or of the prestige (that is to say, expense) of the institutions at which they are attained, but instead by that thirst with which people seek out truth.

The heavy reading list - 20 modern works and 5 classics

Some days ago now, one of my readers, we’ll call him Jon McC—, suggested in the wake of my last blog post that I draw up a list of twenty books that have been influential on my political, theological and economic thinking. This struck me as an excellent idea, and I will attempt to do so now – though the caveat is that these are non-classics (that is, they have been written at some point after 1688 – a date I’ve picked, somewhat arbitrarily, as the beginning of English-speaking modernity). But, that being said, I’m always happy to pass my readers on to read people a fair bit less muddle-headed than I am!

1. The Russian Revolution by Nikolai Berdyaev. This is the book that led me to treat Marxism not as a political theory but instead as a (chiliastic) Christian heresy – albeit one from which certain economic and social insights were still retrievable. It is also worthwhile as an introduction to Berdyaev’s somewhat fragmentary and existential philosophical thinking; a style which I then found (and still find) compelling!
   
   
2. The Russian Idea by Nikolai Berdyaev. This is a far fuller exposition of Berdyaev’s historical thinking, tying it more directly into his religious philosophy, and explicating the various strands in Russian thought. It broadened my reading list exponentially (leading me back to Dostoevsky, to Gogol, to Pushkin, to Leont’ev, Solovyov, Il’in and Pobedonostsev) and led me to a fuller and deeper appreciation of the religious tradition I had embraced.
   
   
3. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. This book a.) helped me tremendously through a rough bout of depression coming back from my Peace Corps service, and b.) demolished entirely what little remained of my beliefs in the cult of ‘progress’. And Vonnegut’s wry, cranky, often contrarian socialism in the tradition of Eugene V Debs was one of the reasons why I couldn’t so easily put socialism behind me – and why I still refuse to condemn the socialist intellectual stream uniformly.
   
   
4. Unto This Last by John Ruskin. A true Tory socialist treatise and a broadside against what had not yet come to be called homo œconomicus, calling for a balanced ethic of consumption and production, this tome also happened to be a guide for Gandhi’s ethic of swaraj, and a direct progenitor of English distributism and the agrarian rising. ‘There is no wealth but life.’ Very, very highly recommended.
   
   
5. Conservatism Revisited by Peter Viereck. A highly useful bird’s-eye view and anthology of a number of different strands of conservatism, ranging from Metternich, Bonald and Chateaubriand to Adams and Calhoun, and even ranging to the conservative ‘Wobbly’ labour-unionism of Frank Tannenbaum. If you want to take a first step into the larger world of conservative and reactionary thought, there are few better places to start than this.
   
   
6. From the Soil by Fei Xiaotong. The single definitive sociological treatment of traditional, rural Chinese culture. Many things that do not make sense to an American visitor of China begin to make sense, even today, after reading this book in particular. Fei furthermore explores the collectivist psychology of the Chinese people, and posits that any form of democratic governance in China will have to be conditioned locally and with respect to this collectivistic psychology. Something of a standing rebuke to China’s zapadniki.
   
   
7. Lament for a Nation by George Parkin Grant. A decidedly dim view of Canada’s future as a nation independent of the United States, conditioned by the election of Lester Pearson over John Diefenbaker, George Grant here lays out his view of the Canadian national project as a conservative one, yet one characterised by a strong sense of social equity and fairness. Though he doesn’t believe the Canadian project will survive American imperial designs, still he holds out a Christian hope for something better to take its place; as such, this book is best not described as a ‘pessimistic’ one.
   
   
8. Technology and Empire by George Parkin Grant. Another masterful work in Canadian High Tory thought from the pre-eminent philosopher of that tradition. Technology and Empire is a series of essays touching on matters of social history, education and the impact of technology in light of the North American cultural inheritance, facets of which will appeal both to radicals and traditionalists. Jacques Ellul and Simone Weil both leave strong impressions throughout this work, as does Leo Strauss.
   
   
9. Theology and Social Theory by John Milbank. Milbank’s most famous work: a sceptical, radical-Platonic read of the history of modern social theory, from the Middle Ages down to the postmodernists. I am not sure that I would now agree entirely with the entire sweep of the book and its fingering of John Duns Scotus as the cause of all our modern woes, but this work definitely got me drinking from a number of different wells, and most deeply from those associated with the saints and Scholastics of Late Antiquity.
   
