King Oswald's Heirs

New catechism coming soon! Plus - Gospel Simplicity interview

Greetings, dear readers.

It has been a while—not because of any laziness on my part, I assure you, but because most of my writing time has been going into a new book, King Oswald’s Heirs: A Catechism for the Renewal of the English Church. I’m glad (frankly, relieved after spending two years on it) to say that it is basically done. It is based on the Q&A catechism in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. More details will follow, but I thought you might enjoy a sneak preview of the introduction today.

In other news, Austin Suggs has been kind enough to grant me an interview on his YouTube, which readers may find interesting:

King Oswald’s Heirs, Introduction: Hunting Dragons

One need not go as far as the Orient to hunt dragons. Plenty dwell in the West, for those with eyes to see. Many swoop through the winds of my native British Isles. Not all are bad. The good ones still fight on to rout them. But what they have in common is that they fly unseen. They work in a realm shaded from our natural vision. To see them, we must use our supernatural eyes. Alas, we have dwelt so long in caves that the eyes of our hearts are all but blind. Even we who seek the dragons see them only dimly.

The eyes of England were once open wide to the realms of spirit. The life of the Church, however neopagan apologists might tell you otherwise, kept them so for centuries. It was the Church that kept the memory of sprites and spriggans as well as saints and angels. We harboured a healthy fear of the unseen world and all its denizens. Most see them no more. But the fact that one cannot see a bear in the dark of a cave does not blunt its claws.

England is littered with visible signs of this invisible world, however much the English themselves have been conditioned to ignore and despise them. The neglected spires of village churches and empty pews at cathedral Evensongs bear sorry testimony to the beauty and antiquity of our tradition. Our bards’ best songs are left unsung, our poets and playwrights are scorned by schoolteachers, our Prayer Books bearing some of the finest liturgy composed gather dust and mould at the west end of unheated churches. For too long, powerful progressives, both outside the Church and, alas, within, have stripped our people of their spiritual inheritance. Foreign tourists come to see the beauty of the buildings to which we have been blinded, our eyes drawn instead to the glowing rectangles in our pockets which increasingly dictate our desires and so rule our lives.

Our poets sang of a world where the lives of men and angels intertwined, along with other things in between, the realms of faerie, the haunts of ghosts and demons. It was a world in which God sung, too, through the beauties of the cosmos He has made. Those who heeded joined the dance. But the spirits were exorcised, and with them God Himself confined to the realm of the imaginary, the private fancy: fine for those who want to believe in such things, but ultimately a distraction. What matters now is matter alone, a world which follows physical laws immutable as clockwork; a world conceived no longer as the vessel of a higher law and deeper magic, but—to invoke the Orthodox writer, Paul Kingsnorth—as Machine, in which humans are nothing more than cogs.

I am not convinced, though, that “Machine” is enough to describe today’s technocratic totalitarianism. Doubtless, the mechanistic theism of the 18^th century has fundamentally altered the way Europeans imagine the cosmos, and in turn, that of the peoples we conquered by force of arms, ideology or trade. But the fact that modern man has come to see the world like Paley’s watch does not mean that it is. We imagine a realm of pure nature, devoid of content, onto which we impose meaning according to our will: in short, the “disenchanted” world of Max Weber and Charles Taylor. But there are reasons to believe that our perception does not match the reality; that the world is not disenchanted after all, but is enchanted with the wrong things; that supernature, just as much as nature, abhors a vacuum. Evacuate the world of one kind of spirit, and soon enough another kind quickly fills its space. The Machine contains ghosts. It is our vision which is dimmed. Having blinkered ourselves against the better kind of spirit, we are equally unable to see the worse ones which replaced them. This serves their interests. Only when the egg is hatched does the mother know the cuckoo.

Man in his hubris thinks he rules the world, failing to see that he is manipulated by higher forces which dictate his desires and form his nature. The technically minded might think of them as algorithms which work not through silicon or ether, but through flesh, to form the collective human will. Or by biological analogy, there is a kind of spiritual virus at work in the human spirit, replicating itself meme-like to stir up great waves of hatred and corruption. And much like, say, Coronavirus, like any living organism, these spiritual viruses seem to have a will of their own, a will to survive and to replicate.

Are these intellectual viruses which drive our minds the product of a human will, or are humans only their conduits? It is hard, certainly, to point to any individual human as their progenitor. We speak of people being captured by an ideology, and perhaps this is closer to the mark. An ideology is not a material thing. One cannot weigh or measure it. And yet, surely, it is real. We know it by its effects. So we discover, if we look deep enough, that we are only aspects of something greater which moves us and is beyond our mastery. We may think the world is a machine. We may think that we can harness its power and use it to our own ends. But we are discovering that even the machines we make with our own hands develop intentions of their own, from somewhere beyond their makers’ understanding.

Might it not be that, as the ancients thought, our world is moved by higher wills than those of any individual? We encounter these wills as movements or memes, cultural shifts which seem to animate people into division and violence, but which cannot be reduced merely to the individuals who succumb to them and advance them. The old names for them have fallen out of fashion. Sometimes they were called gods; but also, demons.

