The Last of Logres

The ruins of Glastonbury Abbey

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There is one particular aspect of the Arthurian mythos which, as far as I am aware, has not been reflected on as much as it should. After the Last Battle and Arthur's voyage to Avalon, a number of surviving knights join a monastic community which, in Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling, The Road to Camlann (1981), later develops into Glastonbury Abbey:

'Within half a year came Sir Blamore and Sir Bleoberis, and little by little certain others of the old lost brotherhood of the Round Table. And when in due time the ancient Archbishop died, Sir Lancelot, whom he had made a priest while he yet lived, stepped into his place and celebrated Mass for the rest as he had done and for all who chanced to pass that way.

'So they continued for seven years, living in prayer and poverty and giving their help and comfort to all who sought it; and keeping the last light of Logres alive as they kept the honey-wax candles burning on the rough altar, while the darkness flowed in over the rest of the land. For though Constantine, Duke of Cornwall and a young kinsman of Arthur, had taken the High Kingship and led his troops to battle under the dragon banner, he was not Arthur, and there was little that he could do against the Sea Wolves and the Old People from the mountains and the North.'

What is notable here is that the knights seem to intuit that the time for action is past and the time for contemplation has begun. Martha cedes place to Mary, you might say. The knights could, of course, have carried on the fight, pledging their allegiance to Constantine or forming a resistance movement in the hills. But no, they understand that fighting is behind them now and that the Round Table has served its purpose, leaving behind a glorious legend that will inspire the men and women of Albion for centuries to come. They recognise that something different is required from them, a prayerful, inner-directed counterpoint to the years of struggle and striving in the outer world. And this new orientation bears fruit in unexpected ways. After Sir Lancelot's death:

'Sir Bedivere and several of the brotherhood remained at the little church and its hermitage all the rest of their days, gathering others to them, so that at last the place became an abbey again; and later still, mighty and beautiful stone buildings arose where the little wattle church and its surrounding bothies had been. And men began to call it Glastonbury.'

The Sea Wolves sweep across the land, but the little church keeps the flame of faith alive, becoming a 'mighty and beautiful' abbey, a foretaste of the Christendom that gave us the great cathedrals which stud the land like jewels, from Carlisle to Salisbury and Canterbury to Durham. These mighty edifices - these 'sermons in stone' - are storehouses of spiritual energy, worthy successors to the stone circles of the Celtic and neolithic eras, and becoming increasingly popular. Visitor figures have been up for a while now, with Choral Evensong especially well-attended. Their finest hour may still be yet to come.

It is good to reflect upon these themes on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, two days of apparent defeat and despair. As Saturday evening in Jerusalem shades into Saturday night, nothing seems to be happening at all. There is nothing more to happen in any case. All is over, finished, consummated. Or so it appears.

But how deceptive appearances can be. Transformation is a mysterious, unquantifiable thing. Its ways are not our ways. Think of the tiny seed in Jesus's parable which grows without fanfare or headlines into the mightiest tree in the forest. This should give us hope on the micro-level too - all those occasions when we feel stuck, frustrated and shorn of inspiration. 'I've nothing to show for my life', we sometimes say, but we don't know that yet. We don't know it at all, in fact. For Jesus's followers on Holy Saturday, everything looked done and dusted, yet all the while He was setting the spirits of the dead free in Hades and breaking the power of death. The real work - Christ's Harrowing of Hell being the great archetypal example - goes on in secret and in silence.

Why are there no good leaders, and only bad leaders, in modern Albion?

I believe that we need to have confidence that events are extremely malleable to Divine Influences - such that God can arrange matters so Real Life provides the experiences we personally need to learn-from - and when these recur it is because we have not yet learned.

By Real Life I means your life and my life, specifically - I am not talking about people you know about only by Hearsay... from the mass media, reading books, seeing movies or whatever.

Here and now we in Albion live in a world without good leaders, and no good leaders are even 'on offer'. We must assume that if leaders were going to be helpful, then we would have them - at the least we would be given the opportunity to choose good leaders.