   
10. The Justification of the Good by Vladimir Solovyov. A broad-ranging work of anthropology and ethical philosophy, which puts paid to a number of the utilitarian and egoistic arguments that characterise much of modern ethical thinking. A selective use of the Christian-humanist intellectual patrimony to articulate what would now be thought a ‘postliberal’ position; though nowadays some of his conclusions might seem dated, it still makes for important reading.
    
    
11. The End of the Revolution by Wang Hui. A collection of essays from one of modern China’s most important literary men, all touching on the topic of China’s revolutionary heritage, the depoliticisation of China’s politics, the challenges facing the Chinese intelligentsia, with an extended meditation on the work of Lu Xun. Even when I was first reading it, I was struck by how he appealed to China’s traditional intellectual heritage to interrogate the present - China desperately needs more like him!
    
    
12. China from Empire to Nation-State by Wang Hui. Here is where Wang’s radical-conservative streak really comes out to play. He takes on the foundation of the Chinese nation on the framework left behind by the Qing Dynasty, and argues that the continuity in China’s form of government that allowed it to transition from an empire into a modern nation is a continuity which takes its legitimacy from a malleable acceptance of a Confucian ethical worldview, which is neither racially- nor linguistically-exclusive. Very intriguing thesis, very much worth reading, though you do have to put up with Wang’s occasionally-circuitous writing style.
    
    
13. Reflections of a Russian Statesman by Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Pobedonostsev, though he reserves his harshest criticism for Russia’s fourth estate and for the institutions of democracy in general, nevertheless gives ample attention to the problems of Russia’s common people. He often comes off as a populist or as one of the paternalistic socialists of Ruskin’s vein; assuredly his infamous reactionary convictions are something very different from what many in America are used to.
    
    
14. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson. Johnson’s famous ‘philosophical novel’ which tackles with a genially-humorous eye the ways in which modern Europeans of his own age attempt to make themselves happy, though it ends on a somewhat melancholy note. He uses the outside perspectives of Rasselas, Imlac and Nekayah to lampoon modern pretentiousness and ‘wisdom’, though in more serious terms he attacks the institutions of slavery and colonialism as inhumane.
    
    
15. The Fleet Papers by Richard Oastler. The Tory Radical statesman and his crusades against slavery and workhouse conditions in Britain, informed by a conscious idea that the powerful and the comfortable have a responsibility to ensure the welfare and betterment of the weak, poor and miserable. His formulation of ‘Altar, Cottage and Throne’ makes appearances both subtle and not-so-subtle.
    
    
16. On Spiritual Unity: a Slavophile Reader by Aleksey Khomyakov and Ivan Kireevsky. My first and strongest introduction to Slavophilia, apart from Nikolai Berdyaev’s introductions. Intimations on the meaning of the concepts of sobornost’ and integral knowledge, expressed through meditations on ecclesiology and Russian history. Khomyakov and Kireevsky both show a clear dislike for Western social theories of both left and right, though it is clear they are keen on preventing particularly capitalism from taking root, and place a great emphasis on the institution of the obshchina as a bulwark against it.
    
    
17. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. A more direct, Juvenalian work than Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, but it touches on many of the same themes; in addition to being an attempted repudiation of the social-contract theories of Hobbes and Locke, it uses fantastical settings (Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, the land of the Houyhnhnms) and the person of Lemuel Gulliver to lampoon European colonial endeavours, militarism, sectarianism, scientism and slavery - themes which Swift repeats in his other works.
    
    
18. My Life in Christ by Saint John of Kronstadt. The diary of the great Russian saint and cleric, who addresses his accounts of his own spiritual struggles primarily to his fellow clerics, though there is much also to interest the Orthodox layman. His writings, dense, challenging and spiritually-profound, place great emphasis on humility, hope, patience, single-heartedness, service, kindness to others in the pursuit of emulating Christ. In addition, many of his aphorisms touch on the spiritual challenges of modern life and distractions, and particularly on greed and mammon; his calls to hold possessions in common and to give freely to the poor might be surprising in someone of his reactionary reputation, but they are very much in keeping with Patristic thought on the topic.
    
    
19. The Lord of the Rings by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. The one great work of high fantasy to which all others which followed would be indebted, though Tolkien himself was deeply indebted to the fantastic imagination and antiquarianism of William Morris. Even so, his vision of a good society in which the small pleasures are valued, in which the green and wild spaces are preserved, in which the neighbourly and hospitable virtues are exalted, in which small and ordinary everyday deeds of good add up to something greater - these things did leave a far deeper impact on my middle-school mind than the high adventure and epic battles.
    