Many of us want to resist. Our numbers are growing. Yet the traditional institutions which once afforded help in that resistance have been compromised. So much of the Church seems bewitched by the technocratic spirit of the age, with its unconvincing attempts at salvation by management technique. An older generation, brought up on the socially liberal mores of the 1960s, saw fit to modernise the Church, to make its worship more “accessible,” to throw away the words sung, spoken and remembered by our people for centuries, to trim Christian doctrine down to the Procrustean measure of the present day. But they cut off the head instead of the feet. Every modernising measure has served only to accelerate Christianity’s demise. These spouses of the spirit of this age will soon be widowed by the next. Liberal Protestant and Catholic congregations throughout the Northern Hemisphere face plummeting membership, the youngest of whom are in their eighth decade. Yet still the bishops persuade themselves that the kumbayas their generation sang around a camp fire in the 1980s are going to draw in the young today. The reality is that the young who want to resist the devastating assaults on their cultural, intellectual and spiritual inheritance are finding it in the traditional, older forms of religion that the baby boomers despise. Middle of the road, liberal Christianity with turn of the century music and spoken, call-and-response liturgies read from sheets in a semi-demotic register appeal only to those who think they are several decades younger than they really are. This kind of religion has no future. It has bored two generations into apostasy.

One reason for this is that certain liberal religionists, eager to appease liberal secularists, have so downplayed the spiritual realities at stake that they can barely see them any more. To them, left-liberalism is the gospel. Heaven is a place we have to build on earth, hell an abusive story with which to scare children. Angels are an embarrassment, demons a primitive attempt at psychiatry now surpassed. God is the Light side of the Force or, at the far extremes, just a useful fiction. The Bible may be of some use for moral education or self-help meditation, but only when severely abridged to avoid offensive sections. The stories of our islands’ saints are to be taken with so much salt as to completely kill their flavour.

If that kind of religion sounds banal and insipid to you; if you are looking to the Christian religion to do more than just prop up secular niceties; if you want to recover the old spiritual ways of the British and English people; if you suspect that there is real spiritual darkness at work in the world and so seek real spiritual light, then this catechism will help to open your eyes.

It is atypical of its genre. Catechesis is preparation for initiation into the Christian Church, and usually focusses on doctrine. Indeed, I have based this book on the Catechism of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which at first sight is a dry Q&A of dogma to be memorised before Confirmation. This book is not too light, I think, in doctrinal content. But doctrine alone will not serve the needs of our times. What is needed is a reawakening of the spiritual imagination of the English-speaking peoples. I am convinced that the stories of our local saints are a powerful means of effecting this, and so have wrapped doctrinal and spiritual teaching in their lives.

This book is part of the project of “re-enchantment,” but we must be clear what we mean by this word. Disenchantment is the term used to describe the gradual erosion of modern people’s sense of the sacred, so that the world is seen not as a vehicle of spiritual power, but as bare and empty matter, ready to be conformed to the strongest will. My contention is that this disenchantment is only a surface phenomenon. In reality—deeper reality—the world is very much enchanted, but by forces which are the enemies of humanity and of God. In the first chapters of Genesis, we learn how man can become a curse to the land when he invites dark forces to share in the rule God designated to him alone. We, uniquely of all creatures, can invoke the help of angels or of demons. We can become like either and we can change the world for good or ill accordingly. This book is for re-enchantment by the Good, which means knowing the enemy and being ready to fight him. It is not the refilling of an empty space, but the exorcism of a space filled with the wrong things.

These pages contain, then, a call to arms. They are meant to equip us for spiritual combat. God, the Scriptures tell us, is a man of war. The liturgy of the Church in West and East joins the angelic proclamation at every celebration of the Eucharist of the “Lord God of hosts,” those hosts being the angelic armies. The martial ancestors of the English understood this well. They saw Christ as the Father’s commander-in-chief, the Cross as His standard, self-denying love as the prime weapon in His arsenal. Join in His victory, and we gain nothing less than participation in God Himself. We become, as the Serpent promised, like angels, the Sons of God, and so like God Himself—but on God’s terms and by His means, not on those of the Devil. The means God chose was to become man, so that man might become God. Our aim is nothing less than that.

Although of primary interest to Anglicans, I hope that this book may also be of value to other Christians with an interest in the spiritual heritage of the English-speaking peoples. This book is not about historical rationales for denominational claims. I am writing in the belief that the English Reformers intended not to start a new church, but to cut away what they considered innovative excesses of the Roman Church. They were not always right. When we look to the writings of the Apostles’ earliest successors, extra-biblical Jewish literature and to the teachings of the Eastern Church, we may find that the Reformers were wrong in certain of their suppositions and threw the baby out with the bathwater. But there is no obligation for the scions of a church established in AD 597 to define herself by a single century of doctrinal flux that happened a millennium later. Still less are we obliged to perpetuate the more recent errors of liberal partisans, however kindly intentioned. Freedom from attachment to error, whatever its provenance, is a hallmark of Anglicanism, rather than clinging to dogma for the sake of preserving some historical snapshot of ecclesial identity. Whatever the errors of the Reformers, my intention in this catechesis is to follow their spirit by recovering and teaching the pristine faith of the ancient, undivided, Holy Catholic Church in its English instantiation.