God can do this! God has done it often in the past when the right person has emerged at the right time and done the right things - but God is not currently doing it.

As all our major leaders are incompetent, corrupt, indeed active agents of evil; then we should assume that this situation contains a lesson we need to learn and have not learned.

England Led the World Into Materialism

England was probably the first country to adopt the mindset that led to the materialisation of consciousness and the present-day attitudes in which God has no place. It was a pioneer in many areas that formed the contemporary world. You can't trace this back to any single formational event or time but Protestantism was certainly one step towards the separation of the natural and supernatural worlds, and then the English Civil War was another. One religious, the other political. The fact that both of these things may have had positive elements to them is beside the point. The basic truth is that they opened up a gap between the spiritual and the material which, once opened, could be expanded exponentially until the point was reached at which the spiritual was so far removed it no longer existed in any real sense and could just be denied reality. That is now. Consciousness has effectively contracted to the material which is not just perceived as primary but as all there is. This has affected even religion which is largely earthbound and moribund these days. That contraction may have been beneficial in some areas, such as the development of certain qualities of selfhood and the exploration and dominance of the physical world, but these cannot be said to compensate for the spiritual loss that has accompanied them.

It might be pointed out that these external events were just the manifestation of inner changes in consciousness which brought them about and therefore they were secondary, and that is perfectly true. Nevertheless, they also hastened the process of materialisation and grounded it in a way that enabled it to proceed and spread much more rapidly. And it was in and through England that this largely (though not exclusively, of course) came about.

The development of the physical sciences really started to take off in England in the 17th century with the founding of the Royal Society a seminal moment, and thereafter there are too many English scientists at the leading edge of their disciplines to count. Newton and Darwin are obvious examples of people whose work changed the world but there are many more. Again, this was not something that was limited to England but if anywhere was the centre of this work then it was England which was also where the industrial revolution first took hold. The same is true with regard to the new socialist political movements. When I lived in France I used to enjoy teasing the French, still viewing their Revolution through rose tinted spectacles, that the English had killed their king long before they had killed theirs.

So, blame England for the modern world!

But there is another side to this story. Alongside the prosaic, matter of fact qualities of Englishmen of the 18th and 19th centuries there existed the romantic Englishman, best exemplified by her poets whose names are too well known to require mentioning, but also appearing in other forms of literature and perhaps too in a special concern with landscape and natural beauty. And I would say that it was chiefly in England in the 19th and 20th centuries that new approaches to spirituality began to be explored, often in clumsy ways, it is true, but the intentions were generally good, and the aspiration to higher things real. The reaction against materialism first took place in the country that was principally responsible for it.

At present, any opening to spiritual awakening that seemed possible at various times over the last 150 years appears to have gone away. We are currently more locked into materialistic attitudes than ever. Even the revivals of the New Age, self-indulgent and foolish as they often were, seem to have faded away. Perhaps the damp squib that was 2012 was responsible for that. Some people look to Brexit as indicating a stirring of some sort but that seems wildly optimistic to me. Brexit is a patriotic reaction to the destruction of this country's individuality but in the vast majority of cases the people who voted for it were not considering spiritual factors.

Nevertheless, I do consider that Britain still has a part to play in the spiritual awakening of the world. As does America which is one reason why these two countries are relentlessly attacked and their inner integrity constantly undermined by the powers dedicated to the destruction of spiritual truth. Sometimes great light and darkness are to be found in the same place which makes sense when you consider that the devil would naturally focus his guns on the areas of greatest threat to him. So, although there is much darkness in this country there is also light but, paradoxically, that is less easy to see largely because it is a spiritual thing and works mostly behind the scenes. But it is there and we have to do our best to foster it, both in ourselves and in the world around us. Even if a few little candles of light remain that will eventually be enough to light others and eventually banish the darkness.