    
20. A Confucian Constitutional Order by Jiang Qing. An admittedly-ambitious and Utopian institutional-Confucian take on modern governance and legitimacy, but one which draws rightly upon a broad array of intellectual resources both modern and ancient. Jiang’s critiques of the political inheritance of the High Middle Ages share a great deal with Slavophil critiques of the same, and in many points he parallels the thought particularly of Ivan Kireevsky. I have some reservations about his faith in China’s intellectual élite class, but he does come by that bias honestly, considering the same bias inheres in the Confucian canon through the centuries.

With regard to some of the classical works I would recommend, the following is a short but growing list as I delve further into them:

1. The Book of Rites, traditionally attributed to Confucius. A compilation of behavioural prescriptions for people of every age and from every walk of life, regarding how they should treat the people around them and how they should treat nature, and why. There is a great deal of practical, natural perennial wisdom contained herein, though obviously it is meant for a society that is no longer with us. Still, the idea that we should respect the people who lived before us, and love and care for the people who will come after us, is timeless.
   
   
2. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith by Saint John of Damascus. A classic of the Scholastic tradition, written by a philosopher and polymath with a high respect for the advanced learning of the time, also a Saint and Father of the Church who speaks authoritatively on matters of doctrine. He occasionally gives voice to a Platonic metaphysics regarding time, forms and images in his defences of the doctrines of immortality and the use of icons in worship.
   
   
3. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Saint Bede the Venerable. A historical classic for multiple reasons, including that Bede was among the first scholars of history to place overwhelming reliance on primary sources instead of secondary ones. But Holy Father Bede was also a master hagiographer, prosopographer and Scriptural scholar in his own right, and his mastery of classical learning shines through in his master-work, describing the Christianisation of his own island and people. A must-read for any Anglophile, Christian or otherwise.
   
   
4. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, arranged by Sister Benedicta Ward. A collection of stories and maxims handed down in traditions of various cœnobitic communities, meant to inform and edify seekers after the spiritual life. By turns serious, enlightening and even humorous, the Apophthegmata Patrum is one of the great classics of Christian spirituality, and can be used to make much sense of later Christian thought (and especially, but not solely, Orthodox Christianity).
   
   
5. Beowulf. A tale in the elder Germanic fashion, of hospitality and heroism and comradeship; of facing the unknown; of understanding and appreciating death to meet it with equanimity. The one great ‘secular’ Old English work, it displays the tragic character of the elder Germanic literature, which follows the last glories of a dying line and seeks to preserve its deeds faithfully.

‘Winged visions’ – an occasion for metanoia

Having gone through an intensely heated discussion on the subject, I have found myself needing to take stock, to a certain extent, of my own weaknesses and stumblings, the places where I engage in idolatry and self-delusion. This blog, thankfully, provides an excellent opportunity to do that, since my journey from liberalism into some kind of postliberalism (call it Slavophilia, Tory socialism, Christian reactionary thought, realist-leftism, what have you) has been fairly meticulously documented.

Saint Maria Skobtsova spoke in her writings – specifically her essays on the ‘Crucible of Doubts’ – on the need for (and the dangers of) ‘winged visions’, and she was referring to Plato and Saint Sir Thomas More when she spoke thus, as well as to the various utopian projects of communism, nationalism and fascism that were quickly taking hold all around her, and against all three of which she witnessed – even unto her death in Ravensbrück. It is an account of the ‘winged visions’ I’ve put forth here that I want to bring forward for critique and reflection; not because I necessarily think they are wrong (else I would not have put them forward), but because I can see them as being potentially dangerous and a stumbling-block to the spiritual edification both of myself and of my readers, whom I do very much value.

I think I can say with some honesty that my philosophical ‘first love’ (I use the term quite deliberately) was China – her classical philosophy and her long-lived material culture as well as her people. It was in China that I awakened to some of the problems in my own life and my own way of thinking. It was in China that I first began to consciously doubt the creed of ‘progress’. And my exposure to the philosophy of Confucius in particular jarred me out of my dogmatic slumber, if I may shamelessly borrow the Kantianism. Here, after all, was a man of noble birth who gave up everything, and was exiled from his home country, because of his own thirst for a more humane, just, truthful and beautiful order in the world. And yet he did so not by appealing to some hypothetical state of future perfection, in the way things ought to be, but by digging in the examples of China’s past to find what was valuable and true and worth keeping. He lived – not only preached but lived, through the rites – reverence for the elderly, care for the young, and solidarity for the powerless. He inspired numerous generations of scholars who criticised the powerful and the wealthy. The Analects, and later the Rites, made a deep impression on me – that past eras and people in past times could care so deeply about the same things we moderns care about, and indeed agitate for social arrangements which, even if hierarchical and vertically-ordered, could still be fair and distinguished by equity, and which in their own way were to be valued in themselves. It still pains me deeply to see him misrepresented in his teachings as defending, or conciliating himself with, unjust powers.

But that much is pretty much ancient history predating this blog. I began the current blog (which underwent several name changes and drifts in purpose) as a preparation for a volunteer term of service in Peace Corps which never materialised. That preparation threw into my path the philosophical, combative, patriotic-yet-Russophile poetry of the Qazaq bard Abay Qunanbayuli, and the fragmentary philosophy of Nikolai Berdyaev, both of which lodged deep in my heart and mind and refused to come loose. In Berdyaev in particular, I found the expression of a synthesis I had been searching for, for a very long time: a way of reconciling, through a religious, apophatic and experiential method of seeking truth, the shortcomings of the German idealist philosophers to whom I had devoted so much of my undergraduate career. Berdyaev, with his unsparing eye and his unique, colourful read on history (particularly Russian history), has been an active and constant informant of my ‘winged vision’. Berdyaev’s influence was in no small part responsible for my decision to be chrismated into the Orthodox Church.

And then there is the Tory streak, the Scott-and-Homer ‘violent Tory of the old school’ streak, that has been with me in an unfinished form at least since my contrarian middle school days. The streak that ultimately led me to read a (by now familiar to many readers of this blog) litany of (anti-)modern High Church Anglican and British Catholic – that is to say, High Tory – authors of homily and poetry, theory and fiction: Shakespeare, Hooker, Laud, Astell, Johnson, Swift, Austen, Oastler, Porteus, Strachan, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Ruskin, Morris, Gore, Chesterton, Grant, Tolkien, Sayers, Lewis, Pargeter, Dart, Milbank, Hitchens. Through them all ran a subtle thread, a humane yet quietly-religious thread, that pointed to a way of living that was devoted, familial, agrarian, organic, localist, colloquial, never-quite-egalitarian but scaled in gentle slopes. A way of living which would lift its eyes to God with the aid of monasteries and hermitages (Benedictine monasticism in England being a distinctly Saxon heritage of the seventh and eighth centuries), uphold nobility (albeit with a certain degree of deprecation), tolerate grudgingly the petit-bourgeois and their quirks. But a way of life which was organised on behalf of the great majority of the common people. A vision which can best be summed up in Oastler’s formula: ‘Altar, Throne and Cottage’, wherein the common ‘cottage’ is by no means the least important element. Or, alternatively, in Milbank’s ‘old, spiritual, Platonic England’.

This Tory streak itself eventually found an answer from deep within the Orthodox world – that of the Slavophils, who themselves were concerned most about the fate of the common people, and indeed felt the common Russian peasant had much more to offer to the Slavic world than did the artificially-Frenchified and -Germanised nobility, and the weak, transplanted bourgeoisie – whose Westernising influence was far out of proportion to its relatively narrow importance. Alexis Khomyakov himself displayed facets of both that backward-looking ‘winged vision’ (as Herzen mocked him and John Kireevsky for seeking the living Rus’ in the Primary Chronicle), and that radicalism that Herzen himself exemplified. Yet in spite of all his great influence on the Russian (and broader Eastern European) populists, he was never numbered among them, and this was largely because he still saw value in the elder traditions – both those that predated the Mongol invasion, and those the Muscovite state plucked from it. On a path consciously akin to the Tories of England, Khomyakov and Kireevsky saw, in that body of lived traditions and mutual care that was the agrarian-communist life of the obshchina, the best and most durable form of resistance against both the bestial predations of capitalism and the all-consuming fires of the modern revolution.