England led the world into materialism. That had a purpose at the time but its time is past. It is now time for England to remedy the situation and try to lead the world back out of the materialistic despond. She must rediscover the spiritual light at her heart and set it up on top of a hill so that it can be seen by and inspire all. She will not be alone in this but it is possible that, just as Rome was first the centre of an empire and then became a spiritual centre, so the pattern might be repeated in England or the United States, the destinies of both countries being intertwined to a degree, I believe.

Aidan Hart - Iconographer and Sacred Artist

Christ the All Merciful

*

Jesus said, 'This is what the Kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain - first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.'

Mark 4: 26-29

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It is easy to feel down-heartened about the state of Christianity in Britain today. Church attendance, we are continually told, is in free-fall, while practicing Christians are bundled out of the public square with almost celebratory haste. Yet the parable of the growing seed encourages us to look at the situation differently. The Kingdom of God is mysterious and unquantifiable. It cannot be measured, weighed or counted. It grows in secret ways and places that are foreign to the linear, rationalistic mind. Night and day it grows, whether we sleep or get up. We need eyes to see it though, and ears to hear, neither of which are easy to obtain in this spiritually obtuse age. The good news, however, is that signs of renewal can in fact be found all around us, often in independent, non-official, non-obvious places. The sacred art of Aidan Hart is one of these places.

Hart was born in England in 1957, though he spent most of his early life in New Zealand, where he trained as a secondary school teacher and began practicing as a sculptor. He became a member of the Greek Orthodox Church in 1983, returned to live in England and started his career as a professional iconographer. He lived for two years as a monk on Mount Athos, then spent six years as a hermit in Shropshire. He is now married with two children.

Hart's website - www.aidanharticons.com - illustrates the quality and quantity of his work as well as the sheer variety of his oeuvre: panel paintings, frescoes, carvings, illuminated manuscripts, mosaics, and more. He is also in demand as a teacher, speaker and writer, and his website gives numerous examples of his written and spoken work. He has written two books, Techniques of Icon and Wall Painting (2011) and Beauty Spirit Matter: Icons in the Modern World (2014), and was elected a fellow of the Temenos Academy in 2015. He now has over 900 commissioned works in private and church collections in over 25 countries.

What I find especially cheering is that this great wellspring of spiritual and artistic energy should be bubbling up from the heart of our country. Aidan Hart lives and works in Shropshire, one of the quietest and most sparsely populated counties in England. Maybe some of that calm and stillness carries over into his art and strikes a chord with a public desperately in need of the peace and centredness that only contact with the Divine can bring. Modern men and women, as T.S. Eliot observed in Four Quartets, are 'distracted from distraction by distraction', but these distractions can only numb the ache of a life lived without ultimate point or purpose. They cannot save or heal. Aidan Hart's icons, on the other hand, can help do exactly that, imbued as they are with the salvific, restorative peace that Eliot in the same poem calls, 'the still point of the turning world.'

Hart's icons have a particular resonance, I feel, for those of us with a connection to the British Isles, simply because his work features so many British and Irish saints. This icon of the sixth-century saint, Kentigern of Strathclyde (also known as Mungo), for instance, is a fine example:

Hart's abundant body of work, emanating from the quietness of Shropshire and informed by his monastic experience, plays an analogous role, I feel, to the lives and work of St. Kentigern and the other British and Irish saints of the late Roman and early Anglo Saxon periods. This was a time not unlike our own in many ways, an age of uncertainty and incipient chaos, where the moral and social values that underpinned the Pax Romana for centuries were falling apart, undermined from within and without. St. Kentigern, as a young man, wanted to take a step back from the Empire's collapse, living a life of prayer, simplicity and solitude in a small cell near an extinct volcano. But as with the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt a century previously, he discovered that others came seeking him, recognising in the life he was living something of the meaning, authenticity and integrity that the Western Roman world had to all intents and purposes already lost.