From Khomyakov and his Patristic upbringing, too, I get a love and admiration for the philosophical and religious traditions of classical Iran – as mediated by Persianate Christian saints such as Holy Father Isaac of Nineveh, who were of a manifestly different ‘type’ than either the Greek or the Latin Fathers. The relentless, kenotic, martyrific pursuit of truth at all costs, the expression of spiritual freedom with nothing reserved for the sake of necessity – this Khomyakov identified as a peculiarly Persian genius. The all-consuming detestation the Zoroastrians of classical Iran inculcated in the Iranian people for druj, for the lie, and the corresponding love for truth, is something that found its full expression also in the Jewish prophetic tradition. But Khomyakov was convinced that the Russians had imbibed of this spirit in a way which bypassed the more necessitarian pagan-Roman civilisational impress (a historical view of which I’m sceptical, but which nonetheless has something of a ring of truth to it).

Insofar as I have a ‘winged vision’, then, it does take bits and pieces from many places, many incomplete utopias and false starts, many glimpses of Atlantis, many suggestions in history at a better way to live. It borrows from China’s Han Dynasty (and creative reinterpretations thereof); from the classical Silk Road generally, stretching from Byzantium to Luoyang by way of Iran and the Turkic lands; from Christian England of the eighth century; from newly-Christian Rus’ of the eleventh; from the Stuart monarchy; from the Family Compact of Upper Canada; from the Green Rising. It refuses chronological snobbery. It does have a classical Chinese veneration for the human dimension of ritual, albeit one leavened and lightened by a ‘barbarian’, Persian-Slavic infusion of inspiration, spontaneity and extemporisation. It does have a radicalised, late-antique Cappadocian take on œconomic ethics, tempered with a realistic (Platonic?) view that different people and different classes have different duties. Yet the High Tory (or, indeed, Slavophil) conviction on the duties of class – that more material demands will be made on the materially wealthy, because that is not only socially stabilising, but also just and right – can be and has been informed by both.

I hold all this up in love. And yet this may all turn out to be the empty dream of a fool, the sorry idolatry of someone mired in romanticism and myth, clad only in the ashes of a past long and deservedly dead. Without Christ, indeed, that is exactly what it would be.

But in Christ all things are possible, and all things are included. Christ and His Church embrace these things, and constantly – weekly, hourly – breathe into them new life, where they are found healthy and filled with love, or burn them away if they are not. Christ came among us as a lowly woodworker on the far southeastern border of the Empire, heralded not with royal pomp and fanfare but by a lone voice in the wilderness. His kingship was not one of power or wealth or cunning or libido dominandi, but one of healing, teaching and self-emptying. Yet, let us remember still, He is the personal, incarnate, flesh-and-blood recapitulation of all three of the elder, prophetic Israel; the highest aspirations of philosophical Greece; and the universal reach of imperial Rome. The dove that descended on this day, near two millennia ago: that is the true winged vision.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, the sinner. May I be bold to ask You, not to turn away Your face from me.

God has appeared

On a remote bend of the Jordan River, on the edge of the Empire, near the eastern wilderness, far removed from Jerusalem and even further removed from Rome, came a vision and a voice: ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’

A blessed Theophany to one and all!

The hour is later than you think – the urgency of a creative late-antique ressourcement

Two articles for your consideration, gentle readers:

First, in the Economist, a somewhat pearl-clutching take on how the nouvelle nouvelle-droite are looking toward the Middle Ages for inspiration, with intimations that online communities are learning the ‘wrong’ things from mediæval European studies. Secondly, a response to that article from Rod Dreher at The American Conservative, taking this article to task for assuming only one reason for a renewed interest in mediævalism, and referring instead to Nikolai Berdyaev’s call for a new Middle Ages. And – let us be clear – a rightist, Berdyaev is not. Much less is he a sympathiser with the techno-fetishistic nationalism which forms the basis of the modern ‘alt-right’!

After all, there are certain aspects of the mediæval world that the nouvelle nouvelle-droite miss in their entirety. Though they are correct to reject ‘globalism’, they retreat to a nationalism that the mediæval mind would find quite foreign. The nationalist mythos was unknown to a Christendom in which the village you lived in and the lord you served mattered far more than your bloodline or your idiolect. Black people – excuse me, ‘Moors’ – were viewed with curiosity rather than with hostility. They were an exotic novelty rather than a threat, and still less an ‘inferior’ underclass to be exploited. The latter came only with the Renaissance and the Atlantic slave trade. And, to its great credit, the Latin Church resisted that on traditional grounds.