Aidan Hart's work punches precisely at this level. People encounter it once, then come back for more, just as the men and women of the fifth century came to St. Kentigern. There is a depth and a seriousness to it, together with a joy and a radiance, that cuts right through the tightening mesh of contemporary life - the soulless bureaucracy of the state, the spirit-sapping squeeze of market forces and the adversarial, increasingly polarised nature of political debate. His icons speak the language of Truth, and people respond to that. When you look at his art, you feel at home. The human heart was made for God, irrespective of all the decline we see around us. It will always resonate - no matter how unconsciously or inarticulately - to an icon, a piece of music or a poem (Four Quartets again, for example) which speaks at that level.

It is also important to challenge contemporary misconceptions as to what religious faith entails. Aidan Hart does this very well in his talks and essays. All too often, we suppress the stirrings of our hearts and turn away from a relationship with God because we feel it will somehow cancel out our personality or consist of nothing more than adherence to a strict set of rules. In his talk, The Icon Tradition From Within, Hart shows us that the opposite is true. A life lived in faith is a liberation, not a prison sentence. There is nothing legalistic or self-annihilating about it. On the contrary, it rescues us from the dead ends of individualism and sets us on the path to community and love, a fertile place of life and growth where our true calling and identity can shine forth:

'Although our walk with God is according to the commands given to all, the details of this walk are unique because each one of us is unique ... And one's true, God-illuminated self is the greatest gift we can give to others. White light is made of many colours, and our task is to be one of these colours.'

Our ultimate destiny is not a fixed and final state of 'eternal bliss', but rather a dynamic, two-way relationship with Christ, leading us 'further up and further in' - as C.S Lewis put it in The Last Battle - to the beating heart of the Holy Trinity. As Hart told his listeners in a talk at All Saints Anglican Church, Baschurch, Shropshire:

'We are all called to be transfigured. We are called not merely to follow Christ at a distance, but to be Christ-bearers, to shine with the same glory, the same light of divinity with which he shines.'

To contemplate the work of Aidan Hart is to take a first step on that journey. His sacred art frees us from the prisons of our egos and helps us frame our joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, triumphs and frustrations in a wider, more spacious context, packed full of meaning and love and brimming over with 'that peace which passeth all understanding.' As such, his iconography stands as an outstanding counterpart to the diminished spiritual horizons of our age, 'shining with the same glory, the same light of divinity with which he shines.'

The Mandillion

What prevented Romanticism from attaining maturity? What made it become puerile?

 Owen Barfield in his seventies

Writing in a Festschrift to Owen Barfield (Evolution of Consciousness: studies in polarity, 1972 - edited by Shirley Sugarman); RJ Reilly wrote a superb chapter modestly entitled A Note on Barfield, Romanticism and Time.

What Reilly said has direct relevance to the 'project' of this blog.

He links to a comment by Barfield from Saving the Appearances to the effect that the romantic impulse never attained to maturity during the nineteenth century; and the only alternative to maturity is puerility (i.e. immaturity, childishness, foolishness).

What was missing from mainstream Romanticism was Christianity and Time.

Christianity, because rejection of the limitations of the churches went over into anti-Christianity (or 'anything-but Christianity', in the case of the 'spiritual but not religious' perennialist philosophers and seekers).

And Time was rejected because of the tendency of the tendency of Romanticism to regard enlightenment as all times in the 'ephiphanic' moment, that enlightened moment as out-of-Time and as all-Times - an indifference to chronology, or sequence - the denial of any destiny to history.

It was an achievement of Barfield to pick up the thread of Romanticism and point ahead to its maturity - including the inclusion of both Christianity and Time; and this highlighted those thinkers whose Romanticism did indeed include C&T - the likes of William Blake, ST Coleridge and Barfield's Master Rudolf Steiner.*

This forms a neat summary of the Romanticism, and indeed the strategy, I would endorse - a Romanticism in a Christian framework, and (also consistent with Christianity) one which understands human life and culture in terms of a destiny (an intended plan or sequence) unfolding through Time.

*To which I would add William Arkle.

How can the people of Albion be supine in the face of the Telford (etc) mass, organised, long-term, officially-known-but-allowed; rape and violent abuse of uncounted thousands of children and the vulnerable?