Likewise, rejecting brute œconomism is all well and good. But there is nothing less mediæval than to take refuge in the vulture capitalism and the cult of the ‘winner’ which Trump and his cohort represent. Mediæval monarchs and lords knew that they had responsibilities to those who were less powerful than they were, and the Church (both West and East) made sure that they were aware of those responsibilities even when they didn't practise them consistently. And for all the flaws of ‘progressivism’, the embrace of massive corporate projects that defile the environment and places of sacred and historical import is not properly mediæval either. Mediaeval man may have considered himself the apex of the created order, but he was well aware of his limitations within and against nature. Furthermore, he had both a tragic and ironic sensibility regarding man’s fate in a universe which was not designed solely to accommodate him, but rather God.

Needless to say, these are important elements of mediævalism which I believe to be worth keeping – or, if they have been lost, creatively reintroducing. I have no doubt they would be unpalatable to the Whiggish editorial staff of the Economist. So much the better! But likewise, I have little doubt they would be considered still too ‘left’ for the spoilt palates of the nouvelle nouvelle-droite.

In light of the past series of articles I have done, attempting just such a mediæval and neo-Platonic, ‘realist’ ressourcement on the ‘pelvic issues’ (one meant to run agonal to both the unfeeling clinicalism of modern neoliberal ‘sex education’, as well as to the blood-and-soil racial-demographic concerns – what Berdyaev would doubtless call the ‘bestiality’ – of the nouvelle nouvelle-droite), these two pieces together demonstrate precisely why such a ressourcement is needed and desirable. It’s safe to say, I think, that Mr Dreher and I agree on the need for a less-suffocating public and intellectual atmosphere, one in which ideas other than those of neoliberal faux-progressivism are allowed and considered. We both definitely agree on the value of recovering a Benedictine ethic. We probably have differing views on the methods needed to achieve it, and what the economic and social ramifications of such a recovery would be. But he is right on the money, when it comes to understanding the appeal a more ‘enchanted’ time has on the isolated modern soul.

The sooner this appeal is addressed by those professing themselves to be ‘humanists’, the better. After all, the ‘humanism’ that emerged in the Renaissance was itself rooted in a much earlier and more venerable tradition, going back to Late Antiquity. That tradition (fittingly, given that we celebrated the feast of Saint Basil the Great this week!) includes the Cappadocian Fathers, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Benedict of Nursia, Saint Maximos the Confessor, Saint John of Damascus and many other spiritual luminaries of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. It is not to be forgotten that these luminaries belonged to, and upheld, a rich and ‘dense’ social order which showed, on balance, a far greater concern for the powerless and vulnerable than ours does today.

I have been advocating this for a long time now; but it is high time we began learning the hard lessons of that tradition. The hour is later than we think.

A realist approach to the pelvic issues, part 1.2: whither romance?

I confess, one part of our exchange in the comments on the previous blog post that made me laugh aloud was this one. Not with scorn, mind you, but only with amusement, because it got me quite dead to rights. Mr P— accuses me of ‘want[ing] to rebuild a bawdy medieval court, the mythical Merry Ol’ England peasantry, and a Neo-Platonic Medieval Monastery’.

To a certain extent: guilty as charged! I am an avowed fan (to greater and lesser degrees) of all three of mediæval courtly and knightly culture (including even that attenuated form that held under the early Romanovs), peasant ribaldry and monasticism. To a certain extent, being an ex-Anglican Orthodox with all of the High Church preferences that obtain thereto, that’s unavoidable. But I genuinely believe – and here I’m actually being guided by the honest-to-God realist-left thinking of Christopher Lasch, and not merely by High Church Anglican Tory pieties – that all three of these tendencies reflected a much healthier attitude to sex than the sterile, technically-minded clinicalism and flight from feeling to which we subject eroticism today. To Mr P—’s further doubt that ‘any of these things actually existed except in romanticism and as justification for a destructive social order’, though, I must demur.

There is a good case to make that mediæval court culture existed only as an ideal type (the efforts of the Church, East and West, to tame the violence and lust of Europe’s feudal and tribal élites never having been fully realised). But the ideas of chivalry and courtly love themselves, actually are contemporary inventions which flourished (and had literary and cultural as well as more prosaic material and social effects) in the late middle ages, with Chaucer being the most notable English-language proponent. They are not, as some schools of social history might have us believe, early-modern romantic faerie-tales, fabricated whole-cloth and existing only in song and fable. In fact, if we are to believe psychologically-informed historians like Lasch, the chivalric tradition provided both an outlet for the male id as well as real and needed boundaries of conscience and civility on the comportment of powerful and wealthy men in relation to the women around them.