The short answer is that if the people of Albion were not already and en masse supine, demoralised, hedonistic, nihilistic, cowardly and profoundly demotivated - then Telford etc. would never have happened in the first place.

That is the top and bottom of the affair.

And we know exactly why the people of Albion are such a morally-despicable disgrace.

It is perfectly simple.

As Solzhenitsyn stated: We have forgotten God.

Nothing-butness - From science to bureaucracy

More and more of our patients complain of a sense of meaninglessness in life. More and more often, the reason is the outlook of science. Or what has come through to them as the outlook of science. 

Sometimes it is called reductionism. I'd prefer to apply a phrase of Jung's and say nothing-butness. 

Thinking people tend to feel that science has cut Man down. It's explained away everything that matters in terms of smaller, meaner things that don't matter. 

Religion is nothing but wish-fulfilling fairy-tales. Love is nothing but body chemistry. Art is nothing but a surge of conditioned reflexes. The highest flights of the poet of philosopher are traced back to childhood trivia and rationalised compensations.

Science leaves man shut-in, futile, doomed. In Desmond Morris's words, a naked ape... 

From The Finger and the Moon by Geoffrey Ashe - a novel published in 1973.


The above passage confirms what those who lived through it remember - that the diagnosis of the modern condition of nihilism was well understood 45 years ago - but its cause was wrongly attributed; and, of course, the main and culturally-dominant ideas for how to solve the problems (free-love, rock music, supposedly-egalitarian communes, psychedelic drugs, eclectic Easter-type religiosity...) were almost-completely ineffective, or counter-productive.

Hardly anybody nowadays feels the above sense of oppression by 'science' - science has waned in the public consciousness, even as the number of people employed as 'scientists' has increased more than tenfold... partly because the number of people employed as 'scientists' has increased more than tenfold.


With the death of Stephen Hawking, famous more for being crippled and anti-religion than for the scope of his scientific achievements, and the non-personing of Jim Watson in 2007; most people could not name a single living scientist - nor could a single living scientist's name be recognised by most people.

The reason is obvious enough - real science has disappeared from the official and professional institutions and been replaced by, absorbed by, The Bureaucracy. The biggest and most heavily-funded 'scientific' projects are actually engineering (the human genome project, hadron collider, renewed interest in space travel...) and/ or a pack of lies propagated for political reasons (anthropogenic global warming, the best-selling 'new' medical drugs...).

The 'scientists' are just careerist bureaucrats, doing what they are told by their 'line managers', who are themselves keyed-into the rest of The Bureaucracy - just like everyone else.

The sixties counter-culture has been completely absorbed by the mass media amplified by personal computers and ubiquitous 'smart'-phones - and political 'dissent' and 'radicalism' is mainstream, taught in schools and by state propaganda; subsidised and promoted by The Bureaucracy.


Now science is bureaucracy; consequently The Bureaucracy is science. We believe and obey because Truth is now consensus, and consensus is manufactured by managed-committees, by procedures and by votes - and the bureaucratic consensus is validated by internal bureaucratic mechanisms that allocate funding, publication, promotions, publicity, awards and prizes.     


Meanwhile, people have gone beyond 'complaining' about a sense of meaninglessness in life - why complain about something immovable and unavoidable and all-pervading? They just live-it; and distract themselves from awareness of it (which has never been easier). Science, for all its nothing-butness, was also exciting and hopeful.

Now excitement and hope is restricted to the manipulative totalitarianism of the mass media; and the ever-expanding bureaucracy closes-off all genuine autonomy in a ever-smaller-meshed network of total surveillance and micro-control.


Sixties-seventies radicalism was always mostly a set-up and a dead-end; and things have moved-on. We can seem much more clearly now, than they did then - so clearly that we don't need to be told. Everyman can see for himself - if he wants-to. Everyman can know what needs to be done - if he wants to...

It is the wanting that is lacking - and also the courage to want.