The same goes for peasant ribaldry, the existence and health of which is actually far better-attested than chivalry (and well outside England and the poetry of Chaucer!). It was something which actually underlay the early 20^th-century agrarian thinking of Stamboliyski, Švehla and especially Chayanov (with full-figured, lusty Russian damsels figuring prominently in his alter-Soviet utopia), whose preferences and speculations actually had some real basis in peasant culture, as hinted by the sociological work of August von Haxthausen. Haxthausen’s work connected the fecundity that he observed in contemporary rural Russian culture with an older peasant tradition attested in Robert Crummey’s history of Kievan and Muscovite Russia. This tradition, Crummey notes, included carnal carousing festivities – especially Midsummer – which were only barely-tolerated to be Christianised by the Russian Orthodox clergy and hierarchs. As to whether the rooted, communal, sobornyi social order which inhabited this tradition, or the intellectual streams of Slavophilia and populism which sprang from it, are ‘destructive’, however? That’s something which does remain firmly within the realm of speculation, though it’s quite hard to imagine a more destructive order than the techno-fetishist, totalitarian fascist and communist ones which violently uprooted the aspirations of the interwar Eastern European peasantry.

In a further post in this series somewhere down the line, though, I intend to front a robust defence of cœnobitic monasticism and hesychasm, based on the Apophthegmata and the grand Basilian and Benedictine traditions followed by the Orthodox East as well as the Latin West – and I intend to make the case that the monastic life with its ascetic rigours and disciplines is not actually an unhealthy inversion or suppression of the erotic dimension of life, but instead a sublime, sophic and self-emptying expression of that dimension. In fact, I intend to demonstrate that the monastic expression is one that best allows for a broader and more humane attitude toward sex in the secular culture; and that this is demonstrable from history as well as from a philosophical standpoint. But that is a topic for another post.

One glaring weakness of my ‘realist’ approach set out thus far, is the lack of a clear-cut normative guideline, that gets me straight from my Platonic philosophical preferences to my ethical-political ones, and Mr P— has certainly not been remiss in pointing that out. Thus far, though, that has been deliberate. I’ve established merely that a realist ought to approach sex as a powerful and potentially-dangerous force within human nature, one which can overpower reason and resemble madness – but one which can also bring out great feats of nobility as well as cultural accomplishment.

But even describing where eroticism and fleshly pleasure can destroy and degrade people, and also where it can elevate them to heroic stature, is already to set forth some sort of normative framework for it. I can point backward to semi-idealised aristocratic forms of civility, or to more accessible working-class forms of sensual exuberance and playfulness, or else to the sublime erotic desire for the divine that allows a celibate monk to ‘become all fire’, as rich and colourful expressions of the erotic life that should be preserved and transmitted, if that is even possible in our modern age, characterised by our flight from feeling.

A realist approach to the pelvic issues, part 1.1: do the chains of being liberate the flesh?

So, my previous piece, attempting to set out a brief outline of a Platonic-realist understanding of sex, elicited a spirited exchange with one gentle reader of this blog, Mr Cal P—. We covered quite a bit of ground, and after a couple of attempts to formulate a cogent response in the comments, I thought it best to break out my response to him and turn it into a separate blog post. He had several criticisms of my approach, some of which I believe are fair and valid, others of which are slightly misaimed but still interesting and worthy of fuller explication, and still others of which I found well wide of the mark, completely missing or misconstruing the points I was attempting to convey. We covered so much ground, in fact, that I find I have to structure my response in a somewhat counter-intuitive way.

Firstly, I feel I should clarify and explicate what it is I am seeking to recover from Plato’s works on love, particularly Phædrus and the Symposium. The central insight that that excellent Russian Platonist and dialogist in his own right, Vladimir Solovyov saw in these works is that erōs belongs to a dimension of the human being that is not fully subject to reason, let alone to rationalisation. Erōs is primal. It is protean. It is (to use Solovyov’s formulation) both animal-instinctive and super-animal. It appears behind reason and overpowers it. It should be clear that Plato, and Solovyov after him, are not indulging generalities and superstitions at this point, but treating with hard, experimentally-demonstrable (as in behavioural economist Dan Ariely’s experiment whose conclusions appear in Predictably Irrational, widely credited in psychological literature as authoritative) natural fact that eroticism distorts judgement and ethical reasoning. Arousal can lead someone to discount future consequences, and even disregard elements of her own dignity and autonomy (let alone those of others) for the sake of immediate animal gratification. At this point, the only value-judgement I am making is that erōs is a powerful force in human biology and spirituality both, and is not to be underestimated by reason. I am not as yet casting any normative judgements on particular sexuate forms or sexual behaviours.

But, the behavioural science has proven Plato’s Socrates right: erotic desire can and does approximate a kind of temporary insanity or madness. But far from leading him to reject or shun erōs for the sake of preserving reason, Socrates argues instead that some of the greatest blessings can come from inspired or sophic madness, madness that is open to divine agency. In spite of his insistence elsewhere that wisdom, acquired by rational self-reflection, is the highest good, it is clear from Phædrus that Plato’s Socrates places a high value on the irrational elements of human life – especially erotic love, which he holds to be the highest form of divinely-inspired madness.

This is what I mean by having a realist view of sex. We human beings are political animals; we are social animals; we are reasoning animals; but we are animals. We are created beings with sexuate natures and physical senses. We have physical desires, both healthy and unhealthy. And it is naïve in the extreme to believe that these desires are always and at all times subject to domestication or the exhortations of duty and temperance. Plato’s Socrates fully comprehended this, and placed a very strong emphasis on it as a form of madness, with each and every one of the dangers and capacity for (self-)destruction that such implies.

But it is a madness which has within it a sophic, creative germ – a potential for that divine inspiration, similar to that which visits the Oracle at Delphi or the visitation of the Muses, on which Socrates places such value and which he holds to be the source of man’s highest deeds of nobility. Eroticism is, in Socrates’ own words, ‘the greatest of heaven’s blessings’; but it would be a very dire mistake to think that he either degrades its consummation or holds it valuable only in sublimation. Socrates is no Gnostic or hater of the flesh. As Solovyov himself put it, in his commentary on these two Platonic dialogues:

In the Symposium and the Phædrus, [Plato] clearly and definitely separates and juxtaposes the lower and higher activities of erōs—his action in the animal-instinctual man and in the super-animal man. Yet one must recall that even in the higher man, erōs acts, creates, generates, and does not merely think and ratiocinate. Here, too, [erōs’] main object is not intellectual ideas, but full, bodily life.

My interlocutor, Mr P—, was very much in the right when he held forth that Plato’s Socrates did not affirm or embrace the Dionysian impulse with both arms open. Eroticism is only to be distinguished from the other, infirm and degrading forms of human madness, by how it harmonises with philos toward the beloved, and directs the inspired – or, we might say, afflicted – toward more noble and virtuous ways of living. But the old saw that ‘Platonic love’ is one which shuns consummation for the higher and for the sake of the spiritual – that, unfortunately, is a canard which ought to be retired. In the Symposium, Socrates, though he resists the immediate physical charms of Alcibiades and exhorts him to improve his soul, demonstrates through his discourse that the heavenly, philosophical love can exist even within consummate marriages, or between parents and children – which would imply an erotic love that has already been consummated, and passed down properly into parental affection. Socrates’ account of his dialogue with the wise Diotima affirms the ‘divine’ character even of procreative love: ‘an immortal principle in the mortal creature’. (But the trick – one realised by Solovyov in his The Justification of the Good – is that this immortal principle is an impersonal and necessitarian one which pales next to considerations of the immortality of the soul!) The ‘chains of being’ which mark Plato’s teachings have not been wrought along a single dimension, nor are they in the first instance meant to serve the crude purpose of fettering the flesh to free the spirit. Rather, they serve to link one form of love to the other without confusion. Plato ‘intimates’, in the words of his English interpreter Jowett, for ‘the lover of wisdom… the union of the spiritual and fleshly, the interpenetration of the moral and intellectual faculties’.

Having in this brief response attempted to acquit the honour, as it were, of Plato and his version of Socrates in their understanding of and complex appreciation for the erotic impulse, I shall attempt to move on to more recent quibbles, which are primarily historiographical in nature, but which link directly to this realist view of sexuality.

On that note: a very happy new year to one and all! My best wishes to my gentle readers for a warm and festive beginning to 2017.